Jan Wositzky and Penny Glass performing Dignified Anger: Stories for a Perilous Now. Photos: Clive Willman.
Dignified Anger: Stories for a Perilous Now is highly entertaining, packed with humour and a welcome break from the world’s woes. Yet it is so relevant and thought-provoking.
It is a dramatic, moving and comical piece of storytelling theatre. From a quirky beginning through tough times to a hopeful conclusion, it’s all storytelling, the ancient art, for a contemporary audience.
First performed at the Woodford Folk Festival in 2023 and fresh from the National Folk Festival in Canberra, the two-hour show is coming to Wollongong on 8 May and Tathra on 9 May.
Penny Glass and Jan ”Yarn” Wositzky OAM wrote the show together. Despite the pair meeting occasionally over the past 50 years, the show is their first collaboration and draws on their markedly different backgrounds and skills.
In 1971, playing the tea-chest bass, Wositzky became a founder of the renowned Australian folk band The Bushwackers. They toured Australia and Europe for a decade, then he moved to a career that combined stories and music.
Glass is an actor, theatre producer and musician. She met Wositzky in Melbourne in 1980 while she was studying at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Three years ago, they ran into each other at the Woodford Folk Festival.
“Penny had just come back from 23 years of working in theatre in Chile,” Wositzky said. “I was just there doing a gig, and she was a stage manager at the festival.”
Actor, theatre producer and musician Penny Glass.
They wrote the show together around the kitchen table, workshopping ideas.
“We cooked up the whole thing, finding other stories, making suggestions, writing stuff, chucking it out,” Wositzky said. “We tried a few times and got the show together.”
The show is inspired by their personal and professional experiences in Australia and Latin America, resulting in rich and diverse content.
After many years touring Australia as an actor/musician and community theatre worker, Glass migrated to Chile in 1998. There she collaborated with diverse communities to create theatre, most notably for 20 years with male prisoners in a Santiago jail.
The collaboration was a departure for Wositzky.
“My whole career is about telling Australian stories with Australian music, and now we have this material from Latin America.”
Glass said she had often thought they were ahead of their time.
“I have worked in theatre and social justice and we are both long aware of how societies around us operate,” she said. “We were always thinking about why there is so much individualism, why are men still dominating women and why haven’t we reacted to climate change.”
They wanted to create a show that talked about the people who are working together for positive change.
Wositzky and Glass wrote Dignified Anger: Stories for a Perilous Now.
Wositzky said they were not writing about current affairs.
“We are telling stories that address all the stuff that is happening at the moment, but they are universal stories that have been here in the past and will be here in the future,” he said. “We are trying to tell these stories with universal impact.”
Topics and themes include war, the huge profits of armament companies and people working together to protect the environment. There are stories of resistance with dignity; the wisdom of the bushman and yarn-spinner Bill Harney, who returned from WW1 with a hatred of war; the hidden history of the Aboriginal man on Australia’s $2 coin, and the 14th-century tale of ”What do women desire most, above all else”. The answer may surprise.
With original music and songs from folk legends such as Bob Dylan, Shane Howard and Chilean Victor Jara, those big stories are seamlessly linked with Wositzky and Glass’s personal recollections of growing up in migrant families.
“We intersperse story with live music that we play,” Glass said. “It is just the two of us on stage and our instruments.”
She plays the flute and Andean flute — the quena — while Wositzky plays the five-string banjo and percussion.
You can catch Dignified Anger: Stories for a Perilous Now at the Wollongong Golf Club at 7:30 pm on Friday, 8 May and the following evening at the Far South Coast’s new venue, Headland Theatre, adjoining the Tathra Hotel, at 7 pm.
Book tickets for the Wollongong performance and the Tathra presentation.
