Scott Rankin (born 1959) is an Australian theatre director, writer and co-founder and creative director of the arts and social change company Big hART. Based in Tasmania, Rankin works in and with isolated communities and diverse cultural settings, as well as in commercial performance.
Rankin was born in 1959 [1] in Sydney and grew up there. His parents were businesspeople who owned an early learning specialist toyshop and lived on a Chinese junk in Lane Cove, moored in Sydney Harbour for 21 years. [2] [3]
Rankin enrolled in an arts degree but did not complete it, instead working in a retirement village and offering music workshops to homeless youth. Since 1981, he has mainly lived and worked from the far north-west coast of Tasmania.[ citation needed ]
As creative director of Big hART and as playwright and director, [4] Rankin has created or collaborated on many large-scale Australian stage productions: Namatjira for the Namatjira family; [5] Ngapartji Ngapartji for Trevor Jamieson, [6] [7] [8] Box the Pony for Leah Purcell; [9] [10] RiverlanD for Wesley Enoch; [11] StickybrickS for the Northcott Public Housing community in Surry Hills, Sydney; [12] Junk Theory for the Sutherland Shire, [13] as well as internationally touring works such as Certified Male. [14]
Rankin is a Fellow of the Australia Council for the Arts. [15]
Rankin and his theatre works have received many awards, including:
His works have been included in many arts festivals, including Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Edinburgh, and the Tasmanian Ten Days on the Island Festival. He has also toured to Sweden, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, England, South Africa, New Zealand, Germany [25] and the Netherlands. [26]
List of Rankin's works: [27]
Albert Namatjira was an Arrernte painter from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia, widely considered one of the most notable Australian artists. As a pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art, he was arguably one of the most famous Indigenous Australians of his generation. He was the first Aboriginal artist to receive popularity from a wide Australian audience.
The Pila Nguru, often referred to in English as the Spinifex people, are an Aboriginal Australian people of Western Australia, whose lands extend to the border with South Australia and to the north of the Nullarbor Plain. The centre of their homeland is in the Great Victoria Desert, at Tjuntjunjarra, some 700 kilometres (430 mi) east of Kalgoorlie, perhaps the remotest community in Australia. Their country is sometimes referred to as Spinifex country. The Pila Nguru were the last Australian people to have dropped the complete trappings of their traditional lifestyle.
Mutitjulu is an Aboriginal Australian community in the Northern Territory of Australia located at the eastern end of Uluṟu. It is named after a knee-shaped water-filled rock hole at the base of Uluṟu, and is located in the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Its people are traditional owners and joint managers of the park with Parks Australia. At the 2011 census, Mutitjulu had a population of 296, of which 218 (71.2%) were Aboriginal.
Evert Ploeg is one of Australia's most highly regarded portrait painters, who has won a range of painting prizes, such as the 1999 and 2007 Archibald Prize and was awarded the highly coveted ‘Signature Status’ of The Portrait Society of America.
Wesley James Enoch is an Australian playwright and artistic director. He is especially known for The 7 Stages of Grieving, co-written with Deborah Mailman. He was artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company from mid-2010 until October 2015, and completed a five-year stint as director of the Sydney Festival in February 2021.
Melbourne International Arts Festival, formerly Spoleto Festival Melbourne – Festival of the Three Worlds, then Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, becoming commonly known as Melbourne Festival, was a major international arts festival held in Melbourne, Australia, from 1986 to 2019. It was to be superseded by a new festival called Rising from 2020.
The Arts in Australia refers to the visual arts, literature, performing arts and music in the area of, on the subject of, or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Indigenous Australian art, music and story telling attaches to a 40–60,000-year heritage and continues to affect the broader arts and culture of Australia. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary, visual and theatrical traditions began with strong links to the broader traditions of English and Irish literature, British art and English and Celtic music. However, the works of Australian artists – including Indigenous as well as Anglo-Celtic and multicultural migrant Australians – has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent to the global arts scene – exploring such themes as Aboriginality, Australian landscape, migrant and national identity, distance from other Western nations and proximity to Asia, the complexities of urban living and the "beauty and the terror" of life in the Australian bush.
Theatre of Australia refers to the history of the live performing arts in Australia: performed, written or produced by Australians.
Jean Kittson is an Australian performer, writer and comedian in theatre and print, on radio and television. She made her comedy debut at Melbourne's comedy venue Le Joke in a series of solo performances, and then in the stage version of Let The Blood Run Free.
