Matthew Crosby

Matthew Crosby’s first theatre role was in a production of the musical Mame at Her Majesty’s Sydney in 1968. He comes from a line of actors – his grandfather,
Marshall worked in Australian vaudeville in the 1920’s and appeared in some of the first Australian feature films while his father, Don appeared in many of the feature films that were the renaissance of Australian filmmaking in the 1970’s.

Matthew graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1981. He has worked in all areas of the industry but in the last ten years has concentrated mainly on theatre. Theatre credits include The Chronicals of Macbeth directed by Tadashi Suzuki at Playbox Theatre Melbourne, Adelaide and Tokyo Festivals 1992; Faust (played Mephisto) directed by Barrie Kosky, MTC 1993; King Lear directed by Lech Mackiewicz, Playbox, Tokyo, Korea; Blue Hour directed by Renato Cuccolo Adelaide Festival 1996 & Melbourne; Meat Party directed by Michael Kantor, Playbox Melbourne Festival 2000; Toyo Dasshoku Girl directed by Yumi Umiumare, Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2002 and Undertow directed by Juha Vanhakartano South Australian State Opera, Adelaide Festival 2004.

Crosby has worked extensively in Japan. In 1995, he received a Japan Foundation Fellowship to study Japanese theatre. He studied with Tadashi Suzuki and Sujin Kim of Shinjuku Ryozanpaku. Then in 2000, he received a scholarship from Australia’s Asialink – he went to Shinjuku Ryozanpaku where he performed in seminal Tokyo writer, Kara Juro’s Love’s Beggar. Since that time, Crosby has toured with Ryozanpaku four times. In 2002, he performed with them in The Space Between a period play regarding 16th century Korean Japanese relations for the World Cup Soccer Arts Festival.

Lok Meng Chue

Meng Chue has been involved from the beginning (from 1985 to 1995) in nearly all of TheatreWorks’ productions. These include numerous performances on stage, both locally and overseas, and backstage as director, stage/production management, and offstage as workshop coordinator and administrator. She assisted Ong Keng Sen, TheatreWorks’ Artistic Director in his important early projects like Springboard at the Black Box, The Writers’ Lab, The Directors’ Lab and The Flying Circus Project, which culminated in the international tour of Lear, which she was also Assistant Director of.

After a hiatus of 5 years from the stage, she returned to performance in Keng Sen’s production of the late Kuo Pao Kun’s The Spirits Play both in Singapore (2000) and Japan (2001). In 2002, she once again assisted Keng Sen in his production of Search:Hamlet (Denmark) which premiered at the Kronborg Castle in Elsinore and Copenhagen for the Asia-Europe Forum. 2003 saw her managing TheatreWorks’ Continuum Asia Project (CAP), a one-year project spearheaded by Keng Sen, which focused on people-to-people collaboration. Based on the principle of capacity building, it brought together elders from the Ramayana dance tradition of Laos, youths of the ancient palace town Luang Prabang and Asian artists from various different disciplines. She also assisted Keng Sen in Lim Tzay Chuen, a graduation project of the pioneer class of the Theatre Training & Research Programme.

An associate artistic director of TheatreWorks, her most recent project saw her conceptualizing and directing Shanty: Follow That Dream, a celebration of the dreams, naivety and passion of four young dreamers in their quest for fame and stardom.

Gojo Masanosuke

Gojo Masanosuke is a dancer/choreographer of the Gojo School of Japanese dance. The Gojo School was founded by Gojo Tamami, a popular female dancer, who detached herself from the Hanayagi School in 1941 and created many new masterpieces that remain in the repertory today. Today, the Gojo School occupies a unique position in the world of Japanese dance with its double foundation in the classical repertory and the creation of new masterpieces.

A leading dancer of the school, Gojo Masanosuke has earned high praise for his dramatic expressiveness, which is backed by a sure technique, in performing a wide range of classical roles, including both female and male roles. Gojo has also carried on the spirit of the Gojo School by creating and performing new works, including Nijinsky-sho (Nijinsky Encomium), Yoma Densetsu (A Weird Legend), etc.

