Editorial 20 September 2017

In a world steeped in cynicism and buffeted by escalating crises, it’s difficult to fantasise peaceful and socially equitable futures. Too Close to the Sun’s The Bluebird Mechanicals [image above] conjures an exquisitely beautiful world, a museum-ish miniature of our own, doomed by hubris to imminent destruction, but blessed with the fertile imaginations of the production’s numerous makers.

Ensemble Offspring: Lisa Illean & the porous voice

Keith Gallasch

Ensemble Offspring’s Who Dreamed It? features five female composers. One of them, Lisa Illean, tells Keith Gallasch about the subtle forces — poetry, twilight, voices and “scraps of heard things” — that inform her new work, Cantor.

Soft Centre: Festive hardcore

Keith Gallasch

Soft Centre, a new, big, bold 12-hour festival of electronic music has added depth and scale with immersive light works and collaborations between musicians and visual and performance artists at Casula Powerhouse, Alice Joel tells RealTime.

OzAsia: Tangling with utopia

Chris Reid

Chris Reid takes in After Utopia — a timely exhibition from Singapore soon to be seen in Adelaide — which eloquently assays the fantasies and realities that shape our capacity to project ideal societies.

Five luminous new Australian filmmakers

Lauren Carroll Harris

There’s no single route for young people into filmmaking in this country or anywhere. Lauren Carroll Harris finds five artists taking distinctly zigzagging, peripatetic educational and creative pathways into cinema.

The Loop

This week, smart creative thinkers address political storytelling, the figure of the migrant in Australian cinema and the new Slow Art theory.

Editorial 13 September 2017

Two highly experienced performers, Rakini Devi, studying at the University of Wollongong, and Steve Matthews at the University of Sydney, are well on their way to completing doctor of creative arts degrees. They tell us what motivated them to deepen their practices with intensive research, reflection on their art and the making of new works.

Namatjira Project: Righting a wrong

Dan Edwards

Dan Edwards thinks Sera Davies’ multilayered, culturally alert documentary about Big hART’s collaboration with the family of Albert Namatjira should inspire action to return the artist’s copyright to them.

Visualising sound, making Home

Chris Reid

Hong Kong artist GayBird tells Chris Reid about his two works for the OzAsia Festival: a performance with Zephyr Quartet that progresses from an electronic future to an acoustic past, and Home, a large-scale public installation populated with magical tiny houses.

Interview: Steve Matthews, going seriously solo

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

Towards his Doctorate of Arts at the University of Sydney, Steve Matthews has researched the form and made a solo autobiographical performance. He tells RealTime about the personal and artistic challenges and rewards.

Unseen energies manifest as art

Stephen Jones

First seen at Sydney’s MCA, Energies: Haines & Hinterding is now at Perth’s PICA. Read Stephen Jones’ richly informative 2015 response to this subtly mind-bending show.

Laura Hindmarsh: Runtime (2017)

Critical Video

Though our footsteps (and our lives) are digitally tracked to the millimetre, something feels “out of step, out of time,” writes Elyssia Bugg of Laura Hindmarsh’s GPS-misguided Runtime. Watch now, with headphones on.

Editorial 6 September 2017

This week, fascinating works for watching and listening, with new Critical Video and Critical Audio features.