THE TEAM

M’ck McKeague - Lead Artist

M’ck McKeague is a performance maker, set and costume designer and installation artist currently living on unceded Yuggera and Turrbal land. M’ck’s work is often immersive, and experiments with fostering audience agency and nonlinear experiences of time. M’ck’s early career highlights included the set design for sell-out seasons of 지하 Underground in Brisbane and Seoul, the development and presentation of The 떡볶이 Box (The Dokboki Box) at Federation Square for Next Wave Festival 2014. Since completing the Master of Design for Performance at Victorian College of the Arts in 2018, M’ck has collaborated with Michael Zavros, The Hole Collective, Company Bad, Lenine Bourke, All the Queens Men, Polyglot Theatre, Elbow Room, and Embittered Swish. Dissatisfied with master narratives and the systems and spaces that uphold them, M’ck seeks out collaborative scenographic practices that embrace difference and disrupt privilege in process, form and content.

Meri Leeworthy - Co-creator

Meri Leeworthy is an activist, multidisciplinary artist, composer and sound designer living in Naarm / Melbourne. Working in theatre and performance, she designed sound for Lifestyle of the Richard and Family (Next Wave 2018), and her work on Moral Panic (Darebin Arts Speakeasy) was recognised in 2019 with a Green Room Award for Composition and Sound Design. Her own performance works, including Kingfisher (La Mama 2017), Paradisiac (Melbourne Fringe 2018) and Proxy Rite Rainbow (Next Wave 2018), have explored her lived experience as a queer and trans person, and the transformative uses of sound, voice, music and ritual.

Nathan Stoneham - Creative Producer

Nathan Stoneham is a community and cultural development artist, facilitator, and producer who has been creating contemporary, socially engaged arts processes and performances with communities across Australia and the Asia Pacific region for fifteen years. He is currently an Artistic Directorate member at Next Wave, an Australian Volunteer in Mongolia, and part of the arts collective Company Bad. He is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Art's Kirk Robson Award and the Brisbane City Council Lord Mayors Creative Fellowship, and is an alumnus of the Australia Council for the Arts Future Leaders Program. He holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (drama and music), a Bachelor of Education, and a Social Work Masters. Nathan's practice explores transcultural and queer approaches to making art and friends, and brings people together to collaborate on different ways of being together.

Jeremy Neideck - Co-Director

Jeremy Neideck is a performance maker and academic who has worked between Australia and Korea for almost two decades, investigating the interweaving of cultures in performance; the intersection of queer identities and theories in performance; and the modelling of new and inclusive social realities. The recipient of scholarships from Aphids, Australia-Korea Foundation, Asialink, and Brisbane City Council, Jeremy has undertaken residencies at The National Art Studio of Korea, The National Changgeuk Company of Korea, and The Necessary Stage (Singapore). Jeremy is Course Coordinator of the Bachelor of Performing Arts at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at Edith Cowan University. Jeremy regularly consults on the architecture and facilitation of collaborative projects and programs of institutional and community transformation.

Younghee Park - Co-Director, Performer

Younghee is an independent artist working as a performer, director, facilitator, educator, and theatre activist. She has over 25 years of experience working in a broad range of settings, including adult and children’s theatre, film, and television in Korea, Australia, America, Japan, Germany, and China. She specialises in multidisciplinary, bilingual theatre and is a member of the Australian-Korean artist’s collective Company Bad, creating transcultural performances and community arts programs. Younghee is dedicated to fostering safe and inclusive creative environments in the performing arts industry, collaborating with international art activists around the world. Currently, Younghee teaches at QUT, where she is completing her PhD.

Nayuka Gorrie - Dramaturg

Nayuka Gorrie is a Gunai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta freelance and comedy television writer. Their writing centres on black, feminist and queer politics. They co-wrote and performed in the third and fourth seasons of Black Comedy and provided additional writing on the second season of Get Krack!n. More recently, Nayuka was a writer for the sbs/Matchbox series, The Heights (season 2) and the NITV children’s series, Thalu. Nayuka’s writing can be found in The Guardian, Saturday Paper, Vice, Junkee, Archer Magazine, The Lifted Brow and NITV among others. Nayuka contributed to the anthologies Growing Up Queer n Australia and Animals Make Us Humans and is currently writing a book of essays as a recipient of The Wheeler Centres Next Chapter initiative to support their writing.

