George Seddon's Legacy For Perth

Isobel Necessary (Super Hooper)

Week 2 Performance Summary
Isobel will be performing her Super Hooper routine: she may look like any ordinary woman, but in front of an unsuspecting crowd, on any street, at any time, Isobel Necessary will transform into the greatest superhero the world has ever known.

Isobel performance consists of tumbling and hula hoop routines. The show features clowning and audience participation, and culminates in the 21-hula hoop stack.

Bio
Isobel is an accomplished physical performer, director and community artist. She has toured in Europe, where she performed street theatre shows in Amsterdam, London and Edinburgh, and performed in many Fringe Festival shows including The Best of The Fest, with Jimeoin, Ross Noble and Adam Hills. In 2003 she produced The Six Dollar Woman, a one-woman circus theatre show utilising multimedia projections, original music, soundscape, improvisation, clown and spectacular acrobatics.

In 2003, she has also performed at the National Circus Festival in Tasmania, the Perth International Arts Festival, the Fremantle Street Arts Festival, the Perth Royal Show, the Melbourne International Arts Festival in the Famous Spiegeltent (with The Cat Empire), and the inaugural Noosa Buskers Festival. Isobel spent 2002 undertaking what she has dubbed her "self-funded creative development, research and performance tour of Australia", driving 30,000km around the country and busking in every mainland capital.


Isobel performed at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in the Tiny Top, the smallest circus tent in the Southern Hemisphere, in the Darwin Fringe Festival, the Festival of Darwin, and at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, in the Tiny Top and in the Seriously Big Show in the Lunar Tent. She taught the circus workshop program at Corrugated Iron Youth Arts, participated in the Circus Masterclasses as part of the Adelaide Fringe, and in April 2002 Isobel participated in "Straight Up!", the National Training Project hosted by Rock'n'Roll Circus.

Isobel was a core member of Fremantle-based company Bizircus for five years, touring extensively in Western Australia, to Melbourne, Brisbane, Singapore, Edinburgh, Austria and Amsterdam. She performed in the company's productions "Glitch 3" (Artrage, 1998) and "Circus Alfresco" (Festival of Perth, 1997) and is dubbed The Circus Lady by countless Perth children.

Prof. Peter Newman (Perth's Future: Sustainability and Creativity)

Week 1 Speaker Bio:

Peter Newman is the Professor of City Policy and Director of the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, at Murdoch University. In 2006/7 he was in the US as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville, examining innovations in sustainability in US cities, regions and states. This is based on comparative work he did in Western Australia at the political level when he worked with the Premier of WA from 2001 to 2004 to develop the State Sustainability Strategy; this was the first state in the world with such a strategy, covering 42 areas of government.

In 2004-5 Peter was the NSW Sustainability Commissioner assisting with the production of the Metropolitan Strategy. He is well known in Perth for his work in rebuilding Perth’s rail system which is now seen as a model for modern cities. Peter’s academic work includes his book with Jeff Kenworthy 'Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence' which was launched in the White House in 1999 and his 2001 co-authored book is called ‘Back on Track: Rethinking Australian and New Zealand Transport.’ Peter is the author of the chapter on Greening Urban Transportation in Worldwatch Institute’s ‘State of the World, 2007’.