Come Back Festival Week 1. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. Wilde & Darling Productions // Alix Kuijpers. 15 Aug 2026
Come Back Festival is a simple, but wonderfully engaging idea. Reprise the best of the best short works Goodwood Theatre and Studios have hosted over the years, present them over three weeks. Pair them creating an evening of disparate themes, forms and experiences, with a dinner break.
Goddess Era by Wilde & Darling Productions, along with I Know The End by Alix Kuijpers first appeared at Goodwood Theatre Studios during Adelaide Fringe 2023.
Both are two handlers. Both have all female casts.
One is a story and song-structured dive into Greek female mythology, in which the terrors lived by four Greek Goddesses are dovetailed into experiences lived by four female characters in modern times. The other is a sci-fi spiced contemporary dance piece dealing with ideas of ‘alien’ identity.
Sarah Kwong and Shannon Beckett’s Goddess Era offers a modern take on Goddesses Artemis, Andromeda, and Cassiopeia, along with Medusa, all who suffered for being who they were. Their self control, pride and beauteous excellence saw them shamed and punished.
Kwong and Beckett’s production is an extraordinarily warm, gentle story handling the most disturbing issues women face today; coercive control, sexual abuse, workplace oppression, childhood oppression.
This pair of artists keep it simple and direct, creating new characters and recognisable contemporary lives within the guise of each Goddess. Women living among us now.
Stories blended with Beckett’s original songs on guitar and ukulele gracefully flow in and out of each other with deceptive ease and beguiling harmonies. Yet the hard reality of what these women experience is not spared. It’s contrasted starkly with the sense of their ideal divinity, if that’s their reality, because being turned into a monster, or a chair in the starry heavens isn’t exactly winning at divine life, is it?
A wife is coerced into being smaller than she is. A child follows it up by being incapable of standing up for herself. A proud successful career woman’s choices seem to condemn her in the eyes of others.
Goddess Era doesn’t shy away from the brutality the work addresses. It confronts it with a warm humour and hope in spite of all that. It doesn’t rage against darkness. It offers hope, glimmers of sunlight, pathways out.
Confrontation achieves little without such things on the horizon.
I Know The End is the most delightfully absorbing sci-fi themed contemporary dance work, operating on so many levels.
Choreographer/set designer/sound designer Alix Kuijpers understands the power of using simple means to create a big impact. White sheets cover the floor and over a thin double bed mattress. Upstage backdrop is also white sheets. Dancers Caroline De Wan and Fern Mines approach each other and the central bed from the wings. They speak a sentence in unison, a tale of a man, of an alien, of the other side. On the bed they fall.
This simple, enchanting, engrossing opening moment is the hook drawing all into a thrilling, momentous journey, greatly abetted by a thrilling B grade sci-fi film sound score of utter perfection.
De Wan and Mines create worlds filled with allusions to space, space flight, and esoteric beings. Kuijpers’ choreography brings them together and apart in a manner alluding to unknown beings forming themselves and creating a construct between them.
The great thematic unifying moment is the double bed mattress being lifted to reveal it has as an alien poster on it declaring ‘I want to believe’.
Kuijpers dancers embody the universal attraction of cosmic bodies in its own chosen ‘alien’ form.
I Know The End is a tremendous work, sprawling in its pop culture ambitions underneath which lies at the heart of all great science fiction, a desire to give expression and explore the unknown, the misunderstood, the forbidden.
David O’Brien
Where: Goodwood Theatre and studios
When: 13 to 30 Aug
Bookings: goodwoodtheatreandstudios.com.au
