About Us

Explore

Regions

Performing Lines at APAX – 2025

Performing Lines champions independent artists, reflecting the diversity of the performing arts being created across Australia. We are excited to represent a range of projects at APAX in 2025, some of which are tour-ready and some are in development and we’d love for you to keep an eye on for future programming conversations.

This isn’t our entire portfolio – please check out our website for a full rundown of the artists and projects we support, as well as the sector capacity building initiatives we support, such as Kolyang in WA, the Regional Artist Residency in Tasmania, or the National Producers Platform.

Browse the APAX shortlist below:

Browse the plethora of work below, including:

- APAX Program 2025
- Touring in 2025/26
- Ready to Tour
- Premiering Soon
- In Development

Meet the APAX Team

Head to the bottom of the page to meet the team attending APAX this year, and come and say hi in person.

APAX Program 2025

The Censor

Vidya Rajan & Cassandra Fumi

Producer: Haneen Mahmood Martin
haneen@performinglines.org.au

Have you ever been told you can’t read this or that book? Maybe the adults said it was too scary? Or not a good book for kids?

What if you still really wanted to read it? What would you do? Welcome to The Censor: a world where you can read everything. Where you’re in control of what you choose to read. Where you’re in control of yourselves.

Where you’re in control of… the adults!

Unwoman (The Protest)

THE RABBLE

Producer: Samantha Butterworth
samantha@performinglines.org.au

A durational artwork by THE RABBLE (UNWOMAN, WAKE, YES) celebrating the multitude of experiences around birth, in/fertility, pregnancy and parenting. Over the period of this collaborative and inclusive performance, hundreds of community participants take to the stage, one after the other, to read their testimony to the audience.

Touring in 2025/26

M’ap Boulé

Nancy Denis

Producers: Jane Schon
jane@performinglines.org.au

Experience the lyrical storytelling of M’ap Boulé – a dramatic Cabaret about a child born of immigrants growing up in a country called Australia. Nancy Denis shares funny and pivotal stories from her journey to embrace her Black, Queer, Haitian and Australian identities, framed by the pain and joy she carries from her self-liberated Ancestors who revolted against their colonisers and created the first black-led republic of Haiti.

Aunty

BEAT ENTERTAINMENT

Producer: Carmen Lai
carmen@performinglines.org.au

AUNTY is BEAT ENTERTAINMENT’s Inter-Indiginational-Kiki which is part cabaret, part party. AUNTY is a celebration of Music, Black Women, Queer Icons, Indigenous Royalty and everything FABULOUS in between. Creating and fostering important space for LGBTQIA+ communities centreing QTBIPOC artists and audience FIRST.

ARCO

Adam Kelly

Producer: Melanie Julien-Martial
melanie@performinglineswa.org.au

ARCO is Adam Kelly’s award-wining show about living with autism, or, in Finbar the fish’s case, living in water. The show takes a heartfelt look at the life and struggles of a young man trying to make connections with the people and world around him. Along the way Adam asks gently of his audience to consider life from his perspective.

Wonderbox

Sensorium Theatre

Producer: Joo Tan
joo@performinglineswa.org.au

Sensorium Theatre – Australia’s leading theatre company making work specifically designed for young audiences with disability and their friends – invites children to roll the dice and set out along a safe, exhilarating pathway into the unknown.

Inside a giant puzzle-box of illusions, kooky-carnival friends with magic in their pockets lead audiences into an immersive multi-sensory wonderland of fantastical large-scale projections, strange tiny delights, and infectious live music.

TWO

Raghav Handa

Producer: Vanessa Wright
vanessa@performinglines.org.au

In a joyful celebration of trust and collaboration, the pair push the boundaries of Indian Kathak convention in a charming and playful testament to friendship, respect and profound exchange. Imagining new ways of working shaped by the sharing and negotiation of power, TWO presents impressive physicality, virtuosic music and witty encounters to expertly demonstrate the creative potential in respectfully challenging tradition.

An Uncertain Time

Sarah Austin

Producer: Samantha Butterworth
samantha@performinglines.org.au

Taking the notion of the first year of an infant’s life as a period of great uncertainty for both baby and carer, An Uncertain Time uses elements of song, sound, physical theatre and object puppetry to create a narrative journey for both baby and carer.

