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Chinese Market Garden Show : FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE!

Sara Isherwood

Updated: Jan 13, 2023


The drama is built around the story of my own family history - including myself. This is an ensemble piece. It tells the story of three generations of Chinese market gardeners, and the communities they lived and worked in. It contains circus forms including clown, tightwire, and juggling, in the context of a historical narrative of one Chinese family’s connection and contribution to Queensland via small scale, community based agriculture and food/cooking.



The work is an immersive, experiential and experimental theatre piece. The audience is not passive, and participates in a multisensory, dramatised experience - eating food, planting seeds, listening to stories. They will be able to feel the coolness of the water in the watering can, hear vegetables and plants singing in the Earth, smell the cooking smells, and taste the ginger frying in the wok. Old knowledge of life forces and universal connections to the earth will be explored through music and sound.


The juxtaposition of Australian and Chinese imagery with original photograph projections is combined with live Chinese music to create an engaging and multisensory, experiential theatrical production. It is intended to be staged in a non-traditional space. From the perspective of one family, this work also reflects the experience of Chinese immigrants within the Australian milieu and the concept of belonging. This is a complex relationship that speaks of the Chinese philosophy and world view, and how it is played out in an Australian context.



BASED ON TRUE STORIES.


Synopsis:


The show begins with live music played on Chinese instruments and a backdrop of a Chinese market garden, painted. The story, however, is not chronologically linear.


Chinese market gardeners, the Mar family, have a colourful history in Queensland. This play charts:

· the extraordinary, mythical journey by foot from Darwin to Charters Towers that great-grandfather Mar undertook in the late nineteenth century

· the extreme conditions in which Willie Mar Senior started his garden in Winton in the 1920s

· The Chinese takeaway and corner shop that Grandad “Ian” Mar owned in suburban Brisbane in the 1980s – after he gave up market gardening in tropical north QLD

· The Community Supported Agriculture project that great granddaughter Sai Lan Isherwood (the only female gardener in the show and also the only Eurasian) started on the Atherton Tablelands in 2007.

Scope and Creative Development


First Draft is now complete and the playwright is currently actively pursuing the first Creative Development. Please get in touch

if you are interested, either as an Asian or other background actor, a producer, director or dramaturg.


The intended audience for this work is regional Queenslanders – especially those with cultural or other connections with market gardening. It will also be of interest to historians and researchers, Chinese cultural groups, local history societies and so on. My aim is to partner with a regional theatre company and a metropolitan company to produce the show within five to seven years. Ideally it would be toured (satellite touring model) to three to five major regional QLD centres such as Cairns, Townsville, Winton and Bundaberg, where Chinese market gardening was prolific and had a significant impact on social development post-European invasion.


Sara (the playwright) is currently looking for community organisations, theatre companies, actors and musicians (especially those who play Chinese instruments) to work with. She is also in the process of seeking funding for the next stage of creative development – Draft 2.



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©2021 by Sara Isherwood

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