Polly Sara - Performer

POLLY SARÁ is a queer immigrant who makes independent work in so-called Australia. They are an interdisciplinary maker, performer and deviser who is driven by the collaborative process. Polly has performed with The Danger Ensemble, La Boite Theatre Company, Lingua Franca, Dairakudakan and Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre and has trained in Butoh, Leqoc, Viewpoints and Suzuki techniques with a range of Australian and international artists including Ellen Lauren, Yoshito Ohno, Barney O’Hanlon, Semimaru, Steph Kehoe and Anne O’Keeffe. Most recently Polly worked with The Danger Ensemble as a performer and deviser in Day After Terrible Day.

Thea Ravaneau - Performer

I am a proud Aboriginal Transgender Woman from Gunggari, Lardil, and Kullilli Country. I am originally from Giabal country, in Toowoomba, but relocated to Meanjin (Brisbane) to pursue a career in the Creative Arts, and I'm soon to be completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Acting) at the Queensland University of Technology. I have always aspired to tell stories through acting, writing, directing, dancing, and yarning. I'm a very passionate person and care a great deal, so I thrive for projects that create a sense of growth, hope, and change. I admire art in any form that challenges the ‘norm’ and gives a voice to those that struggle to be heard. I'm a hardworker, a team player, and a very spiritual person, so you can always find me striving to maintain a safe space with a good workflow.

Darcy Jones - Lighting Designer

(they design lights, as in the objects in your house not a series of cues for the ones in the grid)

Darcy Jones is a designer from regional Western Australia living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Sifting through the detritus of commercial production, their work is grounded in sustainability and identity, motivating them to design spaces and products that weave autonomy into urban systems. They are building collaborative relationships with event organisers, creatives and local plastic waste supply chains. Sequestering waste into the function of space, beauty and living, not ecosystems it might further damage.

Easton Dunne - Props Designer / Outside Eye

Easton Dunne is an artist, arts worker and arts educator based in Central Queensland on Darumbal Country. Their work explores connections between identity and place through an autobiographical lens with a particular focus on LGBTQIAP+ narratives in rural and regional contexts. They utilise drawing, sculpture, installation and time-based media to create autobiographical narratives offering their perspective on life as a queer, transgender and non-binary person who grew up in rural and regional Central Queensland and returned to live as an adult after studying and working in South-East Queensland.

Informed by Rural Queer Studies, Dunne’s work aims to facilitate dialogue and exchange between regional and metropolitan communities around how socio-cultural and geographical factors influence diversity in queer identity work and practices. Dunne completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art in 2012 and a Postgraduate Diploma of Education at Queensland University of Technology in 2014.

THE WORK

Deep in Central Queensland, a ragtag crew of queer and trans conspiracy theorists, doomsday preppers and hackers are piecing together a disturbing series of events. An off-season cyclone threatens to wipe their hometown, Paradise, off the map, and a strange man with a briefcase has mysteriously appeared in town. Who is he? Where is he staying? And what’s with the suit? 

A local pirate radio station crackles and splutters to life on the power of small town boredom and a “borrowed” car battery. Its fearless, Britney Spears-obsessed host is desperate to get to the bottom of it all. Time distorts and realities intertwine amidst an escalating climate crisis. An elaborate tapestry of military experiments, intergalactic corporate deals and freak natural disasters begins to unravel, but nothing can deter the upcoming psychic expo from going ahead. 

Come one and all to witness the whimsy and wonder of The Annual Paradise Psychic Expo, held at Town Hall this Winter solstice at sunset.

The audience arrives.

The blackbox theatre is transformed into a small bustling fair.

Theatrical moments emerge and dissolve as the audience is invited to browse the stalls, sample the wares and see the future in a crystal ball. But if they dig a little deeper, who knows what sinister plot might be revealed.

Dense with mystery and misdirection, The Annual Paradise Psychic Expo is a genre-bending, immersive, transdisciplinary event that weaves together queer magic realism, small town gothic and a gnawing need for action on climate change.