Marg Dobson – Secretary
I have worked in performing arts including theatre in education, musical comedy, cabaret and theatre. In the mid 1980’s with Women’s Community Theatre and the early days of Melbourne Fringe in the collaboratively produced Women’s Season, I wrote and presented a variety of group and solo performance projects.
These shows were usually comedy and musical, Cooking with Marg, Marg and the Beast and The Whole Shebang. Expanding later into Environmental Education with Vox Bandicoot, and street musical theatre with The Teabags Marching Band, and cabaret with The Romanoffs. In 2011 I was hostess for Finucane & Smith in The Burlesque Hour and The Carnival of Mysteries at fortyfivedownstairs Melbourne. In March 2014 at Footscray Community Arts I played the lead role in the reading of Peta Murray’s play, Things That Fall Over, a production in development over two years.
Since living in Ballarat I have worked with Lynden Nicholls on Voices as a performer and directed the life models in the Art Gallery of Ballarat for the 24 Hour Experience Ballarat. In Backspace Gallery I wrote and performed a recording of an artist response to Dora Meeson’s painting Leaving for the Front. In 2016 I narrated Peter and the Wolf and the Carnival of the Animals at Her Majesty’s Theatre for the Winderlude Festival with the Ballarat Symphony Orchestra and four dance schools.
Currently I am working on The Women of the Goldfields, a new play, using historical source material to explore the true stories of women during the Eureka Stockade. I have presented two development performances in Ballarat, at the Main Bar in November in 2014 and the Mechanics Institute in 2016.
Everybody wants to be able to give to others in need. Sometimes they just need a vehicle and the VABT is a just the ticket. Through the generous theatre audiences chucking in notes and coins at a bucket rattle, others responding to requests for donations via a letter in the mail, and the people organising to ask for the money, the VABT can give to others in need. The power of giving is enormous and the community of the theatre world is powerful.
