Dinner Party at the End of the World: Creative Development Program 2025
Community in Recovery 2025
41 Artists
9 Creative development projects
241+ participants
NORPA’s Dinner Party at the End of the World is a multi-year, multi-artform theatre-making process inspired by the raw and powerful stories of the Lismore floods. Its aim is to reflect on community, resilience, and the extraordinary ways people come together in a time of crisis.
NORPA’s curiosity for this concept has been ongoing since 2023, through the collection of stories, research and development, and creative developments led by NORPA’s Artistic Director Julian Louis.
In 2025, we expanded this enquiry, inviting a remarkable group of artists to create responses to the theme, alongside the Northern Rivers community. Working across theatre-making, play, improvisation, dance and text, their work embraced the region’s stories of strength, generosity and enduring spirit.
Project Associate artists in 2025 included Bridie Hooper, Fred Copperwaite, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, Kaz Therese, Kimberley McIntyre, Mitch King, Naomi Feller, Noa Rotem, Sprung Ensemble, Suzie Miller, Poppy Walker as well as NORPA’s Artistic Director Julian Louis.
The many components and outcomes of the process have been important and inspirational for the ongoing development of a new NORPA production Dinner Party at the End of the World – conceived and directed by NORPA’s Artistic Director Julian Louis.
Creative responses from Associate Artists
COMMUNITY CHORUS LED BY FRED COPPERWAITE
“Why have we forgotten that we are Country and Country is us?”
Fred, a Bunuba man from the Kimberley WA, is an actor, director, dramaturg, teacher and co-founder and former Artistic Director of Moogahlin Performing Arts, NSW’s leading First Nations performing arts company.
Fred’s exploration was driven by the question “Why have we forgotten that we are Country and Country is us?” He worked with 12 community members through an open 8 week workshop program to create a chorus — an ensemble that brought a collective voice and presence to the stage.
SPECIAL EFFECTS WITH KAZ THERESE
“How do we maintain our humanity and connection in climate catastrophes?
What comes after resilience?”
Kaz is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist working across theatre, dance and visual arts, whose practices centres community, collaboration and cultural exchange. Kaz is Artistic Director of WEREWOLF, exploring radical transformation in extreme times.
For Dinner Party at the End of the World, Kaz held a public workshop and worked alongside collaborators Gerladine Balcazar and Joey Ruigrok to develop Special Effects — a playful, surreal response to disaster narratives. Inspired by vintage cinema effects and family games night rituals, the work transformed catastrophe into unexpected vignettes of joy, humour and connection.
THE LAST DANCE WITH KIMBERLEY MCINTYRE
“All humans have their limits, I’m curious about those edges.”
Kimberley is a Northern Rivers dance maker, teacher and performer. Through her evolving practice Curious Body, she has nurtured local dance communities since 2014 and leads the Old Men Dancing collective in Mullumbimby.
Kimberley collaborated with long-time movement partner Phil Blackman on an intensely physical duet, sharing partner work, contact improvisation and martial-arts-inspired techniques in an open public workshop.
The duo tested the limits of movement to explore extreme emotion, tenderness, generosity and survival in the face of disaster. The project asked: what do we reveal about our humanity when we are pushed to the edge?
SUSTAINED DEFIANCE WITH BRIDIE HOOPER
“Our capacity to endure, to connect, the innate experiences of hope, love, devastation that universally connect us.”
Bridie is an award-winning circus artist whose career spans over a decade of international touring with CIRCA and acclaimed independent works. She is known for pushing circus into bold new artistic territories, blending extreme physicality with poetic storytelling.
As part of this creative development, Bridie developed Sustained Defiance — a long-form duo exploring physical languages of resistance, endurance, and defiance in response to the climate crisis. Collaborating with her close friend Billie Wilson-Coffey, her sister and musician Freyja Hooper, and filmmaker Poppy Walker, Bridie also investigated how circus could be meaningfully translated to film, capturing risk, effort and connection through new textures and expressions. Bridie and Billie also held a public skills development workshop exploring partnerwork and balance.
SPIRIT OF THE THRESHOLD RIVER WITH JADE DEWI TYAS TUNGGAL
“The river is the body of the earth. Feeling is the body of the soul.”
Jade is a Javanese Australian choreographer, dancer and director celebrated for transcultural, interdisciplinary works performed across the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Collaborations with NORPA include Djurra, Wildskin and Flow.
For Dinner Party at the End of the World, Jade developed Spirit Of The Threshold River, a practice-led research exploring the ecological and emotional currents of the Lismore floods. Rooted in the Clarence River’s riparian zones and inspired by Yaegl ecology and the Javanese concept of rasa — feeling as the bridge between the visible and invisible — the work created a River Icon: a living spirit of memory, grief and hope.
Working with Northern Rivers independent dancers, they moved though improvisation, breath and touch to give voice to what the floodwaters have carried and taken. A dance of trauma and transformation, listening to body, land and community, Jade expressed
DUNDURIMBA WITH MITCH KING
“Knowing that when we no longer exist she will still remain. Will we find peace or become more destructive within ourselves?”
