New Beginnings 2026
Creative Development Showcase
Friday, 6th February 2025 // 6PM
Subiaco Arts Centre
New Beginnings is a dynamic creative development program dedicated to supporting and nurturing emerging artists as they explore and develop new works across diverse performance mediums. Designed as a platform for fresh voices, the program fosters collaboration, experimentation, and artistic growth, with a strong emphasis on partnerships between BIPOC and non-BIPOC creatives.
We recognize the systemic barriers that emerging BIPOC artists face in accessing opportunities for collaboration and creative expression. New Beginnings aims to dismantle these barriers by cultivating a vibrant, supportive community where diverse artists can connect, refine their practice, and share their work with broad audiences. With a focus on inclusion and cultural exchange, the program encourages artists to push boundaries and reimagine storytelling.
BLOOP BLOOP
by Rebecca Attwood
Team - Alexia Skipper, Brodie Christie
Pro Forma Persona
by Xin Ong
Team - Nicholas Gardiner, Shelby McKenzie, Ken Meyer
Note: Sound contains excerpts from an ABC interview with Meryl Tankard
Waves Between Us
by Carole Katz, Brigitte Underwood-Legeron
Freedom
by Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’
Team - Shelby McKenzie, Rebecca Attwood
Creative Producer & Curator
Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’
Producer
Anja Starkiss
Directors
Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’ & Shelby McKenzie
Creative Partners
DASAKI Productions ('Ana Ika & Domenic Anthony)
Stage Manager
Kiara Thomson
Lighting Designer
Katrina Johnston
Mentors
Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Mararo Wangai, Zendra Giraudo, Ella Heatherington
The running time for this production is approximately 75 minutes.
New Beginnings 2026 is proudly funded by Ubuntu Project through the African Australian Creative Media Grant, awarded to Creative Producer and Curator Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’. Additional funding has also been provided by the City of Cockburn’s Cultural Grant through the Creative Development Community program.
BLOOP BLOOP
Swim Fast, Stay Hungry
BLOOP BLUP, BLUUB GLIB BLIP, BLORB BLUP.
[Translation: Swim fast, Find Land, Stay hungry.]
“BLOOP BLOOP” explores what it means to feel like a code-switching chameleon.
Or a museum exhibition.
Or a culturally exhausted emerging artist who ticks the BIPOC box on applications even though they’re super
disconnected from their culture.
“BLOOP BLOOP” combines the shared lived experiences of three young mixed-race artists, as they tackle their
conflicting relationships between their whiteness and non-whiteness, and discover how to find home in a world
that wasn’t built for them. This work uniquely blends camp visual imagery with heartfelt and evocative
storytelling, as the performers traverse their journeys of self-discovery, found family and rebellion.
GLUB GLOOOP BIP.
[Translation: And yes, this show will solve racism.]
Pro Forma Persona
Am I who I am?
Pro Forma Persona is a dark, edgy contemporary performance that explores how we navigate societal expectations and the tension that arises within this journey of identity. Centring cultural and interdisciplinary intersectionality through the universality of the human experience, this process-driven collaboration between BIPOC and non-BIPOC artists is a conversational co-creation at the intersection of dance and theatre-making, music and visual art.
Waves Between Us
Poetic, rhythmic, feminine, islander
Waves Between Us is a lyrical voyage across azure seas and sun-kissed shores, created by two island women who find refuge in verse. Through spoken word, song, dance, and percussion, we celebrate tropical rhythms and the whispered stories carried on the ocean breeze. Our performance explores home, identity, nature, and femininity—each piece reflecting our shared roots and evolving selves. Guided by our pens as compasses, we navigate memory and emotion to weave a vivid tapestry of island life, uniting our voices in tribute to the beauty, resilience, and spirit of our beloved home, while tracing the journey of finding our place in a world far from where we began.
Freedom
Across Worlds, Rising
Freedom is an interdisciplinary performance work exploring what it means to seek, lose, and reclaim freedom across diasporic Black and African identities. Blending theatre, live music, spoken word, movement, storytelling, and design, the piece moves through Nigeria, the UK, the US, and Australia to examine how liberation is shaped by colonisation, migration, memory, and belonging.
