What is Radical Equity?

To describe our purpose, Second Echo Ensemble often speaks of Radical Equity. With just a little over six months experience as General Manager of Second Echo Ensemble, I am reasonably placed to answer the question proposed by this article as both an insider and an outsider.

In the first instance it's important to define equity. This is about consideration of what any one person needs in order to do their work, live their life, be in the world. The supports that any one person needs look different and this isn’t confined to those who identify as living with a disability.

I am usually happy working in an environment with ongoing noise, so I don’t necessarily need special supports. Others find it very difficult, if not impossible, to function within this kind of sound environment. This person might need ways to personally adjust the sound down. Their support looks different to mine.

You might also be familiar with the classic image of equity where we see that it doesn’t work to give everyone the same box to stand on to see over a fence to a baseball game. Instead, each needs a different height and shape to suit their physicality. 

The second phrase I’ve heard many times over since I joined the Second Echo Ensemble team is “why not?” When I talked with Creative Director Kelly Drummond Cawthon about the possibility of joining the team we discussed how Second Echo Ensemble was about to take a show to the Sydney Opera House. “The Sydney Opera House…? wow, that’s incredible!” I said, to which she cheekily replied, “Yeah… Why Not?” in my response, she had picked up my surprise at the Sydney Opera House.

To be honest, I was probably astounded that any small band of performers was making their way there from Tasmania, which probably shows a few layers of limited expectation soon to be washed away! At this stage I didn’t fully understand what Second Echo was, or where it could fly. 

Six months on I understand a little more and I’d say that “why not” and “Radical Equity” go hand in hand. 

If we go back to that equity image, with that fence and those boxes, I’d say that Radical Equity dissolves the fences and the boxes - I mean why was everyone only ever looking over the fence to the footy match anyway? And this approach lifts our artists, with their collaborative input and consent, to places well beyond what they could have ever imagined.

It is a process of working that asks “Why not?” and in doing so, genuinely questions the limits, the systems and the expectations that place an invisible cap on what someone, or a group of people, might be able to do, experience, say, sing, make, perform.

I like to think of it as a rocket, the Why Not Rocket if you like, blasting away from those limits, to places beyond. Second Echo Ensemble loves a space metaphor, so why not?!

We SEE our studio model as being like a slow burn experiment, bubbling away over years at a time in the lead up to potential rocket flights. An artist might begin simply by building the confidence to work with their own body, voice, hands or mind and slowly travel towards incredible professional artistic outcomes like our recent original musical The Adventures of Peacock, Chicken and the Pony They Rode Upon which was performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2025.

That ramping pathway is deliberately long because everyone needs the time and space and many different kinds of supports in order to participate at that highest level. The distance between an initial idea and the professional outcome can be years long. Our Adventures show took 3 years.

But I expect you are asking, what does this actually look like?

Dave Montgomery, Nicole Simms-Farrow and Paul McGee in The Adventures of Peacock, Chicken and the Pony They Rode Upon, Theatre Royal Hobart. Photo: Pete Mellows

It looks like Dave, on the left, performing in a show for which he is both the visual dramaturg and a lead character. Everything that you see emerged from his own mind - the puppet character, the colours, the patterning of the sets, and the inspiration for the digital backdrops.

But it's not just the creative output, it's everything that surrounds this. It's Dave being a professional performer on Australia’s best known stage. It’s Dave working out ways to learn his lines in his own way. It's Dave travelling with the Ensemble and staying in his own apartment. It’s Dave leading workshops and operating at all times as a professional. 

SEE stage manager Elise Bagorski in the Sydney Opera House booth calling The Peacock, Chicken and the Pony They Rode Upon. Photo supplied.

It looks like Elise caught in the midst of Stage Managing the Adventures show at the Opera House. They have their own small community theatre company and at 21, they are already recognised and awarded for achievements in the local sector.

Here they are in the booth at the Sydney Opera House, calling our Adventures show as Stage Manager, something that they and many others would not have expected them to achieve at this age.

Second Echo Ensemble said “why not?” and supported them along the way, connecting them with mentors like the Opera House lead Stage Manager. 

Elise Romaszko, Nicole Simms-Farrow, William Webster, Kelly Drummond Cawthon, Dave Montgomery and Anna-Maria Väisänen perform in Relâche: The Last Dance On Earth. Photo: Jesse Hunniford

And it looks like Second Echo Ensemble performing the live show Relâche: The Last Dance On Earth.  They are a diverse cast with distinct abilities, but here, they are a professional Ensemble performing an innovative reworking of a 100 year old Dada ballet. Radical Equity here, was the Ensemble directing a show with many professional collaborators and it was the experience of a sold out audience, completely moved by an incredible, 360 degree theatrical experience, where they were focussed solely on the art, not ability.

So if you find yourself watching a Second Echo Ensemble performance into the future, and feeling that sense that the normal bounds don’t apply, then you are vicariously experiencing the beautiful uplift of that Why Not Rocket, and perhaps that might leave you adjusting your own internal expectations of others, or maybe even yourself. And instead of finding yourself saying “could this be possible?”, you might find yourself instead saying “Why not?”

Jude Abell is Second Echo Ensemble’s General Manager.