ABSTRACT
I arrived at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith International Airport for my fourth visit to Australia on a sunny Friday morning, 24 October 1997. Gordon Beattie, Senior Lecturer in the University of Western Sydney’s theatre department, picked me up and drove me to his home in Penrith, all the way to the edge of the western suburbs at the foot of the Blue Mountains. As the crow flies, it is a distance of 60 kilometres, but virtually impossible to bridge by public transportation and even by car a slow two-hour trip, first through the congested suburbs south of downtown and then on the M4, a tollroad currently being widened for the 2000 Olympics and hence prone to long delays. My aim was to document the work in progress of what was reputed to be one of Australia’s most exciting community theatre organizations, Death Defying Theatre (DDT), which in April 1997 had renamed itself Urban Theatre Projects (UTP). I had selected this company on the recommendation of Monica Barone, a community and youth theatre artist I had worked with in Holland in 1996. Barone’s inside view of DDT, for which she had directed productions in the past, was confirmed by other friends, theatre artists, and scholars. And the ‘Trackwork’ project itself sounded fascinating: a funky show created and performed on regular trains by residents of western Sydney, supposedly the most troubled area of this ‘sprawling’ metropolis.
