Steven Oliver’s Bigger and Blacker, which premiered at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, calls for more engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Claudio Raschella
Steven Oliver’s new cabaret show is an exhilarating journey through hard-hitting stories about success, love, depression and racism.
Dallas Dellaforce, Queer Central, Imperial Hotel, Erskineville, 2018. ‘Queerdom’ presents an archive of queer and trans life in Sydney.
Queerdom/James Eades
Queerdom, an exhibition of photography and poetry, presents a history of queer and trans performance in Sydney that challenges recent narratives about queer life in Australia.
A new exhibition pairs China’s famed Terracotta Warriors with contemporary works of inspiring ethereality. The contrasts here are many: life and death, harmony and chaos, energy and control, art and politics.
Sheridan Harbridge as Tessa in Prima Facie, a new play about a lawyer who becomes a victim of the legal system after she is sexually assaulted.
Brett Boardman
Written by a former lawyer, a new play presents a forceful critique of the Australian legal system’s treatment of sexual assault.
Juan de Dios Mateos as Cavalier Belfiore and Ruth Iniesta as Corinna in Opera Australia’s 2019 production of Il Viaggio a Reims at Arts Centre Melbourne.
Jeff Busby
Gioachino Rossini’s opera was originally meant as a satire of royalist France. A new production updates the work for a modern audience, setting the drama in a museum where the paintings come to life.
One of the most powerful images at this year’s Venice Biennale is Christoph Büchel’s.
Barca Nostra, 2018-2019,
Shipwreck 18th of April 2015.
La Biennale di Venezia
Often called the ‘Olympic Games of art’, the Venice Biennale’s national pavilions are an outlier in a globalised world. This year’s strongest works explore global issues like refugees and climate change.
Igor Sas in Water. The play deals with the issues of ‘illegal’ immigration and environmental crisis in three narratives.
Daniel J Grant
A new production of Cloudstreet - the play adapted from Tim Winton’s literary epic - is visually arresting. But despite a diverse cast, Indigenous characters remain spectral and peripheral.
Some 50 years after his death, a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales shows why the work of Marcel Duchamp continues to challenge the very idea of what art may be.
A new exhibition charting Alexander Calder’s atypical path into the modernist art canon is elegant, dramatic and great fun.
Members of Brisbane’s Sudanese community celebrate the signing of a peace accord that signalled an end to the Second Sudanese Civil War in 2005. The first recorded African-diaspora settlers in Australia were convicts who landed with the First Fleet in 1788.
Dave Hunt/AAP
A new collection of writing by African-diaspora Australians shares a diversity of experiences: stories of displacement, isolation, endurance and the right to call Australia home.
Following the whirlwind success of Nanette, Hannah Gadsby recreates comedy as a safe, comfortable space in her new show Douglas.
Supplied
Hannah Gadsby’s groundbreaking stand-up show Nanette was always going to be hard to follow. Her new show is a deftly executed, brilliant comedy about women and autism.
The performers in The Mares switch between roles using simple theatrical magic.
José Navarro
There is a long history of cultural silence on the frontier wars that characterised Australia’s colonisation. Peta Clancy’s exhibition invites us to see this history in the Victorian landscape.
Renato Musolino is the beating heart of a new production of Animal Farm.
James Hartley
An impressive solo performance of Orwell’s classic novella by Renato Musolino portrays a world not so far from our own.
Youth dance troupe Stompin performed their thought-provoking work Nowhere as part of this year’s Ten Days on the Island.
Jacob Collings, Lusy Productions
Despite the diversity of art and performance on display at the tenth Ten Days on the Island festival, key themes emerge: life, death, and Tasmania’s colonial history.
Grand Finale is a new work from Israeli-born, London-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter.
Rahi Rezvani
Hofesh Shechter’s latest contemporary dance work is not the rousing narrative its title might suggest. Its dancers inhabit a global catastrophe and then a brutal new world order.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne