Canberra creative directors and sibling duo put community centre stage

Posted on 15 November, 2022

‘Who are we without community?’ It’s a question that sits at the heart of siblings Charley and Eliza Sanders’ latest multidisciplinary production, That Was Friday.

Coming to life at the Belconnen Arts Centre from Wednesday 23 until Saturday 26 November, this beautiful piece of storytelling is an ode to connection, the fragility of relationships, and the comfort we seek in the arms of isolation.

Their work seamlessly combines art, theatre, and visual means of storytelling to drive this intimate narrative. And where acting ends, contemporary dance begins, each filling a gap that lives within the other, despite being joyfully intertwined. It’s here that the thematic exploration of connection seals itself on stage—inspired by both the unprecedented times of previous years and the quiet disconnect that often occurs in the everyday.

For Eliza, she found the latter beautifully captured in a poem written by her friend Ruby Dixon.

“I brought this poem to Charley and said, ‘I want to create a work from this.’ And Charley’s response to the poem was to appreciate the writing, but also to be more interested in the context in which it was written,” she says.

“Ruby is an Australian Jewish woman who grew up in Canberra—she now lives in London—and was travelling to Israel for the first time in her life. And so she was in her ancestral homelands, but it felt completely unfamiliar.”

“Our interest became the personal and political context of what it is to belong somewhere and what it means to have a history in that place. It’s not so much about the big epic stories of where we belong, but how we are within ourselves when we’re in places that have a fraught connection to our sense of home and self and belonging,” adds Eliza.

“It’s these moments of discomfort that That Was Friday speaks to.”

Where the threads that connect us to the community become strained, and so too does our sense of identity. And while these wildly creative siblings worked within traditional narrative structures, they also allowed emotions to exist untamed—honouring the diverse nature of community—and guiding the audience (and the production) beautifully forward.

“There are a couple of relatively traditional narratives. There’s a true autobiographical narrative as well as a fictional narrative – that is really an Odyssean journey,” says Charley. “But we also wanted to disrupt those narratives because they often live within false and structures, and the world is not perfectly narrativised.”

“And so, through the world of dance and theatre, as the work evolves throughout the evening, there are these shifts and changes that point to the lie within these structures and ask what are the ways into community? Is that through human touch or embodied communication rather than linguistic or narrative eyes? It’s really about providing a whole range of ways in which people can understand connection.”

And as the duo reflected on what community might look like for others, their own connection to Canberra inevitably came to the fore—with place, memory and the human body taking centre stage.

It’s a testimony to Eliza’s talent as a choreographer who captures tender portraits and pushes boundaries in abstraction and creativity while respecting the limitations of the human body—a nod to the power of refrain.

“As soon as we were here [in Canberra] Charley and I realised that as the core creators, facilitators, and leaders of the process, there’s nowhere else that we could make this work than our hometown that we grew up in,” she says.

“This particular work and all of our work deals with memory and nostalgia and the embodied experience of history—how things we don’t remember linger in our bodies and senses. And I have such an experience when I’m in Canberra, a feeling in my body that brings up memories, inspiration, and ways for me to reflect on how I have grown and learned and basically become the person that I am.”

But uniting dance and acting with harmonious intersections has brought with it creative challenges. It’s what Charley describes as a ‘balancing act’—where even the most revered actors are nudged into unfamiliar territory.

For Lord of the Rings star Sara Zwangobani, That Was Friday has created a unique experience to share her storytelling abilities with the art form of dance.

“It’s a very different way of performing. There are times that you have a piece that you’re working on that has some dance elements, but the theatrical part of it is always central,” says Sara.

“But in this production, the two exist very much in conjunction, which is something I have never done before. It adds all sorts of different layers to your story and other forms of emotionality and understanding to your character’s narrative because you’re not the only person telling it.”

But perhaps the strength of this production lies in its ability to find a connection with us all—daring to use diverse art forms to inspire—welcoming us into a profoundly moving Saunders sibling point of view.

“It comes down to the thought that reaching across spaces that can seem vast, both physical and emotional, and interpersonal but it can actually be transverse with just a shift in perspective. And I think that shift is closer to most of us than we might think.” says Sara.

Photography: Lorna Sim