FIREBIRD
IN DEVELOPMENT
Firebird is a new musical in early development about women, age and the lifelong act of becoming.
At its heart is an ageing opera singer whose greatest performance is no longer on the stage, but in the lives of the women who find their way to her door.
Once a rising opera singer, she came of age in the bohemian heart of 1970s Kings Cross, where creative expression flourished and Sydney's creative glitterati gathered. Standing on the cusp of an international career, a devastating personal tragedy changed the course of her life forever.
Today she lives in the last fibro house before the bush on Dharawal Country. She refuses to sell as developers transform the surrounding land into new housing estates. Over time, she has become something of a local myth, an eccentric singing teacher, animal whisperer and formidable matriarch whose weathered home seems to exist between worlds.
Women arrive looking for singing lessons. What they find instead is a place to fall apart, begin again and slowly remember the parts of themselves lost through motherhood, grief, ambition, expectation and fear. Yet beneath her wit and bravado is a woman still searching for her own way forward.
But this is no ordinary story.
Guided by two mischievous, shape-shifting women inspired by Baba Yaga and Slavic folklore, Firebird unfolds in a world where songs become spells and the everyday gives way to the fantastical. Four women's lives become unexpectedly entwined as they travel between past and present, music and myth, memory and becoming. In Firebird, voices are inherited, borrowed, lost, silenced and reclaimed.
Drawing on opera, pop, electronica and Slavic sevdah and balkan folk music, the original score sits alongside movement, comedy and heightened storytelling to create a theatrical world where singing becomes ritual and performance becomes an act of survival, connection and renewal.
At its core, Firebird asks what it takes to keep becoming when life doesn't unfold the way we imagined. It celebrates our elders, teachers and unexpected women who lend us their courage before we are ready to carry our own. Like its mythical namesake, Firebird imagines transformation as a lifelong cycle of burning, becoming and rising again.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
Firebird has been generously supported by Campbelltown Arts Centre through two creative developments:
November 2025 - two week creative development
January 2026 - three week creative development
CREATIVE TEAM
Created by sibling trio Josipa Draisma, Sime Knezevic and Mara Knezevic
Music by Zeljko Papic