Event Recap | IWD She Plays Concert at Church Street Studios
Written by Yantra de Vilder
Chair, AGSC Gender Equity Committee
3 April 2024
The Gender Equity Committee was created in 2017, with Caitlin Yeo, Amanda Brown, Felicity Wilcox and I. Our mantra was 50/50 by 2020. We are still at 13% in terms of our presence on the screen music landscape. We have not reached our goal…..yet.
Our intention with events like this is to increase our visibility in a way that celebrates and honours our connection to the global happenings of international women’s day. To reach out and feel our connectedness through music and screen.
This concert idea was originally birthed in partnership with AFTRS where we presented a female screen composer’s concert as part of a 3 day conference entitled Glories of the Score. We worked closely with the late Martin Armiger on this project.
This was hugely successful and we have been trying to create this event again. So, thanks to Guy Gross at Church Street Studios we were given a venue, and for International Women’s day 2024, we were able to lend our musical voice to the millions of women around the world standing up for women’s rights and visibility.
I’ve been involved with the guild from the early days in the 80s and I have seen it go from strength to strength. I believe we are entering a brave new world where women have an important role to play in telling the stories of our time through music and film. Thank you to those who attended the concert for supporting this vision of a better future.
I’d like to thank the great team that helped make the concert possible, including, Kingston Anderson , Minami Takahashi, Fiona Loader, The Gender Equity team, the AGSC board, Michelle Barry, Ellie, The Church Street Team and the amazing composers – Caitlin Yeo, Amanda Brown, Me-Lee Hay, Luna Pan, Andrée Greenwell. And special thanks to Véronique Serret for playing violin, organising the string ensemble – musicians Stephanie Zarka, Beth Condon, Rowena Macneish, Elsen Price, Annie Burbank , Fiona Loader and to the Ephemera Community Choir .
Featured Composers:
Caitlin Yeo is a multi award winning Australian screen composer with over 70 film and TV credits. Caitlin has won three AACTA awards and 8 APRA AGSC Screen Music awards She was the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Sydney UNESCO City of Film Award.
Amanda Brown is a screen music composer, musician and songwriter from Sydney, Australia. She has been writing music for stage and screen since graduating from the AFTRS in 2000 and before that enjoyed a career as a multi-instrumentalist in several bands, playing violin, guitar, mandolin and oboe. She was a member of The Go-Betweens,
Andrée Greenwell is multi-award-winning composer with a catalogue of over 100 scores for performing arts and screen. As artistic director of Green Room Music, Andrée is a leading creator of independent music theatre and multidisciplinary work, frequently involving screen projections. Awards include the prestigious Australia Council for the Arts Music Fellowship and the NSW Ministry for the Arts Women in Arts Fellowship.
Luna Pan is an award-winning screen, advertising and game composer from Sydney, Australia. She studied piano and music theory for a decade from a young age, now armed with Master of Arts degree in Orchestration for Film, Games and Television from University of Chichester. Luna is a two-time finalist and the winner of 2023 APRA AMCOS Professional Development Awards.
Me-Lee Hay is A Malaysian born Chinese-Australian, Hay has been nominated for an AACTA Award for Best Original Score in Film (Suka) in 2024. She has had works shown across multiple platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Free to air TV channels plus mainstream cinemas to 360 degree dome planetariums domestically and internationally.
Dr. Yantra de Vilder is a creative artist, composer and performer, specialising in film, art installations, and theatre. She has worked for the BBC on projects in London, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Burma. Yantra has a doctorate in creative arts, her research focusing on “The Search for The Artistic Moment”. Yantra is a founding member and chair of the Australian Guild of Screen Composers Gender Equity Committee. For She Plays Yantra performed 2 of her music art films, Have We Paid Our Dues and Love Not War.
Have We Paid Our Dues – Winner Women’s International Film Festival, Munich New Wave Short Film Festival, Accolade Global Film Competition and LA Independent Film Channel Festival and finalist at Paris International Awards, Tokyo International Short Film Festival and Montreal Independent Film Festival. “This film is dedicated to understanding our fragile place in this eco system of our planet earth and examining our place as a thread of humanity. Created during lockdown 2021 -this piece is my reflection on these challenging times that we are going through.”
Love Not War – Premiered at She Plays.
