Digital Native: the art of Jenny Fraser, playful provocateur

Jenny Fraser with Keith Gallasch

Awarded the prestigious Australia Council Experimental & Emerging Arts Award in 2022, Jenny Fraser adroitly uses whatever media and images are at hand to celebrate Indigenous cultures and protest the wrongs done to First Nations Australians.

Liveworks 2023: Brooke Stamp, Mickey, Amplifying dance’s psyche

Keith Gallasch

Performance Space’s Liveworks 2023 kicked off boldly with an emotionally and physically powerful dance and sound creation that is seductively elusive, richly allusive and wrought with the intensity of a disturbing dream.

Night Songs: Pied Butcherbird, centre-stage

Keith Gallasch

Jon Rose & Hollis Taylor’s deeply engaging Night Songs, with Ensemble Offspring in Liveworks 2022, celebrates birdsong as music, reminding us of the ecological and emotional significance of our kinship with other species.

Word dance: Nikki Heywood & Mark Cauvin, Broadcast into Oblivion

Keith Gallasch

Broadcast into Oblivion is a grimly thrilling expression of today’s cumulative existential anxieties, delivered by Heywood and Cauvin with passion and wit, voice and double bass resonantly entwining, and offering more than a very rich aural experience.

Raghav Handa, Follies of God: A dance for life

Keith Gallasch

In the 2022 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Handa’s Follies of God is a physically exacting, viscerally gripping contemplation of the morality of waging a “just” war.

Kaz Therese’s Sleeplessness: Art and trauma

Keith Gallasch

A courageous and emotionally exacting creation, fusing personal recollection and night-time delirium, Sleeplessness climaxes in a moment of remarkable transformation, as it confronts the tragedy of intergenerational trauma.

Keith Gallasch: WE ARE HERE’s Radical Transparency: resurrecting dance

Radical Transparency is a vivid, frequently funny and affecting depiction of a young dance company returning to performance ‘post-Covid’ in an interplay between individual impulses and a need for collective cohesion.

Life on the edge: Suzon Fuks’ Be Like Body—Obsolete #4

Keith Gallasch

Fuks’ 2021 live-streamed “poetic meditation on age, obsolescence and technology” is a richly inventive melding of performance, dextrous filmmaking and the voices of six women poets from around the world.

re:group, COIL: Looping loss & laughter

Keith Gallasch

re:group’s live-cinema event COIL is an astonishingly multi-layered, funny-sad eulogy for the demise of video rental stores around Australia, a foundation on which grievings personal and artistic are built with an often hilarious, virtuosic interplay of live and screen action.

Virginia Baxter & Keith Gallasch appointed Members (AM) of the Order of Australia

Virginia and Keith have each been awarded the Order of Australia AM. They express their gratitude to all who have partnered them in their four decades as performance-makers, writers and publishers.

Andrée Greenwell’s Cinéaste: reflections & refractions

Keith Gallasch

Cinéaste Vol. 1 is a fascinating assemblage that allows composer Greenwell to lovingly reflect on the idiom of film scoring and to inventively refract her own compositions, yielding aural gems: riffs, ostinatos, hooks and soundscapes, the stuff of movies actual and imagined.

Sky Blue Mythic: Angela Goh’s fantastical myth-making

Keith Gallasch

More essay than review, Keith Gallasch’s response to Angela Goh’s Sky Blue Mythic explores the relationship between experiencing a powerfully disconcerting work, reviewing it and engaging with the artist’s account of it.

Narcifixion: Watching the narcissists

Keith Gallasch

Anton’s vigorously propulsive, grimly funny dance work, Narcifixion, about screen-bred narcissism provokes Keith Gallasch, watching a finely streamed performance, to appreciate the logic of its structure and respond to its account of a complex condition.

Rakini Devi’s nightwork: the performer as visual artist

Keith Gallasch

The exhibition Inhabiting Erasures powerfully attests to a passion to arrest the wrongs done to women, conjures a magical otherworld of female strength and beauty and exquisitely reveals painting to be the foundation of Devi’s practice.

Excellent everyday Kathak: Raghav Handa’s TWO

Keith Gallasch

With amusing conversation and exquisite partnering dancer Raghav Handa and tabla player Maharshi Raval reveal much about collaboration, Kathak dance and the testing of boundaries.

Album review: Offspring Bites 3: En Masse

Keith Gallasch

From Ensemble Offspring potent works by Alex Pozniak (dramatically assaying weight in music), Holly Harrison (a witty take on instrumental and other distortions) and Thomas Meadowcroft (a gently vibrating meditation that opens out to a pulsing expansive vision).

Editorial Thursday 27 August 2020

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

The highly successful 2019 exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, which celebrated the interplay between RealTime and the artists Martin del Amo, Vicki Van Hout and Branch Nebula, is now exhibited online. We also interview instigator and co-curator Dr Erin Brannigan about her motivation for mounting this innovative exhibition. In another bold archival venture, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari have created Timely Readings, a visual mapping of live art in Australia.