Earlier this year, the First Nations-led creative team behind JUTE Theatre Company’s Three Dresses packed up and headed north to Hope Vale.
To begin creating this new North Queensland story for families across Australia, we spent a powerful, beautiful week developing this new work right where the story breathes – on Country, surrounded by the community at its heart.
Based on Wanda Gibson’s multi-award-winning children’s book and adapted by the brilliant First Nations playwright Chenoa Deemal, Three Dresses is a theatre work built specifically for children and families. It’s a massive, joyful meld of performance, Guugu Yimithirr and English language, original music, movement, puppetry, and striking visual storytelling.
While Three Dresses celebrates the magic of childhood holidays and deep family love, it also holds space for a gentle, necessary truth-telling. It explores the lasting impacts of mission life and the Stolen Generations. This story is a gentle invitation for families to look at our shared North Queensland history through a lens of profound love, memory, and resilience.
Up in Hope Vale, our team got to work with local young people, yarned with Wanda and her family at the Hope Vale Arts and Culture Centre, and soaked up the inspiration at Elim Beach.
Now, we’re bringing all that magic back to Gimuy, Cairns.
Across October and November, the team is entering a four-week creative intensive. We’re moving past the words on the page to test out the music, the puppets, the visual design, and how it all comes together.
It’s a massive undertaking, and we can’t do it alone. Regional storytelling thrives because the community lifts it up.
This AusArt Day, 22 October, we’re asking you to join the crew. Creating a new Australian theatre work of this scale takes much more than putting actors on a stage.
Your donation helps JUTE:
- employ First Nations and regional artists and creatives
- develop new music, puppetry, design and visual storytelling
- support cultural collaboration and Guugu Yimithirr language within the work
- provide the time and space artists need to develop the production properly
- move Three Dresses from creative development into full production
- prepare the work to reach children and families in Far North Queensland and beyond
BE PART OF THE STORY
Whether you give $20, $50, $100 or more, your contribution becomes part of the journey of this new work. This is about ensuring that a distinctly North Queensland story gets to shine on stages across Australia in 2027. Let’s get it there together.
AUSART DAY – 22 OCTOBER 2026
AusArt Day is Australia’s national day of giving to the arts, bringing audiences and communities together to support artists and creative organisations.
This AusArt Day, we’re asking our community to get behind Three Dresses and help us bring the work to the stage in 2027.
