A playful path: Theatrical wayfinding in rural Queensland through the gift of the game

Queensland presents a unique challenge to rural theatre makers and audiences. As one of the largest and most decentralised Australian states, the tyranny of distance renders engagement with performance products and processes inaccessible to many. This has produced communities of 'haves' and 'have nots', where those in sites of concentrated theatrical activity often see their places and perspectives meaningfully represented in the performance zeitgeist, whilst the remainder subsist on local amateur productions of globalised commercial works and sporadic, 'fly-in, fly-out' imports (Abercrombie, McPhail, Peluso & Toohey 2020" Beckett, Fensham and Rae 2020" Regional Arts Australia 2019" Terracini 2006). According to this logic, the path to theatre in Queensland charts south, away from the regions and towards the major centres. By contrast, this researcher proposes a new, playful path, wayfinding a course towards locally-responsive theatre using shared community knowledge and "the gift of the game". This presentation will detail how an integrative games/theatre praxis can challenge notions of creative control in artist-in-residence contexts, centring both the narrative and artistic contributions of non-practitioners to produce new theatrical works. Through a gift-driven approach to experience design, this model encourages visiting artists to adopt a decolonising mindset, elevating non-practitioner communities beyond the status of 'theatrical subjects' and into creative agents. Within the 'magic circle' of the roleplaying game, keepers of local and formal knowledge are invited to travel together as co-artists, shaping original work that contributes new and valuable perspectives to Australia's theatrical milieu.