Mitch is a performing artist, creative producer, and a proud Yaegl and Widjabul Wia-bul man from the Bundjalung nation on the east coast of Australia. His main disciplines are music, theatre, and dance. He loves telling stories through sound, movement and film.
Mitch started with the provocation that to understand the end we need to go back to the beginning, where it all began. What was here before, what currently is and what will remain after we are gone. Dundurimba – swamp lands. A paradise that once existed as beautiful and pristine as you can see the clear waters and Jullums swimming throughout her while also giving all living things around her what it needs to thrive. Together with creative collaborators Tess Eckart, Shannon Smith and Kirrilee Dawn, Mitch created a short dance theatre work with spoken word poetry, exploring this theme.
SPRUNG DANCE THEATRE ENSEMBLE
“We think the world ends and we’re not sure what comes next.”
Based on Bundjalung Country, Sprung develops original dance and theatre works. Both a training program for emerging d/Deaf and/or disabled artists and professional performance ensemble, Sprung has presented works at Brunswick Picture House, NORPA, Plunge Festival, and Australian Dance Awards.
For Dinner Party at the End of the World, each Ensemble artist imagined their own version of what the end of the world could look, feel, sound and smell like — drawing on personal ideas and perspectives of disaster and survival. From these starting points, they developed rich visual worlds through storytelling, movement and sound.
Working with local collaborators — experimental music collective Tralala Blip and visual artist Naomi Feller — they layered movement and sound in unexpected, playful, and sometimes unsettling ways.
FUTURE FEAST WITH NOA ROTEM
“How can the awe and delight — as well as the acknowledgement of devastation and despair — be grounds for resilience building?”
Noa is a director, performer and educator who has trained and worked internationally with companies including The Human Theatre, The Danger Ensemble, Little Dove Theatre Art and Anne Bogart’s SITI Company in New York.
For this project, Noa led Future Feast, a youth focussed strand of the project. Over 160 primary students embarked on a creative learning journey across four workshops in 8 schools that nurtured imagination, connection and care for the Earth. Noa invited artists and workshop facilitators, Kate McDowell, Poppy Walker, Dom Sullivan and Waangenga Blanco, to help bring children’s voices into the conversation, exploring how awe, wonder, devastation and despair might shape resilience.
Noa hoped to discover how deeply young people feel their connection to the natural world — and what future they imagine rising from crisis.
NAOMI FELLER
A visual artist and poet, Naomi inspired and supported this project throughout with a particular interest in disability representation and community activism, having held her own dinner party at the end of the world in the aftermath of the 2022 floods. For this iteration of the project, Naomi designed, made and glazed over 130 ceramic bowls and shared a deeply personal poem. In an act of radical generosity linking with the theme of sacred hospitality, each bowl was given away, with a request that the recipient in turn pay forward a generous act, spreading a tangible and powerful community message.
Additional Project Activities
The Sharing Event
In November 2025, over 200 participating artists and community members including invited guests gathered at NORPA’s The Joinery for a culmination of the Associate Artists’ creative response projects. Bringing together the extraordinary artists, workshop participants and key collaborators who helped shaped the project so far, the evening was both a celebration and a heartfelt thank you.
Part party, part creative showcase, the night featured the Associate Artists sharing glimpses of their new works-in-progress and ideas in development – bold, playful and thought-provoking responses to the provocation of the Dinner Party themes. It was a chance to gather as a community of makers, reflect on the journey so far, and toast the creative energy that has carried the project forward.
Essential Stories: A Panel Event
Essential Stories was a live panel event exploring how art, storytelling, and shared experience shape who we are and how we live together.
Hosted by Professor David Heilpern (Southern Cross University), the conversation brought together acclaimed playwright Suzie Miller (Prima Facie), NORPA Artistic Director Julian Louis, storycatcher Jeanti St Clair, and First Nations theatre director and actor Fred Copperwaite.
Through reflection, live readings, and lively discussion, the panel explored the power of art and storytelling to connect us and shape how we live together.
Listen to a live recording of the conversation via SoundCloud, Spotify, or Apple
Documentary Series
A five-part short documentary series follows the evolution of NORPA’s Dinner Party at the End of the World creative development program. Through the voices of its artists and collaborators, the series highlights NORPA’s signature approach to making new Australian theatre — one deeply grounded in Country, community, and collective storytelling.
A CREATIVE FUTURES FUNDED PROJECT
Dinner Party at the End of the World is supported by the Creative Futures Fund, a Creative Australia initiative backing extraordinary works that push boundaries and bring distinctly Australian stories to audiences across country and around the world.
We’re proud this project was selected from a highly competitive field — a recognition of NORPA’s commitment to telling powerful collective stories, and the innovative, collaborative processes we use to create new work.
Future Feast received funding from the Australian Government through the Northern Rivers Recovery and Resilience Program, administered by the NSW Reconstruction Authority, and delivered by NORPA. Future Feast is also presented in partnership with the Diocese of Lismore Catholic Schools Office – NORPA’s Education Partner.
Photos by Tajette O’Halloran.