Sydney Musings With Iolanthe, On Building Creative Worlds And Party Alter Egos

Sydney Musings is an original local series of intimate conversations tracing Sydney's creative undercurrent and exploring the enduring exchange between a city and the people inspired by it.

Living in Sydney, it can start to feel as though everybody has one foot out the door.

The older you get, the further away community seems—not to mention how hard it can be to break into new social circles in a city where everyone keeps their friends close. By 25, half of those friends have jetted off to London anyway, chasing three years of non-stop travel and partying—before returning home to settle down and readjust.

Ask most Sydneysiders and you’ll hear the same complaints on repeat: it’s too small, there’s nothing to do, and the nightlife is dead. Lockout laws may have reinforced that last point for the better part of a decade, but with those restrictions now gone, there’s room for some of the city’s most exciting creative minds to step forward again.

The question is: was the problem ever really Sydney, or have we just been looking in the wrong places?

Actor, writer and founder of Purple Flower Productions, Iolanthe is one of the creatives challenging that narrative and helping shape a more expansive vision for Sydney after dark. You may recognise her most recent venture as the launch of Cinnamon Club, an events label under Purple Flower that blends music, performance, fashion and community.

Image credit: Sistren | Instagram

Iolanthe picks up my call from a rooftop in Melbourne. She’s there shooting an SBS show, she tells me through wired headphones, takeaway coffee in hand. Immediately, it feels like catching up with an old friend, even though we’ve never met, or spoken, before today.

“I've always been drawn to creativity that's kind of been my strong suit since I was a kid,” she tells me.

“For the very formative years of my life, from zero till six, I was living with my mom in Tasmania. She was a single mom, I was an only child, and she was writing her PhD in sociology, so a lot of my experience was kind of understanding the world and establishing language and personality in parallel to my mom.”

At six, Iolanthe and her mum moved to London, where she first fell in love with reading, writing and creating.

“The UK Guardian would send packages to kids where you could get like ten books every month if you did a book review for other children,” she laughs.

“I was getting my little Charlie and Lola books by Lauren Child and writing my book reviews. And that was when I was first published, when I was a child.”

As she got older, acting became the focus. She performed in the UK before moving back to Australia to study at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), one of the country's most respected training grounds of actors. Over time, those instincts for performance, language and storytelling began to converge. Most recently, they found expression in Sistren, a play exploring friendship, community and growing up in the UK. The production premiered last year, has taken to stage at Surry Hills' Belvoir St Theatre (heroing original Australian stories and emerging creative voices) and has since been optioned for television.

Alongside it all however, Iolanthe is unashamedly, a party girl at heart.

“Even when I was 14 or 15 in the UK, my best friend Ellie and I would be friends with the sixth-formers, and we'd go to their parties,” she reflects.

“I remember loving the feeling of being able to walk into a space and no one knowing you of sharing music and stories and sitting around a fire and dancing.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that her most recent venture is Cinnamon Club.

After years spent moving through nightlife scenes across London, New York, Paris, Bangkok, Barcelona, Melbourne and beyond, Iolanthe began mapping out what made a great party work: audience-first curation and strong aesthetics, rather than just another room full of people scrolling between songs.

The name itself traces back to her original birth name, later reborn as her long-running party alter-ego.

“I've always been enamoured by the fact that my name was almost Cinnamon,” she muses.

“My mum always told me that story. She gave birth to me on her own in Sydney, and when the midwife asked what my name was, she said, ‘Her name's Cinnamon.’”

“The midwife laughed and said, ‘Really?’”

“My mum realised then that wasn’t the reaction she wanted for her child’s name. So she went away and thought about it. There were a lot of Jacarandas around when I was born, so she looked into purple flowers. Iolanthe is a purple flower—so she called me Iolanthe.”

She pauses to think, setting the scene. 

“There’s always been something I’ve been fascinated by about that idea,” Iolanthe continues.

“I often wonder who Cinnamon would have been if that had been the name I grew up with.”

Image credit: Iolanthe | Supplied

As we talk, I find myself increasingly curious about what it is about Sydney that keeps pulling her back. She already spends five months of the year in the UK, occasionally dropping into Barcelona to see family—yet she doesn’t fall neatly into that particularly jaded category of Sydney escapists.

“My partner works as a restaurateur, I think it's been really enjoyable to experience his restaurants because they feel so curated, like they're building a world,” she tells me.

“They feel almost like sets.”

But it’s Marrickville—and the Inner West more broadly—that she speaks about with particular affection.

“I think growing up in London, the influence of being able to walk down the street and experience a kind of chaos that isn't filtered by the Western lens, is really enjoyable,” Iolanthe reflects.

“There’s just a lot of Vietnamese community that are existing within their own patterns and routines, which I really appreciate. It reminds me of Brixton in South London.”

“And also—the Central Tunnel!” she quickly adds.

“It’s just me with my headphones and my sunglasses and my delusion."

Although Iolanthe clearly admires Sydney’s creative underworld, she’s also quick to point out that structural forces can sometimes flatten the city’s nightlife into something slightly one-dimensional.

“My take on it is that a lot of individuals with very singular perspectives aren’t actually in positions of creative power or control that allow them to platform themselves in the ways their work deserves,” she explains.

“But there is a very abundant creative force and life in Sydney and that does ripple down to nightlife.”

“I think it’s the potentiality that excites me,” she continues.

“There are more and more people putting their essence and personality into creative projects and it’s working. Part of making cultural shift is proving that there is capital and community value in platforming these ideas.”

Image credit: Iolanthe | Supplied

Cinnamon Club itself is a manifestation of these ideas—a melting pot of community and creativity that forms her own kind of utopia. She describes the process as magical realism: free-form, playful and referential.

“I don’t want people to feel bound by rules. I don’t want them to feel shushed. I don’t want them to feel like you can’t exist as yourself,” Iolanthe asserts.

“I don’t want self-editing or shame to exist in any of the spaces that I create.”

That philosophy extends into how she imagines her own future unfolding—fluidly, and without borders.

“I definitely want to build a creative life that transcends space, where I can move between countries. Travel is a huge part of how I get inspiration,” she says.

“I would really love to have a Cinnamon Club in the UK—but I’d also love to throw a party in Barcelona. It’s such an expressive, free place. I’d love to see what Cinnamon Club could do there.”

Perhaps it’s time, like Iolanthe suggests, to start seeing Sydney as a genuine creative player alongside cities like London, Barcelona and New York—and to start spotlighting the minds that will help it reach that point.

That doesn’t mean we should stop travelling, moving away, or questioning the systems around us. There’s clearly much to learn from experiencing different corners of the world. Just don’t forget to bring a piece of those learnings back home and see if there’s potential for it to take root.

Love the series? Read on for

• Sydney Musings With Local Designer Ian Tran,  Is Shaping A City, One Sign At A Time
• Sydney Musings With Hyun Lee, The Filmmaker Finding Solace In Asian Grocery Stores And Mystic Beings

Image credit: Nicole Brannen | Supplied