In his capacity as a scholar of traditional music and dance at the Kunitachi College of Music and the Musashino Academia Musicae Graduate School, Gojo conducts analytical workshops that have been consistently well received in many cities including Paris, London, Dusseldorf and Rome. He is also a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music.

Rizman Putra

“My belief is that art should transcend all boundaries and genres. This is what my performances and creations are about. My ultimate goal is to imbibe all cultures around me and produce an amalgamation of that product. The consumption of the Arts should be brought to the masses. One day all Art forms will be accessible to the man on the street.”

Graduated from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (LaSalle-SIA College of The Arts) with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Art, Rizman Putra co-founded the Multi-disciplinary art collective, Kill Your Television (KYTV) that has been voted as one of top ten acts in 2003 by The Arts Magazine.

He straddles between two significant posts as a choreographer and liason officer for the group. Last year, KYTV presented their works Dark Room Devil and The Spoon Circus and Deadline for the Substation’s Sept Fest and Theatre Fest respectively.

As an individual artist, he is also involved in a dance project, Melatonin, recently performed in Tokyo, Japan last October together with four other dancers which include the up and coming choreographer Daniel K.

In 2002, together with 5 other Singaporean artists showcased a multi-media work at Hanoi Contemporary Art Centre, Hanoi, Vietnam. And the following year, he performed in Yogjakarta, Indonesia for a performance art project called Fusion Strength with the rest of 23 other Indonesian and Singaporean artists.

Rizman, is well-known for his alter-ego, Manic Jango, which has seen different reincarnation in his acclaimed solo performances.

Apart from performances, he works on collages, installation and drawings, which have been the primary force behind his outrageous performances. He is also a singer/songwriter for an indie-rock outfit, Tiramisu, which has performed extensively in the local music scene.

A member of The Artists Village, presently, he is a committee member and has been involved with their shows overseas and locally.

Kota Yamazaki

After high school, dancer/choreographer Kota Yamazaki, studied butoh in Tokyo with Akira Kasai, and performed for three years with Tenshikan, Kasai’s company. In 1981 he began the study of classical Western ballet under Hirofumi Inoue, and in 1989 he was invited to join in a creation by Daniel Larrieu at CNDC in Angers, France. In 1994 he became a finalist in The Platform of Bognolet Competition in France, and in 1995 Kota founded his first company, Rosy CO. Generally, he works with a different cast for each production exploring new forms of human relationships and community. His works for Rosy CO include What’s Wrong (1996), Picnic (1997), Chinoise Flower (1999), and Chalon (2001). In 2002 he founded a new company, Kota Yamazaki Fluid hug-hug Co, which has already presented two dances in the butoh style, Meronna and Night on the Grass. His last project with TheatreWorks was Search: Hamlet which premiered at the Kronborg Castle, Elsinore for the Kopenhagen International Theatre festival, then moved to Betty Nansen Theatre at Copenhagen.

Tim Harvey

Tim earned a Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Drama at Deakin University in Melbourne. Since then, he has worked as a performer, teacher and choreographer and often facilitates extra-curricular dance workshops for schools in regional areas of Victoria.

Since 2002, he has continued to develop the Plan Protean Project with choreographer and director Shelley Lasica. This ongoing research has produced performances including History Situation (2002), Solos Project (2003) and Play In A Room (2003). Tim performed with Danceworks in Sandra Parker’s Work in Progress (2002) and Symptomatic (2003), both as part of the Melbourne International Festival for the Arts. Tim joined BalletLab in 2004 and is currently developing a new work with artistic director Phillip Adams and choreographer Rebecca Hilton.

Tim has also directed and choreographed various works including As the Crow Flies, Rubber Runway and Sinking, Feeling, a short, absurd cabaret performed at the Famous Spiegeltent in 2002. Other recent performance credits include Luke Hockley’s Awkward and Museum Emotions, a film by Fiona Macdonald.