Editorial 29 June 2018

Hot off the press!! At long last RealTime print editions 1-40 are available in our online archive. PDFs of each edition preserve the look of RealTime and each is searchable — treasure chests of highly responsive reviewing, critical thinking and, yes, humour (we even had ‘sports’ columns in those days).

Making art in heavy weather: Australian Indigenous Performance, RealTime 1994-2000

Virginia Baxter

Virginia Baxter traces the emergence from 1994 to 2000 of a highly influential generation of Australian Indigenous performance-makers, bold experimenters sustaining and generously sharing their culture.

Highly charged connections: Visual arts, RealTime 1994-2004, Part 1

Katerina Sakkas

In Part 1 of her survey, Katerina Sakkas reveals key trends and issues: burgeoning hybridity and cross-cultural dialogue, pivotal major exhibitions, prominence and challenges for Indigenous art, and threats to arts education and ARIs.

RealTime 1994-2000 online for the first time

Keith Gallasch

We’ve scanned the 40 print editions of RealTime’s first six years, making available online a fascinating record of a period of wildly intensive creativity, new and fervent preoccupations, humour and angry arts politics.

Editorial 8 June 2018

Our grand archiving project is well underway. For the first time online you’ll soon be able to browse RealTime editions 1 to 40, a telling record of 1994-2000.

Farewell Tom E Lewis, 1958-2018

Recalling his superb 2014 Sydney Festival performance in The Shadow King, RealTime mourns the death of the Aboriginal actor, singer and cultural leader.

Unwrapped: new life for independents at the Opera House

Keith Gallasch

Reviewing the first season of Unwrapped and welcoming the appointment of Fiona Winning as Sydney Opera House’s Head of Programming, we look back to 2002 when Virginia Hyam announced her first program for The Studio.

Readymade Works’ very Happy Hour

Keith Gallasch

Martin del Amo and Anton, Nikki Heywood and Tony Osborne, and Kathy Cogill manifested intriguing personae in a program with which curator Julie-Anne Long celebrated the art of too-little-seen experienced independent Sydney performers.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Howling Girls: Voicing trauma

Keith Gallasch

Pictorially and sonically immersive, Sydney Chamber Opera’s wordless The Howling Girls is a remarkable celebration of the voice and a continuation of the feminist project to depathologise and give voice to the extremes of women’s experiences.

Editorial 1 May 2018

Happy May Day — International Workers’ Day! And welcome to our 2018 series of occasional reviews and, soon, copious surprising highlights from and reflections on 24 years of RealTime publishing, culminating later in the year in a number of open forums.

Thank You

A huge thank you for the multitude of phone calls, cards, emails and ever-escalating social media messages responding to the announcement that we’ve ceased regular publishing of RealTime.

Editorial, 13 December, 2017

Reality check. This is the last edition of RealTime. It’s been an extremely difficult and a very sad decision to make to draw the magazine to a close — to cease weekly publishing this year. In 2018, the magazine’s 25th year, we will complete the archiving of the deeply personal, totally consuming project that the magazine has been for us. It’ll be a year of reflection and celebration for RealTime’s many contributors, readers and supporters and, we hope, provide an enduring legacy — a unique record of a period in which the arts have radically transformed. You can read more about our decision here.

You’ll hear from us from time to time in 2018, but for now we wish you a much-needed, resuscitative holiday season and thank you for being part of our venture into art that makes a difference. Virginia & Keith

MY MY MY: Amala Groom’s Have you seen MY Emily?

Keith Gallasch

In Have you seen MY Emily?, a wickedly amusing six-channel video installation, artist Amala Groom, performing multiple roles, recreates a tense conversation about cultural ownership with the wealthy owner of an Emily Kngwarreye painting.