Debut show champions female talent

FOLLOWING their recent fire relief fundraiser, new theatre company LadderFrame Collective are preparing to debut their first original show, Big Women.

To premiere at Volta Saturday 27 February, the show has been put together by creative director Zara Wilson-Boyle and music director Chiara Angeli incorporating real women and their stories.

“It’s a verbatim theatre piece which includes seven girls in the cast and we also have an all-female crew as well,” Wilson-Boyle said.

“All the girls went off and interviewed women in their life, recorded the interviews and we selected monologues from the interviews to perform with a bunch of physical theatre as well.

“We want to make sure that the words are the most important thing, paying respect to those people involved, but also bringing something new out of it.”

In addition to the showcase, on the night there will also be musical and spoken word performances by Kayla Di Pasquale, Candi Wade and Megan J Ried as well as small, female owned businesses retailing a variety of products.

“It’s all female but it kind of happened by accident,” Wilson-Boyle said. “But then we thought, why not showcase all of the female talent here in Ballarat especially in the arts, music, jewellery, writing that kind of thing.

“There’s so many hard workers here and people to choose from, why not.

“We have GM Jewellery, The Minority Co, Logie and Co which is a makeup company, in cahoots with a few others, just a bunch of small entrepreneurs out there doing stuff that we would like to boost.”

Having recently raised around $4000 from their fundraiser, Ms Wilson said they plan to utilise a portion of the funds to pay crew members and actors as part of the show case.

“Obviously paying a high wage for actors is hard, but we want to make sure artists are getting paid and respected for their work,” she said.

“We want money going back into the artists, that’s a huge thing for us.”

To purchase a ticket to LadderFrame Theatre’s Big Women show at Volta, visit bit.ly/3a73Hz2.