QUT x La Boite Centenary Creative

Emerging from QUT's enduring partnership with La Boite, the Centenary Creative project provided an opportunity for a diverse group of creative arts students to excavate and reimagine the theatre's century-long history. The five collaborative outcomes that emerged from this process serve as both memorials and generative acts—a living archive that resists static commemoration in favour of dynamic creative engagement, the signature impulse of both La Boite and the School of Creative Arts.

The works respond not just to La Boite’s geographical transitions from Hale Street to the Roundhouse Theatre, but to the emotional terrain of theatrical memory. In the foyer, Girdler and Gregg's a playful stop-motion meditation L'oiseau dans la boîte explores themes of flight and transformation, while Turner and Tenkate's stained-glass inspired Synergy on Stage pays tribute to the formidable women who helped shape Queensland's theatre landscape—each work exploring the tension between preservation and change.

Equally compelling is how these works address the ephemeral nature of live performance through material permanence. Outside, Stevens and Glasson-Green's participatory chalk archive A Breathing Tunnel creates space for new voices to join historical ones by recreating graffiti from La Boite's former backstage area known as "The Tunnel." Berry and Stirling's textile canopy Behind the Curtain suspended above the entrance evokes both theatre curtain and childhood cubby, incorporating more than 25 motifs from La Boite's production history—literalising the childlike wonder that theatre can engender.

Woven throughout the foyer seating, Grimmett and Keane's audio work Imprinted Echoes gives voice to the theatre space itself through two distinct personas—Gold and Blue—representing the bold foundations and quiet vulnerabilities of theatrical life. Here, the material traces of performance history are excavated not through objects but through the affective resonances embedded within the architectural space itself.

The Centenary Creative project demonstrates how archival research and site-specific art practice can combine as both historical reflection and speculative future practice, transforming an 'invisible' archive into an opportunity to see how collective memory shapes our present and future. This project reveals what La Boite's community knows well—that institutions thrive when they activate new creative possibilities rather than preserve fixed narratives. These works show us that engaging with the archive does not mean being bound by it.

A/Prof Charles Robb BA(Hons) MFA PhD SFHEA
Associate Professor of Visual Art
Academic Lead, Engagement
School of Creative Arts Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples as the original and enduring owners of the unceded lands on which this project has been conceived and produced.

This project would not have been possible without the support of the Technical Services team of QUT's Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, in particular Harley Coustley, Simon Wheeler and Sam Wigman.