The work explores ideas of love, loss, hope and uncertainty through a tactile, sensory and visual experience that will captivate babies and adults alike.

Ready to Tour

Rinse

Amrita Hepi with Mish Grigor

Producer: Thom Smyth
thom@performinglines.org.au

What is it about the beginning that remains intoxicating? Our persistent lust for the first rush of a romance, scene, canon, theory, relationship, meal or country. Created by extraordinary dance artist Amrita Hepi, Rinse explores the romance of beginnings and what happens next, when those initial thrills begin to fade and inertia takes over.

The Act

Amrita Hepi with Mish Grigor and Tilly Lawless

Producer: Thom Smyth
thom@performinglines.org.au

A collaboration between two professionals that tests the transactional limits of art and erotic power. Through movement and intimate dialogue, dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi, and writer and sex worker Tilly Lawless, interrogate the delicate balance between personal expression and professional service, between artistic integrity and market demands.

Deejay x Dancer

Nick Power

Producer: Kath Papas
kath@performinglines.org.au

Deejay x Dancer brings Hip Hop’s traditional dance and musical instrument back into sharp focus, honouring the initial connection that sparked the worldwide culture, utilising this foundation to create new histories. Featuring 3 of Australia’s most accomplished Breakers fuelled by DJ Total Eclipse on the wheels of steel, this new work continues Nick Power’s choreographic exploration of Hip Hop’s rituals and origins, following on from his past 3 full length dance works; Cypher, Between Tiny Cities and Two Crews.

Charcoal

Keia McGrady

Producer: Sinsa Mansell
sinsa@performinglines.org.au

Charcoal explores the embodiment and physicality of caring for country through visual art and movement. Working with charcoal made on Migunberri country, this extraordinary interdisciplinary dance work embodies the fire that forms it. Charcoal investigates the impacts of land management or lack thereof, as well as the importance of First Nations stewardship.

UNWOMAN

THE RABBLE

Producer: Samantha Butterworth
samantha@performinglines.org.au

Unwoman is song.
Unwoman is a crime.
Unwoman is a real and substantial risk.

UNWOMAN is an epic and imagistic piece of feminist theatre created in both Ireland and Australia, examining reproductive rights, experiences of pregnancy and bodily autonomy.

LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches)

Joe Paradise Lui and Merlynn Tong

Producer: Kath Papas
kath@performinglines.org.au

Merlynn and Joe hold a vigil for their dead grandfathers. Merlynn wants to preserve the rites of her forebears. Joe thinks it’s a load of superstition. As the night wears on, things get a little overheated, and the Lords of the 18 levels of hell decide to step in. LEGENDS is a heart-filled buddy comedy and deeply personal examination of the Asian cultural experience and the enduring power of friendship.

Premiering Soon

THE BLOK!

A Daylight Connection

Producer: Carmen Lai
carmen@performinglines.org.au

Radical, Blak, and funny as hell, First Nations theatre company, A Daylight Connection delivers new work, THE BLOK! This hilarious and irreverent show is a portrait of what it means to be an artist right now.

The play centres on a character called The Master, an auteur whose exponential success and dizzying sense of self-importance comes crashing into a severe case of writer’s block.

Back to Bilo

Belloo Creative

Producer: Vanessa Wright
vanessa@performinglines.org.au

We are proud to be working with Belloo Creative in the development and presentation of Back to Bilo at Queensland Theatre as part of Brisbane Festival in September 2025, supported by the Australian Government’s Major Festivals Initiative.

This is the remarkable true account of one family’s ordeal in the nightmare limbo of immigration detention, a story of how love is stronger than fear and of how persistence and togetherness can win against crushing odds.

In Development

Love Less Tender

Raghav Handa

Producer: Vanessa Wright
vanessa@performinglines.org.au

Love Less Tender looks at the complexity of love and pleasure through the Sanskrit scripture, Kama Sutra.

The piece, a danced, spoken and sung conversation between the quartet, explores the motivations behind and the borders that lie between love & pleasure and how they are shaped by personal, cultural & contemporary forces. What would you do for love? Is it ever too much? Is pleasure always guilty?

