Sue Benner Bump out
The Flaunt set was bumped out of the Sue Benner theatre on the Saturday night of the 14th of April 2016. The truck was driven up to Cairns by Felicity aka ‘Flick’.
Costumes had been neatly packed. 
Cairns Centre of Contemporary Art
CAIRNS: The first stop was the theatre. It was good to see Charles Wiles who runs The Centre of Contemporary Arts, Cairns. I had been to CoCA in 2011 for a visit when Charles had programmed my work Slowdive for the Cairns Festival at the Attic Nite Club. Fran and Matt had already arrived before me and along with Felicity had already laid the tarkette and assembled the set. The dancers arrived on the Wednesday and we began to rehearse in the space.
Audience development takes time, but due to the strong dance audience in Cairns thanks to Charles Wiles work developing dance audiences. we had two shows at CoCA.
Every venue is different and that impacts on how much space there is, and especially on lighting. We had the time to tweak the lighting and there were some specific things I had wanted to fix following the Metro Arts season. Below: rehearsing in the space at CoCA:
I thought it might be good to get some aditional photographs taken of Flaunt in a larger theatre. Photographer Marc McCormack was recommended and was available. Here’s some my favourite images he took of Flaunt 2.0 at the Centre of Contemporary Arts Cairns.
We bumped out of CoCA on Saturday the 23rd of April, and flew back to Brisbane on Sunday the 24th (not without a cast and crew photo before we left).
The truck was driven back to Brisbane and ready for the next venue which was Toowoomba:
TOOWOOMBA:
I had a few days of workshops in Toowoomba in the lead up to the performance in Toowoomba. I am told that Toowoomba only programmes one contemporary dance show per year. In 2017 it was ADT! So as an independent artist it was a big deal to be taking my work to Toowoomba. We had one show in Toowoomba which was at the Armitage Theatre at the Empire Theatre.
I had been to Toowoomba the month earlier for the screening of my film Ward of State and I took some photos while testing the film to show Fran and Matt who were not familiar with the space.
Bump in:
We didn’t have a photographer for Toowoomba, but here’s an iphone snap from during the performance:. 
We bumped out of Toowoomba the night of the 14th. It was two weeks before the final show, so everyone was starting to feel a bit sad about it being over. The final stop was the Ipswich Civic Centre on May the 27th.
Ipswich Civic Centre
It is said that dance is a hard sell in Ipswich, but I had built connections there over the years. It was nice that the final show was in Ipswich with a lot of students, friends, and familiar faces in the audience. The local high school dance school teachers where’s I’ve taught guest workshops brought their students along. It was nice to feel supported. Ward of State was screened after Flaunt as a double bill. Many people had not seen the screening in December 2014, so it was a chance to show the film again.
Here’s the team at the Ipswich Civic Centre: 
The Ipswich Civic Centre seats 500 people, and the Flaunt sales were close to 400 which is a massive fete for dance. I’d been told to expect 50-100 if I was lucky. Metro Arts and my local connections worked so hard to encourage as many people to attend.
Ipswich discovery
One strange thing did occur in the time between Toowoomba and Ipswich. In all my family research that informed my film Ward of State, I often wondered if my Great Grandfather Charles Thyer had ever performed in Ipswich. They had performed in Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, and New Zealand. I could never find any evidence that they had performed in Ipswich, but had a feeling that they did. Occasionally I search the Trove website and had never found any evidence of them performing in Ipswich. However in the lead up to Flaunt and Ward of State in Ipswich, this information had just been digitised and leaped out of the screen!
My Great Grand Father would have been too young to have joined his siblings in their toupee called “Les Thiers” at the time. But his older siblings, Ada, Maude, and Wattie (acrobats and contortionists) were on the bill as “Special Engagement by the Wonderful Thyer Family”. I read further below and their father “Mr Charlie Thyer” was also performing and listed him as a banjo soloist and a comedian.
The Thyer Family performed at the School of the Arts in Ipswich. It’s still there, directly across the road from where Flaunt was shown at the Ipswich Civic Centre. The timing of this appearing was quite surreal as I was in Ipswich making a work that came about from my family research, (as a starting point in looking at how women pushed themselves in history), and my show was performing literally accross the road from where performed in 1898, almost 120 years earlier! This was the School of Arts in Ipswich Qld (now is the Art Gallery).
http://picture.ipswich.qld.gov.au/awweb/main.jsp?flag=browse&smd=1&awdid=12
Flaunt Bump out
On Saturday the 28th of May, we bumped out of the Civic Centre and retuned to Mill Street Studios where the set would live. The post-show blues had kicked in. When you invest so much of your time, money, and passion into something, it can be hard to say goodbye.
