Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright, dramaturg and director. In 2021, she wrote and directed the Sydney Festival/Walkleys Award series THE JOURNALIST GENE, innovating a new form of interview panel with performance elements. As co-writer, with Ursula Yovich, of Barbara and the Camp Dogs she was awarded both a 2019 Helpmann Award and 2020 Green Room Award for Best Original Score, as well as a Helpmann for Best Musical and Green Room for Best New Australian Work. In 2019, Valentine wrote the libretto for the critically-acclaimed song cycle Flight Memory with composer Sandra France and many of her award-winning plays feature original songs including The Sugar House, Head Full of Love and Ladies Day.
Valentine also works as dramaturg with Bangarra Dance Theatre and was part of the creative team for its Helpmann Award-winning best new Australian work, Bennelong, for which she wrote lyrics with composer Steve Francis, as well as working as dramaturg on its dance theatre productions of DARK EMU, PATYEGARANG and ID (Belong).
In 2019 the Seymour Centre in Australia presented Made To Measure, a commission from the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, where Valentine was Writer in Residence.
Valentine has been awarded four Australian Writers Guild awards and a Churchill Fellowship, and she previously worked with six First Nations singers on the narrative concert Barefoot Divas: Walk A Mile In My Shoes. She received a Centenary Medal for her work on the Centenary of Federation, a Cultural Leadership Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and a Literature Fund Fellowship.
How and why did you get into being a librettist?
I had been writing songs for several years that appeared in my plays (The Sugar House) and work for children (Ratticus and Reidar) when Caroline Stacey at the Street Theatre in Canberra commissioned me to write the book and lyrics for a jazz song cycle called Flight Memory with composer Sandra France.
Around the same time I was continuing my work with Bangarra Dance Theatre and sometimes, after creative sessions, I would send Stephen Page poems summarising our words and ideas for the dramatic movement of the dance work. He asked composer Steve Francis to set some of them to the music they were creating for the score of Bennelong. We continued this work together more fully on the libretti for Wudjang: Not the Past and Baleen Moondjan.
I wrote Barbara and the Camp Dogs with the sensationally talented Ursula Yovich, which won both the Helpmann and Green Room awards for Best Original score. Then Neil Armfield commissioned Christos Tsiolkas and [me] to write the libretto for the oratorio, Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan with composer Joseph Twist for the Adelaide Festival.
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Steve Francis and I have collaborated since on a musical – My Brilliant Man about the Lindt Café siege – and just this week I have been in a development workshop on a new opera by composer Felicity Wilcox called Emergenc/y about a female composer in superlative crisis. So my interest in and love of working as a librettist is ever-expanding.
You’re best known as a playwright and dramaturg – how do these roles complement and interact with your work as a librettist?
Libretti are not poems written to work on the page, they are dramatic storytelling written to be sung and spoken. As with all my work, you need to consider clarity of storytelling, but also the shape and beauty of words in the mouths of performers, the rhythm, the movement of the emotional logic under the storytelling. The work of the playwright, the dramaturg, the librettist are all about finding surprising new ways to look at people we think we know, understand in fresh ways questions that have no answers, and elevate in powerful ways voices that are rarely heard.
How would you describe what you do to friends and family?
I structure ideas to create meaning. I collaborate with colleagues to make art. I play.
What’s an average day or week like for you when focused on your work as a librettist?
Working in the theatre is like walking along a beach and when you get to the other end you sit down and examine every grain of sand that has stuck to your feet and arrange it in a pattern that pleases you. By which I mean, I walk through life gathering details and impressions and observations and then I take time to reflect on my experiences and organise them into a coherent work. As a librettist you accept utterly that the composer has music flowing into their brains and they will either hear how to set your words to music or they will hear music that snatches of the words will cleave around. An average day writing is solitary, an average day working with a composer is magical and, can I say, there is no average day working with singers because the control they have, the genius of hitting specific notes with only their breath and their bodies is a marvel that absolutely never gets old.
If you were interviewing someone to take over your job, what skills and qualities would you look for?
Humility (it’s all about the music) and audacity (no guts, no glory) and originality (she who dares wins) and particularity (it’s all in the detail) and passion (if you do not have love you are become as sounding brass) and a deep and driving sense of drama. Librettists are dramatic poets with the emphasis on drama and a little on poetry. Action, conflict, perspective, character are as essential in a good libretto as they are in any time-based work for the stage.
What is the most memorable thing that’s ever happened in your career to date?
A First Nations woman named Coral came up to me after Parramatta Girls premiered at Belvoir and told me I had given back the 12-year-old girl who was taken from her 50 years before. A young man put his hand up in a theatre school and told me he’d become a theatre-maker because he read my play Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah. Laughing with Ursula Yovich about a filthy joke we both wanted to put into Barbara and the Camp Dogs, but were mutually scandalised by the thought of doing so (and then putting it in). Standing backstage after the opening night of Bennelong, with Stephen Page and the Bangarra dancers, sitting in an ABC Studio and being told, live, that I had won the STAGE International Playwriting Competition for my play Ear to the Edge of Time. Watching the brilliant Andrea James direct Peter Kowitz and Paula Arundell to a remarkable ending of my play Nucleus.
Finally, you’re currently co-adapting Barbara and the Camp Dogs for the screen and have a new play, Nucleus, about to open for Griffin at the Seymour Centre: what’s your advice for colleagues about how to best juggle multiple projects simultaneously?
Get up early and swim/shower in cold water. Be generous, it comes back to you.
Griffin Theatre’s production of Nucleus by Alana Valentine runs from 14 February – 15 March at the Seymour Centre, Chippendale.
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