SPHINX

THE RABBLE

Producer: Samantha Butterworth
samantha@performinglines.org.au

A cinematic performance installation investigating the role of the care giver as a gendered experience.

In 1977 Laura Mulvey made Riddles of the Sphinx, a film investigating her own work on the male gaze. Using Mulvey’s and other feminist filmmakers’ techniques THE RABBLE will create an event that looks at the role of the care giver. The camera not used as a tool to enhance the auteur’s gaze, but instead focusing on the small tasks of the care giver. It aims to decimate the traditional uses of the camera in live performance and search for a new kind of dramaturgy.

THE FIZZ

BEAT Entertainment

Producer: Carmen Lai
carmen@performinglines.org.au

THE FIZZ is a narrative driven work about a family with 2 Mum’s (Mumma and Mummy) written by BEAT Entertainment and Yve Blake. We enter the story when Mummy has recently passed. We follow the two children who are coping with grief in very different ways, Jack (the youngest) is angry and internalising, whilst Bella (the oldest) is controlling everything possible in an attempt to contain her grief.

Watch Her Burn

Nicola Ingram

Producer: Sinsa Mansell
sinsa@performinglines.org.au

Watch Her Burn is a new play by Palawa / Wiradjuri emerging playwright Nicola Ingram exploring how a community navigates identity, responsibility and bureaucracy. The story is inspired by responses to an archaeological survey that revealed evidence of the oldest human habitation in the southern hemisphere lying in the path of a planned major highway.

The Fire Project

Andrea Gibbs

Producer: Jen Leys
Jen@performinglines.org.au

The Fire Project by Andrea Gibbs is an immersive audio-journey through the urgent issue of escalating bushfires in WA and across Australia. Through powerful first-hand accounts, it immerses listeners in the realities of fire, offering an understanding of its effects whilst proposing pathways for regeneration and hope.

SAMPAI, TAK SAMPAI

Jumaadi and Michael Toisuta

Producer: Jane Schon
jane@performinglines.org.au

Sampai, Tak Sampai (arrive, not arrive) is a new performance work by Michael Toisuta and Jumaadi that explores migration, inspired by the Javanese tradition of ‘boyongan’ where entire communities carry belongings – sometimes whole houses – during relocation. The project explores migration with a focus on how communities maintain cultural identity and creative expression in the face of displacement. This is a deeply personal work weaving together Jumaadi’s distinctive visual imagery with an intricate soundscape by Michael.

Sylvania Waters

Antoinette Barbouttis

Producer: Vanessa Wright
vanessa@performinglines.org.au

Asking profound questions about ethics, culpability, and narrative agency, the work explores the Donaher-Baker blended family during their time as the focus of the documentary series as well as its subsequent effects on their lives.

The Simmering

Jo Pollitt and Maitland Schnaars

Producer: Jen Leys
jen@performinglines.org.au

In The Simmering, Perth-based writers Jo Pollitt and Maitland Schnaars go toe-to-toe in an emotional and intellectual boxing match that confronts the difficult, often hidden, conversations within family relations and societal roles. The result is a provocative dialogue that takes form over a series of fierce rounds in an arena that is simultaneously a suburban kitchen, outback AFL field and inner-city gym.

The Team

Simon Wellington
Executive Producer

simon@performinglines.org.au

Vanessa Wright
Senior Producer NSW

vanessa@performinglines.org.au

Jane Schon
Producer NSW

jane@performinglines.org.au

Nelson Lee
Associate Producer NSW

nelson@performinglines.org.au

Jen Leys
Senior Producer WA

jen@performinglineswa.org.au

Joo Tan
Associate Producer WA

joo@performinglineswa.org.au

Kath Papas
Senior Producer VIC

kath@performinglines.org.au

Samantha Butterworth
Senior Producer VIC

samantha@performinglines.org.au

View National

Visit

View New South Wales

Visit

Visit

View Tasmania

Visit

Visit

View Victoria

Visit

View Western Australia

Visit

Visit

In everything we do, we acknowledge that we live on Aboriginal land and constantly learn from the wisdom of First Peoples.

Where we are and the history that precedes us informs how we work and how we move forward. 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website may contain images, voices and names of deceased persons.