Home from the USA + Talon Salon in Darwin Festival

Geeeez.  I had an awesome and eye opening time in the USA. I spent my last week in the Twin Cities, which is also where my Dad’s massive family live. I was overwhelmed by the sense of community and generosity in the arts and within the Hmong community. I am rabidly keen to go back to the Twin Cities and complete a month-long residency. Some ideas I have are to remount Talon Salon, to run some peer/info-sharing sessions, to undertake an oral history project within my own family and from this create a verbatim theatre piece. I’ve been toying around with the idea of re-appropriating the ‘Sliding Doors’ movie (Gwenyth Paltrow, English accent). The idea that there are crucial turning points in our lives where the direction our lives fork off into dramatically different paths is, I think, something pretty universally understood. In one reality, I could have been a village girl. In another, I could be in St Paul. In my present reality, I live in Melbourne. What if these various destinies overlapped and collided? What if we all cut our hair into pixie cuts ala Gwen? What if our stories intermingled with scenes and dialogue from Sliding Doors.

Closer to home is the Northern Territory. In the NT is Darwin. Yay! It’s warm in Darwin! It’s eclectic and tropical and relaxed! Talon Salon has been invited to the Darwin Festival 2013. We’ll be at Beautiful Nails on Mitchell Street and Nail Lovers in Casuarina Mall in August 2013. And we’ve made two new tracks, working with Russell Goldsmith as the sound designer and with actors Jing-Xuan Chan, Tom Considine, Piper Huynh and Amanda Ma.

Get your nails done, and see/do/experience a big program of arts. See the Darwin Festival website.