A thrilling double bill of contemporary dance opened this week in Sydney: the Australian premiere of William Forsythe’s Quintett and Rafael Bonachela’s new work, Frame of Mind.
Nothing to Lose, by dance theatre company Force Majeure, invites the audience to engage with the richness, nuance, and variety of fat bodies and fat experiences.
Playwright Nakkiah Lui plays herself in Kill the Messenger, now on at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre. Hers is a strong, passionate and resilient Indigenous voice – and she has a message to deliver.
Sociologist Max Weber once called politics “the slow boring of hard boards”. If he had been in the arts he might have added, “using your head as a drill”. Australia’s cultural agenda often feels like an…
At least four metronomes ticked away at various points on the stage as the audience seated itself for last night’s opening performance of Anton Chekhov’s On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco at the Sydney…
There is a flock of swallows that swoops low across the clifftop nearby. This kind of joyful flight, that windy rush of ornithological freedom, is at the heart of Perth Theatre Company The Last Great Hunt’s…
There’s a singular kind of hush that comes over an audience when the figure on stage takes off her shoes and steps into a bucket of flour. But this hush is even more apparent as the actor, now flour-footed…
In rehearsal for the 1976 premiere production of Footfalls at the Royal Court in London, Billie Whitelaw recounted Samuel Beckett’s direction: When we rehearsed eyeball to eyeball, he opened up in me whatever…
Now the pantomime season is well and truly underway, many will have heard a familiar complaint. It’s newfangled, it’s not what it was. What happened to the good old days, when panto didn’t involve 3D glasses…
The Melbourne Theatre Company’s (MTC) production of David Williamson’s 2013 play Rupert has finally made it to Sydney, via Melbourne and Washington, in late 2014. Along the way, the MTC has acquired the…
There aren’t many things I miss about London. Waiting for the 22 bus on evenings of interplanetary cold: no. Inching down Oxford Street through crowds like rows of rugby prop forwards: not really. The…
Tragedy is a peculiar thing. More than a style, different from genre, it cuts across art forms to carve out its own non-Euclidean aesthetic space. In the 4th century BCE Aristotle, in his Poetics, famously…
More than ten years after the last production by the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project (KTTP), playwright Daniel Keene and director Ariette Taylor have reunited to produce the Australian premiere of Dreamers…
Last week, Sydney Festival launched its 2015 program – under Belgium born director Lieven Bertels – and it was revealed that Australian rocker Tex Perkins will recreate Johnny Cash’s 1968 Folsom Prison…
Shakespeare’s King Henry IV recently opened at the Donmar. And it has a twist. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter as the king, the production follows Lloyd’s acclaimed Julius Caesar…
Several British theatres have made a pledge to address the levels of gender inequality on the contemporary stage. And a theatre complex in Sheffield has gone a step further, promising to create parts for…
The September 4 live transmission of Euripides’ Medea will have brought an ancient Greek tragedy to thousands of viewers. And it’s quite a play. Spurned by her husband Jason, Medea commits unspeakable…
Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism and Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100-1800, The University of Western Australia