Ania Walwicz

Walwicz was very sensitive to the treatment of performance artists which operate outside the normal practices. Her writing tends toward an impressionistic, stream of consciousness exploration of inner states. It also exploits 'appropriative' or 'sampling' techniques of production. Apart from publication in numerous anthologies, journals and several books, her work has been performed by La Mama Theatre, the Sydney Chamber Choir and set to music by ChamberMade. Walwicz performed her work in France, Japan and Switzerland. Until her death in September 2020 she taught creative writing at RMIT in Melbourne. A fellow performance artist, John Cage, is known for creating interesting pieces of music that stretch the traditional limits and practices of musicians. The unconventionality of his work, once considered controversial, led people to reject his pieces. John Cage told a story about how professional orchestras destroyed his instruments because they refused to play his work. This story was very influential on Walwicz, as it demonstrated the intolerance of people who should not be intolerant to artists. In Walwicz's one-woman play Telltale, the writer uses the influence and experience of her childhood to convey her work. “The play is populated with a lifetime of characters, some of whom have survived those early days when Walwicz did invent stories in the once- upon-a-time world of her childhood. "In a way there's millions The person begins in a chaotic state and winds up in one of grace." Several cultural influences impacted Walwicz throughout her life. She was a strong believer in feminism and this is evident in her work. For example, she chose to rewrite the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" from a feminist viewpoint. Walwicz was also "inspired by writers like Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky, her written work is featured in over 200 anthologies and in secondary and tertiary literary curricula and sound recordings of her works feature in Voiceprints." As a nonconformist, Walwicz was once was critical of a beloved author and received backlash; the underlying message she received was 'you will believe what others believe'. This was very influential on her overall attitude towards authority and orthodoxy. This attitude helped Walwicz transcend the boundaries that many in the artistic community would try to place upon her. Ultimately, Walwicz believed in the beauty found in creation. In particular, she believed in the power of writing. "A person once said to me that the act of writing is the ultimate act of hope. That you have this empty page and you can do something with it. So that's a beautiful thought. We can always start again."

In a piece, 'Transgressing Language', Lyn McCredden writes: "This impulse to return to origins, to childhood and new beginnings, is a recurrent one in Walwicz's work. Language is the possibility of renewal, of writing the self. It may be a treacherous or dangerous womb, but it is in its dangerousness, its sharpness, that it rewards the experimental poet who, through repetition, insistence, flights of lyrical affirmation and childlike simplicity, incants the new self. Questions of control are thematised, as the poet struggles with language for the desired effect, the new languaged self. But it can also be argued that poet and language seem to be coming from the same angle, in a relationship of concurrence, confronting the more conventional." "A number of contradictions shape the poetry of Polish-Australian writer Ania Walwicz. These contradictions are bred partly by the literary theory which has so insistently surrounded her work, and, it will be argued, are partly inherent in the enterprise of avant-garde or experimental poetry."