St Martins Youth Arts Centre
Australia
St Martins is one of Australia’s leading companies working with children.
We create visceral face-to-face interactions with children to provide powerful experiences for adult audiences. As befits the outcome of each inquiry, our work is: immersive, site specific, devised, text-based, multidisciplinary, collaborative, small, epic, screen-based, a black box theatre performance, an installation, an interruption.
Over the past five years, St Martins has implemented an ambitious artistic production strategy producing eleven new works that have achieved public and critical acclaim.
Our works have been presented in collaboration with Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Festival, Melbourne Fringe, Arts House, THE RABBLE, Abbotsford Convent, The Substation, Dark MoFo, Darwin Festival, Dance Massive, Minus18, Worawa Aboriginal College, TheatreWorks, and Castlemaine State Festival.
We value:
+ Children’s Agency
+ Inversion of Hierarchy
+ Inquiry
+ Quality
+ Striving towards inclusivity
Artistic Director Nadja Kostich is a multi-award-winning interdisciplinary director and creative producer who has brought a powerful and provocative body of work to our stages, festivals and public spaces for almost two decades. For St Martins’ she directed For The Ones Who Walk Away, winner of the 2017 Melbourne Fringe Best Live Art Award and 2018 Green Room Award for Design across four disciplines: lighting, set/ costume, sound and video in the Contemporary and Experimental Category. Kostich’s 2019 production Balit Liwurruk: Strong Girl received six Green Room Award nominations in the Independent Theatre Category, winning for Ensemble and Direction.
Associate Artist Katrina Cornwell has been directing and devising new performances across Queensland and Victoria for over a decade. Cornwell has presented works in partnership with Darebin Speakeasy, Festival of Live Art, Mackay Festival of Arts, Melbourne Fringe (nominated for Best Live Art and Best Theatre), MLIVE Festival, Monash University, Poppyseed Festival and The Malthouse. Cornwell’s practice forefronts community-performer engagement and an experimentation with liveness that creates unique audience experiences.