Rigorous, Women‑Centred Artmaking for Structural Change

The Living Room Theatre is committed to rewriting societal scripts through a multi‑arts practice that centres women’s experiences and challenges the systems that shape them. Our work is driven by multi‑disciplinary artistic and scholarly research, using performance, sound, movement, and installation to confront systemic injustice and inequality. We amplify themes of trauma, violence, and resilience — not to reproduce harm, but to create new imaginative and ethical spaces for understanding.

As artist and filmmaker Del Kathryn Barton reminds us: “More importantly than the working surface of violence against women… is the inestimable healing capacity of the imaginary world.”

This belief underpins our approach: art as a site of reckoning, transformation, and collective imagining.

A Twenty‑Year Commitment to Research‑Led Practice

For over two decades, Artistic Director Michelle St Anne has pioneered a methodology that positions The Living Room Theatre as both a hothouse for artists and a gymnasium for scholars. Our floor is a site of audacious cross‑disciplinary collaboration — a place where artists, thinkers, and communities come together to interrogate entrenched narratives and engage in critical dialogue about the most urgent issues of our time.

These collaborations shift perception, unsettle assumptions, and open new pathways for understanding the lived realities of women within systems of power.

‘Composing Self’ — Our Core Methodology

Composing Self is Michelle St Anne’s embodied practice of collaboration. It is designed to create safe, self‑determined spaces where artists can take risks, extend their practice, and reckon with their own methodologies.

At its heart, Composing Self values:

• Care — as an ethical and aesthetic foundation
• Kindness — as a mode of working and relating
• Knowledge creation — through embodied, iterative, and interdisciplinary processes
• Inquisitiveness — as a driver of artistic and scholarly discovery

This methodology supports artists to work with complexity, to sit inside difficult questions, and to build practices that are both personally grounded and socially engaged.

Why We Do This Work

Our mission is to rewrite societal scripts through a multi‑arts focus. We do this because:

• Women’s experiences are too often marginalised or misrepresented
• Systems of violence and inequality require new forms of attention
• Art can reveal what is hidden, held, or unspoken
• Imagination is a powerful tool for healing, critique, and change

Through rigorous research and collaborative creation, we build works that invite audiences to witness, reflect, and re‑imagine the world we share.

Image: Cloe Fournier in ‘the foul of the air’ The Lock Up, Newcastle
Photo: Chris Brown