Mari Lourey Wins 2014 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award for DIRT CLOUD

Last night at the Seaborn Broughton and Walford Foundation (SBW) Christmas Party, the winner of the 2014 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award was won by Mari Lourey for her play "DIRT CLOUD."

The $20,000 award for the development of a play or other approved performing arts project attracted a great number of submissions from across Australia.

DIRT CLOUD is an ambitious new play set against the backdrop of landscape, mining, kinship and space exploration being written specifically for an indigenous and non-indigenous cast. Described by the R E Ross Trust as "a startling work of genuine promise and excitement the play is bursting with rich imagery rendering the dark forces of human nature spirituality and the cosmos in exquisite detail. The relationship between these richly drawn characters is as fragile as the landscape that sustains them."

In accepting the SBW Award Mari said "This award will enable a draft of this play to be finished and workshopped with a director, actors and designers to explore how this complex work will become a three dimensional theatrical work with a poetic vision for the stage. It will provide an opportunity to bring some of the best of this country's artists together from opposite sides of the country and genuinely realise a cross-cultural collaboration that is not seen enough of in this country."

Mari Lourey is a playwright, performer and dramaturge who came to theatre from a music background. She divides her time between Broome WA and Melbourne. Her most recent play was the critically acclaimed Bare Witness, which completed a national tour with Performing Lines in 2012, following a sold out season in Melbourne. Her new play Dirt Cloud was developed with the assistance of Playwriting Australia's National Script Workshop. Both these plays received Victoria's coveted R E Ross Trust Script Development Award. Previous independent work includes the critically acclaimed Dirty Angels, (La Mama Theatre 2003, regional Vic tour '04) and Digging Into the Green Mountain, a solo show with music that played at La Mama and various music festivals in 1999.

Since the beginning of 2014 she has worked in Broome with Goolarri Media where she has facilitated the establishment of a professionally tailored writers program for Indigenous writers. Between 2010-2013 she was co-facilitator of ILBIJERRI Theatre's Black Writers Lab.

Between 2002-06 she worked as researcher, writer and performer on several plays for the ground breaking Torch Project company, including the Green Room and Vic Health Award winning The Bridge, made with the Murray River communities of north-west Victoria directed by Rachael Maza, with a cast of professional and community actors. She holds a Masters in Performance Writing from VCA University of Melbourne and studied performance and other writing at RMIT between 2000-'03.

Mari has led major artistic projects in communities including The Big Issue's Homeless Not Artless project between 2007-09. Between 1996-99 she worked with Beyond A Shadow Of a Doubt shadow puppet theatre company which performed numerous shows around Victoria and NSW, as well as performing in various bands. She also works freelance as a dramaturge and has been a proud member of the Australian Writers Guild since 2002.

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