In Chinese, the word for crisis comprises two characters, one denoting danger, the other opportunity.

With the loss of Education department funding, and the departure of long-time Artistic Director, Kate Shearer, Jigsaw Theatre Company stood at the crossroads of crisis.

Canberra’s professional theatre company for young people since 1974, Jigsaw faced a fate, suffered by many of Australia’s leading theatre in education companies. So many lighthouse companies of the halcyon seventies and eighties have slid into oblivion. Companies such as Toetruck, Salamanca, Magpie and Woolly Jumpers are now the whispering ghosts of a time when young people across the country would sit in wonder to share the excitement and participate in the learning that was at the very heart of the theatre in education movement.

In 2009, one of Australia’s leading theatre for young people’s companies with an impressive pedigree of hundreds of productions over its 35 years, was confronted by a do or die choice. Make the wrong choice, and Jigsaw Theatre Company would also vanish from the shrinking landscape. Make the right choice, and the company might just survive. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and the new board of Jigsaw Theatre Company, advised by a recently appointed General Manager, was in an ideal position to turn the danger to opportunity, to invent the new, liberate the old and …