Margaret Cameron

Margaret Cameron is a Melbourne based freelance writer, director, performer and teacher. In a long association with La Mama Theatre as ‘a public studio’ and Playbox Theatre over 20 years she has created work that is informed by individual need, rigorous dialogue and enduring collaborative exchange with arts practice and her audience. She is uniquely articulating performance through workshop and performance forums nationally and internationally and utilises these and other pedagogical frameworks as places of sentient research to develop association, collaboration and her own practice.

Her original works, situated somewhere between performance art and theatre, have been widely performed in Australia. These include Things Calypso Wanted to Say! produced by ABC Radio (1998) and published in Performing the Unnamable (ed by Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman Currency Press 1998), first performed at La Mama Theatre, touring Australia then at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Germany; Part Two 'Calypso' published by Pascoe Publishing Australian Short Stories and ABC Radio; The Mind's a Marvelous Thing! La Mama Theatre and ABC Radio (1997). Knowledge and Melancholy was short-listed for 1997 Victorian Premiers Literary Awards and was first performed at La Mama Theatre & Dancehouse, Melbourne (1997), then at The Zachary Scott Theatre, Austin Texas in collaboration with The Deborah Hay Dance Company (1998). Bang! A Critical Fiction! was produced by The Playbox Theatre Melbourne along with Knowledge and Melancholy (2001). Currency Press published both works in association with Playbox Theatre Melbourne (Inside 01 Anthology).

In 1998 she received The Gloria Dawn and Gloria Payten Fellowship and the 1998 Eva Czajor Memorial Award For Female. In July/August 2005 the proscenium was presented in Magdalena USA, Providence Rhode Island and The Articulate Practitioner – Articulating Practice, Aberystwyth University, Wales. She has an MA in Performance Studies at Victoria University, Melbourne and received the Australia Council Theatre Fellowship in 2004. her work was recently presented at The Odin Theatre, Denmark (07) and Barcelona Piezas Connectadas, in Spanish.

In her performance pieces “Cameron rides a different "frontier", her own psychic landscape … material reality and social relations are mutable, charged with desire and imagination” (Thompson. Writings On Dance). Her body of work is absorbed with the imagination, delaying closure and the exigency of storytelling. “Cameron constantly invites the audience to think beyond (or through) the performance space” (Jonathon Marshall Realtime). Through the mundane, the recognisable and the ordinary, narratives - not only her own – examine Marriage, Relationship, Work and Art.

Her work is described as:
“Achingly funny … Cameron creates metaphors for human experience. Crackers explode just as love and life can blow us to pieces. … A balance of text with movement, humour with the poetic, the banal with the philosophical and the personal with the universal … (her) writing tilts from hilarity …to poignant, wrenching despair." (Kate Herbert The Sun Sept 17, 2000)