Putting words to a musical meditation on fatherhood

JAZZ vocalist and songwriter Liam Budge, one of Canberra’s greatest musical success stories, changes direction and takes the stage name Creswick to present a theatrical production about fatherhood at The Street Theatre. Trying to.

If your real name is Liam Sidney Creswick Pepper Badge, you’re spoiled for choice. Nom de Theater. I chose Creswick for the badge. It’s also the name of the photo and video business he shares with his wife, Canberra visual artist and photographer Abbie McKay.

“In His Words – Voices of Fatherhood” is an exploration of fatherhood based on badges and video interviews with nine fathers.

There’s no formal narrative, but it’s musically underpinned by the visuals shown above and a sophisticated combo of Brett Williamson on keyboards, Chris Pound on bass, Ben Hauptmann on guitar, and James Hauptmann on drums. Through the elements, the stories are linked.

Budge appears singing his new song while playing piano and guitar.

Budge tells me over coffee in The Street that his play is a “meditation on paternity” that rejects the idea that it is inherently gendered. Parenting is universal, he said, and hopes the show will be “appealing to music lovers, movie lovers, and raw storytellers.”

After studying at Canberra Grammar, Budge went on to study at the ANU School of Music, where he was one of the star jazz students, and after a whirlwind career between Canberra and Sydney, he left for Manhattan in 2014, where he: I sang and played with great musicians. Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, Chris Bowers and Brad Williams also studied with jazz vocalist Kurt Elling.

Then, when Abby, who lived in Brooklyn, gave birth to their son Julian, fatherly feelings kicked in and they immediately thought they were in the wrong place to raise a young family.

Canberra is renowned as a child-friendly capital and has families here. I traveled back in time and came to The Street. Black box.

He came back to the Canberra scene very briefly. Because he was always deeply embedded in the Canberra scene, calling it “a wholesome environment where creative vibes thrive, even if only temporarily”.

He was soon reunited with old friends such as jazz pianist Wayne Kelly, saxophonist John Mackie, and dance artists Alison Preby and Sarah Black, who are now writing and He enjoys a busy life teaching vocal music in the fields of jazz and contemporary at music schools. Singing and running the Creswick Collective.

An academy-trained musician, he happily admits to being self-taught in photography and videography, saying, “That means you don’t have to worry about being musically burdensome when it comes to photography and video.” says.

Returning home just in time for the wildfires and pandemic, he and Abby set about raising children and filming visuals, while he worked on The Streets, an “early stage” for applicants with only the seed of an idea. ” program was implemented. Go to the “First Seen” program.

The program put him in touch with his mentor, Campion Descent. He is the screenwriter for the 2019-2020 wildfire play Embers.

With the idea of ​​creating a verbatim stage production (created from real-life press transcripts) about nine fathers, he began the process of collecting interviews and deciding which ones would cooperate with the audience. Did.

“It was a lot of work…we talked to 100 dads of all cultures and ages, and we ended up with nine in the play,” he says. Mr. Budge developed a unique process for conducting his 45- to 60-minute interviews, always asking subjects at the end if they had anything to add.

“There was a beautiful weakness in the interviews,” he reported, as the men told him of their father as a role model, sometimes exposing a bad relationship – being a father in spite of themselves. ing.

Budge is definitely not a member of any men’s movement, but rather he hopes to have created “a very new interrogation on the subject of fatherhood.”

It’s a universal theme, so he says he’s not interested in artist fathers, although it does feature some very famous musicians: Canberra’s Michael Solis and Candelo’s Sam Martin. But he emphasizes that he is interviewing them as a father, not as a musician.

The show ends with his own son Julian, but how that will be spoiled.

“In His Words: Voices of Fatherhood,” Street Theater, June 23-25.

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