about The Old Van

The Old Van is an independent professional theatre company, established in 1998 in regional Victoria. The company has developed a reputation for producing performance projects of high artistic merit, with strong levels of community participation and support. Projects are site (or more accurately location) specific and respond to the local area in which they are developed. Settings for performances have ranged from shearing sheds and chapels, to an old river-water pool, a pavilion a racetrack and a sea cove.

The company works with a core of experienced multi-arts practitioners staging small scale professional productions including seasons of Faith Healer (Melbourne and Daylesford); The Swan (Daylesford) and Molly Sweeney (Castlemaine, Footscray) while a six-actor Macbeth toured to Daylesford, Colac, Portland, Kyneton, Bendigo, Wangaratta and Melbourne. The Old Van also has a proven capacity for creating large-scale community work in regional areas: two seasons of A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming Mildura 1956 (Mildura); Man Of The Mallee (Mildura); The Seal Wife (Portland, Warrnambool, Mildura/Wentworth); Romeo and Juliet (Mildura); The Bludgers Opera (Shepparton) and the mammoth undertaking of travelling The Life and Deaths of Don Koyote - a play that ‘grew’ in three parts from Bendigo to Daylesford and Heywood. The company's unique work model has developed through the accumulation of experiences in each of these regional communities.

The Old Van develops its work exclusively in rural and regional areas and provides an opportunity for participation for those that have limited access to the arts due to distance and disadvantage. Participants in projects have come from diverse backgrounds and have included the Latje Latje Dancers, the Tractor Restoration Appreciation Club Sunraysia (TRACS), the “Z” team (a group of dynamic pensioner gardeners), the Portland Bell Ringers, the Bendigo Girl Guides, actors from Create Ability, numerous brass bands, netball and football players, and the HMS Henty Sea Cadets. Groups who might not usually become involved in such projects gain profile in their communities. In our experience local talent is found in unusual places.

Old Van productions are a shared environment for people of differing cultural and economic backgrounds, of differing genders and generations to meet in a community act of making the work, where a genuine, spontaneous interaction occurs.