At its centre, Freedom asks: What does freedom truly feel like and for whom is it withheld, delayed or denied? Through a dialogue with self, history, and community, the work weaves grief with resilience, pain with power, and silence with song. It invites audiences to reflect on their own relationship to liberation, and the many forms freedom can take.
Artistic Director & Curator’s Note
Kaya, Ẹ káàbọ̀, and Hello everyone.
My name is Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’, but you can just call me Ayo.
I’m the Artistic Director of Blue Joy Theatre Company, the curator of this program, and I’m also really grateful to be sharing my own 15-minute work as part of today’s showcase.
New Beginnings was born from questions I’ve been carrying with me for a long time.
Questions like: What would it feel like to have more time to create?
What happens when we stop looking for perfection on the first try and instead allow space to fail, reflect, and grow?
As a Nigerian-born creative, I move between many identities and art forms - music, visual art, poetry, community storytelling, and theatre. I am Yoruba, Black, Muslim, African, a person of colour. And I’ve also lived in the in-between, where I’ve felt visible and invisible, understood and misunderstood, sometimes put in a small box.
This program is my response to that experience. A quiet dream in motion. And it’s only just the beginning. I created New Beginnings for underrepresented artists like myself, artists who deserve time, space, and care to grow and experiment. To be seen not only when the work is polished, but when it’s raw, unfinished, and still becoming.
This program isn’t about presenting a final product. It’s about starting. Showing up imperfect. In progress. And in collaboration.
The works you’ll experience today, BLOOP BLOOP, Waves Between Us, Pro Forma Persona and Freedom all come from deeply personal places, shaped with amazing souls by the brilliant creative teams behind them. These are stories of timing, culture, race, and human experience. Stories of silence and connection, memory and love. Stories of holding on and letting go. Of friendship, community, identity, history, grief, journey, and growth.
So we invite you into our space this lovely Friday evening, knowing that New Beginnings stands for process, challenge, and discovery.
Much of the magic you’ll witness today happened quietly: in writing and devising hours, collaborative workshops, and spontaneous moments during weekend rehearsals. There may be a misread line, a missed cue, or an imperfect step, and that’s okay. These works are still learning, and they’re still teaching us.
At the heart of this program is a commitment to collaboration over competition, and to building spaces that centre care, truth-telling, and joy, especially for early-career artists. We know the barriers. We’ve lived them. And this is one way we begin to break them.
A special thank you to The Ubuntu Project, who supported this work through the African Australian Creative Media Grant, and to the City of Cockburn for their Cultural Grant through the Creative Development Community Program.
To our incredible collaborators, creative teams, and mentors, thank you for holding this process with such generosity, wisdom, talent, love, creativity, and care.
And to you, our audience: thank you for being here, and for choosing to witness something still becoming. You’re not just watching a show, you’re helping shape a future. Our future.
Thank you very much, and we hope you enjoy the show.
Shelby McKenzie - Co-Director’s Note
Working on New Beginnings has been incredibly rewarding as a director. There has been so much joy, richness, and trust in this process, I’m grateful that Carole, Becca, Ayo, and Xin have brought me in to help build their stories. At first, when Ayo asked me to join New Beginnings as his Co-director, I was excited, I knew that this would be a unique process to be part of. I did not realise how much of a positive impact it would have on my own creative process.
The creative requirements for the New Beginnings application were broad, some of our artists came in with seeds, some came in with scripts and some came in wanting to explore where the process would take them creatively. There is such a vast ocean of experience, artistic practice, culture, knowledge, and connection to home. I feel a great privilege to be pulled and stretched as a director to ensure I am supporting each unique show in telling their story. I am grateful Ayo and the blue joy team have started a program like New Beginnings, designed specifically for BIPOC and Non-BIPOC collaboration, it has brought so many creatives together, from wide ranges of experiences and cultural backgrounds together, to listen, to relate and to explore their own identities.
