Intercultural performance company based in Sydney, Australia, embracing performative culture and collaboration with artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and geographic locations. Australian Performance Exchange (APE), incorporated in 2007, creates and produces inter-cultural performing arts projects involving collaborations between artists from Indigenous & non-Indigenous Australia, mu
lti-cultural Australia and the rest of the world. APE creates new Australian theatre work, which responds to current and historic concerns of cultural identity, diversity, climate change and social justice. APE’s inaugural performance, The Eyes of Marege, brokered a collaboration between Indonesian theatre company Teater Kita Makassar and Indigenous artists from Arnhem Land, Adelaide, Sydney and Newcastle. It opened at the inaugural OZAsia Festival in 2007, followed by a sell-out season at The Studio at The Sydney Opera House. Artistic Director, Sally Sussman has had over 25 years of engagement with artists from other cultures, beginning as a scholarship student at the Central Drama Institute, Beijing and the Conservatorium of Music in Shanghai, where she worked as Culture, Education and Science Consultant at the first Australian Consulate-General. In 1996 she received the Rex Cramphorn Performing Arts Award to study inter-cultural theatre at New York University and was a Resident Artist at Mabou Mines the following year. Fluent in Mandarin, she began working with Chinese artists in Sydney on an innovative training project that brought together leading contemporary performance artists and Chinese Opera actors in an exchange of performance skills, which evolved into a ground-breaking work, Orientalia. Sally has created programmes for the Melbourne and Perth International Arts Festivals and worked with artists from China, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, India , Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon; with car enthusiasts in Newcastle and with students at NIDA, VCA, PACT, Macquarie, Sydney & Western Sydney Universities. APE Artistic Associate, Annemaree Dalziel has extensive experience working with arts communities in western Sydney and regional NSW. Her work is underpinned by collaborations with artists whose practices extend from grass roots to internationally significant work; and with the people whose lives, concerns and communities are the subject and inspiration for the work.
