Create Space May 2025 Residency
The May 2025 Create Space Residency partners with Performance Space — a leading champion of experimental and interdisciplinary practice in Australia.
Performance Space’s Queer Development Program (QDP) nurtures and amplifies queer creativity by supporting emerging artists to develop new ideas, refine their practice, and build industry connections. The program plays a vital role in strengthening the visibility and impact of queer performance in Australia.
This residency supports Aliyah Knight and Solomon Frank — two artists who have previously participated in the QDP — as they return to further develop their work at Sydney Opera House.
About the artists
Aliyah is a Black and queer film and theatremaker working on unceded Gadigal and Wangal land, drawn to messy, political, and personal stories told through horror and humour.
Their playwriting credits include SNAKEFACE (Belvoir Downstairs, 2025; Runner-Up: Australian Theatre Festival NYC’s New Play Award, 2024), THE DOG HOUSE (Performance Space’s Stephen Cummins Residency, 2024), and Four Legs Good (ATYP’s Intersection Festival, 2024; Currency Press). They were part of ATYP’s Fresh Ink cohort in 2024. Their debut musical A Tiny Doll’s House, co-created with Andy Freeborn, was presented by Hayes Theatre Co. as part of its Festival of New Work.
Aliyah’s short film Consume premiered at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival 2024 and will screen at Final Girls Berlin Film Festival 2025 and AGNSW x Sydney Mardi Gras' Queer Art After Hours. Their film The Swell was a finalist in the Queer Screen Pitch Off and received the 2024 Queer Screen x Screen Australia Gender Matters Taskforce Professional Development Prize. They are also developing a horror feature born out of Sydney Film Festival x For Film’s Sake’s Platform: Lab. Their first video art work doomscrollin debuted at The Bearded Tit in the FIRE, ASH, STARS, I Attend To Survive exhibition.
Aliyah is also a skilled note-taker, collaborating with Roadshow Rough Diamond, Fremantle Australia, EasyTiger, and others. They are currently developing Blood Rush, a supernatural comedy pilot, and are a graduate of AFTRS.
Solomon Frank is an Australian performer and composer living and working on Cammeraygal land, whose inter-disciplinary practice straddles cross-species musical collaboration, vacuum cleaners and time travel. Solomon receives emails from the future including music and musical instructions written by future humans and entities for Frank to perform and carry out in the present.
Solomon’s works and those received from the future have been performed by Ensemble Offspring, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows, Kirkos Ensemble (Ireland), double bassist Will Hansen, Willoughby Symphony Orchestra and E-Mex Ensemble (Germany) and at Mona Foma (Tasmania), Liveworks, Canberra International Music Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Syd) . These fictional conceits provide a frame for listening, a way of situating art music and making audiences aware of their cultured ears.
Solomon’s improvisational practice expands upon the clarinet, replacing parts of the clarinet with other objects, homemade aluminum and plastic reeds, hoses, vacuum cleaners, watering cans and water. Solomon thinks of his music as “dystopian nostalgia for the present”; it reflects upon art music’s precarious place in a world dictated by corporate technocrats, TikTok algorithms and celebrity deification. Additionally, Solomon is undertaking a PhD researching animals and music, exploring interspecies musical collaboration with dogs as means to question the human uniqueness of musicality and creativity.
