A Social Service Program

A social service 11 – 29 aug

Malthouse Theatre presents

A social service Chapter Three: ritual // extinction *** Beckett Theatre Original concept by / Nicola Gunn Created & Performed by / Nicola Gunn and David Woods Guest performances / Abira De Oliveria, Angelo Duot, Shaan Juma, Isabelle Mure and Elisabeth Wot Sound Design / Nick Roux Lighting Design / Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist Production Design / SANS HOTEL (Nicola Gunn and Gwen Holmberg-Gilchrist) and Eugyeene Teh Bust Construction / Katrina Gaskell Stage Manager / Tia Clark

This project has been supported by the City of Yarra.

Malthouse Theatre would like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin nation on whose land this work is being presented.

A note from the creator

From the outset, I was interested in exploring the ethics of social engagement in art and wanted to offer a critique of the model of commissioning works intended to activate public spaces. How is art used to become socially and politically significant and what are the conditions of the environment in which it exists that enables artworks to attain such significance?

In 2014, as part of a Masters project at RMIT, I began researching incidents of contested space – and in particular the contested spaces within public housing estates. I’d been given an article about an inner-city estate in Melbourne that had successfully lobbied against an urban renewal Master Plan that was proposing to develop the estate’s green space into an apartment block. An advanced form of gentrification was already happening all over London: council estates were being emptied of their tenants on the grounds that large concentrations of working poor and unemployed people needed to be moved out and replaced by mixed communities

of owner-occupiers and private renters. David and I pursued these controversies and found several alarming accounts – in London and New York – of art being used as an agent of eviction, providing much of the stimulus for A Social Service.

We spent several weeks in and around housing estates, interviewing various key players and discovering a complex political system. Throughout the early stages of development, we genuinely hoped to make a site-specific public artwork that engaged the residents and would speak to this agenda of gentrification and privatisation.

The site is now Malthouse Theatre.

At its heart, A Social Service is about the morality of place while reflecting on art’s relevance to society and its capacity to affect change.

Nicola Gunn / Creator Thank you to Kirsty Baird and the City of Yarra for their support, Dave Nguyen, Shaan Juma and the young performers from Uprising Theatre, a youth theatre collective based and funded in the City of Yarra, Wendy Lasica, Diana Nguyen, Caitlin Nunn, Fiona Ross, Kate Shaw, Eugyeene Teh and Emma Valente.

Cover Photography /

Andrew Gough

Cover Treatment /

The Sisters Hayes

Production Images /

Pia Johnson