I hope audiences see how deeply these works have been cared for by the creative teams, there has been so much poured into these pieces by everyone involved. I hope they find as much enjoyment watching them as I had supporting them.
BLOOP BLOOP Artist’s Note
Existing as a mixed-race, gender non-conforming, pansexual means that I traverse the world in a liminal space outside of normative (and colonial) boxes. I often feel like a code-switching chameleon, or a museum exhibition, or a compassion fatigued cultural consultant. As a representation of being mixed-race, we were inspired by the intersection between identity, conformity, and the image of half-fish, half-human hybrids. We found ourselves playing with the feeling of being a fish out of water, and eventually finding your school of fish that share expeperiences despite coming from different backgrounds. This show is when Brodie and I talk about how loudly our Aunty’s laugh, or when Alexia and I bond over all the white-people music our mothers never played for us. Although this isn’t necessarily a universal experience, I hope audiences feel represented by the underlying themes of isolation, rejection, found-family and community. It has been extremely rewarding to be a part of a process that deeply engages with my core values as an artist, thank you very much to everyone at Bluejoy, and our mentor Zendra Giruado for your guidance and wisdom!
Pro Forma Persona Artist’s Note
Pro Forma Persona is a dark, edgy contemporary performance that explores how we navigate societal expectations and the tension that arises within this journey of identity. Centring cultural and interdisciplinary intersectionality through the universality of the human experience, this process-driven collaboration between BIPOC and non-BIPOC artists is a conversational co-creation at the intersection of dance and theatre-making, music and visual art.
Waves Between Us Artist’s Note
Our work for the New Beginnings program is a collaboration between two Creole island sisters in life. We come from the Indian Ocean islands: Brigitte from the Seychelles and Carole from Réunion, with Carole’s parents originating from Madagascar. Our shared histories, shaped by movement, ocean crossings and ancestry, are at the heart of this work.
The piece, The Waves Between Us, explores where we find ourselves as migrant women in midlife. It speaks to the experience of searching for direction while living far from the families who raised us, with the steady pull of our beloved island homes always pulsing beneath the surface. It is about figuring out who we are without the daily support of kin and navigating the complex journey of midlife in lands that are not our own.
Presented through spoken word, music and song, both live and through video, we draw on the wisdom of our ancestors as a vital source of strength. When those who cradled us from birth are no longer physically present, geographically or in life, we call on ancestral memory to guide us.
We hope audiences connect with this insistent restlessness that migrant women, and women more broadly, encounter in midlife, and that through our work many feel seen, held and understood.
Our gratitude to the blue joy theatre co for their kind, supportive and respectful direction in this intimate work. Theatre is new to us and we appreciate the safe and nurturing space held for us to learn, create, test and share this story.
Freedom Artist’s Note
As a Black African artist moving between Nigeria, the UK, the US and Australia, freedom has never felt fixed or complete. It appears in fragments, in language, in sound, in movement, in moments of arrival and moments of pause. Sometimes it feels expansive. Sometimes conditional. Sometimes imagined.
This development period has been an invitation to slow down, listen deeply and test ideas without the pressure of polish. Freedom is still becoming, and this showing invites audiences into that process, to sit with the work as it breathes, questions and opens itself up.
My deepest thanks to Shelby, Mararo, Jeffrey and Becca for their immense generosity, care and support. Your time, guidance and belief have been foundational to this work at this stage of its journey.
Special Thanks
Ubuntu Project
City of Cockburn
Ella Heatherington
The Blue Room Theatre
Creative Team
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Alexia Skipper
Alexia U-Min Skipper, 优敏 (She/Her), is an emerging Chinese-Australian Playwright and Performance Maker based in Whadjuk Noongar Country, Perth. Studying Performance Making at WAAPA, she’s interested in bilingual theatre making, inclined to see how audiences understand languages they cannot speak. Hailing from Singapore, multiculturalism and the mixed-race dilemma strongly undercurrent the performances she makes.
Her work has taken her internationally, working with Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) in 2024 for the Connect Up Youth Encounter in Forli, Italy. As well as participating in ATYP’s National Studio 2024 held in Bundanon, NSW.
