In a bid to overcome writer’s block, award-winning author Ellen van Neerven started swimming every day.
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So it was quite by accident that the playwright, who is of Dutch and Aboriginal origins, from Queensland’s Mununjali clan, created their first play, Swim, from doing daily laps at the local pool.
Actor Dani Sibosado, who will be performing in the upcoming Griffin Theatre production of Swim.Credit: Louise Kennerley
“I find swimming is a really good way to put your mind into a completely different zone and just flow,” says van Neerven, whose debut work of fiction Heat and Light won the 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist award and was a 2016 co-winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards’ Indigenous Writer’s Prize.
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“Water is so much a part of the social fabric of Australia, particularly Queensland. Where I grew up in suburban Brisbane, the important question as a kid was ‘do you have a pool?’“, she said.
“I wanted to amp up the metaphor of fluidity, how the lead character accesses both their masculine and feminine parts just like water, which is fluid and has no boundaries,” says van Neerven, who identifies as non-binary.
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The story revolves around gender-fluid protagonist E, negotiating the space between the men’s and women’s changing rooms. The lead is played by non-binary Baad and Yawuru performer Danielle Sibosado.
Swim, which opens on July 10 at Carriageworks, began as a series of poems but developed into a theatre piece working with Griffin Theatre’s Associate Artistic Director Andrea James.
34-year-old van Neerven was inspired by African-American Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf , a series of monologues accompanied by dance and music.
