The Red Room Company

The Red Room Company is a non-profit organisation based in Sydney, Australia that creates, publishes and promotes poetry in unusual ways.^[1] It was established by Johanna Featherstone in 2002, emerging from The Red Room Radio Show, which broadcast on 89.7FM Eastside Radio from 2001.^[1]

The Red Room Company concentrates on three core programs: Papercuts, a poetry education program that sees contemporary Australian poets visit students in primary and secondary schools; Unlocked, a workshop series designed to promote literacy, rehabilitation and self-expression in correctional centres across NSW; and public projects, that aim to promote the status of poetry in the wider community.^[2]

Papercuts

Papercuts logo

Papercuts is The Red Room Company's poetry education program. It sends contemporary Australian poets into primary and secondary schools all across Australia. It was launched in 2007 with support from the Keir Foundation and the Ian Potter Foundation, initially piloting in four NSW high schools. In 2008 it expanded into Victoria and in 2009-2010 moved further interstate to Norfolk Island and Queensland schools. Papercuts is now a national program, servicing schools everywhere in Australia.

In November 2010, KPMG hosted a Papercuts 'poetic excursion' to promote the program, during which small anthology was printed.

A Croydon Public School student with her poetry object.

Papercuts claims to be the only national poetry program available to high school students across Australia. The importance and potential of poetry has been endorsed by students, teachers, poets, and education professionals, as well as by benefactors of the organisation.^[3]

Papercuts organises the Poetry Object, a free writing project for students in Years 3-10 attending NSW Public Schools in the Sydney Region.

In November 2012, an exhibition featuring posters of poems and photographs of special objects was held at the State Library of New South Wales.

As part of The Poetry Object, six Australian poets have been commissioned to write new poems about their own talismanic objects.^[4]

Unlocked

Unlocked logo

Unlocked is an educational arts program developed and run by The Red Room Company in collaboration with educational staff from NSW Correctional Centres, which 'unlocks' the potential of inmates through poetry. The initiative's goal is to encourage self-expression and reflection while improving inmates' literacy. Introduced in Sydney in 2010, the project has entered its third year.

At correctional centres across NSW, Australian poets run intensive writing workshops, collaborating with students on every stage of the writing process: from the initial exercises and experimentations, through the editing and rewriting process, to recording, performing and publishing their work in a professionally designed print anthology.

The project was developed in collaboration with Corrections NSW Audiovisual Unit and education staff, 2SER's Jailbreak radio show, Blood & Thunder Publishing Concern and Boccalatte.^[5]

A participant at an Unlocked workshop in Balund-a

• Current Unlocked Projects

The most recent Unlocked project was held at the Balund-a Project, a residential diversionary programme for male and female offenders between 18 and 40. Indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty led the workshops, and the students responded with great enthusiasm to Lionel's work and stories. There was a particular interest in Lionel's use of language, his mixing of English and Bandjalang dialect.^[5]

In October 2012 Red Room Company poets Lionel Fogarty and Nick Bryant-Smith will travel to South Coast Correctional Centre to run an intensive, three-day workshop.

• Project Outcomes

According to The Red Room Company, Unlocked offers a range of potential outcomes and benefits for the students involved. Through Unlocked, poets work with both with the vocational education providers working in NSW Correctional Centres, as well as education providers such as ACE Community Colleges, an Adult Education provider and Registered Training Organisation which runs accredited courses in the Balund-a Project.

At the completion of each project, a limited-edition anthology of work created during the project is published. These publications are made available to inmates who participated in workshops, and is distributed among libraries in correctional centres around Australia.

Through Unlocked, students can return to their community with recognised qualifications, as a part of the study that they have completed inside. In this way the value of the project is not only supporting students to come to terms with emotions, past experiences or relationships, but to build practical literacy and communication skills, and the confidence to apply them.^[5]

Public Projects

The Red Room Company regularly runs major public creative projects whose goal is to commission new works by contemporary Australian poets, then publicise this new work as widely as possible. Past Projects include:

• Pigeon Poetry - eight poets from across the country were commissioned to each write a poem that would be raced by thoroughbred pigeons on 3 August 2008.^[6]
• Clubs & Socs - in 2011 contemporary poets were paired with clubs and societies from across Australia. Poets created new poetic works based on their experiences.^[7]
• Sea Things - saw four new poems commissioned from poets in Hobart, Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin, and from secondary school students in Perth, Darwin and Thursday Island, as the project charted the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race. From March - June 2011, an installation of the trips 'poetic cargo' was displayed in the window of the Australian Council for the Arts in Sydney.^[8]
• Sun Herald 'Extra' Poems - in 2009 the Sun Herald asked The Red Room Company to collect poems from their archive to be featured over the summer.^[9]
• Stacks - The Red Room Company’s poetry-in-libraries series in 2011, held in City of Sydney Libraries. Andy Quan, Judith Bishop, Toby Fitch and Eileen Chong hosted children's poetry workshops.^[10]
• ATYP Workshops - The Red Room Company paired with the Australian theatre for young people to teach young actors how to read poetry.^[11]
• The Poet's Life Works - featured four high-impact Australian poets in four events in various spaces around Sydney.^[12]
• Dust Poems - in 2009 explored the words of truckies and their experiences of the road and commissioned three truck-driving poets and three professional poets, Brendan Ryan, Lindsay Tuggle, Judith Bishop who work in non-trucking industries.^[13]
• Red Room Radio - individual poets were commissioned to write a poem for community radio broadcast and online access.^[14]
• Nightwriting - encouraged people to use all their senses to explore poetic language. A poem-pod installation, designed by Camilla Lawson, was fitted with audio Braille and tactile alphabet versions of an original poem. The project premiered at the 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival.^[15]
• Sustainable Sydney - in partnership with the City of Sydney council, and Art and About. Eight poets ran workshops in schools in inner Sydney.
• Occasional Poetry - an installation of poems, dressmakers dummies, and related costumes at the 2007 Sydney Writers' Festival.^[16]
• The Poetry Picture Show - a series of poems on the theme of film and the moving picture. These were accompanied by filmic interpretations of the poem and a project blog on the Red Room website.^[17]
• The Cabinet of Lost and Found - an installation of poems, and the personal objects that inspired them at the 2006 Sydney Writers' Festival.^[18]
• The Wordshed - a series of six half-hour television programmes, about all kinds of writers, reading and creative processes, broadcast on Television Sydney.^[19]
• Poetry Crimes - new Australian poems on the theme of crime and justice, launched at The Justice and Police Museum.^[20]
• Toilet Doors Poetry - a series of illustrated poem posters for display on the backs of public toilet doors, which ran in 2004 and 2006. The 2006 poem posters were displayed in Greater Union cinemas and Qantas domestic terminals across Australia. Toilet Door Poetry was partially funded by the Australia Council.^[21]
• Fingerprints - a collection of hand-written poems and poet portraits,^[22] exhibited at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2004.^[23]

Board and staff

The Red Room Company's directors include chairperson Bret Walker and Artistic Director Johanna Featherstone.^[24]

Poets

The Red Room Company has collaborated with many poets including Judith Beveridge, Bonny Cassidy, Eileen Chong, Tricia Dearborn, Brook Emery, Kate Fagan, Mike Ladd, David Malouf, Greg McLaren, Derek Motion, Andy Quan, Craig Sherborne, Sandra Thibodeaux, John Tranter and Fiona Wright.

A full list of poets can be found at the Red Room Company's website.

External links

• Official website

References