Swedish director Kay Pollak’s film As It is in Heaven (2004) climaxes at a point of musical bliss which is both chaotic and profoundly unifying. Rather than singing a few polished songs with energy in…
Last night thousands of Sydneysiders gathered at Martin Place to hold a vigil for convicted drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Together we listened as actors, artists and musicians called…
The kids program for Sydney Festival has been fun and varied this year, but a highlight was Ali McGregor’s Jazzamatazz!. The cabaret singer staged her set in the Aurora Room, a mini-Speigeltent with a…
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…
Unfortunately, I will not see Germany: Memories of a Nation at the British Museum because it closes this weekend – and I live in Perth, Australia. As a result, I am unable to speak about my personal response…
Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) is, alongside Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), the defining dramatic text of post-war European theatre. Few, if any, theatrical images are as…
During an artist talk just an hour before performing Wot? No Fish!! on Saturday at the Sydney Festival, English writer/actor Danny Braverman observed that as an artist he seeks “to foreground universals…
Show a gay man on TV, and you immediately open yourself up to a degree of scrutiny that other artists usually have the privilege of avoiding. Representations of marginalised subjects on screen or in literature…
Whenever I approach mass cultural events – especially ones that seem to bear the conceit that they are “higher” and more culturally valuable than, say, a comic book fair – I am reminded of two of the 20th…
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…
Tex Perkins, once upon a time lead singer of The Cruel Sea and Beasts of Bourbon, appears before his Tennessee Four band in a gentle swagger, grabs the chrome microphone, and announces: “Hello, I’m Johnny…
Hollywood films that depict American history deeply influence our sense of national identity. Films that portray Civil Rights and Black Freedom history are particularly important. Beyond entertaining moviegoers…
Today, Triple J celebrates its 40th birthday. Over four decades, the youth broadcaster has built up a proud history of outside broadcasts and regional concerts. As Double J the station staged some of the…
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…
The dramatic, temperamental sound of the organ joined with the lush visuals of contemporary video is not an obvious combination. They are brought together in Darkness and Light, a work by two collaborators…
As part of the Footscray Community Arts Centre’s Womenjika Festival this weekend, Mariaa Randall (Githatbul and Gidabul) and the DubaiKungkaMiyalk (DKM) Dance Company’s moving performance HA LF places…
Goths, punks and hipsters roam the streets, wilfully asserting their counter-cultures. But in an age of cultural appropriation, is this resistance just another way of fitting in? In 2015 can anyone truly…
One evening ten years ago I was walking in pouring rain down the streets of Cidade Baixa in downtown Porto Alegre, Brazil. I went into a music store to look around and, to my surprise, the two-storey building…
The opening night of Masquerade at the Sydney Opera House last Friday attracted a rather higher number of under-12s than might usually be expected for Australia’s theatre demographic – and it was a delightful…
French circus performer and director James Thierrée famously eschews comparison with his grandfather Charlie Chaplin, to whom he bears a conspicuous resemblance. But as he and his troupe stood on stage…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne