About Us
“Born in a Taxi has the best name in the business!”
Born in a Taxi are deeply committed to experimentation, accessible art for all,
and connecting with our audiences in the spirit of play.
Established in 1989, Born in a Taxi is led by artistic directors Carolyn Hanna and Penny Baron.
We are an independent, artist-run and award-winning physical theatre company whose artists are internationally recognised as masters of improvisation.
For over thirty years, we have produced original, physically driven and participatory works in theatres, site-specific and outdoor contexts, that focus on real-time co-creation.
We find ourselves in an almost perpetual state of research and discovery, uncovering deeper nuances in the relationships between performer, audience, and place.
Our artform is ensemble movement improvisation, a play-based form. All our skills are tools for improvisation - dance, theatre, live art, film, visual art and sound. We select the devices that best tell the story and best connect with our audience.
Taxi increasingly shares our methodologies through teaching, and, since 2014, have begun turning our expertise to social impact projects – big ideas through deep engagement.
In 2019, Taxi presented 150 works nationally and internationally and celebrated its 30th anniversary.
Our work has been seen at:
World Theatre Festival Powerhouse Brisbane, Perth International Festival, Melbourne International Festival, Melbourne Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival, White Night Melbourne, Enlighten Festival Canberra, Manchester Commonwealth Games, Gwacheon Hanmadang & Goyang Lake Park (Korea), Sziget (Hungary), Oerol Festival and Theatre festival Boulevard (Netherlands), ISTF Ghent & Chasspierre (Belgium).
Awards include:
Powerhouse Performance Award, Melbourne Fringe Festival 2010. Best Production, Best Independent Theatre, and Best Female Actor Award Arts Centre Melbourne Short & Sweet Festival 2008Best Production Award Melbourne Fringe Festival 2005and De Grote Prix Jury Award International Street Theatre Festival Ghent Belgium 2003
People
Carolyn Hanna/ co-artistic director
Carolyn is a multi disciplinary performance-maker, director, performer and teacher. She is co-artistic director of Born in a Taxi, joining the company in 1996 and contributing heavily to the conceptual development of many of their works. She is a key performer, co-deviser and co-producer of all Taxi works.
Carolyn has spent decades honing her performance craft with companies including Strange Fruit, Triage Live Art Collective, The Humour Foundation, Rawcus, Weave and CreatAbility. Her undergraduate degree in Environmental Policy influenced her to conceptually spearhead Taxi’s first environmental work, The Whale’s Tale co-commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne and Windmill Theatre which has gone on to tour USA, Korea, New Zealand and Australia. Since then she has instigated new Taxi work, Butterfly House that draws attention to our shrinking insect numbers with tangible real world outcomes including planting over 4000 native butterfly host plants.
Carolyn is interested in human connection, limits, death, sustainability, the essence of celebration and taking her performance skills out of the walls of theatres and into new contexts. She is sometimes a guest sessional teacher at Victorian College of the Arts and Monash University.
Penny Baron / co-artistic director
Penny Baron is co-artistic director, key performer, and core co-creator of all Taxi works, with 3 decades of experience in performance making. Now in her 30th year with Born in a Taxi, she has created a vast body of work as a director, performer and collaborator. Penny has accumulated 10 awards for her work. Highly regarded as a visionary artist with a heightened instinct for real-time performance, her practice has evolved around inquiry into the alchemic relationship between performer and audience.
Penny co-conceived THE CUBE, a demountable venue and vehicle for public presentations of high-quality ambitious artistic work in the public realm. Penny has directed many of Taxi’s theatre works including THE ENORMOUS CLUB, NOT DEAD YET and THE WAITING ROOM. In 2018 she co-created CHILDREN OF THE EVOLUTION, an interactive talk show by children to voice their concerns about the world they are inheriting.
Penny teaches and directs work for VCA, Monash University and John Bolton Theatre School. Penny has worked with Bell Shakespeare, Polyglot, Rawcus, Weave, Dislocate, The Dream Masons, Shaken and Suspicious, The Grimstones, CreatAbiility, and Company 13.
Nick Papas / Founding Member
Nick Papas joined Born in a Taxi in 1989 as a founding member.
Nick trained in Improvised Movement, Clowning, Butoh and Contemporary Dance. He is an original member of The Urban Dream Capsule (a durational performance inside shop windows). Urban Dream Capsule toured the world for ten years after its inaugural appearance in the Myer Melbourne windows (1996 Melbourne International Festival).
Nick has performed with Melbourne Playback Theatre Company, The Blue Project, The Great Melbourne Accordion Orchestra and The Omnibus of Dreams. His directing and teaching skills have led to work with theatre and dance practitioners, Back to Back Theatre, Weave, Just Us, Monkami and Rawcus. In 2009 he created and directed Storming, an outdoor dance performance in three different locations with 40 people from the Shire of Yarra community. In 2014 he directed Voice Mob, a street theatre project involving voice, movement and flash mobbing with singing groups from the Yarra Ranges. Other directing credits include For The Love Of Pina with the mixed abilities group Rollercoaster, a dance piece inspired by the work of Pina Bausch.
Nick now focuses on teaching and is currently engaged in writing a book documenting Born in a Taxi scores and pedagogy.
Performers
Taxi has a growing pool of brilliant performers/ independent theatre makers versed in the company’s style that work regularly with the company on any given project, bringing their own rich performance history to the ensemble.
