The Malthouse Theatre is located in a historic beer-making malt house (1892) on Melbourne’s Southbank. “We champion artistic and cultural diversity and seek out alternative points of view. Committed to inclusivity, Malthouse Theatre invites collaboration without bias. We actively address inequities in representation. We believe fiercely in gender equality. We champion positive change and passionately influence its enactment.”
The Suitcase Series empowers young people, aged 14-16, to tackle the greatest challenge of their generation: climate change. The Suitcase Series is Malthouse Theatre award-winning participatory program for appox. 720 Year 9 and 10 students and 40 teachers from 50 classroom groups. Combining in-class activity with in-theatre performance, this innovative program is an opportunity for students to develop and expand their theatre-making skills and share work with peers. The aim of the program is to stimulate creative thinking and responding to provocations of climate change by developing and producing an Australian play for young audiences.
Every two years Malthouse Theatre commissions a new script exclusively for the program, which is then offered to schools who engage with the program over a course of a year, with new schools participating in year two. Malthouse Theatre call out to a select group of playwrights and directors which are typically engaged because they are looking to challenge themselves with a new form and/or are early career and poised for one of their first main stage commissions.
As the culmination of the Suitcase Series program the students will come together over two weeks in October and engage with professional theatre artists. They will also experience a main stage production where Malthouse Theatre performs the work with a cast of 3 in the Beckett Theatre.