Biography

SINGER • SONGWRITER • ENTERTAINER

Demented love-odes • haunting laments • raucous tunes and bad behaviour

Anya Anastasia is an accomplished entertainer, singer, dramatist, director and theatrical songstress who crafts performances with great flair and originality. Her songs are poignant, witty and captivating. She is an Australian Adelaide-based writer, but as a performer she travels across the globe, this year performing in the Prague Fringe Festival.

Anya has released two albums, and written, directed and performed in a number of shows, which have premiered at festivals in Adelaide and New Zealand. Her show “Violet Rapscallion: A Stray Cabaret” received 5 stars in the Advertiser during the 2010 Adelaide Fringe.

Her performance troupe Bird Wizdom sold out shows in the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival, the Adelaide Fringe festival (2010 & 2011), the Feast festival, and most recently the Dunedin Fringe Festival (NZ).

Anya Anastasia’s unique blend of cabaret is a lively combination of mischievous social satire, silliness, raucous circus-gypsy style songs, poignant ukulele serenades and heartfelt confessions of a (semi-)normal human being.

Her voice could be placed somewhere in between Kate Bush and Regina Spektor, but strongly influenced by the music of Weimar Berlin Cabaret, and the likes of the Dresden Dolls and Tom Waits. Combined with the lyrical playfulness of Dr Seuss, and a visual aspect that could place her comfortably in a Tim Burton film, Anya is a mixture of many things and yet definitely something entirely of her own.

*****
“Forget commercial comedy and half-baked theatrics. This is Fringe at its wild and spunky best.“
- THE ADVERTISER (Of Bird Wizdom’s 2010 Fringe show Violet Rapscallion)

****
“Adelaide’s ambitious Bird Wizdom is easily the oddest and most beguiling act to emerge in a long time… this is an extraordinary debut from a remarkable talent.”
- THE SUNDAY MAIL

“Devilishly intriguing vocalist Anya McNicol-Windram weaves blackly-humoured tragic-comic tales over crazy keyboards as if she were the carnival raised offspring of Tom Waits and Cabaret’s Sally Bowles.”
- THE SUNDAY MAIL (Of Bird Wizdom’s First album eclection)