Changing the Face of Australian Theatre

New Matilda, part 2.

QUERY: what kinds of theatre experiences have you had?

Andrew Haydon’s last post, on what may be Nicholas Hytner’s ultimate right-wing play, has made me think about the kinds of experience one can viably have in the theatre (or outside the theatre, geographically speaking, but in a performance). This because Haydon’s post is concerned, on the outer edges, with the dangers of enjoying a [...]

Melbourne news, news

A flurry of unusual performances has swept Melbourne in the past few weeks, and although I will not have time to pen an essay on every single one of them, I should give each a moment in the blogging sun. (In the place of an introductory paragraph, please reader content yourself with a bracketed explanation, [...]

Life… is a Dream.

Seeing a progression in someone’s work the wrong way around is always intriguing for the possibilities it offers for misreading, or overly simplifying. Having seen Daniel Schlusser’s Peer Gynt before Life is a Dream (a remount of which has just closed at The Store Room - but bear with my lateness, for I am working [...]

Bookmark: Marianne Van Kerkhoven

The image of the Berlin Wall comes from Dream of Harlequin, where is appears uncredited.
If we define idealism as “acting on the basis of an unshakeable belief
in the possibility of a better life”, then we were the bearers of a
fervent idealism and great optimism. In its philosophical meaning,
idealism is a theory that holds first of [...]

Reviewbit: in the absence of sunlight

Local theatre has been experimenting with reception studies and things-that-make-theatre-not-film, such as site-specific performances, interactive performances, and doing things to the audience, for a little while now, and you would think we would have moved past taking such gestures as meaningful in and of themselves. Taking one person on a little tour round North Melbourne, I assumed that the artists would have thought through the possible problems. Eg, how will the single audience member feel about being walked around and spoken to in quite confidential terms? Will they get bored? What if they try to walk out? What if they feel they can’t walk out? What is the purpose of it all anyway?

None of those questions (and more) got answered by the one-on-one walkabout, which was not only batshit-boring, but also awkward in the manner of bad dates.

Reviewbit: Sonographs: Trips Along the Fault Line

Sonographs was utter crap, and not even my infinite charity could stop me from walking out halfway through; either out of consideration for the performers, whose humiliation I no longer wanted to witness, or the selfish need to spare myself the pain of the experience.

RW: Attract/Repel

Attract/Repel is really just awesome. If you want to read a 1,500-word pondering on why so (involving multiple real-life figures and some sexual references), please do. But I thought I may also just tell you now.

The Hunger Artists of St Petersburg

Writes Dmitry Vilensky on the global arts newswire:
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On May 15, the young contemporary artist Artem Loskutov was arrested
in his native Novisibirsk and charged with possession of a narcotic
substance (marijuana) by the local branch of the Interior Ministry’s
notorious Center for Extremism Prevention (Center “E”). Loskutov and
his supporters claim that the police planted the marijuana in his [...]

Note on Unimelb

It is a bit of a public secret, acknowledged but unspoken, that if you are interested in learning, universities are, at the moment, possibly the worst places to go. From my dual position as the subject and object of the tertiary system (the inflictor and the sufferer of education), it seems reasonable to say that [...]