What Does it Mean to be an Artist? Tegan Ware talks Cicada

Interviewed by August Turnbull; words and questions by Asher Wood.

The latest offering from Merrigong Theatre Company’s MerrigongX artists’ program, supporting new and innovative works, Cicada is an exciting upcoming play presented not in a theatre, but in the Wollongong Art Gallery. Guided by gallery attendants, with works by local artist Steve Tierney, we follow a young artist from his childhood in the sun-bleached suburbs of the Gong, seeing his talent eventually bring him to the highest heights. But what caused his fall from grace and subsequent disappearance?

We sat down with playwright Tegan Ware to get the scoop on this unique work, hearing all about her leap from screen to stage, and the process of bringing together the worlds of art and theatre.

August: Do you want to start us off by telling us a bit about yourself and Cicada?

Tegan: I’m a Wollongong-based playwright and filmmaker. I’ve been working on Cicada for 3 and a half years with MerrigongX. It’s a play about an artist. We follow him through 3 different stages of his life, so, growing up in suburban Wollongong in the 90s, discovering his love for drawing, and then him as a young man in the city, and then him becoming a famous well-renowned artist. It tracks that experience, from discovering art to, like, a subsequent fall from grace and what happened in that space.

A: Your background is in screenwriting, and now you’re working on your first play. What’s the same and what’s different? Were there any elements of the process that you didn’t expect?

T: Yeah, it’s kind of strange because it’s similar in so many ways, but different in, really, so many ways as well. Both me and my director Nat [Carney] both come from screen backgrounds, so, I think, we’re very visual and very tactile in the way that we think about blocking and character and things like that. And bringing it to stage has been a really interesting experience and kind of figuring out how to connect with a live audience, in a way that film doesn’t as much. Putting it on in the gallery, it’s a very intimate space. The audience is kind of right there. And in film, you kind of get to choose where you direct your audience’s attention to at any given time. Whereas, in theatre, the audience has more agency to look at different things and experience it in a different way, and every show is different, which is exciting. 

A: Cicada is staged in an art gallery, and it blends theatre with visual art. Why was it important to you to tell the story in this way? What was it like trying to find the right balance or mix of the two?

T: The play has always been about visual art and the experience of making things, so that has always been at the forefront of how we've been creating it. Putting it on in an art gallery was a really interesting challenge for us, in figuring out how to present the work. So we’re presenting it as, it’s like the audience is stepping into a retrospective at an art gallery for an artist. So, like, getting to play in that space and figure out how the space and the play kind of talk to each other in that way. And we’re working with Steve Tierney, who’s a local college artist, and he’s created some beautiful works for the show, which has only helped elevate it.

A: What has it been like developing Cicada through the MerrigongX program?

T: It’s been amazing. There’s not really any other program that I know of that’s like it. I got to write the show a couple of years ago, and then we had a year or two just to develop it and kind of figure out what was working and what wasn’t. That’s when we discovered that it would work the best in an art gallery, with an audience, really intimate, as opposed to on a stage. So yeah, a lot of discovery through that process, which has been amazing. 

A: You're an Illawarra local, and Cicada is set here in the Gong. Is there something special about making work that’s so literally close to home?

T: Yeah, definitely. I think Wollongong is a very artistic city, in ways that I think a lot of people don’t expect. Like, there’s art everywhere you look in Wollongong. It was interesting because when I set out to write it, I didn’t think about the local aspect of it, and when reading the script back, it’s really peppered in there. So I think my experience, growing up in the Gong, really influenced the work in ways that I didn’t expect. And so it does feel very, very Wollongong and very local, and I think it hits close to home. 

A: How do you hope audiences will connect or respond to Cicada?

T: I think I’d like audiences to feel connected to the character that we’re presenting. I’d really love for people who love visual arts to be introduced to theatre and people who love theatre to be introduced to the world of visual art. I think Cicada opens up a lot of questions about what it means to create, and what it means to be an artist and put your work up for other people to judge. And so I think I’d like people to go away kind of reflecting on that and maybe kind of questioning the way that they engage with art or the way that they see artists. I think that would be really great. 

Cicada, presented by MerrigongX, plays at The Chambers in the Wollongong Art Gallery from August 27th to 29th. Find out more and book your tickets at merrigong.com.au.