Nestled on four hectares of leafy parklands, South Melbourne arts institution Gasworks, which marks its 40th year in 2026, has always offered a unique cultural proposition to Melbourne and Australia more broadly. A place that wears many hats, including two each of theatres and galleries as well as studio spaces, it’s very much for artists of all stripes.
Which is why new Creative Director and CEO Sam Strong is such a perfect fit. A man also accustomed to wearing many hats, his multi-hyphenated career has included chipping at the policy coalface with Creative Victoria and transformative stints as the head of Queensland Theatre and Griffin Theatre Company.
Strong’s also served as a dramaturg in residence at Red Stitch Actors Theatre and Associate Artistic Director of Melbourne Theatre Company. Then there’s his award-winning directorial turns, most recently helming Joanna Murray Smith’s Honour and Trent Dalton’s Love Stories.
‘What unifies the hats, for me, is a passion for creativity and for the sector,’ Strong says. ‘It keeps coming down to being really excited by and having faith in the possibility of the creative industries. In the sheer delight and great privilege of being sustained by it.’
A life built around creativity in its many forms keeps Strong’s artistic spark firing. ‘I tend to be a better artist, creative and professional when I’m engaged in multiple things,’ he says. ‘If something occupies my sole focus, I tend to overthink it. So I’ll deliberately put myself in environments where there’s a lot of things going on.’
New era at Gasworks – quick links
Moving with contemporary audiences
‘Lots of things going on’ is Gasworks in a nutshell. ‘What excites me is the possibility this place offers to do things that are site-specific, to activate a whole precinct and bring together things that can really only happen at Gasworks, moving into the participatory,’ Strong says.
Never shy of innovation, Strong has ditched the traditional annual program in favour of dropping quarterly seasons, with each new program announced as part of a festival of sorts held in Gasworks’ dear green grounds, dubbed Seasons in the Glade.
‘Quarterly programming is keeping up with how contemporary audiences consume their culture,’ Strong says of our constantly information-bombarded times. ‘It’s about having repeatable rhythms, and Seasons in the Glade is part of that, on the first Saturday of each season. We’re trying to create rituals that people will be more inclined to engage with.’
Strong says the proof was in the pudding when upwards of 2000 hardy souls turned out for the inaugural ‘Summer’ in the Glade – despite the thermometer only reaching 12 degrees, accompanied by a hearty downpour. The event combined community carols on an outdoor stage with the Rose Street arts and craft market, food trucks, kids’ activities and all artist studios were open.
‘At the same time, we launched the new program, a renovated foyer and almost finished park upgrades,’ Strong says. ‘And the result of all that was the generation of a lot of energy and momentum.’
On the quarterly programming front, Strong says it offers greater flexibility. ‘I’ve always appreciated the agility of the small-to-medium sector,’ he says. ‘Larger companies can sometimes be bound by the weight of how things have been done in the past. What’s fantastic about Gasworks is it’s a really nimble, agile place, where you can engineer a lot of change very, very quickly.’
A small but perfectly formed team can be the dream, Strong insists. ‘On one level, it’s a bit like a startup, where you can move a lot faster.’
Queerly beloved
Besides the Seasons in the Glade shake-up, Strong has also been working to make the most of Gasworks’ natural strengths, building on solid foundations with pre-existing partners and forging new ones, too.
His debut season, taking in Melbourne’s upcoming LGBTQIA+ showcase Midsumma Festival, expands on Gasworks’ ongoing support of the Queer Playwriting Award, in which snippets of works in progress by queer creatives are presented in competition.
‘I was very fortunate to inherit the relationship with Midsumma and the Queer Playwriting Award, but we’ve evolved it, because it fits really beautifully with my interest in new stories and my interest in pathways, both for artists and for works,’ Strong says.
As a result, Gasworks’ Midsumma line-up for January and February includes two full stagings of previous winners, in Danish Sheikh’s Much To Do With Law, But More To Do With Love, and Tom Ballard’s A Comprehensive & Profoundly Queer Accounting of the Brief (Yet GLORIOUS!) History of the Gay & Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Island, directed by Lyall Brooks.
‘I couldn’t be more thrilled that Danish and Tom’s work is the centrepiece of the new season,’ Strong says. ‘They’re both incredible pieces of new queer storytelling, whether that’s Tom’s excavation of this hilarious forgotten history, or Danish’s combination of great intellectual rigour and provocation with something that’s also an utterly charming examination of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.’
Gasworks opens doors for artists
Strong has also invited Albert Park’s much-loved Avenue Books into the fold, alongside the Sorrento Writers’ Festival.
‘Gasworks’ point of distinction is its multi-artform nature, and we will stay true to that, so we’re really happy to add literature and ideas to the mix,’ Strong says. ‘We’re keen to change the balance, so more live music, more comedy and other forms that we haven’t engaged with much in the past.’
While it’s likely Strong will don his directorial shoes at some stage, he’s in no hurry. ‘It’s really important for me to balance my own creative output with providing opportunities to others,’ he says. ‘I’ve got no interest in taking opportunities that should go to other people. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of them.’
The many-hats theme extends to the multitude of practices that co-exist under Gasworks’ roof, with Strong acknowledging it’s a lot to juggle.
‘How do you bring an incredibly diverse range of activities, artforms and spaces into a coherent whole, and even more than that, how do you unlock the possibility that comes from all of that uniqueness?’ he asks.
But it’s in his accomplished and seemingly unflappable nature to tackle those challenges head-on, viewing them as a wealth of opportunity.
‘What has unified different career challenges for me is the unlocking of potential,’ he says. ‘That’s something that I enjoy doing as a director, curator and organisational leader.’
Strong’s invested in nurturing talent, both emerging and established. ‘Having been a theatre director, someone who has come through the independent and small-to-medium sector and spent time as a freelancer, that combination of experiences does set you up with a really great set of qualities or understandings.
‘You’re more naturally sympathetic and predisposed to what other artists need, so it’s much easier to find ways to be artist-led and to centre artists when you understand what it is to be a practising one.’
He brought that same energy to Creative Australia, considering how policy affects artistic practice of all stripes, and will funnel that interconnectivity back into Gasworks.
Handing over the keys
‘It’s a cliché, but theatre is such a collaborative artform, where you’re synthesising the contributions of a lot of really amazing people into a coherent whole. And you’re doing that while creating an environment in which people can feel safe and do amazing things.’
That’s especially vital in febrile days, globally, with the arts under constant pressure, including startling financial squeezing and slashing. That’s where Gasworks’ open studio program comes in.
‘What is our intervention? We thought that probably the best thing we can do at this point in time is to give free space to independent artists, allowing them to showcase new work. So that’s why we’re handing over the keys to the studio theatre for one day every month, and they can take all the box office.’
From small but spirited gestures, big things come. ‘We saw through Covid how important it was for organisations to find ways to negate the precarity of freelance existence,’ Strong says. ‘That’s still true, and it’s incumbent on organisations to attempt to engage as many people as possible and to throw open the doors.’
