Rawcus Ensemble: Song for a Weary Throat

The arts highlight the world’s beauty and brutality, uncover its truths and reimagine its future. Diversity in the arts is a cultural asset that leads to greater artistic vibrancy and innovation while breaking down barriers, empowering diverse voices and growing empathy, understanding and human connection. 

Rawcus Ensemble performing Song for a Weary Throat, Theatre Works, St Kilda Victoria 2017. Image Credit: Paul Dunn.

Rawcus is an award winning and critically acclaimed long-term collaborative ensemble delivering exceptional arts experiences which include artists with disability. Rawcus devises new works that express the imaginative world of the ensemble through a marriage of intense physicality and arresting visual imagery.

Rawcus was supported with an Australia Council project grant for the creation of Song for a Weary Throat, a major new work that premiered at Melbourne’s Theatre Works in December 2017. Song for a Weary Throat is a haunting expression of what remains following a major event or impact – an exploration of hope and resilience and an antidote to isolation and despair.

Audiences came from across Australia, and Rawcus worked with an interpreter to reach their largest deaf audience to date. Described by The Age as ‘…brilliant and transporting’, Song for a Weary Throat contributes to Australia’s world class reputation for theatre created by ensembles of all abilities.

“In a society where there is so much emphasis placed on the ‘us’ and ‘them’, here in this company (and in particular in this work), we are offered a true example of the arts’ ability to bridge such divides.”  Melbourne Critique 

Annual Report 2017-18, Australia Council for the Arts

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