In October of 2009, a slew of theatre artists and performance collectives launched themselves towards a new world. Amidst an audience of fellow misfits and troublemakers, they carved out of Newcastle’s rocky cliff-faces the space for a national conference where the future of performing arts practices could be created, debated and deformed. The result is the Crack Theatre Festival, a home for Australia’s independent, emerging and experimental performing arts.

Downstairs a gypsy ensemble plays behind a manic refugee storyteller, bellowing lovelorn tales of beauty and misery across a sea of festival-goers. In another room a performance is conducted using the SMS texts of the audience as its only directorial tool. Upstairs, notebooks and pencils fly across the room in a passionate debate on political vs pastiche theatre. No side shall concede and the middle ground does not exist. Across the city, a 3-tonne truck pulls up to a loading zone and a brightly dressed mob break into dance while a DJ plays a 15-minute set from within.

The 2009 Crack Theatre Festival featured over 60 artists across 31 events, including 14 contemporary Australian performances. The festival presented work across a range of mediums including musical storytelling, narrative and post-dramatic theatre, multimedia and technologically-mediated interactive performance, site-specific and installation theatre, invisible and guerilla performances, hiphop theatre and spoken-word, cabaret, physical theatre, inter-disciplinary performance and ‘Playground’, a large-scale participatory performance / chaos party.

Welcome to Crack. We have landed.

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GALLERY

Images by Pete Butz and Talsit. Mouse-over for artist names.

Susan Sarandon aka Thomas Henning & the High-Vis Dandies.