A Fighting Chance

Claudia Chidiac has long been interested in communities and an engagement with their stories, in her work and practice. “For about ten years now I've worked with young people in a community engagement context, and through my role as Artistic Director at Powerhouse Youth Theatre I really honed my skills on engagement, contemporary performance and working with young people,” Chidiac explains.

When her tenure at PYT was coming to a close she proposed Tough Beauty, a confronting exploration of young girl-to-girl violence in Australia. Three years on, as the theatre producer at Casula Powerhouse, Chidiac is directing Tough Beauty, the first theatre show to be produced entirely in-house at Casula. “Girl-to-girl violence has not been represented on Australian stages before, and this is an Australian response to girl-to-girl violence. We hear and we see a lot of work on stage and on screen about male identity and male violence. I don't know a performance piece that has addressed or has looked at female violence, and it's a gap, and there is something very serious that is taking place.”

One need only to recall the 2006 case of two teenage girls beating a cab driver (it resulted in his death) or the numerous YouTube schoolyard wars to which the likes of A Current Affair have pandered over recent years to realise that Chidiac has found an issue that needs addressing.

While touring schools previously with an anti-bullying show, Can You Hear Me, in partnership with South West Sydney Legal Services, Chidiac noticed a common trend among the teenage girls – a silence on the culture of violence that existed: “In an all-girls school it would take a while to get any response. At one school – it was a co-ed school – no one said anything, and then one girl put her hand up and said, 'Look, no one is saying anything because this stuff happens at this school, and no one wants to talk about it.' With high schools, again it was that same question, why? Why is this an option, and why aren't we doing other things? The young women I met would say, 'You know what, because we can, we can do it,' and that's what I wanted to explore, that choice. Why is the ultimate choice for you to make in that moment to hurt somebody else?”

Following a series of workshops and interviews that engaged the local community, she enlisted Finegan Kruckemeyer to write a fictional script that illuminated the responses of young participants, that recreated their world. “Both Finegan and myself feel really strongly that it's not our job as artists to give answers, and something like violence is so complex we can't give an answer to it and so what we have done is we've revealed violence in the lives of four young women, young women who have made conscience choices to commit acts of violence.”