Recent Works
Liesel’s most recent works include a ‘Bio-Cabaret’ for the Sydney Festival, ‘Send for Nellie’ by Alana Valentine, the drama, ‘Masterclass’ by Terence McNally at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre and ‘Window Dressing’ a large public performance installation created for Sydney’s Vivid Festival.
The Darkening Ecliptic (Ern Malley Hoax of 1943), The Sydney Art Quartet
Created as a promenade performance for Redfern’s 107 Project space, this performance by the Sydney art Quartet invited audiences to consider the relationship between ‘Legitimate Art’ and Hoax. It explored and played with the problematic poetry of Ern Malley and featured a repertoire by Grazyna Bacewicz and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Created for the 2024 Vivid Festival, Window Dressing was a site-specific performance installation staged in the windows of the Frank Gehry building at the University of Technology Sydney. The work invited audiences to engage in their own way with the imagined lives within the eight windows of the four ‘apartments’. Set to a carefully curated score featuring cocktail lounge music, silent film score, tangoes and Shostakovich’s unsettling Piano Trio No 2, Window Dressing cast the audience in the role of both voyeur and narrator – creating their own stories about the eight performers and their connections.
Window Dressing
“If you see just one thing at Vivid Sydney this year, Window Dressing should be it...Poignant, funny, intriguing, tragic and spellbinding. I dreamt about it last night and hope I do again”
– Carolyn Unwin, Creative Life
Masterclass
“Once in a while – very rarely indeed – a theatre production is so accomplished, so well executed, that there is little for a reviewer to do but sing it’s praises…..what dazzles is the way Badorrek’s Masterclass mines and refines that gold”
– Peter Hackney, Arts Hub
This new work by acclaimed Australian playwright, Alana Valentine, celebrated the cross-dressing cabaret and vaudeville star Nellie Small. Appropriately performed as a vaudeville cabaret, Send for Nellie featured episodes from Small’s life reimagined as vaudeville acts and a live band led by musical director Zara Stanton.