Recent Works
Liesel’s most recent works include a ‘Bio-Cabaret’ for the Sydney Festival, ‘Send for Nellie’ by Alana Valentine, the drama, ‘Masterclass’ by Terence McNally at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre and ‘Window Dressing’ a large public performance installation created for Sydney’s Vivid Festival.
The Glass Menagerie, Ensemble Theatre, 2025
“The Glass Menagerie is transcendently directed by Liesel Badorrek.”
– Joy Lawn, Arts Hub
“….theatre, as produced by Ensemble Theatre, shows us the heights of human empathy in the teamwork of wonderful actors, and of human intelligence and understanding in the work of director Liesel Badorrek ….Theatre of this outstanding quality makes life worthwhile”
– Frank McKone Canberra Critics Circle
The Half-Life of Marie Curie, Ensemble Theatre, 2025
“Director Liesel Badorrek handles the material with care and vision, bringing the ideas of transformation and discovery to the forefront, crafting a dynamic emotional arc. Her direction highlights both sharp, momentous humour as well as gentle rhythmic silences. ”
– Benjamin Webb, The Scoop
“….presented with mastery, Ensemble’s production of The Half-Life of Marie Curie is superb theatre. ”
– Paul Gilchrist, Theatre Red
Liesel was the 2023 recipient of Churchill Fellowship and travelled to the United States, Europe and the UK investigating her project: Making Opera with and for Marginalised Audiences.
Churchill Fellowship, 2023
The Darkening Ecliptic (Ern Malley Hoax of 1943), The Sydney Art Quartet
Created as a promenade performance for Redfern’s 107 Project space, this performance by the Sydney art Quartet invited audiences to consider the relationship between ‘Legitimate Art’ and Hoax. It explored and played with the problematic poetry of Ern Malley and featured a repertoire by Grazyna Bacewicz and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Video excerpt from Window Dressing, Vivid Festival, 2024
Created for the 2024 Vivid Festival, Window Dressing was a site-specific performance installation staged in the windows of the Frank Gehry building at the University of Technology Sydney. The work invited audiences to engage in their own way with the imagined lives within the eight windows of the four ‘apartments’. Set to a carefully curated score featuring cocktail lounge music, silent film score, tangoes and Shostakovich’s unsettling Piano Trio No 2, Window Dressing cast the audience in the role of both voyeur and narrator – creating their own stories about the eight performers and their connections.
“If you see just one thing at Vivid Sydney this year, Window Dressing should be it...Poignant, funny, intriguing, tragic and spellbinding. I dreamt about it last night and hope I do again”
– Carolyn Unwin, Creative Life
Masterclass, Ensemble, 2024
“Once in a while – very rarely indeed – a theatre production is so accomplished, so well executed, that there is little for a reviewer to do but sing it’s praises…..what dazzles is the way Badorrek’s Masterclass mines and refines that gold”
– Peter Hackney, Arts Hub
Send for Nellie, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney Festival, 2024
This new work by acclaimed Australian playwright, Alana Valentine, celebrated the cross-dressing cabaret and vaudeville star Nellie Small. Appropriately performed as a vaudeville cabaret, Send for Nellie featured episodes from Small’s life reimagined as vaudeville acts and a live band led by musical director Zara Stanton.