On Friday last week, I had the curious and not-entirely-intentional experience of engaging with two completely different works of art, that seemed to be trying to say similar things. This kind of synchronicity is unusual, and often surprising, and by placing two works of art side by side, they begin to speak to each other in unexpected ways. The works were The Squash, Anthea Hamilton’s installation at Tate Britain, and Daniel Raggett’s production of The Human Voice at the Gate Theatre. For me, both works spoke to the concept of intimacy, both in life, and in what happens between a work and its audience.
Read MoreIt has taken me a few days to decide to sit down and write about this work, and to decide how to write about it, when my usual dramaturgical clarity may fail to capture what this experience actually was. Which is perhaps appropriate, given that so much of it is about what it takes for a woman to actually sit down and write about something, the oddly maternal process of creative birth, putting words into the world when it is easier, and more convenient to keep them to yourself.
Read MoreThe Great Court at the British Museum is not an obvious location for a performance - it's a space that is used predominantly to get to other spaces, spaces with things in them. The Great Court is full of people moving from one place to another, consulting maps, looking at their phones, occasionally looking up at the vaulted ceilings and towering marble structure of the paean to colonialism that is the British Museum. So to have Laura Wilson's durational, site-specific performance You would almost expect to find it warm in this strange and cavernous space seems like an unusual choice. Until, of course, you actually experience it. This mesmerising piece of durational, site-specific performance art responds to the complexities of this space in beautiful, nuanced, and provocative ways.
Read MoreI'm in London, and have been doing and seeing some very exciting theatrical work. Unfortunately my extremely busy work schedule has left me little time to write about some of the theatre I've seen - Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman, Vicky Featherstone's bleak and beautiful production of Bad Roads at the Royal Court, Ann Washburn's very knowing, tongue-in-cheek adaptation of The Twilight Zone at the Almeida - but I did get the opportunity to see Ivo van Hove's much hyped, sold out production of Network at the National Theatre last night, and thought that it raised some fascinating theatrical and sociocultural questions. Whilst not flawless, as much of the hype would suggest, this was a slick and assured production that spoke powerfully to both its source material, and the current media climate.
Read MoreThe third major work of scale programmed in this year's Melbourne Festival (in addition to Under Siege and A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) was the collaboration of artistic giants Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson, and Jamie xx, resulting in the contemporary ballet Tree of Codes. Giants in their respective fields - choreography, visual art, and electronic music - in combination, and with the extraordinary talents of a group of dancers from Company Wayne McGregor and the Paris Opera Ballet, they were able to realise a truly beautiful and technically staggering performance.
Read MoreHow does one even begin to talk about a performance like this?
24 hours, covering 240 years of American history, with over 100 performers, where the audience are, according to Taylor Mac, “the sacrifice” and find themselves doing anything from being blindfolded, to throwing things at one another, to dancing and screaming and kissing. I’ve never experienced anything like it, and it has become my benchmark for what art is capable of. Programmed as the headline event of this year’s Melbourne Festival, Taylor Mac’s raucous, anarchic, drag-performance-art extravaganza A 24-Decade History of Popular Music was performed over four 6-hour no-intermission chapters over 2 weeks in the Forum Theatre. And what a glorious 24 hours it was.
Read MoreThe Melbourne Festival carnival has rolled around for another year, and this year the programming focus seems to be on works of scale. American artist Taylor Mac's 24-hour extravaganza A 24-Decade History of Popular Music has been programmed, as has Chinese choreographer Yang Lingping's contemporary epic Under Siege, which I was lucky enough to see last night. Fusing contemporary dance with centuries-old Chinese artistic traditions such as Peking Opera, Under Siege was an undoubtedly impressive but not entirely satisfying spectacle, and a fascinating insight into artistic traditions almost entirely divorced from the Western hegemony that dominates the Australian stage.
Read MoreThe past two months I have been consumed with putting two separate shows on the stage, and have been largely unable to go and see other work. It was wonderful then, to return to the auditorium this week for Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre's Melbourne Festival co-pro Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets. A wild and lucid almost-opera composed by Tom Waits and written by William S. Burroughs, it somehow managed to sit between a spaghetti western, a Weimar cabaret, a fairytale and a fable, and has lodged securely in my mind like one of the bullets of the title.
Read MoreThere has been something of a hushed reverence surrounding this show in the Melbourne theatre community. Friends and colleagues who have seen it have invariably prefaced their recommendation with a caveat along the lines of "but be warned, it's messed up". People have either passionately loved or hated it, been ecstatic in their praise or scathing in their contempt. Discussions are peppered with very strong swear words (in either praise or disdain). In asking a friend to come along with me, I warned that they would probably be scarred for life. Yes, Kim Noble's one-man show You're Not Alone is deeply confronting, offensive on every level, graphic, grotesque, truly and vividly weird, and utterly fucked (in more ways than one). It's also completely brilliant, as both a work of theatre and a piece of performance art.
