It seems likely that Anouska Gammon was predestined to a career in the spotlight, even if her childhood was spent on a Northern Rivers farm in a small, close-knit community, running barefoot, climbing trees, riding to school on horseback, and volunteering at the Surf Lifesaving club at the weekend.
Those country inclinations, including a robust sense of community, are still very much alive in Anouska, but she has lived up to her exotic name, accumulating decades of experience in Australia and overseas as a dancer, singer, writer, choreographer, theatre director and teacher. Ten years ago, she channelled that experience into co-founding the Bangalow Theatre Company (BTC), and becoming its president and artistic director.
Margaret Curtis, BTC’s musical director during those 10 years, says Anouska’s boundless optimism, paired with her creative brilliance, have made her a true dynamo in the Bangalow community. “I continue to be amazed by her remarkable talent for selecting productions that are not only crowd-pleasers but also thought-provoking and deeply relevant,” Margaret says.
The company’s work has become legendary across the region – and beyond – and it now has a momentum that is both exhilarating and exhausting for Anouska and her team of hardworking volunteers. Even before the curtain had fallen on its last hit, the musical Come From Away, BTC was organising the next – Vivid White, which opens in March at the Brunswick Picture House.
A key factor in deciding upon this stage play was its writer, Eddie Perfect. A few years ago, Anouska directed another of his works, The Beast, and its darkly comedic story of several tree-changing couples’ search for an idyllic rural life going horribly wrong “landed beautifully” with local audiences, she says.
Similar digs at the aspirational class are a feature of Vivid White, a satirical musical about property-owning Australians that’s based on a personal experience Perfect had of house hunting in Melbourne. Among its targets are the national obsession with property, real estate pretension, interior designers, and the trend of knocking down beautiful old homes to build something soulless and, invariably, white.
There’s also a deeper undercurrent – about the growing divide between those who own a home and those who rent. It’s dystopian, and features an oversized octopus, one of an army of cephalopods working in conjunction with realtors to take over the world, a world in which renters are ‘disappeared’. “It’s full on,” Anouska says, slightly concerned it may ruffle some feathers in the local gentry. “Like, it really goes there. But it’s comedy; it’s a musical, after all.”
Anouska will direct, a role she has often filled since she and Adrienne Megan Lester founded BTC in 2015. It started with a huge launch party in the A&I Hall and when some guests offered to sign up “we just went, 
right, ‘what’s our first production?’,” she says, and decided on The Drowsy Chaperone, a witty musical that parodies the genre.
The immediate challenge was to find male actors, including some with tap dancing, roller-skating and singing skills. The niche casting meant auditions were prolonged and the rehearsal schedule unusually brief.
“It was crazy. The whole production was very quick, but it felt alive. I felt I had found the energy and buzz that, moving back here from Sydney, I was kind of missing,” she says.
It filled a deeper personal need too, one instilled by her dad’s lifetime of community volunteering; the drive to be part of something meaningful and inclusive. Watching “40-year-old men with no experience suddenly singing a solo and tap dancing across the stage” brought her real joy.
Her parents were still living on the farm near Kingscliff at the time. It was the best place to grow up, she says, and she wanted a similar upbringing for her kids.
Her own schooling was at Duranbah Public School, where the community ethos was strong. “If someone had a birthday, the whole school would be there.” She started dance classes and piano at about eight, then acting and drama, then singing, “and it just snowballed”.
At Kingscliff High School, her enchantment with performing deepened: she did well in her HSC dance and music exams, and “lent into” choreography from then on. “I absolutely loved it. You couldn’t get me out of the dance studio. Recess, lunchtime, I was there.”
Afterwards she gained a double degree in dance and drama education, and a diploma at Brent Street Performing Arts, then it was agency work and travel overseas to perform. Back home she sang and recorded with a pop group and learned how to make films. “This is like 25 years ago, in Kings Cross,” she says. “Such a fun time.”
Her work with BTC takes up 70% of her work time, and is unpaid. “This is my love job,” she says, though she never imagined that her life would involve so much volunteering.
Her ‘day jobs’ include teaching at several schools, and privately, as well as choreography workshops up and down the coast, and at state festivals, along with running the BANG! Academy of Performing Arts, and much more. It sounds exhausting, and she admits to feeling the fatigue at times.
A “pumping adrenal gland” helps carry her through – and something less corporeal: “I can see the benefits within the community of what I’m trying to do. I do a lot of improvisation in my classes, and just that playfulness, that spontaneity, I find so magical. Seeing people ignite and laugh is kind of magic.”
The optimism Margaret Curtis notes manifests itself as an irrepressible energy, and a deeply rooted belief in the power of the performing arts to help people, especially the young, to be “grounded”, to boost their capacity for critical thinking, and to develop a sense of self.
“Human to human connection, sensing that realness and witnessing it as an audience member or performing, sharing that moment. There’s nothing better.” She radiates a can-do positivity, even when sharing her concerns that BTC’s volunteer team is smaller than it once was, the mean-spiritedness she has faced from arts bureaucrats (and occasionally fellow theatre groups), and the fact that the company has no real home.
The Gammon’s carport is filled with costumes from previous productions, and the BTC board meets monthly around the family’s dining table, so Anouska and husband Will’s three children, aged 20, 17 and 12, have also been heavily involved in the theatre world. The younger two were rehearsing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Emmanuel Anglican College in Ballina last month, which Anouska, naturally, was directing. It meant more work but she can’t help herself: “Oh, but that’s just fun; it’s really fun.”
The rewards cannot be measured in material terms.
Anouska recalls a moment when she was watching the various BTC teams on Come From Away fine-tune the production after three or four shows: “Everyone was pretty exhausted but on stage, the director was giving feedback; the musical director was giving notes to the band, who were practising with the cast. And we had the set people fixing up sets, the technicians adjusting the sound and light and cues, the costume people sewing things. I’d never seen anything like it, these highly skilled people, that dynamic, and I sat down and I kind of welled up in tears.”
The feeling that overcame her was one of “worth”, she says.
“Just realising that everyone was there because they love it. It’s not about a monetary transaction. It’s higher than that, even though it’s harder to get there. And this is the thing: the grind, the resourcefulness of that grind and the fatigue behind that grind, is worth it in the end.”
Digby Hildreth