Pacesetters Creative Archives

Every project is a valuable project. My first questions are always, ‘What do you need?’ ‘What do you want?’, ‘What do you need me to do?’

Most emerging and mid-career Asian-Australian performance artists call Annette Shun Wah their ‘Asian Fairy Godmother.’ Dig deep into the origins of any Asian-Australian theatre work over the past ten years and her influence will make itself felt:

Drama is about writing other people’s points of view of the world … Through craft you can hopefully speak to other people, and the more you do, the more you learn about what works, what doesn’t, how to connect to an audience, the ways you can structure a story to have a particular kind of impact.

A key motif in Ali’s work is the dev, or demon, which is used to reflect critically on the experience of marginalisation.

It fascinates me how young Edison was able to develop a love of books. Picturing the world he described, I can’t see how he could grow to become such an avid reader. He tells me, ‘the only thing I could see in my village was a radio…but then not everybody owned one…’

This interview is from Diversity Arts Australia’s Pacesetters Creative Archives project, a chronicle of the histories of creative practice of migrant, refugee and culturally diverse communities in Australia.

For me, the fact that Boey exists as a poet at all, and that he continues to write poetry, is a miracle altogether.