By Terri Soumilas
In Melbourne’s arts sector, if you mention the name Donna Jackson it definitely evokes an immediate response: ‘She’s that woman from the West who does community arts.’
I can’t help but feel it is a description delivered with admiration, and one that only hints at the scale of her influence. For more than three decades, Donna has been a driving force behind some of the country’s most ambitious community‑based creative projects, blending politics, industrial landscapes and collective artistry into works that are unmistakably hers.
For me Donna first came to prominence as the founder of the Women’s Circus, established in Footscray in the early 1990s. The organisation – still thriving today – set a benchmark for feminist, community‑driven performance, celebrating the strength and creativity of all types of women’s bodies. It also cemented Donna’s reputation as an artist who could bring people together, build skills, and create high‑quality productions with participants who had never before imagined themselves on a stage.
Donna’s practice has since expanded across theatre, music, installation, and large‑scale outdoor spectacles. Her methodology is rooted in collective process, political consciousness and industrial themes, and continues to be refined through her commitment to collaboration, and bringing out the best for everyone.
Donna continues to work closely with local artists, drawing inspiration from the factories, workshops and working‑class histories of Melbourne’s western suburbs.
Class politics run through most of Donna’s work with clarity and conviction. Her acclaimed production Dust, created with songwriter Mark Seymour, confronted the human cost of asbestos exposure.
Probably my favourite performance, We Built This City (2006), featuring 124 building workers, led audiences through the indoor and outdoor spaces of Scienceworks Museum, weaving together storytelling, film, installation, a rock concert and a ‘machinery ballet’ starring a 100‑tonne crane. It was a celebration of labour, industry and the people who shape the city.
In her upcoming cabaret work, Art, Accidents and Underpants, the story centres on her own experiences as a middle-aged rock chick reflecting on her time in the 1980s. But the production process is characteristically inclusive with participants learning new skills, sharing stories, forming friendships and contributing to a collective creative outcome.
It is, in every sense, a Donna Jackson project.
Her work continues to demonstrate that art made with communities can be bold, political, aesthetically powerful and deeply human.
Donna Jackson is not just ‘that woman from the West who does community arts’. I think she is an enduring and inventive community‑arts practitioner: an artist who has spent her life proving that creativity thrives when people come together.
DATES
Saturday September 5th 1.30pm, Saturday September 12th 1.30pm
Yarraville Club
135 Stephen Street Yarraville