Read MoreThe Merchant of Venice is a notoriously difficult play, primarily because it presents a giant, blazing, anti-semitic obstacle to our unfettered bardolatry. As the compassionate, tolerant, cosmopolitan, contemporary inheritors of the Western literary tradition, it is difficult to reconcile our opinion of Shakespeare as the paragon of tolerance and empathy, with this particular work of his. This is a shame - as much as we think of Shakespeare as timeless, he was very much invested in the cultures and mores of his time, and much of his success was owing to his ability to create work that appealed across the spectrum of early modern society, from Queen Elizabeth to the Globe groundlings. Judaism was not openly practiced in Shakespeare's London, and was a subject of great curiosity. Indeed, Phillip Henslowe's diary (which records by day all of the plays performed at the Rose theatre, how much they earned, and a great many other things besides) reflects this societal curiosity through the successive programming of a number of plays with Jewish villains - The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and a number of lost plays that appear to touch on similar themes. Contemporary productions of The Merchant of Venice can get bogged down in a bleeding-heart pathos for Shylock that obscures the delightful tone of a great deal of the play. The great strength of Anne-Louise Sarks' production for Bell Shakespeare is that is doesn't shy away from lightness and joy, whilst at the same time pointing out the cruelty and casual intolerance of the play.
Read MoreIt is difficult to write about Dark Mofo. There is so much that happens - the all-consuming surfeit of experience is quite difficult to process, and it is the strength of the programming that means that each event seems inextricably linked to all of the others. There is enough to say about each thing to do an individual write-up for every event. But that makes it incredibly difficult to convey the 'event-ness' of the whole thing, and the experience of interlinking affect that runs through the entire festival. It is an extraordinary experience, rare and risky and precious, and it inspires and challenges me in equal measure, and like no other arts event I go to. The programming at Dark Mofo is programming that happens nowhere else in Australia. The experience is utterly unique.
Read MoreGeorge Orwell's 1984 has been having something of a resurgence of late - returning to the bestseller lists in the wake of the election of Donald Trump in the US and the rise of far-right politics worldwide, its bleak and unforgiving vision of the future of humanity under totalitarian rule is once again (and perhaps has always been) oddly prescient. No surprise then, that the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne was packed on Wednesday evening for a performance of the stage adaptation of this novel, on tour from the UK. This is actually the second time this production has been in Australia - developed by Headlong Theatre in association with the Almeida, it was brought out for the Melbourne Festival in 2015 and has since toured worldwide. It is a slick and uncompromising show, with a lot of truly thrilling theatrical moments.
Read MoreHow lucky am I to have seen two productions of Richard III in as many months - the unruly and invigoratingly chaotic Schaubühne production at the Adelaide Festival, and last night, Peter Evans' slick and complex show for Bell Shakespeare, starring an astonishing Kate Mulvany. This was always going to be good - I have seen Mulvany command the Bell Shakespeare stage on a number of occasions, and she is a magnetic performer, as well as an accomplished writer and dramaturg. Her performance as Richard, however, is nothing short of extraordinary.
Read MoreMatthew Bourne has quite the profile. He's a knight (Sir Matthew Bourne is the more appropriate appellation), and shot into the stratosphere in the late 1990s with his production of Swan Lake, where the famed ballerina swans were transformed into a corps of menacing male dancers in feathered pants. I've been lucky enough to see this production twice, and the interpretation is literally and metaphorically muscular - it's a magnificent intervention into the canon of classical ballet. Lord of the Flies is the latest dance offering from Bourne, and it's an intriguing proposition - the core cast of 8 professional dancers is supplemented by 23 young, untrained boys under the age of 25, who have been cast in the show via a series of workshops in urban and rural Victoria. It's a combination between a community arts project and a highly professional production, and I think that in trying to be both at the same time, it loses some of its lustre.
Read MoreIn previous years, The Australian Ballet have set aside one slot in their programme for a contemporary triple bill, often containing one or two well-known contemporary ballets (Forsythe's In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated being an example of this in 2016) and a newer or lesser known work. Their 2017 iteration of this programming slot was Faster, which I was lucky enough to see on Wednesday night. The three ballets performed were David Bintley's Faster, a world-premiere of Australian choreographer Tim Harbour's Squander and Glory, and Wayne McGregor's Infra. What always excites me about these contemporary triple bills is the way in which the company and dancers are so physically suited to modern ballet, and Wednesday evening's performance was no exception.
Read MorePerhaps one of the most beautiful things about living in a city with a cultural calendar as rich as Melbourne's is the serendipity of what happened to me yesterday - on a whim, I decided at about 11.30 am to head into the Arts Centre and catch the final performance of Victorian Opera's The Sleeping Beauty at 1 pm. I am a subscriber to VO, but for some reason this show was not on my radar, and how glad I am that I was able to see it before it closed. It was full of all the things that I love about Victorian Opera: innovation in form and performance, an absurdly talented young Australian cast, creative collaboration and exchange with other companies and artists, and unbridled joy in the ridiculousness and sublimity of opera.
Read MoreLast night I made the trip to Tea Tree Gully, in the outer part of Adelaide, for an outdoor staging of Andrew Bovell's play The Secret River, an adaptation of Kate Grenville's novel of the same name, staged in the Anstey Hill Quarry. Walking past colonial-era buildings and through magnificent bushland to the quarry, I was also led away from the usual accoutrements of an arts festival, and into a space seemingly made for telling this story. What a humbling and shattering experience this show was. I feel genuinely privileged to have witnessed and experienced this piece of theatre.
Read MoreThe Adelaide Festival juggernaut has rolled into town, bringing with it possibly my favourite theatre company on the planet, Berlin's Schaubühne Theatre. Director Thomas Ostermeier, the wunderkind auteur at the head of the company, is someone whose work I have always admired, so I was thrilled to see that the Adelaide Festival had managed to program this show. In the past I've found Ostermeier's productions to be thrilling and irreverent, theatrically compelling and consistently surprising. His production of Richard III opened at Her Majesty's Theatre in Adelaide last night, starring longtime collaborator Lars Eidinger as a grotesque, banal, utterly magnetic Richard.
Read More