OzAsia music: Bold syntheses

Chris Reid

GayBird’s stunning combination of electronic music and dazzling visuals, an engaging multimedia portrait of a great painter, Ian Fairweather and a revival, with guzheng, of a classic 1960s rock album, thrill Chris Reid.

Editorial, 11 October 2017

We return from Adelaide, bearing delights and insights granted us by the artists whose work we experienced in just one of the three weeks of OzAsia Festival.

OzAsia: W!ld Rice Theatre, Hotel: Close to home

Keith Gallasch

W!ld Rice Theatre excels on all fronts in a frank five-hour account of race, class, language and gender across 100 years of Singaporean history via expertly performed farce, situation comedy and high drama.

OzAsia Festival: Worlds reconfigured

Ben Brooker

Ben Brooker applauds Macho Dancer, Until the Lions and Recalling Mother, performances that in very different ways unsettle conventional gender and personal relationship expectations with verve and passion.

Liveworks 2017: Beautiful Disturbance; interview, Jeff Khan

Keith Gallasch

In an interview with Keith Gallasch, Jeff Khan, Performance Space Artistic Director, guides us through the festival program’s fantasias and political provocations, works of grand scale and intimate one-on-ones.

My dinner with birdfoxmonster

Katerina Sakkas

In an Erth/Studio A collaboration, three artist-performers “created an idiosyncratic mythology of self that imbued every last detail of the production. A wonderfully transportive experience,” writes Katerina Sakkas.

The Silent Eye: Astral vision

Luke Goodsell

Luke Goodsell is transported by a deeply atypical documentary about music (Cecil Taylor) and dance (Min Tanaka) by Australian filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson, The Silent Eye, showing this week at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival.

Ensemble Offspring: Down the rabbit hole

Keith Gallasch

Ensemble Offspring’s Who Dreamed It?, a concert of five fascinating, formula-bending works by female composers, delighted Keith Gallasch with their evocations of wacky dreams and moody reveries.

Editorial 27 September 2017

In recent weeks we’ve looked at the role of the university in supporting the making of new artworks as research at postgraduate level and today review one of the outcomes, Rakini Devi’s Urban Kali. This week we turn to recent graduates, interviewing Jess Wallace and Phoebe Sullivan about the WAAPA Performance Making course that took them straight to the Perth professional stage with a self-devised work.

Sounding the Future: Towards new sound ecologies

Emily Stewart

Emily Stewart is immersed in a tech-driven exhibition curated by Gail Priest, in which sound artworks are “smeared in time” and thrown toward their possible sonic futures.

Laika: Into space by radio

Jonathan W Marshall

Second Chance Theatre’s Laika, staged as a radio play about early Russian space travel, is “an immensely enjoyable example of how to modestly evoke sublime spaces,” writes Jonathan W Marshall.

Interview, Frances Barbe: The university as performance incubator

Keith Gallasch

Frances Barbe, Course Coordinator for the Bachelor of Performing Arts degree at WAAPA, tells Keith Gallasch about the Performance Making course, its evolutionary structure and transformative 10-day training in Singapore.

Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites: Interior revelations

Keva York

Sydney independent writer-director Platon Theodoris’ debut feature film, now on video-on-demand and reviewed by Keva York, transcends the limits of realism for a fantastical, Tardis-like exploration of its reclusive protagonist’s inner world.