Gatekeepers is a dreaming kind of  place. A bar hidden in the backstreets of Queen’s City where once you step through the doors you are transported into a world full of music that you never got to see because of the Gatekeepers in the music industry. Those artists paved the way for the strength you get to see now. 

GATEKEEPERS - SHORT FILM

Below is the short performance film created by Blak Social (led by Alethea Beetson) for the Sydney Opera House Short Wave program. The film acts as the catalyst for this new performance work and features Aunty Maggie Walsh as Stella Sovereign — a character she can reprise for this project — alongside Alethea’s Indigenous pop star character from the Queen’s City universe.

Find selected songs from the world of Queen’s City - the theatrical universe in which GATEKEEPERS is set - below.

Land Back Era introduces the universe’s 2010s Indigenous pop star — the project’s Blak Born This Way moment.

Light In Your Heart is written as a song from the 1930s within the world of the work, centred on healing intergenerational pain.

Don’t Judge Me imagines a 1980s hair band led by an Indigenous woman and marks the first original music created for this storytelling universe.

Dreaming’s debut track Too Deadly for This City, from their album Neverwhite. This marks the first original song created by Cormac and Digi Youth Arts within the Queen’s City universe, demonstrating the project’s ongoing growth and musical expansion.

COOKED

COOKED is a youth-led theatre work created by Digi Youth Arts and presented at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, before travelling internationally as part of the Documenta Fifteen program in Kassel, Germany. The work brought together First Nations young performers to create a bold, contemporary performance grounded in humour, storytelling and lived experience, demonstrating Digi Youth Arts’ track record of developing work that moves from community creation to major national and international presentation.