Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes premiered in 1945, when the composer was 31. The work can be seen as an examination of the individual versus the community and the sinister potential of the collective.
A trombonist is forced to play the cymbals, while a pair of marching girls dance out his frustrations. A full brass band slips from classical, to jazz, to folk and cabaret. En Avant, Marche! is a strange show, but worth your time.
Part protest, part dance party, part autobiography, Flexn tells stories of police brutality and racism in dance.
Stephanie Berger, Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory
Flex, a dance style that originated in Jamaica in the 1990s, has evolved into a protest movement in the US that enables its practitioners to articulate their experiences of racism, police brutality and violence.
What does telling the story of the long-running conflict in the Congo through the lens of Verdi’s Macbeth teach us? Owen Metsileng and Nobulumko Mngxek in Macbeth.
by Nicky Newman
Brett Bailey’s Macbeth at Brisbane Festival is a powerful production that relocates Verdi’s opera (based on Shakespeare’s play) to the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Black Diggers brings black and white Australians into the same narrative.
Branco Gaica/Brisbane Festival
The performance space in which Wesley Enoch’s play Black Diggers is being performed at the Brisbane Festival is a large black box. It features a raised stage in the middle which proves versatile for battlegrounds…
Juana Molina, who played at the Brisbane Festival last night, is a true original.
Photo: Marcelo Setton
Argentine singer-songwriter Juana Molina is one of those fearless artists. The kind of fearless artist who abandons a successful TV show at the height of its popularity to pursue a solo career in making…
Local hero Danny Harley aka The Kite String Tangle played to a home crowd at the Brisbane Festival.
Brisbane Festival
Danny Harley has had a pretty big year with his one-man band project The Kite String Tangle. There have been festival appearances, both at home and abroad, a song in the top 20 of Triple J’s iconic Hottest…
Philip Glass’s reimagination of the Disney myth is a timely consideration of cultural labour.
Brisbane Festival
The Brisbane Festival’s production of Philip Glass’s opera The Perfect American is only the third production of the 2012 work ever to be staged. That’s quite a coup for the Brisbane Festival and Opera…
Lally Katz’s adaptation of Ibsen’s classic play A Doll’s House is playing at the Brisbane Festival.
Dylan Evans/Brisbane Festival
When Jane Caro compared traditional marriage to prostitution on a recent episode of Q&A, she did not mean to conflate today’s stay-at-home mothers with sex workers. But that didn’t stop the loud handful…
Performers cavort around five onstage bathtubs in Soap, currently playing at the Brisbane Festival.
Andy Phillipson/Brisbane Festival
Traditionally soap is made by rendering down lard. But in this tight show, Soap, playing at the Brisbane Festival, there isn’t an ounce of fat to be seen. The pace is fast and the bodies are lean. It’s…