Editorial 23 August 2017

After focusing on graduate and postgraduate artists in recent weeks in our ongoing Arts Education & Training Feature, we turn our attention to new works made by academics who are prominent artists, successfully practising from within and beyond the academy.

OzAsia & Hong Kong: Identity & connection

Chris Reid

Chris Reid speaks with OzAsia participating choreographer Chloe Wong and Hong Kong Arts Development Council Chairman Dr Wilfred Wong Ying Wai about art and the autonomous territory’s cultural identity.

Woman with an Editing Bench: How do film editors think?

Lauren Carroll Harris

Made at Macquarie University, Dr Karen Pearlman’s new film about Elizaveta Svilova, editor of Man with a Movie Camera, is both a stand-alone art work and original research into editing and distributed cognition.

Speechless: Giving voice to refugees

Chris Reid

Composed in response to the inadequate reception for The Forgotten Children report, Speechless, a new opera by Monash University Professor of Music Cat Hope, brings together soloists, unusual instrumentation and a community choir.

The Rape of Lucretia, put to the test

Keith Gallasch

With superb musicianship, striking design and challenges for its actor-singers, Sydney Chamber Opera’s provocative take on Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia tests the work’s moral and gender framework.

Making the most of end time

Victoria Carless

In The Danger Ensemble’s very timely The Hamlet Apocalypse, actors oscillate between playing themselves and Shakespeare’s characters with verve as the world goes to pieces, writes Victoria Carless.

Dancenorth & Urab Dancers: Power shifts

Bernadette Ashley

In Tectonic, Dancenorth stages a work about power and climate change juxtaposed with a performance by the Urab Dancers from the slowly sinking Torres Strait island of Poruma.

Editorial 16 August 2017

This week in our Arts Education & Training Feature we take you into the postgraduate screen-world with an in-depth look at the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s new Masters Degree programs.

Top of the Lake: China Girl: Beauty concealing violence

Eloise Ross

With its feminist focus on a dynamic group of women, the new season of Top of the Lake takes Eloise Ross beneath Sydney’s shiny exterior into a murky world of sex workers, illegal surrogacy and missing girls.

The Derwent: Re-envisioning a river

Andrew Harper

A conglomerate of video art, IT creativity and archival materials, Martin Walch and David Stephenson’s The Derwent fascinates Andrew Harper with the immersive totality of its vision.

Be Your Self and Trapper: Bodies of our time

John Bailey

John Bailey sees ADT’s “hugely physical” Be Your Self as “both intensely material and quietly abstracted,” while in Arena Theatre’s “visually lavish” Trapper, “the movement is slow and measured, conceptually proceeding with just as much deliberation.”

Mountain in concert

Steve Dow

Steve Dow embraces the screen-stage synthesis of Jennifer Peedom’s spectacular mountain footage and the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s live score and ponders its potential for diversifying audiences.