Slingsby Theatre Company, the end of an era.

At the beginning of my career, I was doing a lot of performance photography work, shooting for musicians, theatre and dance. The work was very creative, involving posters, album covers, performance and portraiture. There was a strong arts scene in Adelaide at the time, and a tangible reverence towards live performance. As well as my interest in grassroots performance, I managed to achieve my goals of landing the most auspicious gigs in the Arts for a performance photographer in Adelaide. I was the official photographer for the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, Womadelaide, The Festival of Ideas, and I shot for State Theatre and State Opera.

Early on in my career, I shot a show for an up-and-coming director named Andy Packer. He was an audacious thinker, and we got each other immediately. I shot a couple of his early shows just before he formed Slingsby Theatre Company, and I became part of the creative team. Their premise was to make powerful, dramatic works specifically for a youth audience. Slingsby created a big-hearted universe of magic realism as a vehicle to explore the depth of the human experience.

Everything about Slingsby’s work was impeccable and original, combining great storytelling, tech and analog devices; these shows were very beautiful. From the cast, the writing and the scores, to the lighting and the set and costume design. The work was a treat for the senses. As the stories of each play developed and unfolded, so did the sets, morphing before your eyes, to reveal more and more as the shows went on. Their work has a defined signature.

Inevitably, their lighting design was moody and dark. Our running joke was that the lighting was plotted by the Prince of Darkness. To say that these shows were technically challenging to photograph is an understatement. With much of the set extremely dark and whilst other areas quite bright, or barely any lighting at key times, the show’s always looked fantastic, but it took every ounce of my experience in low-light photography to land good shots of a run.

Promotional performance photography needs to fulfil a few outcomes. The photos need to be exciting to the intended audience and should convey the tone of the performance. Ideally, the actors can be identifiable from the shots. The hero poster image needs to be a cracking photo, with adequate negative space to accommodate text. It should include a big moment in the production, but it’s always good if the show has more in store than the advertisement reveals.

There is a balance between capturing a powerful performance in real-time and having time to refine the moments that get photographed. Peak performance almost always happens in front of an audience, whilst the energy from a run is often pretty good. In both cases, as a photographer, I have no real control over refining the final work. Nobody wants to pay for a ticket to a show only to have the guy next to them constantly clicking away and changing lenses. This makes shooting an actual performance the least favoured option. Shooting a run offers more freedom, but moments need to be caught in real-time, and there is often movement in low light to contend with.

Typically, I would shoot a tech rehearsal, capturing what I can, followed by a dedicated photoshoot of the key moments from the show. This allows me to attempt to capture the energy during a run, followed by having a dedicated photoshoot. I’m free to move around on stage and can ask for specific lighting states to be brought up. Then I have the opportunity to refine my compositions in a controlled setting.

But I digress, I wanted to discuss my time working with arguably one of the finest youth theatre companies in the country, and very much a high-water mark in my working life in this genre. I’ve just delivered photography for their swan-song, a triptych of plays, A Concise Compendium of Wonder. Due to funding cuts in the Arts in South Australia, this marks the end of the road for Slingsby’s.

I have been photographing their work for over twenty years, and their shows are up there with my favourite work as a photographer. Productions that were so photogenic that I felt like I was cheating. Always audacious in scope and always raising the bar, every show has been exciting to photograph.  

I have watched audiences of school kids absolutely beaming after watching their shows. I know that for some of those kids, that deep resonance with theatre was a pivotal moment in seeing a pathway to a creative life. I'm saddened because I wasn’t studious, and had no interest in sports, and creativity has always been the centre point of my life. The current trend to ignore funding the arts is very worrying to me.

I feel incredibly lucky to have started my career when I did. I caught a moment in time of huge creative energy and opportunity to share ideas and work. I feel very grateful to have had so many years working with such talented and devoted people as Slingsby’s.