From hidden laneway markets to retro roller rinks, Melbourne gets lit once the lights go out. Thanks for signing up! Slide 1 of 2 Slide 2 of 2. Malthouse Theatre Heritage listed Theatre.
Box office hours are subject to change. Briwyant - as with all my projects - is the product of a very collaborative effort. The creative team sits and yarns about topics related to the work; plays games and, most importantly, accumulates a shared knowledge that ultimately illustrates the original concept.
People who have contributed to this work in a devising capacity but are not represented in the current production are: Ghenoa Gela, Rirrwuy Hick, Nyarn Mumbulla, Eric Avery and Elias Constantopedos. Kelly Jaffa was instrumental in the realisation of the card river as was later Dario Vacaria and Kaye Van Hout who spent hours every day gluing thousands of cards — before passing the baton to Alison Murphy-Oates for this tour.
Sally Fitzpatrick introduced me to Rex Granites and his two partners, Ida and Lorraine painters from Yuendemo who became mentors, sharing their work and allowing me to watch several paintings being made.
Thanks to Dr Aaron Corn and Dr Joe Gumbulla for originally letting me audit their lectures for information about ancient trade practices and modern-day reciprocal sharing. Narelle Lewis and Annie Winter were responsible for set realisation; from stealing hip-hop tags to make the humpy, to cataloguing each mat Vicki Van Hout. Marian worked with Vicki Van Hout on previous creative development stages of Briwyant, and has most recently created digital media for Picture Perfect Fiona Malone.
Kay has had a long career as a NSW-based independent dance artist, working predominantly as a solo artist, her work touring both nationally and overseas. In , she was awarded the prestigious Robert Helpmann Scholarship.
Currently she is a dance member of e. Jarrod is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kinfolk Enterprise, a social enterprise that operates hospitality businesses that create more inclusive communities. Embedded in the operation of Kinfolk is an inclusive training program for volunteers that creates opportunities for people marginalized in the community to gain training, build their confidence and build a social network. Many volunteers face barriers to employment which can include transitioning from prison; people with learning disabilities; mental health challenges and those who have experienced long-term unemployment or who have never been employed before.
Kinfolk is unique as a social enterprise as it has operated in a self-sufficient manner for a large part of its existence. Jarrod is inspired to help Rollercoaster develop self-sufficient income streams to build resilience in the organization for the future.
Emily has broad marketing and communications experience in arts and cultural organisations in Melbourne including Mollison Communications, Australian Film Institute AFI , Playbox Theatre — where she managed the launch and transition to Malthouse Theatre - and in an arts marketing agency in London where she managed the marketing for the opening of a new Salvador Dali Gallery in County Hall.
She is tenacious about exploring all available options to create the right capital solution for each client and the long-term health of their business. She strongly believes in building capital solutions that consider all of an organisations financial requirements, optimising resources for sustainable growth and development. Fiona is an actor and producer based in Melbourne, she is a graduate of the full-time programme at 16th Street Actors Studio.
Over 20 years in the industry Fiona gained ten years of leadership experience, delivered profit against large budgets, managed large teams, reported strategically to board level and travelled and lived in many places around the world.
My daughter, Shea who is 34 years old and was born with Downs syndrome, has been an ensemble member with Rollercoaster Theatre for approximately 7 years. Shea has taught me so much with regard to the inclusion and acceptance of those who may be marginalised. In , I started working in the school office, where I am currently employed as the Office Manager. Jacinta has also been involved throughout her working life with community arts and music organisations and has a passion for ensuring the growth, strength and diversity of arts and culture.
Jacinta is an ambassador for Crohns and Colitis Association Australia and in that role advocates for people living with chronic illness and IBD. David Baker. September 3. Until October 3. Two middle-class couples meet to politely discuss a spat between their year-old sons. This flimsy expose of the pretensions of the French bourgeoisie is a one-note show, an exercise in mannered naturalism played out in real time that, for all its hysteric activity, flounders towards tedium.
Director Peter Evans classes it up with a slick production that features a stylish design and some enjoyable comic performances from a stellar cast.
Feel free to engage, Geoffrey! I just couldn't get excited about this one, and although I could extend what I wrote, I really haven't an awful lot more to say.
Labels: mtc , peter evans , yasmina reza. The Public Intellectual PI, for the acronymic among you debate continues with a Guardian blog post by Andrew Haydon , in which he robustly - and rightly, to my mind - defends the role of the humble reviewer, the put-upon gumshoe of the profession who does all the legwork.
George Hunka questions the assumptions of value in Village Voice critic Michael Feingold's essay on criticism in the internet age. And our Neil Pigot is in the Age today proclaiming the decline of Australian theatre, blaming the funding-led desire to "bureaucratise" the arts for a loss of artistic maverick outsiderdom, and a consequent loss of audiences. Or a lack of new audiences, anyway. An assertion which I wonder about, given the high audience capacities at the Melbourne Fringe Festival - yes, my annual aesthetic breakdown is on its way - which compare very favourably with every other fringe festival in the world.
