About Splinters
Splinters Theatre of Spectacle, also known as Splinters Inc. or simply Splinters was a most remarkable truly home-grown Canberra artistic venture. Renowned for large outdoor spectacles, site-specific performance and transgressive, cutting edge theatre between 1985 and 1998 Splinters produced more than 20 works that played at theatres and festivals around the country and provided a springboard for many individual artists and successful companies. Founded by David Branson, Patrick Troy, Ross Cameron and John Utans, Splinters was one of a wave of significant experimental performance companies that arose around Australia in the 1980s and introduced new collaborative, cross-art form approaches making use of any and all artistic media and techniques.
Splinters began as an anarchist collective but even as it became professionalised, retained an open structure: well over 1000 people performed with the company over the years, including hundreds of young performers fostered by Splinters members working as tutors with Canberra Youth Theatre. Several key members trained at the Canberra School of Art and musicians in the group played in well known Canberra bands. Splinters ran regular cabaret style events in pubs and later established the School for Performance Investigation and Training (SPIT).
As this archive shows, the impact and spirit of Splinters can still be discerned in Canberra, even though almost all its key members have left to pursue careers elsewhere. Companies and artists that had their origins in Splinters include Snuff Puppets, Red Cabbage Collective, The Village Festival, Temple State/Spectacle Art Inc., Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, CIA, ODD Productions and Triclops International.
The creation of the David Branson Papers (HMSS0233) collection at the ACT Heritage Library in 2010 by Joel Swadling and Gavin Findlay created a unique opportunity to make the work of Splinters accessible for study, and enable an assessment of the cultural heritage created by its theatre practice and to reconnect it to the ongoing cultural life of the city.
There are Wikipedia pages about Splinters and David Branson.