An unusual match of talents takes the stage at Smith this week when yarn spinner, musician, writer and a founding member of the famous Bushwackers Band, Jan “Yarn” Wositzky, teams up with theatre worker Penny Glass, who for 23 years has been creating theatre in a Chilean men’s prison.

Together in their joint show, Dignified Anger: Stories for a Perilous Now, the pair will be debunking what they call “dangerous bullshit” ideas such as the survival of the fittest and that human beings should subjugate nature to our will.

Having done that, they say, they’ll be telling alternative stories about women who led Latin American indigenous communities to defy mines and dams and Australian bushman Bill Harney who returned from World War I with a hatred of war, to take two examples.

Between them, the pair play five-string banjo, quena, flute, bodhran, harmonica, bones and spoons and are on stage for 90 minutes straight.

Wositzky has written TV documentaries, ABC radio features and books, including one with Phar Lap strapper/trainer Tommy Woodcock, and yarned up north with Yanyuwa, Garrwa and Wardaman people, also taking Australian history performances into schools.

Glass, trained in community theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, toured Australia as an actor-musician, then migrated to Chile with her son where in 2012, she co-founded Colectivo Sustento, known for community activism through theatre and gardening.

The show they’re presenting at Smiths, they say, is storytelling, it’s theatre, but it’s not a play.

Dignified Anger, Smith’s Alternative, Civic, May 16.