Editorial Monday 10 September 2018

Spring brings promise in the shape of highly focused, inspirational arts festivals of the ilk of Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art (image above), Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival and the recent Extended Play Festival of Experimental Music in Sydney. South Australia’s artists and audiences, however, are set to endure a wintry slashing of art funding and unified portfolio support.

Liveworks 2018: It’s Alive! It’s Alive!

Virginia Baxter

Spring for ravenous culture vultures means Liveworks, the annual, two-week feast of seductively challenging live art presented by Sydney’s Performance Space with Asian and Australian artists working side by side.

OzAsia 2018: mutualism & displacement; interview, Joseph Mitchell

Keith Gallasch

Joseph Mitchell’s enticing program features striking works by female Asian visual artists, a Chinese performance about young women living in a social media bubble, theatre from Iran, Syria and Malaysia, dance from Japan and Indonesia, and South Australian-Asian collaborations.

On having no style

Linda Marie Walker

While reflecting on writing for RealTime, Linda Marie Walker had been commissioned by a magazine to write about a visual art exhibition. The magazine’s rejection of her piece threw up for the writer questions around house style, poetic language, the general reader and writing as a way of being in the world.

Vicki Van Hout, dancing on a cultural knife-edge

Keith Gallasch

Vicki Van Hout’s new dance theatre work for FORM Dance Projects, plenty serious TALK TALK, is wickedly funny, existentially intimate, culturally complex, bitingly political and superbly danced beneath an exquisite grass sculpture woven by the artist.

Back to Back, In Between Time & RealTime

Osunwunmi

Osunwunmi visits the making of the latest account of Back to Back Theatre’s The Democratic Set for the We are Bristol Project, and, with In Between Time Festival Artistic Director Helen Cole reflects on IBT’s relationship since 2006 with RealTime.

Editorial 22 August 2018

RealTime will take performative shape on 21 October. Titled RealTime in real time and part of the just launched 2018 Performance Space Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art program, it’s a five-hour open conversation focusing on a quarter of a century of extraordinary change in the arts — for artists and audiences and not least reviewers.

Performance in a progression-regression helix, Adelaide 2011-17

Ben Brooker

While reflecting on works, companies and festival productions that deeply engaged him when reviewing performance for RealTime in 2011-17, Ben Brooker worries at the disadvantages suffered by the city’s small-scale innovators.

Writing the art experience: Itching shaking crying being held – Part I: Of silence and silencing

Zsuzsanna Soboslay

In the first of two intensely felt, lyrical accounts of works she wrote about for RealTime for over two decades, Zsuzsanna Soboslay tracks her physical and emotional responses with concomitant observations about the writing body and the politics of gender and ability.

Editorial 1 August 2018

The utterly distinctive artist and radically dissenting thinker Philip Brophy is one of RealTime’s most popular writers, his words spilling from our pages over the decades, demanding to be read aloud given their inherent rhythms and oratorical drive.

Move fast and hear things: writing Audiovision

Philip Brophy

Reflecting on the random and contradictory perceptual impulses in works that drive his passion for audiovisuality, and the driven writing that flows from it, Philip Brophy surveys his output for his Audiovision column 2012-2017.

Andree Greenwell: Listen to Me

Keith Gallasch

Composer Andrée Greenwell’s new digital album, Listen to Me, addresses the subject of gendered violence with intensely lyrical and dramatic songs framed by musically underscored personal statements that lend this timely project documentary immediacy.