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'Ana Ika
'Ana Ika (she/her) is a Tongan Australian artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. She graduated from WAAPA in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in Acting. Since graduating, ‘Ana has performed in a range of film, theatre and television, including Bump for Stan and Amadeus at the Sydney Opera House. Alongside acting, ‘Ana is passionate about producing and creating stories from underrepresented voices. Since late 2024, ‘Ana has started producing theatre and film with Domenic Anthony, under DASAKI Productions. In 2026, ‘Ana will be performing in The Almighty Sometimes with Black Swan State Theatre Company.
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Anja Starkiss
Anja Starkiss (she/her) is an independent producer, performer and creative originally from Narrm (Melbourne) and currently based in Boorloo (Perth). Since graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (2023) with a Bachelor of Performing Arts (Performance Making), Anja has taken her time to explore many facets of Perth’s arts industry, always following compelling storytelling and collaborative processes.
As Program and Production Coordinator for Blue Joy Theatre Company, Anja is fueled by a passion for supporting artists to tell their stories, prioritising people-first, inclusive and collaborative approaches to programming and process.
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Brigitte Underwood-Legeron
Brigitte Underwood-Legeron (She/Her) is a Seychelles-born, Western Australia-based writer and performance artist. Just like her favourite Creole dishes from home, dance and music colours her life in rhythms and adds flavour to her writing. Under the pen name Bree Woods, she writes women’s fiction and contemporary romance, currently revising a novel about a migrant woman’s healing journey through dance. A member of Romance Writers of Australia for over a decade and Holly Craig’s Write Club, Brigitte also freelances as a Sega, Moutya, Maloya, and Samba dancer. Her work celebrates cultural diversity, especially stories of migrants and characters of mixed heritage.
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Brodie Christie
Brodie Christie (They, them) is a triple threat performer in their second year of Musical Theatre at WAAPA. Brodie has foundational roots in musical theatre performance but finds a sense of artistic identity in contemporary dance and Indigenous theatre. Brodie’s Aboriginal roots derive from the Yamatji, Noongar, and Wongi regions of Western Australia. In 2024 they were able to study the Aboriginal performance certificate IV at WAAPA from which they received an education on major Indigenous texts and history.
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Carole Katz
Carole Katz (she/her) is a Reunion Island-born singer-songwriter and dancer. Growing up on a multicultural French island with parents from Madagascar, Carole was immersed from an early age in a rich tapestry of cultures, music and stories. Living in Perth|Boorloo deepened Carole's appreciation for her island heritage including the tropical rhythms of sega and maloya which she embraced and honoured over a decade of colourful musical performances in WA and Victoria. With her award-winning band Tchéga, Carole brings to life the sunny, sassy and soulful spirit of the Indian Ocean islands, featuring traditional island beats with a contemporary flair.
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Domenic Anthony
Domenic Anthony (he/they) is a queer actor, writer and producer from Boorloo, based on Gadigal Land. He graduated WAAPA in 2020 with a Diploma in Screen Performance. Since then he has worked in TV appearing on TOTALLY, COMPLETELY FINE (Stan) and made his series regular debut on Season 2 of THE TWELVE (Binge/Foxtel). Domenic made his writing debut while studying at WAAPA with multiple writing credits on showcase scenes used for both the BA (Acting) and Diploma (Screen Performance) showcases. 2024 saw his official playwriting and producing debut with his new work HEAVEN presented as part of The Flying Nun by Brand X. Domenic also works in production for global experiential creative agency, Amplify, as project coordinator.
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Ken Meyer
Kumo-bako (Ken Meyer) [he/him] is currently developing new works that merge light and sound into interactive environments, exploring their relationship to our inner worlds. By amplifying these interactions through technology to create immersive spaces, he seeks to create experiences that challenge the ways in which we currently engage with, and view, the world.
