Editorial 5 December 2018

Welcome to a bumper holiday edition of RealTime featuring extensive reviews of two critically important festivals, OzAsia (image above Yui Kawaguchi) and Climate Century; treasurable reflections on writing for RealTime by Richard Murphet and Gail Priest; and a look at how Australia’s Indigenous dance scene is set to change as new companies emerge.

OzAsia 2018 performance: More than cultural diplomacy

Ben Brooker

Deeply engaged by five works in a bracing festival, Ben Brooker writes of their evocations of “displacement, the unsettling of body and being by the effects of colonisation, technology and environmental disruption.”

My RealTime years: art, writing & terror

At a time when “politics takes no notice” of art, Richard Murphet looks back with passion to the revelatory works he wrote about for RealTime, with a sense of community and a freedom to engage beyond the parameters of ‘reviewing.’

Notes from the sound underground

Gail Priest

Reflecting on her emergence as a writer on (and practitioner of) sound art over two decades, Gail Priest maps a wonderful constellation of artists, events, reviews, video interviews and phases in the development of a diverse and now pervasive artform.

Black dance, BlakDance, companies & culture

Jeremy Eccles

In a 2009 interview Bangarra’s Stephen Page worried about the absence of other Indigenous dance companies. In 2018, Jeremy Eccles speaks with BlakDance’s Merindah Donnelly, surveying key players, emerging companies and the politics of funding.

Climate Century: countering apocalypse

Ben Brooker

In acts of radical imagining, performances in Climate Century, produced by Vitalstatistix, place their audiences inside fantasias that evoke imminent doom and surreal alternatives, writes Ben Brooker.

Editorial 14 November 2018

Once again Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art has produced a program of small scale performances of often visceral intensity and formula-testing inventiveness, including works from Taiwan, Japan and Indonesia. We felt honoured to be part of this year’s festival with RealTime in real time (image above), a five-hour conversation about art in the 25 years of the magazine’s publication.

Liveworks: RealTime in real time pix

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

As part of Performance Space’s Liveworks, RealTime writers from around Australia gathered with artists and readers to consider the enormous changes in the arts 1994 to the present in an informal five-hour conversation that variously free-floated, hit home and entertained.

Liveworks 2018: Art testing

Keith Gallasch

Keith Gallasch welcomes the challenges to form, thinking and feeling provided by Performance Space’s dexterous experimental art programming, in which Branch Nebula’s High Performance Packing Tape and Rianto’s Medium proved to be exacting highlights alongside impressive works by John A Douglas, Appelspiel, Asuna and more.

The spirit of the place: 8 years of writing for RealTime

Urszula Dawkins

Urszula Dawkins evocatively reflects on adventures in reviewing highly unusual works for RealTime that tell of how we inhabit and generate places, literally and metaphorically, from the Arctic to the mind and digital imaginings.

Horror in RealTime: lovely, dark and deep

Katerina Sakkas

Katerina Sakkas created a special niche in RealTime for horror film — especially works by Australians and women in particular, in part inspired by her coverage of three of Tasmania’s Stranger With My Face festivals. Delving into her passion for the genre, she reveals its capacity to be much more than escapist.