Glynn Nicholas is an Australian actor, comedian, director, writer, and producer. In the early 1990s he developed several the comic alter ego Paté Biscuit, a parody of Patsy Biscoe, a fellow presenter on the TV show Here's Humphrey, which he later presented in The Big Gig. He has appeared in many stage productions.
The Deadly Awards recognise achievement by Indigenous Australians in music, sport, the arts and in community service. First held in 1995, in 2008 the ceremony was hosted by Luke Carroll at the Sydney Opera House on 9 October 2008 and was broadcast on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and National Indigenous Television Service (NITV) on 12 October 2008.
Alex Kelly is an Australian freelance artist, filmmaker and producer based in regional Australia. Kelly was born in regional NSW and grew up in a farming community near Wodonga in regional Victoria,
Big hART is an Australian arts and social-justice company based in Tasmania.
Wayne Blair is an Australian writer, actor and director. He was on both sides of the camera in Redfern Now. He is also the director of the feature film The Sapphires.
The Namatjira Project is an Australian community cultural development project, launched in 2009, conducted by arts and social change company Big hART. It is based in the Aboriginal communities of Hermannsburg (NT) and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. Its focus is the life and work of the late Albert Namatjira, an Arrernte watercolour landscape artist. The project undertakes community work and has developed an award-winning touring theatre show, Namatjira, which depicts "the commercial appropriation of Aboriginal experience".
Ngapartji Ngapartji was an Australian Indigenous language maintenance/revitalisation and community development project that ran between 2005 and 2010. One of its spin-off projects, a stage production of the same name co-created by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, toured Australia extensively in between 2005 and 2008.
Genevieve Lacey is an Australian musician and recorder virtuoso, working as a performer, creator, curator and cultural leader. The practice of listening is central to her works, which are created collaboratively with artists from around the world. Lacey plays handmade recorders made by Joanne Saunders and Fred Morgan. In her collection, she also has instruments by David Coomber, Monika Musch, Michael Grinter, Paul Whinray and Herbert Paetzold.
Trevor Jamieson is an Aboriginal Australian stage and film actor, playwright, dancer, singer and didgeridoo player.
Tarnanthi is a Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art held in Adelaide, South Australia, annually. Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) in association with the South Australian Government and BHP. It is curated by Nici Cumpston.
Vincent Namatjira is an Aboriginal Australian artist living in Indulkana, in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara in South Australia. He has won many art awards, and after being nominated for the Archibald Prize several times, he became the first Aboriginal person to win it in 2020. He is the great-grandson of the Arrente watercolour artist Albert Namatjira.
...Scott Rankin from Big hART, Australia's leading arts and social change company
Namatjira, which opened last week at the Malthouse after a ... Sydney season at Belvoir St, plays authenticity against truthfulness. ... Namatjira, written and directed by Scott Rankin, is a supple mediation between the artifice of theatre ... and the realities that the story of Namatjira reveals...
...Ngapartji Ngapartji, a performance at the Sydney Opera House that tells the story of the Spinifex or Pitjantjatjara tribe of Central Australia and their encounter with atomic testing at Maralinga in the 1950s.
Ngapartji Ngapartji one is a Centenary of Canberra project, proudly supported by the ACT Government and the Australian Government
Helen Thomson's informative and cogently argued essay, "Aboriginal Women's Staged Autobiography", for example, introduces a number of brave new works: Jane Harrison's Stolen; Deborah Mailman's The Seven Stages of Grieving (with Wesley Enoch); Leah Purcell's Box the Pony (with Scott Rankin); Deborah Cheetham's White Baptist Abba Fan; and Ningali Langford's Ningali. Representing the most marginalized of all social groups in Australia, these women have recently created and performed autobiographical shows that document their experiences as victims of the Stolen Generation.
RiverlanD (director Wesley Enoch, writer Scott Rankin, design Richard Roberts)
Scott Rankin, creative director of StickybrickS
On the River Torrens, Rankin has moored a Chinese junk, the sails of which reflect images put together by 100 people who live in the Sutherland Shire, around Cronulla in Sydney.
Scott Rankin and Glynn Nicholas's show, which was initially put on in Australia, digs deep into the wounded recesses of the modern male psyche, but it does so with the lightest of touches.
Scott Rankin, Artistic Director of Big hART – His latest production "Beasty Grrrl" begins a season at the Melbourne Festival 16th October
The Scott Rankin written and directed piece is being debuted in Tasmania as a part of the biennial festival Ten Days on The Island.