A Perth Festival show about dragons, smart tech and neurodiversity marks the debut for the new West Berlyn performance studio in Bayswater, writes Stephen Bevis.

A converted fly-fishing store in Bayswater has been recast as a much-needed performance studio for WA independent artists.

The premises, just around the corner from the local IGA and across the road from the busy new Bayswater train station, is now a fully equipped black-box studio and 30-seat public theatre under the name West Berlyn.

Billed as Perth’s most affordable venue by its new(ish) owner, the performer, director and writer James Berlyn, West Berlyn is a creative haven available to independent artists in a city where viable, affordable options to develop new work are hard to come by.

After 15 months of painstaking renovations and compliance works undertaken by Berlyn, the first new show to emerge from West Berlyn is Dragon I, a Perth Festival commission and world premiere from the newly formed Neuro Bureau.

Neuro Bureau is a collective of neurodiverse artists who have emerged from the WA Youth Theatre Company (WAYTCo), where Berlyn was artistic director from 2017-2023. During that time, WAYTCo created a series of successful works for Fringe World (Rest, Body Rights) and Perth Festival (Beside, Seven Sisters).

At the heart of Dragon I is Adam Kelly, a self-described “autistic gentleman” whose beautiful monologue in WAYTCo‘s 2020 Fringe World show Body Rights was co-developed by Berlyn and illustrator-animator Ben Hollingsworth into Kelly’s award-winning touring show ARCO, reviewed by Seesaw in 2022. ARCO – which stands for Autism, Rejection, Celibacy and Optimism – is a personal tale woven through with a message of acceptance and urging people to consider life from another perspective.

For Dragon I, Kelly is delving into his prodigious knowledge of dragons to explore the multi-headed, monstrous wonder of AI and its impact on human imagination and neurodiverse creativity.

For those who fear AI will gobble us all up in it digital jaws, the dragon analogy should be quite easy to relate to, Kelly says.

“Dragons are tremendously powerful, hard to predict, and it’s hard to know what their possibilities can be,” he says. “AI has similar traits, in that it’s hard to predict, we don’t understand the full extent of it, and it can very much reshape a lot of things.”

Kelly is joined on stage at Subiaco Arts Centre by performer Jade Del Borrello, who plays a chat-bot assistant helping him present a fictional TED-style talk about dragons and a mythical storybook world he has created.

Kelly and Dragon I director and co-writer Berlyn describe the show as a kind of onstage fever dream in which Kelly’s dragon presentation is comically derailed by ever-shifting technological boundaries. 

As so many creatives are wrestling with these days, Dragon I is a kind of “To AI or not to AI” proposition, they say. Using theatre, animation and music, Kelly and co explore the moral, artistic, neurodiverse and environmental implications of the AI juggernaut for a neurodivergent artist like himself.

Asked what he would like audiences to take away from seeing Dragon I, Kelly hopes to prompt conversations about the applications and implications of AI on creativity and imagination – and greater understanding of how his autistic mind works.

“Personally, I don’t like imposing what I feel the audience should and shouldn’t feel, because they have their own lives, their own experiences and journeys through the beautiful chaos that is existence. I’d like them to come to the show, be entertained, and get a lot of ideas to think about and digest, things they haven’t considered before. That’s the beauty of life, experiencing new things and growing.”

Kelly, from White Gum Valley, was studying horticulture when he was bitten by the performance bug after joining some friends who were taking acting and improv classes at WAYTCo. It’s where he met Berlyn as WAYTCo artistic director and the pair forged what is now a 10-year working relationship.

“Performing is my favourite thing to do in the world,” Kelly says. “Because I feed off it, you know? Because I get to perform and tell the story. It’s the best thing ever. For most of my life I felt like I didn’t fit in. I felt like a penguin on land when it looks awkward and ungainly. Acting was like going into the water, and I could then swim and glide and fly – and that was amazing. That’s what it was like when I was performing.”

For Berlyn, Dragon I continues a long line of innovative work in a prolific and influential four-decade career as a dancer, writer, director and producer across the country and internationally. In 2021, he received the prestigious Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for performing arts excellence. His credits span his lauded solo shows Tawdry Heartburn’s Manic Cures and I Know You’re There, collaborations with WA Opera, Matthew Lutton and French artist Benjamin Bergery, numerous Awesome Festival shows, co-founding Australia’s first one-on-one performance festival Proximity and WA’s former adult disability performance group Tracksuit to lecturing at WAAPA in movement and devised performance.

Berlyn is keen to “give back” by mentoring and supporting a new generation of emerging artists like Kelly and to help ease their way through the high-risk underfunded arts industry via access to a facility like West Berlyn.

“I have been dreaming about some version of a space like this for about 20 years,” Berlyn says of his Bayswater bolthole, recounting a long list of studios he has occupied with mixed results over the years.

West Berlyn fills a need for a low-cost venue for independent artists to create and present new work with security and confidence. An increasing number of theatre-makers are caught in the yawning opportunity gap or the “missing middle” that sits between WAAPA, WAYTCo, the Blue Room or other emergent pathways and landing a production with Black Swan State Theatre Company.

“There are more people applying for funding than there ever have been,” Berlyn says. “There are more worthy people becoming unfunded and that number is increasing each year. So, there needs to be a place where you can affordably build a first draft. If it’s a small-scale work that can be upscaled, or a version of a work that can then be well funded later, or a tourable version, That’s what it’s there for.”

Berlyn purchased the site during the recent redevelopment of the Bayswater train station, which now serves three lines as the second biggest station in the new Metronet system.

He hopes its affordability and accessibility will make West Berlyn a hub where independent artists from around Perth can stretch their creative wings unimpeded.

West Berlyn is a blackout, black box space with full lighting, sound and projection systems, the latest QLab show control software, a Tarkett floor and seating for an audience of 30.  It already has bookings into the middle of 2026.

“And it has an artistic and advisory board of one,” Berlyn says. “Nobody can chuck me out.”

Dragon I is at Subiaco Arts Centre from 26 February to 1 March. Details: perthfestival.com.au For more details about West Berlyn, contact westberlyn@gmail.com