Jo Stone


Helping to clear up the mystery of their multiple appearances around the Fringe Festival, Jo Stone explains "we're doing three different shows as the Stone/Castro company. That's who we are..."

'We' is Adelaide-born Jo Stone and her partner and Portugese theatre director, actor and film-maker Paolo Castro, now living back here after ten years living and working in Berlin.

Herself a multi-disciplinary artist, Stone is an actor dancer and singer, who last performed her work 'Blue Love' in Australia a few years ago, a collaborative work with dancer Sean Parker.

Stone explains: "'Red Sky' is a solo show written and performed by Paolo, and it's been performed in Germany Spain and Portugal. It's based on a character in denial who doesn't agree that the fall of the Berlin wall (in 1989) was a good thing.

"Paolo plays this mother character who is on constant phone calls to 'her son' trying to get the son to come back the communist way of life. It's quite a sad piece, but also very funny."

The second show being performed for this Fringe is the Jo Stone concert... Stone laughs at the tongue-in-cheek nature of this one and explains how it came about. "I got confused with Joss Stone in Berlin, a few people were confused by the similarity in names. So I thought to myself I'll make a quick concert and rip off her poster and get a million people coming along. It didn't happen like that, but we thought we'd do the concert here, too. There'll be some Joss Stone covers, with back up dancers, me on guitar and computers... it'll be fun."

The third show is 'B-File'.

"The third one is a piece that we did two years ago and premiered in Berlin, a show that was originally written by Deborah Levy. But we've rewritten it and Paolo directs it. With a cast of four, this is a theatre piece about police interrogation and the state's use of force and detainment against its own citizens. "We have two actors coming out from Europe to help perform this with us: one from Switzerland and one from Portugal. It's quite a good show to perform; I get to play two characters in it, which is good because generally you play either a victim or an interrogator in the performance. I get to play both."

Stone points out that a lot of the comment on 'B-File' was based on the timing of it, that the performance premiered as the name Camp X-Ray started becoming known. "It's not a direct comment on Guantanemo Bay," she says, "though it is a comment on authoritarianism in more general terms. People take out of it what they understand from it."

Alex Wheaton


'Red Sky' performs at Holden St from Thurs 22 March; the Jo Stone concert is on Fri 23 March at Holden ST; and 'B-File' is at Holden St from Mon 26 March. See the Prize Frenzy(tm)