‘There’s always an opportunity somewhere’: Meet VCA alum Jacob Boehme
Meet Jacob Boehme, a Narangga and Kaurna man and graduate of the Master of Writing for Performance program at the Victorian College of the Arts. As founding Creative Director of the Yirramboi Festival, Jacob has dedicated his career to celebrating First Nations artists and stories. Here, he provides insights into his practice and upcoming projects.
Hi, my name is Jacob Boehme and I studied the Master of Writing for Performance at the VCA.
I actually completed three degrees at the VCA. I did a Postgraduate Diploma in Puppetry in 2006, which then turned into a Master of Puppetry, which I graduated from in 2007 (these courses have since been discontinued). And then I came back in 2014 to complete a Master of Writing for Performance.
The Master of Writing for Performance was a brilliant, brilliant year. It enabled me to really explore and home in on how I would like to tell stories, and the kind of stories that I want to tell.
As a Narangga and Kaurna man, it is important to me to keep stories about Country alive. It's important to keep the stories about people front and centre. So that's where I focus a lot of my work: telling First Nation stories.
We have a canon of theater that stems back to the 60s, but it's a canon that hasn't really been pulled together or celebrated in any meaningful way. What I did learn in the course was a whole bunch of different approaches to writing, dramaturgy and to theatre historically.
I applied a lot of the information I learned in my Masters to the realisation of Blood on the Dance Floor, which premiered in 2016 at Arts House. The work went on to win a Green Room Award for Best Independent Production. It then toured Canada and Australia. Blood on the Dancefloor is an autobiographical piece about my own experience of being a gay Aboriginal person living with HIV.
I am now working on the second work in what I'm calling The Blood Series, Imago, which means ‘hope’ in the Yorta Yorta language. It focuses on the story of Michelle Tobin who is one of two public HIV positive Aboriginal women in the country. She's an activist, an advocate for HIV and women's rights, a mother and a grandmother. She has an incredible story that needs to be told and needs to be heard.
The different approaches to dramaturgy that I learned in the course I've applied to the curation of festivals like YIRRAMBOI, which I was part of setting up. I have worked at Carriageworks and curating other events around the Australian arts market, including Vivid in Sydney.
I'm currently working on a major commission for the Adelaide Festival. To produce a Narungga Opera. It's called Guuranda. It's the creation stories of the Yorke Peninsula of the Narungga people from where my father and my family are from. Where I’m from. It will premiere at Adelaide Festival in March 2024.
My advice for people wanting to pursue a career in this field is build your resilience. Be flexible. It is always good to hold on to dreams, but don't be so rigid in how those dreams need to play out, because sometimes the most exciting things can happen to you if you just turn left (or right). Don't be so rigid with those dreams that they cripple you with thoughts of failure. Because there’s always an opportunity somewhere.
Discover the Master of Theatre (Writing) at the University of Melbourne.