Description

Good With Maps: When the world map was full of gaps, the Amazon topped the list of places unknown to western explorers. In the twenty-first century are there any ‘unknowns’ left? On a trip to the Amazon, the writer ponders this and other questions as she struggles to deal with her father’s journey through Parkinson’s disease towards what is perhaps our last great unknown—death. Good with Maps is sad and confronting, but it’s also funny and thoughtful, celebrating the power of literature to transport us to places both real and imagined.

‘This is a complex, deeply rewarding piece of theatre, one that balances cerebral exuberance with shattering emotional power.’ — David Kettle, The List (Edinburgh Festival)

Teacup in a Storm: The jungle of bureaucracy, the drudgery of cleaning up yet another shattered plate, the isolation of responsibility. Caring for someone with a disability or enduring health need is no fairytale. But in this mix of documentary and fictional narrative, Noëlle Janaczewska weaves a story of heroines and dragons — and battles fought both inside and out. Teacup in a Storm is a window into the largely unseen world of carers and the power of love and determination.

Winner of the 2017 AWGIE Award for Community and Youth Theatre.

Biography

Noëlle Janaczewska

NOËLLE JANACZEWSKA is a playwright, poet and essayist. She is the author of The Book of Thistles (UWA Publishing)—which fuses memoir, monologue, environmental history, archival collage and digressions—and the collection Scratchland (UWA Publishing Poetry Series). A graduate of Oxford and London Universities with a Doctorate from the University of Technology Sydney, she is the recipient of multiple awards, fellowships and residencies, including the NSW Premier’s Digital History Prize, a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the Griffin Award, multiple AWGIE Awards and a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale for her body of work as a dramatist. Noëlle’s writing has been produced, broadcast and published internationally as well as locally. Recent productions include: The Past is a Wild Party, The End of Winter and Good With Maps—all three produced by Siren Theatre Company; Mrs C Private Detective and Experiment Street for ABC Radio National; Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue and Teacup in a Storm for the Q Theatre/Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre. Performance essays are a key part of Noëlle’s writing practice. A hybrid form she has developed which combines big picture thinking with the intimacy of the theatrical monologue.