Critics, of course, come in for a serve. Jana Perkovic's new aggregate concept for Spark Online - still in progress - suggests some alternatives on the local criticism question. Moreover - and this is a rare point on which every critic would agree - it's certainly not a critic's job to give "an overview of public response".
What, we go to every performance and do vox pops as the audience leaves? Take a clap-o-meter to opening night? That's about as misleading an indicator as, say, not going at all.
He's not alone - Art Kritique also has some stern words. Both wonder how this production will fare in New York the phrase "coals to Newcastle" is being bandied about. And now, allow me to don another hat. I read two books yesterday. Mieville is a ferociously intelligent writer who takes pulp fiction by the scruff of the neck and demonstrates the meaninglessness of snobbish distinctions between "literature" and generic writing.
He's certainly the only writer I've read who created an epic fantasy about trade unions. The other book, shamefully, was one of my own, The Crow. I haven't read it since I finished it proofreading a text around nine times for three different publishers will do that to a gal.
And, you know, it's pretty damn good. I'd forgotten. Unlike Mieville, it's trad epic fantasy for a younger audience, but it is also a passionate anti-war novel that features concentration camps, child soldiers and environmental degradation a la Chernobyl. If that's not worthy enough, there's some racial and sexual politics in the mix too. But what matters most is that it's a good story, and I really did love writing those characters. That's why people keep buying it, and why - for the first time for around two decades - I'm making a decent living.
And no doubt that is why I'm less insouciant about territorial copyright than Guy Rundle , who seems to think that removing it for Australians but not for the British or Americans, natch will be a blow struck for the internet age, dragging us out of mediaeval delusion into the brave new world of the global e-text. Maybe it's a lack of personal knowledge of how international markets work that makes Rundle claim that writers are a bunch of deluded lefties howling for government subsidies.
My genre novels, for the record, like the work of most of Australia's internationally best-selling but culturally invisible fantasy writers, haven't and don't depend on subsidy. They're bringing in much more money than they take out. Removing territorial copyright would probably affect me much less than some others, but I still think that leaving the Australian book market to the tender mercies of Dymocks, Woolworths and a bunch of multinational territory-protected UK and US publishers is a pretty dumb idea.
Yes, the international publishing industry needs to think hard about the impact of the internets. It needs to respond to it with more imagination and chutzpah than the music industry did, and to stop pretending that it lives in the 19th century - publishers all over the world still pay by cheques sent in the post!
But kicking the guts out of the local industry isn't the way to international copyright reform. And what's deluded is to think that it is. Labels: blog biz , books , china mieville , criticism , media.
Labels: media , mtc. The unspeakable is spoken. Liminal Theatre prints a long quotation from Howard Barker's collection of essays, Arguments for a Theatre , on the back of their program for Oedipus - A Poetic Requiem. It's from Barker's essay Theatre Without a Conscience , in which he condemns the "social hygiene" of a theatre which seeks to improve and enlighten and educate, a theatre which, as he says, "never sins". Barker, always the fiercest defender of imagination and beauty, demands a theatre that is a "black box", a theatre in which darkness reveals the inherent danger of play, and which seeks not the easy gratification of moral acquiescence, but the solitary terror of being.
What Barker proposes in part is the trangression of ritual, the dark transformation which unites the sacred and the profane. He interrogates the thrill that surges through our bodies as darkness falls in a theatre. Is it because we are about to watch an actor? Yes, because actors are not entirely human, but more, it is the sense of attending on a sin, the possibility of witnessing a transgression In fact, he is one of those artists whom George Bataille once called hypermoralists - artists like Jean Genet or Emily Bronte or De Sade or William Blake, whose attacks on the certainties of social morality are in the service of a more austere questioning, a rigorous and merciless calling to account of individual experience and thus of individual responsibility.
The exact opposite, one might say, of moralising. These reflections are certainly pertinent to the ambition of Mary Sitarenos' production of Oedipus. Sitarenos has taken Ted Hughes' free adaptation of the classic tragedy, Seneca's Oedipus , and transposed it into a choric lament by four women; the text has been edited but not substantially altered.
Hughes' text was originally written for the National Theatre, premiering in in a production directed by Peter Brook. As Hughes said, his collaboration with Brook sought to "unearth the ritual possibilities" within the play. The result is one of the best things Hughes ever wrote, a play in which the words all but blister the lips in their speaking.
Its visceral potency is still shocking: its invocation of an amoral, unjust universe blasted by plague and famine, of a life which makes death the lesser evil, remains terrifying. Liminal Theatre creates Barker's black box, a work that plays like a nightmare across the retina of the subconscious.
