TILT 2021
Photography: Stephen Heath
Meet the Team
stop drop + roll is a collaboration between performance makers Eliza Smith, William Gammel, Clea Purkis and Nathan Calvert. They have had the privilege of working with a range of collaborators and artists from all over Boorloo.
Click on each artists’ picture to see what they’ve been up to.
Eliza is a queer and neurodivergent artist who approaches making as a form of research. As the founding director of stop drop + roll, she wrote and directed Everything Flickers for TILT (2021), She's Terribly Greedy for The Blue Room's Summer Nights (2022) and is currently the director of Everything Flickers for The Blue Room Annual Season (2023). This being said, it is a widely known fact that they are artistically and professionally indebted to Clea, Will and Nathan, without whom none of these works would have been made and towards whom she is a liability as much as she is a leader.
William is a visual theatre maker and installation artist. When he isn't collaborating with stop drop + roll, Will works as a technician at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was the lighting, sound and AV designer for She's Terribly Greedy (2022) and has been both a performer and the principal designer for Everything Flickers in all of its many iterations. Will is known for frequently having the same questionable ideas as Eliza, including but not limited to the time they both secretly brought a can of deodorant to a bonfire photoshoot "just in case". Perhaps this is why he and Eliza currently spend their days trying to build a piano from scratch.
Clea is an actor and maker who is a vision to behold both on screen and stage. She is passionate about truthful and heartfelt storytelling, and radiates kindness and intelligence. In addition to her role as a performer and deviser on all the company's projects thus far, Clea produced She's Terribly Greedy in 2022. Wrangling a creative team of fourteen artists for a festival season was a feat truly only she was capable of. Clea is widely recognised by her team as the only member capable of "really thinking things through" and consequently, the one person we would all trust with our lives.
Nathan is an actor, musician, performance artist and undercover nerd. Most recently, he wrote his first class honours thesis researching how visual arts and music composition techniques could be translated into live performance and disrupt the supremacy of text. Nathan performed in Tilt (2021), She's Terribly Greedy (2022) and is a performer and composer for the upcoming 2023 season of Everything Flickers. He has a relentlessly intelligent approach to making art in any form, and a spellbinding ability to dissolve the barriers between forms. Most importantly, at age 23 Nathan is the only member of the company without his driver's license (lucky for him, he is always good company to have in the passenger seat).