Introducing The
Reflections For The Future
Project
Project Introduction
The Reflections for the Future project was a creative arts-based recovery initiative developed in the City of Coffs Harbour, following more than 4 years of floods, fires, hailstorms, pandemic and drought. The community live with the memory of these traumatic events, and maintain a fine balance of resilience and hope, alongside anxiety and concern about what the future holds.
Their reflections on their experiences of disaster are invitation to consider our collective future, in which the increasing frequency and severity of natural hazard disasters will continue to impact our communities.
This project was conceived as a piece of verbatim theatre, which could be presented in multiple formats. To develop the work, we interviewed disaster impacted community members to hear their reflections on their disaster experiences and perspectives on personal and community resilience.
The interviews with 11 community members from the Orara Valley and Northern Beaches of the Coffs Harbour LGA were conducted in December of 2023, during which time fires were once again impacting the forests west of the Orara Valley. In January of 2024, and then again in February, flooding, albeit minor, once again reached these communities. These events added extra weight to their stories of resilience.
We warmly call these interviewee’s our “Contributing Storytellers”, and with their permission, we worked with local playwright Amy Bradney-George to develop 7 verbatim monologues from the interviews with our Contributing Storytellers. The monologues navigate themes of hope, loss, resilience, and showcase the deep wisdom, strength and character of not only the Storytellers, but their communities more broadly.
To preserve some anonymity for our Contributing Storytellers, each monologue was created using excerpts from several interviews. The monologues avoid reference to specific local geography, age, ethnicity or gender, allowing for diverse audiences to see themselves mirrored in these stories.
Our ongoing desire is for this project to be accessible to diverse audiences and to evoke empathy with the stories shared. To further this goal, the first performance of this work has sought to focus on diversity and accessibility.
Our Contributing Storytellers were all adults over the age of 35, and their reflections and stories bore the wisdom and resilience of people with broad life experiences. We decided to identify and work with 7 young actors, aged 13-21, to perform the monologues. The intent was to hear the wisdom of years, reflecting on disaster, through the voices of young people whose future is certain to include severe disasters.
We decided to make their performances of the monologues were audio recordings. This is because we wanted to highlight an often-forgotten community during disasters; people with disability. This community is diverse, and a person’s experiences of disability are not universal. Sometimes they are also not visible. However, what is consistent is a sense of ‘being left behind’ before, during and after a natural hazard disaster.
To explore this theme further, the monologues were performed on film, in Auslan, by members of the Deaf community on the Coffs Coast. These performers also have their own experiences of disaster, but experiences which are starkly different from that of hearing people.
The two performances, of our young actors on audio, and our Deaf performers, were combined to create our final performance format. The work is available online, but was premiered in <insert month> 2024 with a live audience. As part of the premier, audience members were invited to experience the monologues through full and partial sensory states. The audience were provided with their own over-ear headphones and eye masks and invited to choose between three options:
- Watch the performances in silence with subtitles, without their headphones.
- To listen and watch the performances simultaneously
- To listen only, using the eye mask
The purpose of this invitation to experience the work in varying ways was to provoke reflection and empathy in the audience, and to consider those in their families, friends and community networks who may need additional support to navigate a disaster.
It is our hope that this work, which showcases the intangible value of community bonds and cohesion, prompts audiences to reflect with the future in mind; how can my yesterdays prepare me for an uncertain climate future?
The Reflections for the Future team acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which this work was conducted, the Gumbaynggirr people, who have cared for this land since time immemorial. We pay our respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge their ongoing connection to, and care for, Country.
Project Notes
Email to: reflections4thefuture@gmail.com
This work would not have been possible without the participation, honesty, vulnerability and permission of our Contributing Storytellers. On behalf of the team, we extend our deepest gratitude to them for trusting us to share their stories.
This work was performed by talented locals from the Coffs Coast, and without their commitment and talent, this project would not have been able to be realised. A heartfelt thank you goes to our Young Performers, and our wonderful Deaf Performers.
Verbatim theatre connects us in a unique way by literally using the words of people who have shared their experiences, feelings and reflections. It’s a platform for telling important stories within a community, for processing significant events and for sharing insights with people everywhere.
I have a deep respect for the words people choose and the ways we express ourselves. It was a privilege to be able to hear the interviews and reflections shared by each Contributing Storyteller, and I took great care in connecting parts of their stories to create these monologues.
Disasters and other significant events affect us all differently. But this project is a reminder that they can also bring us together, at the time, in recovery and afterwards in reflection. The words in these monologues are the words of people in this community, brought together in a way that allows us to all get something from them. Thank you, Amy Bradney-George
Click here to download the playbook.
This work has been developed with Creative Commons License, with further details below. We have taken this approach to ensure that communities, artists and recovery practitioners who would like to reproduce this work, or replicate the project, do so without fear of copyright infringement or limitations.
Reflections for the Future © 2024 by Luke Barbagallo, Amy Bradney-George is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Under this license, you are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
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- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
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