The world premiere of the first solo-devised show by Malaysian-Australian Danielle Lim has been around two years in the making. As she embarks on opening night, she shares some of the enticing storytelling elements she has produced with her creative team, and what the audience can expect during this immersive theatrical experience.

I met with Lim in the Carclew Ballroom, a space she has been using to rehearse and devise her show Caught in Between. The question that drives this work is “how do we decide where we truly belong?” Lim seeks to answer this using a combination of soundscapes, video projections, and live storytelling. It is as much the migrant’s story as it is the seeker’s story.

As a recent graduate of a performing arts training course in South Australia, Lim has been eligible for funding opportunities from arts organisations such as Carclew and the Helpmann Academy. She has been successful in funding her project through Carclew and the Adelaide Fringe Fund. Lim graduated with honours from Flinders Drama Centre and she spoke candidly about the resources she has been able to access as a result of grant funding.

“I applied for a Carclew Fellowship to do some research for the project and to be mentored by Valerie Berry, who is an incredible performance maker, and to go to Malaysia [and] Singapore and meet some collaborators there. I was successful in getting that funding. The whole process was over a month. I spent two weeks doing the research [in Australia], talking to people here, going to visit significant places from my life, and then going back to Malaysia and doing the same thing.

Then, I spent a week in Singapore where I met with collaborators, and we workshopped ideas on how we wanted to build the original audio and voice-overs of the piece. Then, at the end of that a first draft of the script was produced, which was a big effort. Since then, the script has gone through five small developments. I’ve had friends who are artists come in and read for me so that I could envision everything, and listen to it from an outside perspective, and get their thoughts on it.”

It was important for Lim to have a creative team with Asian heritage. Lim is collaborating with local and international Asian artists, including: mentor and Adelaide-based performance maker, Valerie Berry; award-winning filmmaker, Alice Yang; Singaporean award-winning theatre maker, Cheryl Ho; and movement consultant, Penelope Shum. As she advocates for Asian voices in theatre, she emphasised that she is “more than just a token of diversity.” She hopes that her work inspires more artists of Asian heritage to pursue a career in the arts.

“When I was in drama school I was the only person of colour that the course had taken in at least a decade. That was a really strange thing for me because when I went in, I knew that I just wanted to fit in with everyone, I didn’t want to talk about anything to do with culture, I didn’t want to do anything that made me different from other people.”

Despite wanting to fit in, Lim knew that her heritage deserved exploration and upon being selected to participate in the CAAP (Contemporary Asian Australian Performance) Artist Lab in 2021, she finally felt comfortable talking with like-minded people about shared experiences.

“My team is completely [made] of Asian artists which is so cool! And it was so important for me to do that in terms of telling this story.”

Danielle Lim

In speaking to Lim, I sensed the courage required to create such a work, one that represents more than just cultural labels, that touches on aspects of society and things that have been stigmatised and normalised. Lim’s work aims to challenge people to look deeper within themselves, to strip away some of the labels that society may attach to our sense of self. She views it as her artistic responsibility to share her story and, when asked how she felt about sharing such personal elements of her life in a public forum, she expressed that she found it confronting, yet saw value in it.

“It’s definitely quite confronting but I think it’s also important at the same time to be talking about certain things that we don’t usually talk about. The way the show goes is that we kind of time travel through a series of memories from my life – of the different experiences I’ve had to do with mental health, to do with body image, to do with domestic violence – and these are all things to do with how [Malaysian] culture perceives these kinds of things [including] the beauty standards in Asia.

We’ve just kind of seen this as a norm, and so there are these expectations we need to meet, and these judgements that we are constantly dealt with, and that’s not actually healthy. I think people don’t actually realise that because they’ve become a norm. ‘Is this actually okay?’ I know that it’s part of our traditions, but how do we kind of reshape our perspectives to not follow on from generations of traditions that might not necessarily be healthy.”

The project may have started by exploring her cultural heritage but it has led Lim to greater self-acceptance, and she hopes that audiences will leave her show pondering the same.

Her advice for emerging artists entering the profession after graduating from performing arts training is “to not be afraid.”

“Take whatever opportunity you can get to showcase yourself to the industry and build this career independently, and to not shy away from that possibility. Knowing what it is that you are worth, and knowing that the stories and experiences that you have gone through are all you need. There’s always something that’s worth telling. To not shy away from doing the things that seem quite confronting or scary.”

When asked why people should come and see her show, she responded somewhat philosophically.

“How do we define ourselves and accept ourselves? It encourages reflection on ‘are we putting ourselves first?’ and ‘are we thinking about what it is that we want instead of just thinking about what the world wants us to be?’ and ‘how have my experiences defined and made me who I am today?’

“[Caught in Between] … it’s so much deeper than that. It’s about me as a person and whether or not I have accepted myself as who I am, and all the experiences that I’ve had throughout my life. And what it means to actually belong to myself first before I belong to other people.”

Caught in Between will run on 22 to 23 February, and 2 to 3 March 2024 at Studio 166 – Goodwood Theatre and Studios. More information can be found here.