BUILD UP - bold, urgent & relevant

BUILD UP 2025

Our flagship New Work development program BUILD UP has four exciting projects supported in 2025.

Our flagship New Work initiative, BUILD UP supports the development of performance work from a range of performance artforms and cultural practices, offering funding, time, space, and peer support from May – December each year.

Artists receive up to $15,000 worth of support towards the development of their work including cash, office and rehearsal space, dramaturgy, project mentoring, professional advice and advocacy.

This year’s successful Build Up artists will be working behind the scenes throughout the year to move their projects forward.

Ben Graetz
A History of Rock and Roll with Bogan Villea (working title)

I am creating a bold new 60-minute performance work that fuses the art form of drag with the raw energy of rock and roll music. This work will explore themes of gender/masculinity, colonial histories, Aussie culture, and the power of Blak, queer storytelling. Building on the success of my recent show, TINA – A Tropical Love Story, I want to push the boundaries of performance further—deepening the narrative, elevating the storytelling, and crafting a show that is as rebellious as it is revelatory. This show will be part storytelling, part truth-telling, part cabaret—an electrifying fusion of music, history, and identity. Featuring a mix of local performers and creatives, this show will be a celebration of resilience, resistance, and rebellion. But this is more than just a drag and tribute show. It’s a reclamation. A Blak and bogan-infused journey through the soundtracks that shaped generations, amplifying the voices and stories that have been left out of the mainstream narrative.

About the artist

Ben Graetz (Larrakia, Malak Malak, Kungarakan, Iwaidja & Badu Island) is an award-winning First Nations Queer performer, director, and producer with over 26 years of experience. He is the founder of BRG Productions and Co-Director of Party Passport, with an extensive background in developing culturally and socially impactful arts projects. His work has shaped the visibility of First Nations queer artists in the Australian arts sector and beyond.

Kate Wyvill
Pandemonium

This is a text and video theatre piece built around the implications of loneliness. In 2020 when the Corona Virus Epidemic was terrifying the world and the human race locked themselves away from each other, my vibrant, highly sociable mother was placed against her, and my wishes, inside an English care home. Cut off from all her family and from me on the other side of the world, she was dead within sixteen months. Death by loneliness. Staggeringly, young people, who we consider to be the most connected of us all, are now the loneliest age group in society. This begs many questions that I wish to explore in this project.

About the Artist

Kate is a stage and screen writer, actor, director and producer. Her works are funded by Screen Australia, Screen Territory, Darwin International Film Festival Spark Initiative, Arts Council England, Creative Australia, Varuna Writers’ Centre, Creative Australia Regional Arts Development, Arts Northern Territory Development and Production, Brown’s Mart Theatre Development and Production and Playwriting Australia Development. Kate has produced eight seasons of her stage plays with scripts published by Australian Plays Transform. Her first short film, The Wardrobe she also directed and was selected for Flickerfest Best of Australian Shorts 2023. She is currently developing a television series set in Darwin.

Sean Guy
The Community

This play is a comedy of errors. It begins with a big corporation (representative of everything from supermarkets to shopping centres to Amazon) moving to a small town, and the excitement that it brings. People rush to spend their money and make the most of bargains. But soon, the impacts of this begin to show. Local community groups cancel sessions, local businesses shut down, and families are forced to take on second jobs. Minimum wages are stretched further and further, while the bigger business continues to show benefits only for the CEO, who visits once every few months, in between buying investment properties. The manager of the big business was excited to move to a beautiful small town, but within a year, the magic feels long gone. Can she rally her new friends and neighbours to destroy what she has worked so hard to create?

About the Artist

Sean Guy is an emerging storyteller who loves engaging the community and making people laugh. Since 2021 his ensemble plays have been performed over a dozen times at fringe festivals and by community theatres across the country, while he has also hosted many school writing workshops, and advocated for small businesses and youth literacy, for which he won an NT Young Achiever Award. With this Build Up residency, he hopes to write his most meaningful play yet, a comedy of errors about a group of people living in a small town, finding new ways to connect with each other.

Melanie Mununggurr
Little Girls, I’m Home

A creative response to a deep therapeutic session I had with a traditional First Nations therapist/healer from Turtle Island (Canada), around my own childhood trauma and some complex relationships. Following the session I transcribed the journey we took where we returned to my childhood homes in search for answers and comfort from the younger versions of myself. The project idea is that the series of short stories written after the experience are translated into a one (potentially two) person, semi-autobiographical theatre show. It will explore how childhood trauma/intergenerational trauma and even vicarious trauma can manifest in adulthood.

About the Artist

Melanie Mununggurr is a Djapu mother, poet, storyteller and performer. Through her connection to her land, culture and language she is decolonising the literary and performance space through the use of Dhuwal language weaved throughout her poems. Following her win at the Australian Poetry Slam in 2018, Melanie has travelled the world and Australia with her poetry. She has collaborated and performed with some of the country’s finest musicians and producers such as Emily Wurramara, Caiti Baker and Kuya James and in 2023 performed with Jessica Mauboy at Australia Fashion Week. Melanie and multi-award nominated musician Juran Timu, wrote and performed “The Manifesto of Saltwater Women” at Darwin Fringe and after winning two of the festival’s awards, returned in 2024 for a second season at Darwin Festival. Melanie’s first collage of poetry is due be published in 2025, and in 2024 she launched her first spoken word album to be released on most streaming platforms in March.