Louise Howlett is an Australian director, producer and writer.
She creates and co-creates theatre from non-traditional materials for a wide range of audiences. Her productions vary - from multimedia to minimalist, from scripted to devised - but her process remains centred on key values: multi-vocal collaboration, body and voice as connectors, the importance of asking questions and embodied citizenship. She believes that theatre is so important that it must include us all.
Residency project :
With her company, the artist is developing an immersive performance project, Secret of the Raft. The original intention was to create a performance that brings Géricault's iconic painting The Raft of the Medusa to life through the use of, for example, 3D projection, installations and interactive audience participation.
"Géricault's painting 'The Raft of the Medusa' is recognised the world over for highlighting a flagrant violation of human rights. So far, in our quest to tell this story, we have made three creative developments resulting in a script and a projection of images. There is no doubt that visiting the site from which the Méduse set sail would be a unique opportunity to immerse ourselves in the historical context of this tragedy. A residency at the Centre International de la Mer - La Corderie Royale will allow me to further develop the written text of 'The Secret of the Raft' and to improve the projections that complement this work so that they are more detailed and accurate.
Therefore, the next stage of this project is at once dramaturgical, physical and analytical - how best to reveal the many complex elements and layers of the raft's story so that the audience experiences a rich range of stimulating sensory environments.
I'd be delighted to have the opportunity to study the aesthetics of Rochefort and the surrounding area; to research and further develop our main character, a canteen girl who is the only woman to survive among 150 men on the raft, and to undertake a rewrite of the script, putting the dramatic structure under the microscope to see what could be improved in terms of the overall story. Overall, our aim is to make 'Secret of the Raft' an important artistic project that will have a life that will go on and strengthen national and international artistic and cultural links between France, Australia and other French-speaking countries."