Editorial 21 June 2017

Can the arts be seriously sustainable without informed, considered criticism? If you think not, then bring us cheer with an all too welcome donation.

An anxious Australia

Lauren Carroll Harris

In Antidote’s Moving Nations, young visual artists present highly personalised critiques of Australia’s history of migration, writes Lauren Carroll Harris.

Night Parrot Stories: myth vs reality

Luke Goodsell

Night Parrot Stories, an overlooked essay film on the search for a possibly extinct desert bird, “joins the chorus for the resurrection of endangered mythologies,” writes Luke Goodsell.

Emily Dickinson: her soul is her own

Joanna Di Mattia

“While Dickinson’s life appears on the surface to be a quiet one, Terence Davies interprets it as emotionally brutal,” writes Joanna Di Mattia of A Quiet Passion, showing in cinemas now.

James Nguyen and Yin Lan Soon: Call////Response (C.2) (2015)

Critical Video

Poet Emily Stewart is engaged by the subtle mood shifts and rhythms of a performance captured in single-take video in a suburban underpass. Watch it now.

Fraught blueprint for survival

Nerida Dickinson

In Blueprint, recent WAAPA graduates conjure a future in which Mars-bound trainees competitively aim for physical perfection, writes an impressed Nerida Dickinson.

Radio Gothic’s sonic mystery

Steve Dow

At Dark Mofo, Radio Gothic presents The Hanniford Tapes, a live radio performance about murder and paranoia, replete with live sound effects and a digital heightening of ambiguities, reports Steve Dow.

Creek learning

Chris Reid

In Creek Lore, a walk conducted by Laura Wills and OSCA along Adelaide’s neglected First Creek, Chris Reid hears of its Indigenous history, its ecology, sees a responsive artwork and collects rubbish.

Editorial 14 June 2017

Let’s get historical, an antidote to the hysterical politics of the moment. Read the editorial.

Amiable subversion: Black is the New White

Keith Gallasch

In Black is the New White, playwright Nakkiah Lui deftly takes on and wickedly ramps up the bourgeois comedy of manners to portray an Aboriginal middle class family, its prejudices and deeply felt sensitivities.

Seven Stories: archetypal imaginings

Keith Gallasch

With varying degrees of success, Ensemble Offspring’s Seven Stories brings together seven composers, poet, video artist and musicians to engage with primal tales in an ambitious concert.

Rik Rue, sound collagist

Jon Rose & contributors

In a richly evocative socio-cultural account of decades of musical life in Sydney and beyond, Jon Rose and fellow artists applaud the contribution made by a very special sound artist, Rik Rue.