Prima Donna Podcast

Katrina Rank

Dr Katrina Rank is an award-winning choreographer and educator based in Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. Her work creates spaces where the imagination flourishes, expressive forces are harnessed and dynamic exchanges occur.

A graduate of the Australian Ballet School, she performed in dance companies in Australia and abroad before returning home to undertake further studies including a Bachelor of Education and a PhD in Contemporary Arts (Deakin University 1994 and 2001). Katrina was the first Australian researcher to complete her doctorate through practice-exegesis, forging the way for many others to research via their creative practices.

Deborah Kayser

Deborah Kayser performs in areas as diverse as ancient Byzantine chant, French and German Baroque song and classical contemporary music, both scored and improvised. Her work has led her to tour regularly both within Australia, and internationally to Europe and Asia. She has recorded, as soloist, on numerous CDs, and her work is frequently broadcast on ABC FM.

As a member of JOUISSANCE, and long time collaborator with Bassist/Composer Nick Tsiavos, she has performed radical interpretations of Byzantine and Medieval chant. With the the contemporary music ensembles ELISION, LIBRA and CMO she has premiered works written specifically for her voice by local and overseas composers. 

 

Accompanying music:

From Liza Lim: The Bardo. Footage taken of the last ELISION realisation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead installation-performance project in rural Lismore in the early 90's. Conceived by composer Liza Lim and visual artist Domenico DeClario, the highlighted performers include Deborah Kayser, Timothy O'Dwyer, Carl Rosman and Rosanne Hunt.

https://youtu.be/uYWBri5fLSM?si=f5gZnSlq_N9pdohV

 

Nick Tsiavos Ensemble: Axion Estin (an arrangement of Byzantine chant based on part of the Lord’s Prayer) From Liminal.

https://youtu.be/t4h2K75wuQU?si=oA-CsE7HtWdrfqos

 

 

To prostahthen mystikos: The Annunciation. From Akathistos. Jouissance Ensemble (Nick Tsiavos AD and Contra Bass)

https://youtu.be/nkMtuYS0cik?si=9Kqs6shB2iZOjIAJ

 

Photo by Marcus Thompson

 

 

Rosemary Johns

Playwright, Vice-President of Women Playwrights International, actor and director. Rosemary Johns grew up as a child in a seaside town in Wales, went to a boarding school in England, spent seven intense and strange years in America and fell in love in Australia. She's a maverick

Wilma Tabacco

Wilma Tabacco was born in Italy, and lives in Australia

Wilma uses abstract iconography to refer to aspects of Italian cultural history, archaeological artefacts found in ancient ruins and she ‘maps’ ground plans of architectural spaces.

She has presented 45 solo exhibitions since 1988, in Australia, Italy and Korea and participated in over 250 group exhibitions, including in New York, Dubai, London, Seoul, Paris, Edinburgh.

 

http://wilmatabacco.com 

Alma Quon

​Jazz drummer and bandleader Alma Quon was born in 1911 and died in 2007. Her ensemble The Joybelles comprising women from a range of cultural backgrounds was active from the 1940s until the 1990s.

 

In this episode Nat interveiws Alma's nephew, musician Ray Quon.

Julie Peters

Julie Peters grew up in the 1950s, way before trans was generally heard of, let alone understood. As a child she had difficulty working out why people insisted she was a boy when she knew she was a girl. She affirmed her gender in 1990. Julie has been activist off and on since the early 1980s. Her activism has involved being out in the
workplace, slide shows, performance, readings, running for Parliament, engaging with health workers, lawyers, police, academic lecturing and research.

Jane Murphy

Jane Murphy considers herself to be an “Accidental Property Master”.
She stumbled across a role in a film art department in the mid 1980’s in Sydney.
Her love of stories & people, combined with a fascination of things, has proved the perfect marriage for her role of Props Master for film, TV and theatre. 

Elizabeth Russell-Arnot

Elizabeth Russell-Arnot is an inquisitive adventurer with academic credentials across multiple arts disciplines. Her Churchill Fellowship and 2 Masters Degrees in the Arts have led to a focus on our endangered environment expressed through creativity in writing, illustrating, painting and sculpture. Liz has always been aware of the world in which she lives and her artistic work became the voice which she used to express her love for the environment and everything in it: birds, animals, insects, plants and yes, even mankind.

Peta Murray

Peta Murray is a recovering playwright, best known for her plays Wallflowering and Salt. A late-blooming academic, she is also a Lecturer in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University where she writes extravaganzas with preposterous titles, performs essays, coins neologisms, collaborates on loopy approaches to memoir, queers the q(a)antata, and makes mischief with The Symphony of Awkward as they stake claim to world domination in the emergent discourse of diarology.

Lella Cariddi

Lella Cariddi OAM is a writer/researcher of community history, curator of contemporary art, documentary producer, installation artist, adult educator and Community Cultural Development Practitioner. She is committed to the advancement of literatures and the Arts as a vehicle for intergenerational social inclusion between mainstream Australian Society and immigrants & refugees.