MD Crosby
ABOUT
Hi there. I’d like to share some of the rich experiences I’ve had as an actor, writer, director and producer in theatre, film, television and radio over the years. It’s a list that shows plays and screenplays as the mainstay of my writing up until 2007 when I set off on a fiction adventure. It led to a detective horror trilogy set in Melbourne and Japan – The Curse of the Matsumoto Cherrywood. Honestly, I didn’t intend such a massive saga… but to find the original crime, like Raymond Carver tracing clues, I was drawn ever further into the past.
My first experience in Japan was the SCOT/Playbox (now Malthouse) collaboration 1991-2 in which I trained with Suzuki Tadashi and his company in Toga, a small farming village in the Western alps of Honshu. We rehearsed in Melbourne, and toured Suzuki’s Chronicles of Macbeth to Tokyo/Adelaide International Arts Festivals. That really set me on the path. I received a Japan Foundation Fellowship in 1995 studying various forms of contemporary Japanese theatre, during which time I met director of Korean influenced Tokyo company Shinjuku Ryozanpaku Kim Sujin. In 1997-2000 I studied Japanese Language at RMIT. Two Asialink residencies, 2000/2011, support from DFAT, The Japan Foundation, Creative Victoria, the Australia Council and the Playking Foundation have helped me facilitate training, development and production of collaborative tours between Japan, Australia and other Asian centres over twenty years (Sandakan Threnody 2004, Matasaburo – Angel of the Wind 2006, Everyman and the Pole Dancers 2014, Honchos Meeting 2014), mostly performing, producing and sometimes writing. With Australia’s foremost butoh artist Yumi Umiumare and Ben Rogan, I collaborated on the DasShoku series of butoh/cabarets 1999-2006, which received Green Room and Fringe awards and toured throughout Australia and to Osaka.
Before all of that, I acted professionally as a child in theatre, film, television and radio, without doubt because my father Don Crosby and my grandfather Marshall Crosby were actors too. In 1981 I graduated from NIDA.
In recent times, apart from writing The Intriguing Case of the Silent Forest, which premiered here in Melbourne in 2019, my fiction time has been consumed by this curse. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have in writing it. The process of research and investigation and understanding the maxim ‘show don’t tell’, has been more enriching than I can tell.
Oh… in my other life as facilitator of Melbourne’s The Thursday Group, I’m collaborating on a new play, Orpheo Machine. You can find out about that here 🚀. Looking forward to hearing from you! 😀
If you would like to arrange a talk on the stories I write or find out further information, don’t hesitate to reach out.
matthew crosby 