Including:
Tirese Ballard, Debra Batton, Andrew Gray, Lily Fish, Kate Hunter, Miriam Ceh, James Pratt, Alana Hoggart, Sally Smith, David Wells, Nicci Wilks, Jon Clarke, and Hamish Irvine.
Key Collaborators
Michael Havir / Musician/Composer
Is a Melbourne based musician, composer, sound designer and performer with a multidisciplinary practice focusing on collaboration with animators, dancers, physical performers, theatre makers, VJ's and music ensembles.
Working with artists as varied as Yothu Yindi, Born in a Taxi, Andrew Morrish, Tony Yap, Yumi Umiuare, Melbourne Workers Theatre, Danceworks, Polyglot, Chamber Made Opera, The Village People, Queensland Theatre Company, NICA, Playback, SBS-TV and the ABC, he has built a practice combining versatility and adaptability with a strong sense of theatre.
Using improvisation as a performance and compositional tool he has developed a special interest in using recorded and live text, looping and audio processing to create narrative threads in performance. His work has been described as, “Astonishing electronic soundscaping” (Cameron Woodhead The Age)…”sublime…. the brilliance of the composition never overshadows the performance itself…. it adds texture, depth and a necessary point of reference about the emotion being projected.” (Michael Kingston Buzz Cuts)
He is the recipient of an ARIA award (2016) with the Melbourne Ska Orchestra, an ATOM award, and was Australia’s entrant at the MILIA festival France for Three Mile Creek (with multimedia artist Alyssa Rothwell)
Invited workshops include with avant garde vocal stylist David Moss, David Hykes of The Harmonic Choir and Tran Quang Hai (Le Musee de L’Homme France) in harmonic singing.
David Murphy / Designer-Sculptor-Builder
David Murphy is an award winning, multidisciplinary visual artist who often works at the mysterious juncture of art and science. He has worked extensively in the public art realm, as well as producing a range of ephemeral and performance based works. With wide roaming interests, his arts practice extends to architecture, theatre design, community art as well as cutting edge carbon negative bicycle design and the design of new and hybrid musical instruments.
He has a Fine Arts Degree in painting from RMIT and a Post Graduate Diploma of sculpture from the VCA, as well as studying music extensively in West Africa. In 1996 he established Down Street Studios as an artist run, public art partnership with Cameron Robbins and Anderson Hunt. He has a number of permanent artworks commissioned by Frankston City Council, Hobsons Bay Council and Bass Coast Shire Council, as well as work in numerous private collections. He has made ephemeral and event based works for the City of Melbourne, Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, Queensland Festival of Music and the Woodford Festival to name a few.
Bryony Anderson / Designer - builder (Boat of Faith, Whale in Whale’s Tale)
Bryony Anderson’s puppets and constructions for visual performance have toured nationally and internationally with many Australian circus, puppetry, performance and theatre companies, as well as appearing in museums, festivals and films. Solo exhibitions have ranged from interactive puppetry installations and handmade projection machinery to intricate illustration, all investigating the potential in salvaged materials. She has led over 100 workshops in urban, rural, and desert communities, and mentored emerging makers from around Australia.
In 2011 she established One Off Makery and began working with locals to seed a creative industry of skilled artisans making high calibre work from frugal resources. From this Frugal Arts Inc and the award-winning Frugal Forest Project grew, involving participants across the Mid North Coast over three years in its creation. The Forest is now on tour and more participatory projects are in the pipeline. oneoffmakery.net.au
Bruce Ramus / Lighting Designer
Ramus Illumination is a collaborative design studio based in Melbourne. We design and produce visually integrated human precincts through the use of light, sculpture, digital media and interactive technology. Led by Creative Director Bruce Ramus, we offer creative design services complete with technical and documentary detail for producing works that balance creativity with practicality. Our collaborative process results in a unique approach to urban space that aligns public art, community engagement and commercial vitality, co-creating works that are innovative, interactive and sustainable, inviting communities to contribute to their public space environments.
We deliver, light in motion, intimate spectacles that have a personal, local and global resonance as demonstrated with ‘Lighthouse’ @ 888 Collins St and’ Luminous’ in Sydney’s Darling Quarter.
Laurel Frank / Costume Design and maker
Laurel designs and makes costumes for theatre, circus, cabaret, dance, parades, events, museum display and puppetry. She has been the resident Costume designer for CIRCUS OZ for many years, sending them on countless Australian and international tours. She has also designed and made costumes for the FLYING FRUIT FLY CIRCUS, the NATIONAL ACADEMY OF CIRCUS ARTS (NICA) and for many solo independent circus performers.
She has designed for parades in Melbourne including many Moomba Parades and the 2000 Federation Parade. Her work is in the collections of the PERFORMING ARTS MUSEUM (Melbourne), the POWERHOUSE (Sydney) and the FRYER LIBRARY (Brisbane ).
She received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Green Room Awards in 2016.
““With their jump-or-die approach to art, Born in a Taxi are a captivating group of performers for two reasons: their theatrical skills are so finely tuned they’re like reflexes, and you never know what they’ll do next””
Photographer Acknowledgment
Taxi would like to acknowledge all the photographers whose incredible photographs have made this website look great:
Emma Jane Pirvel-Collins, Carla Gottgens, Paul Dunn, Vanessa White Media, Stephen A ‘Court, Tomek Sikora, Jeff Busby, Vicki Jones, Stephen A ‘Court, Leo Dale, Robyn Cambell, Ponch Hawkes, James Penlidis, Jess Stephens, and Colin Hanna.
