Ogoh Ogoh Procession, Dark Mofo, 2019
I’m not the best at keeping this website up to date, but the BIO below is pretty accurate! Email if you want to know more: ianandsu@netspace.net.au
Photo: Sarah Walker
Ian Pidd is a freelance director of theatre and festivals, based in Melbourne, Australia. His practice veers between programming festivals (The Lost Lands, The Falls, Junction, The Village, Moomba), directing theatre (We Are Lightning, Polyglot, Snuff Puppets, Back To Back, Men Of Steel) and participatory "things" (The Unconformity's The Rumble and Techtonica, Dark MOFO's Ogoh Ogoh, Dookie Earthed). Ian's collaboration with Bec Reid and Kate Macdonald, Everybody Now, has created social dance works all over the country, including a large scale commission for the Commonwealth Games Festival 2018. Ian is Artistic Director of the new music and arts festival Wanderer, a three day Music and Arts festival in Pambula Beach, NSW.
Ian co-created and co-directed PASSENGER (a work in which an audience experience a contemporary western revenge tragedy from within a bus moving through an urban landscape) with Jessica Wilson, which had a hit season in Melbourne and was seen at London's Greenwich and Docklands Festival in 2019 and had a season at Sydney’s Art And About program just before Lockdown. Ian directed Sam Halmarack and JOF's ecstatic participatory music work We Are Lightning which garnered a Green Room nomination and which toured the UK in May/June 2018, and won a Judges Choice award at Dublin Fringe, 2019.
His work tends to be musical, accessible, playful and genre hopping, and is regularly seen throughout Australia and in Europe, US and Asia. Ian is project director on Polyglot’s First On The Ladder project which is a three year creative collaboration between the company and two leading indigenous regional sporting clubs: Rumbalara Football Netball club in Shepparton (Yorta Yorta country) and The Moree Boomerang Rugby League club on Kamileroi Land. During lockdown Ian completed his research thesis and has been awarded a Masters degree at Monash University. Ian also curated and produced performances by musicians outside locked-down aged care homes during Melbourne’s long 2020 COVID seige. This work (under the moniker Big Day In, and with huge support from Melbourne Fringe) was recognised with a Green Room award in 2021.
In 2023 Ian premiered the installation work SWING. Debuting as with massive support from Melbourne Fringe Festival, SWING is a giant 9 meter steel swing that joyously, playfully disrupts civic space. Almost 1000 people had exhilarating public swings on Swanston Street and in Footscray. Lots of photos here. SWING will tour nationally over the coming year.
Ian is a Churchill Fellow and was the inaugural recipient of Melbourne Fringe’s Living Legend Award.