Anne O’Keefe, Lynne Santos, Noelle Rees-Hatton

The Women’s Night is an event which focuses on women and improvisation. It takes place at Cecil Street Studio 2 or 3 times a year and celebrates its accompanying season, which provides a throughline and inspiration for the night. The performances are a mixture of solos and duets, and tend to live in that cross-over zone of dance and theatre. Movement, text, singing and live music all feature in an eclectic mix driven by the personality of the performer.

The Women’s Night began in 1997, and the first was part of an event organised by Al Wunder called a Year of Fridays - a year of Friday night performances demonstrating the richness and diversity of improvisational practice in Melbourne. An inspirational teacher of improvisational performance, Al supported and encouraged that first event, coordinated by myself, Noelle Rees-Hatton and Adrienne Leibmann, before Lynne Santos also joined us.

Lynne Santos, Anne O’Keeffe, Noelle Rees-Hatton photo by George Kyriacou

The Women’s Night set out to celebrate women improvisers within the broader community of improvisation in Melbourne. It was established to support performers by providing a safe environment, where risk-taking and experimentation were encouraged. The first Women’s Night had a mixture of highly experienced improvisers and newer, less experienced performers, with everyone cross-fertilising and supporting one another. It was a special event where the concerns of women could be concentrated on and validated. That first show had everything in it from relationship angst to full-scale nudity and everything in between! It was a strongly unifying event and Women’s Nights have continued to feel this way ever since.

This idea of community had been gestating for a long time, fueled significantly by Al and his philosophies. In traditional societies, dance and theatre are not seen as separate from ordinary life, but a part of it. Audience members perform and performers watch sitting in the audience... there is no separation. I wanted to create this same sort of feeling-where an intimate relationship was developed between audience and performer. It’s about generosity, a shared experience where the audience is embraced by the performer and the performer embraced by the audience.

Improvisation often creates this intimacy, as it is impossible not to reveal oneself through it. The audience recognises this authenticity and there is a shared moment of truth. These moments of truth are what the improviser searches for and the audience yearns for, and when found, these moments create a bond, a synergy.

In this way the Women’s Night is about developing a sort of audience/performer community which is mutually supportive. The decoration of the space for the season, food provided for the audience and gifts at the end of the night for audience members and performers all support this.

We work hard to uphold this delightful sense of mutuality and integrity in the Women’s Night. It is part of a thriving community of people at Cecil Street who value authenticity and experimentation very highly and who thrive on the joy that often arises from the present moment in performance: those delicious discoveries fueled by an uncensored unconscious. These discoveries can provide a rich mother-lode of material for set performance or be an end in themselves. Either way those who are addicted to improvisation recognise each other and revel in each other’s discoveries.
Anne O’Keeffe.

The Women’s Night is a seasonal event which presents the work of women who involve improvisation as a central element in their performance practise. It is an inclusive evening involving women from a range of performance backgrounds and experience.

The most recent evening, ‘Scents and Sensibility’, was held in October to celebrate Spring. The programme included 9 events, each about 10 minutes long. Improvised or set text in combination with dance/movement featured in several of the works. One piece was a duet between dancer and musician, with the two performers briefly exchanging roles. And the MCs for the evening were Siamese twins, as intimate as a duet can get!

Apart from a chance to flex those performance muscles, the Women’s Night also provides the opportunity for performers to test run ideas and collaborations with other artists. These short works may then be developed into longer projects.

The Women’s Night seeks to promote improvisation as a valued performance mode in its own right. It aims to foster an ever-increasing audience for this body of work
Lynne Santos

One of the special aspects of Women’s Night for me is a spirit of sharing a night of unique contributions with a strong emphasis on, and sense of, aesthetic.

Women gathered to decorate the space together arranging a boundary of entwining flowers and ferns creating a beautiful setting/backdrop and an ambience to the evening. The performing space was magically transformed and transformative, enhancing and enhanced by the events of the night.

Perhaps inspired by the theme of spring, in nine events of solos and duets there was much humour and sensuality, beauty and outrageousness. The blend included the political, the lyrical and poetical expressed through improvised dance, storytelling, song flute, theatre and a lot of special dressing up...
Noelle Rees-Hatton

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