Based in Walyalup (Fremantle), Ken is a German-born artist of German/Japanese descent, working across digital and physical mediums. With a background in graphic design and photography, his practice integrates digital media, sculpture, projection, light and sound to create immersive, contemplative installations. His latest work Where the Light Rests , was presented as part of the Fremantle Biennale 2025: Sanctuary program. -
Katrina Johnston
Katrina (She/her) has been involved with theatre from a very young age, first as a performer and then in 2014 as a lighting designer. Katrina has worked with a wide range of shows throughout Perth. Most recent credits include "Eden's farewell" by Aboriginal Performance Class at WAAPA, "Sunday Reset" presented by Medina Dizdarevic and "Wednesdays at the end of the world: Flood" presented by Max Barton and Ten nights in Port Festival.
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Kiara Thomson
As a multidisciplinary artist with a creative focus on dance, Kiara (she/her) has been teaching, choreographing and performing for the past 10 years. A founding member of Vybe Nation and co-creator of Open Floor, Kiara has produced local events to nurture dance education, artistic development and community. She has most recently enjoyed expanding her practice into theatre and live performance, working in movement direction, stage management and costuming on recent works: An Evening of African Poetry and Storytelling, Our Motherland Our Stories and is now proud to be involved with Blue Joy Theatre presenting New Beginnings.
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Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’
Mohammed ‘Ayo Busari’ (he/him) is a Nigerian-born, award-winning Creative Producer, Curator, Disability Support Worker, Writer, and Performer. Now based in Boorloo, he holds a BA in Journalism & Media from the University of Hertfordshire and an MArts in Screen Arts from Curtin University. Co-founding The Outsiders theatre group in 2021, Ayo has co-produced, written, and performed at numerous shows, including ’An Evening of African Poetry & Storytelling’ at The Blue Room Theatre (Nominated for Outstanding Overall Design at The Blue Room 2024 Awards). He also performs poetry and live music at festivals, including FRINGE WORLD 2025, Perth Festival 2025, St Kilda Festival 2024 and SXSW Sydney 2024. Ayo serves on the boards of WAYTCo and Regional Arts WA.
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Nicholas Gardiner
Nicholas Gardiner (He/Him) is a screen composer based in Boorloo (Perth) specialising in film, documentary, television, dance and installation-based art. Over the past six years, he has composed professionally for a wide range of local, national and international projects across multiple mediums. His collaborative history includes work with prominent institutions such as Aakash Odedra, Flying Bark, Goolarri Media and many others.
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Rebecca Attwood
Rebecca Attwood (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist who’s currently undertaking their second year of Performance Making at WAAPA. Becca’s current practice experiments with intertwining music, poetry, and movement, bringing forth political themes surrounding injustice, queer identity, colonialism and belonging. Their directorial debut for their self-written play, “Don’t Slay the Messenger” won numerous awards at YouthFest 2023, including; Best Production, Best Actress (to Rebecca Attwood), and a Writing award. More recent works include: “Generator: Precipice” [Music Director/Composer/Devisor], “Eurydice” [Performer - Hades], “Confessional” [Performer], and “Stand and Deliver” [Performer].
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Shelby McKenzie
Shelby McKenzie (They/She) Shelby McKenzie is a performer, theatre maker, and movement artist. They graduated with first-class honours from WAAPA, where they focused on embodiment in live theatrical performance. Shelby has been studying Auslan since 2023, their goal is to bring Auslan into their process to increase access to and opportunities in theatre through language-inclusive practices. Most recently, Shelby acted in the Western Australia Opera’s Il Trovatore at His Majesty’s Theatre and The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer. In 2026, Shelby will be developing work interstate and internationally as she travels to Sydney and Toronto to further her career in theatre and film as an actor, deviser and director.
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Xin Ong
Xin Ong's (she/her) practice is one of co-creative conversation. She has created works in a director-choreographer and producer capacity that range from short dance pieces and films to independently presenting full-length works through i² (IG/FB: @i2installation), a collaborative practice with a focus on deepening audience engagement, a space where we create to connect, and the missing element (i²=-1) is you. She has collaborated as a performer in various dance works, include X (2023), winner of 'Adelaide Fringe Best Dance Award'.