Sitarenos draws on Liminal's Asian influences - which have been internalised also in 20th century western theatre through Artaud and Brecht - to create a kind of theatre that is unique in Melbourne: a theatre that attends to its roots in ritual, and which here enacts the catastrophic edges of imaginative possibility.
With Ivanka Sokol's dynamic video projections - fluid plays of abstract imagery that hauntingly hide and reveal and distort the human body - and Chris Wenn's driving sound design, which unites echoes of ancient Greek music with modern electronic sound - Sitarenos creates a kind of total theatre that engages all the senses. And it's performed in all its relentlessness without a trace of apology or irony aside, of course, from the black irony of Oedipus's fate. The play takes place in an intimate theatre that seats maybe 40 people at most, its walls defined by black cloth.
A mask is projected onto black curtains as a pre-recorded prologue - a brief contemporary speech about the significance of the myth of Oedipus - crackles through the auditorium.
Then two women, their white arms spectral against their black robes, draw open the curtains, revealing a stage naked but for a single leafless branch to one side. And we launch into the opening speeches, summoning us into a landscape of death, of dried springs and withered harvests and the reek of funeral pyres and rotting corpses.
The conception is at once simple and ingenious. Oedipus is represented by a simple mask suspended from the ceiling, and his speeches are recorded, his physical absence playing disconcertingly against the live enactments.
The action of the play is physically realised through stylised movement, white limbs and faces writhing out of darkness, that is given an unnerving textural variety fleshly rottenness, flame and fire, the ambiguity of mist and smoke by Sokol's video work.
The effect of all the different elements is to throw the emphasis onto Hughes' text, which at times - such as in the stunning scene when Manto describes an "evil" sacrifice to the blind Tiresias, or during the description of Oedipus's self-blinding - is almost as hard to bear as if we were really witnessing those terrible acts. In the face of so much achievement, it is a little churlish to wish that the actors' voices had been more compelling; but often the voices, while certainly adequate, left something to be desired.
Even a little more actorly control and power would have made a great deal of difference. No matter what the quibbles, the achievement and scope of this piece is astounding: here we gaze into the abyss that is tragedy, an abyss that is always and without exception an enactment of and a lament for our own inevitable deaths.
Out on the edges of our culture, with the most minimal of resources, Liminal Theatre is making theatre of a rare ambition and seriousness. Attention must be paid. Essay: The Irresponsible Mr Barker. Set design by Mary Sitarenos. Tickets at Easytix. Labels: howard barker , liminal theatre , mary sitarenos , ted hughes. Sad news this morning on Chloe Smethurst's blog : dance critic Hilary Crampton died on the weekend. Crampton was a passionate educator and an influential and astute shaper of arts policy as well as a perceptive dance critic: she reviewed for the Age from until just before her death.
A tribute on the Ausdance site lists her many achievements. Labels: dance , hilary crampton. If you missed this fascinating production the first time round, it's running until September Meanwhile, UK critic Andrew Haydon has made a welcome return to blogging with the recent resuscitation of Postcards from the Gods.
In today's post , he's picking up on a blog conversation started by George Hunka in New York and continued by Steve Waters in the Guardian blog , broadly asking where the public intellectuals are, and why they're not writing about theatre. In a thoughtful and complex response, Andrew responds baldly: "what public intellectuals?
Waters describes blogs as "angry" and "circular", which seems a bit sweeping: Ms TN, to take an example to hand, might be angry, but she's more angular than rotund. We might ask the same question here. Are there any "public intellectuals"? Was Donald Horne the last of his kind? Is it, in fact, possible for an intellectual of the calibre Hunka is citing - Adorno, Sontag - to exist in any public way in our culture, given that "intellectual" is most often used as a term of abuse?
Having watched Alana Valentine's talk on verbatim theatre on the ABC Fora yesterday, which was big on straw men, unsubstantiated assertions and cheap shots gotcha Barrie Kosky, hur hur , I wonder. I don't have a problem with verbatim theatre per se - look at our friend David Williams and Version 1. But Valentine seems to inhabit a universe in which Peter Weiss - a pioneer of verbatim art - is a kind of ice cream. Sometimes I peep over the parapet and all I feel is despair - why are we still in kindergarten?
Discuss while I get on with my own public hackery. Stephanie Bunbury today reports on the film industry's hard ball tactics with critics and journalists in today's Age , remarking that Australian newspapers are still refreshingly old-fashioned on the question of letting PR hacks vet stories or determine where they will run in the paper.
And phew for that. Bunbury's story is nothing we haven't heard before, but it's still a bit jaw-dropping. Ms TN has had her share of cold shoulders from those objecting to reviews that don't fit the publicity line, but that's par for the course. There was that notorious incident, back in neolithic times, when a prominent artistic director waged a long, public and unsuccessful campaign to get me sacked from the Bulletin.
But although that campaign didn't work, others that attracted no publicity did: I know of several instances over the past couple of decades where local companies discreetly pressured editors to sack unfriendly critics.
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