Director Craig Ilott
Lead Performers Danielle Caruana (Mama Kin), Dingo Spender (Spender), Mama Kin Spender
Composers Danielle Caruana & Dingo Spender
Choral composition & arrangement Virginia Bott
Live Sound Designer Max Barton
Stage Manager Georgia Smith
Production Manager Mark Haslam
Movement Director Janine Oxenham
Lighting Designer Matt Marshall
Producer Stacia Goninon
Developmemt Producer Libby Klysz
Images WILK
A map of buried feelings, untended fires and an aching quest for redemption.
Promises & Wild Beasts is Mama Kin Spender as you’ve never seen (or heard) them before – in a theatrical debut that bristles with intensity.
This eerily relatable theatrical debut, bristles with an intensity that can only come from the guts.
Mama Kin Spender take you on a transformative story strung through a cycle of songs drawn from their recent ARIA-nominated concept album Promises. Backed by a gospel choir they conjure the wild tidal nature of human desire, charting the friction between love’s profound, shape-shifting force and the promises we make to try contain it. Love is the bedrock and the beast that these naïve lovers seek to domesticate.
Fierce, intimate and unflinching, Mama Kin Spender brings their trademark percussive fire, searing harmonies and captivating soul-stirring presence to Promises & Wild Beasts.
This show is a rally cry to the heart - don’t miss it.
“Promises & Wild Beasts arrived at Perth Festival with enormous heart. Its world premiere season sold out.... It is a work that beautifully straddles art forms, moving between theatre, music and storytelling while feeling entirely its own......intimate and expansive, funny and deeply moving, capturing something wonderfully relatable about the mess and joy of being human and being in love. You leave wanting to hold the people you love a little closer, to live a little more wildly and to love a little more tenderly.” Anna Reece – Artistic Director | Perth Festival
“Mama Kin Spender’s Promises & Wild Beasts performance was so much more than a gig. Marking their theatrical debut, the evening unfolded as a poetic story of love, separation and finding your way back again... exploring love’s optimism, decay, rampage and transformation.
Backed by five stunning singers, the duo – Mama Kin (Danielle Caruana) and Dingo Spender – personified love itself, adding a deeply intimate layer to the performance.
The momentum never faltered..... the finale brought nearly 30 additional choir members onstage, swelling the closing songs into something transcendent, transforming the room into a moment of communal celebration.” Rolling Stone - Five Highlights From Perth Festival 2026
The development of this work has been supported by Perth Festival, DLGSC and Fremantle City Council.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.