Julian Louis: seven years at the helm of NORPA and going strong. Photo: Megan Louis
At heart he’s still a performer – after all, he roller-bladed at last year’s NORPA launch, but artistic director Julian Louis, who has held the reins of the Northern Rivers Performing Arts company for seven years, has learned the delicate art of balancing creativity and administration, writes Digby Hildreth, and lucky for us, Louis is in the for the long haul…
For Julian Louis, the success of a theatrical production is measured by the extent to which performers and audience share “the wink” experience.
That, says the artistic director of Northern Rivers Performing Arts (NORPA), is the silent understanding between the two, a joyous communion, acknowledging, he says: “That we are in the same place”.
It occurred – literally – in Railway Wonderland, a work Louis co-created with local writer Janis Balodis.
“For Railway Wonderland we built a seating bank on the tracks [at Lismore Railway Station], and the platform became the stage,” Louis says. “The actors came in to the waiting room through a window, moving in a stylised manner, almost like dance, to the tune of the Doors’ Hello, I Love You, sung by an invisible nine-piece community choir. Strangers find their place in the waiting room, and then this old woman appears, on her way home to Italy after her husband has passed away. She pulls out her tea set-up then she notices the audience and says, ‘Oh, you like to come early too, to get a good seat’. And she winks at us. A few beats later she pulls out a microphone and sings directly to us.”
For Louis, a moment like that is theatrical gold. “I like that breaking of the fourth wall, that sense that we’re here together,” he says. “The skill of it is if you can take the audience into being lost in a story, then jolt them out to remind them that this is a fiction and we are telling it at this moment to encourage thinking about these issues because they’re universal, they’re relevant. It’s a source of great joy and is what I’m addicted to.”
A scene from Railway Wonderland, a Generator show from NORPA. Photo: Grant Macintyre
It was an addiction that started early. Louis grew up on the North Shore of Sydney, where his parents moved the family so he could attend Knox Grammar School. His school profile, he says, was as a sportsman, based upon his skills as a [full scholarship] basketball player and all-round jock.“I was fast and sporty across all games and that’s how the school saw me. But when it came to the scholastic stuff, I wasn’t performing that well…I wanted to be involved in dance and musicals, so I decided to move to a public school, and my parents were OK with that decision.”
He loved to dance and his Michael Jackson impersonations earned him “quite a bit” of prize-money at local talent competitions – and there was a bonus: “At the new school I joined a dance group and was the only guy among 12 girls. Great fun!” Thanks to a diligent girlfriend, his academic performance improved, but even before his HSC results were in he had been accepted for a degree course in theatre and media at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst. “What drew me there was the juggling,” he says. “I was drawn to the physical, like a sporty person but my dancing and theatre interests were also evident.”
We’re talking at Louis’ home, a large, light-filled old Queenslander that he and his wife Meg had transported onto a block on the Coorabell side of Federal and moved into just weeks ago.
It is silent, except for the birdsong and the breeze in the stands of rainforest near the house.
Louis has to be here, away from the office, to get his creative mojo working, he says – something that being the buck-stops-here bloke at the theatre company based in Lismore City Hall (LCH) doesn’t allow. That split – between administrator and creative – echoes a divide he confronted on his return from Europe, between performer and “theatre maker”.
Flying back to Australia he reflected upon his time working with “some of the best theatre makers in the world”, including Philippe Gaulier, with whom Louis trained in London and he thought “right, I’m finally a performer, an actor”. It was a hard landing: “I was going to ad auditions and TV scripts and I wasn’t getting jobs and it wasn’t really me; it didn’t feel right.”
He sacked his acting agent after realizing that to see the sort of theatre he wanted to be in, he’d have to make it, so he continued directing and formed an independent theatre company with the well-known playwright Nick Enright, who became a mentor for Louis before he died.
The pair devised a show for the Sydney Festival with no script as a starting point. “He was a writer wanting to work with me and without a text. He was seeking a community, a family,” says Louis. “It’s a big ideal for theatre artists – certainly for me – to have an ensemble, or a team, a family.”
Louis says he has come close to finding a family at NORPA, but the intimate collaborative experience he relishes wasn’t made easy by the demands of his job. “I’ve been busy producing other people’s work, bringing shows here, curating a season, working on funding applications. The renovations [a $6 million overhaul of the LCH venue] took a lot of energy. Now the time has come to focus in on building more work from me, smaller projects, to allow for some spontaneity, and build this sense of collaboration more easily.”
The urge for the “family thing” has its beginnings, of course, with his own family, which was close, supportive and, in his mother, Yvonne, at least, theatrical. “She was a teacher/librarian and she would get dressed up into costume and read books to kids, in the library, which was basically a theatre,” he says. “Mum’s a very creative woman and has been a huge influence on me. Now she’s a published author and wrote a beautiful book called A Brush with Mondrian about our Dutch roots.”
Louis’ seven years at NORPA has seen plenty of successful productions, including Railway Wonderland and My Radio Heart, which he devised after seeing local disability group Tralala Blip perform their “very complex, very beautiful” electronic music.
My Radio Heart, devised after Julian Louis saw Tralalablip perform. Photo: Kate Holmes
Other shows this year have sold out: “1984 was a huge success, as was Great Lake. Food was fantastic. Henry V did well.”
But he feels that the best is yet to come, and that the 2015 season is shaping up as “extremely exciting” for audiences. “We have a project called Cockfight that we are co-creating with an independent company called The Farm [also Animal Farm Collective], here and for Brisbane Festival next year,” he says. That’s a big achievement for us.” NORPA is working with The Farm’s Gavin Webber, a dancer and choreographer who Louis says “does some exciting work mainly in Europe at a very high level”.
Louis says the 2015 season will feature “great local work and some big travelling shows, one of which we’re going to announce shortly – and one I’ve worked hard on is a major state company with a really beautiful story with music of a very important indigenous figure in our history.That’s going to be one of the big ticket items next year, as well as two home-grown works which are going to be huge.We’ve also got a very big local show that we’re working on, that I refer to at the moment as the Bundjalung project because the working titles are yet to stick.Rhoda Roberts is directing that with some fabulous people contributing, such as the Bangarra Dance Theatre; also David Page, one of the country’s great composers for dance; Djon Mundine, curator and visual arts guru; Francis Rings is the choreographer and Melissa Lucashenko, who’s written a book called Mullumbimby and who’s also a Bundjalung woman, is writing a short story for us about three brothers returning to the area.”
Louis is committed to the Northern Rivers, and set on strengthening NORPA’s connection with the community. Says Louis: “One way we maintain vibrancy is with Generator, our theatre-making arm through which we engage with an original idea or a story or a community to create innovative new theatre using multiple artforms to tell stories of the region.”
The company has just been awarded an Arts NSW Regional Theatre grant to develop a locally produced work named Dreamer through Generator, to celebrate “the Northern Rivers wonderful melting pot of dreamers, visionaries, inventors, the creative or creatively mad, the rebellious and the passionate. All of our homegrown work comes from Generator,” Louis says. “There’s been a lot of work and it’s all been successful.”
Louis is an enthusiastic spruiker for Lismore, and the whole region. “Almost every show that travels through comments to me that this is the best audience they’ve played to on a national tour,” he says. “It’s the region, it demands and deserves culture. It demands adventure and human expression in abundance. The more we support it, the more we take a risk on a NORPA production the more we’ll generate and we aim to meet that with a real professionalism and a real bravery.”
