James is a performer, currently artistic director and executive producer of the WA Youth Theatre Company (WAYTC). WAYTC recently presented an extraordinary work for the Perth Festival called Beside, exploring a whole set of ways we position ourselves, or are positioned, beside, life’s action. Beside was staged in an historically significant colonial building that was part of a farm in what is now a suburb of Perth along the Derbarl Yerrigan, the Swan River. There were four discrete performance sites, three of them in the grounds and one in the building itself, the farmhouse, a site of trauma for Noongar people, then and now.