Monash University Performing Arts Centres (MPAC) is thrilled to announce the recipients of its Progress Links Commissions. MPAC has provided two successful applicants with $5,000 plus a 5 to 10-day residency in 2025/26 in one of its venue spaces to develop a ‘proof of concept’ proposal for further commissioning and development within the MPAC program to create and present brand-new works.
The Progress Links Commission is driven by the conviction that creativity is a force that animates and inspires everyone – artists and scientists alike. This year MPAC received a high number of quality applicants and looked at bringing artists together with Monash researchers in fields that help respond to the world around us.
One of the recipients is Emele Ugavule, a Tokelauan, Uvean, and Fijian storyteller, working as a performer, writer, director, producer and educator. Emele will be developing Drau ni Uto Hotel, a new experimental one-women cabaret piece which explores the intersecting realities of Indigenous temporal sovereignty, memory erasure, and environmental destruction through the lived experience of Kali, a laundry attendant working in a luxury resort built on her grandfather’s land.
Emele Ugavule is a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Arts and has worked with various artists and organisations across the Pacific. Her work centres on Indigenous Oceanic storytelling, exploring themes of temporality, memory, kinship, and knowledge transmission. Emele is the founder of Studio Kiin, an Indigenous-led creative studio and collective, and serves as the Creative Director of Talanoa, a platform dedicated to Oceanic digital storytelling.
The other project recipient is Lyall Brooks, an award-winning theatre maker, teaching artist, and founding Artistic Director of Lab Kelpie, an independent theatre company dedicated to new Australian writing. Lyall will develop SELF/LESS, which asks ethical questions about the future of reproductive technology, identity and emotional responsibility.
With over 25 years’ experience across stage and screen, Lyall’s work spans acting, directing, dramaturgy, and producing, with a focus on politically and emotionally charged narratives that interrogate power, identity, and ethics. His creative practice blends rigorous dramaturgy with experimental performance forms, often bringing artists, researchers, and community voices into shared dialogue. Lyall has received four Green Room Award nominations and has worked with major companies including Melbourne Theatre Company, Red Stitch, fortyfivedownstairs, and Malthouse Theatre.
Recent work includes co-creating the immersive production Rebel, which premiered at MPAC in 2022, and developing through the 2024 La Mama Pathways Program There Arose a Great Tempest, a three-act ensemble work exploring crisis triage, ethical collapse, and the human cost of life-or-death decision-making in natural disasters and warzones
