Starting a movement is kind of like being in a football match.
And the story of the AFLW requires some serious athletics to tell it.
Director Sarah Giles doesn't have a footy field or team of players to get the story across.
Instead, she has a hard-hitting and exhilarating piece of theatre that gives a condensed version of a mighty Australian success story.
Strong Is The New Pretty, the new play by award-winning playwright Suzie Miller, which opens this week at the Canberra Theatre, promises plenty of cheers and fist-pumping.
It will also cause some introspection about the journey of women's sports in Australia, and how far the sector still has to travel.
Miller's previous works include the smash hit legal dramas Prima Facie, RBG: Of Many, One and Inter Alia, all one-woman shows that usually end with audiences filing out in pensive silence.
Ms Giles said Strong Is The New Pretty marked quite a change for Miller's work, swapping the courtroom for the locker room and boardroom, to tell the story - lightly fictionalised - of how the women's league came to be, building to the famous first competition match in 2017, and the legendary grand final between the Brisbane Lions and Adelaide Crows.
Actors include Tara Morice and Lucy Bell, who plays an earlier version of our own Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who served as the first female AFL commissioner, and was a leading advocate in the fight to establish the AFLW.
Ms Giles said the play was "a kaleidoscopic, bird's-eye view of how these people put this together", with multiple storylines and five central characters, and a timeline running from 2017 right back to women playing footy during World War I.
"It's 100 per cent one of those things where there is huge drama, huge stakes."
It was, she said, "a sort of love letter to Australian women".
"I don't have eight elite athletes at my disposal. What I have is eight elite actors at my disposal," she said.
"It's incredibly moving watching these women just absolutely sweat their guts out and work their tits off for the best part of an hour and 15 minutes ... The stuff that they do in the show is so virtuosic and collaborative, and they're such a great ensemble, and it's so inspiring."
And while the play had some heavy themes, she said the aim was to inspire.
"In a time when great upheaval and great societal change is required, I think that's the other genius of the play that it becomes a very inspiring example of how to get stuff done, how to make changes, how to fight against prejudice, how to fight against people saying, 'well that's never happened before, so that won't work'," she said.
"I think you can look at the story of the AFLW and and apply it to almost any circumstance and see when people get together and do things outside the box, and when people know how to work within the structures, we have to make changes.
"It is heavy-hitting, it is political, but it's inspiring and very kind of joyful, and that's what I think we need at this moment in time," she said.
