Keith Gallasch: STC: Shaw’s St Joan, Savage’s high tragedy

Keith Gallasch

Sarah Snook’s Joan is complexly alien: a nationalist, religious fundamentalist instructed by the voices of saints; a divine fool and truth-speaking adolescent; a tragic heroine, stranger, and better for it, than George Bernard Shaw’s Joan. Possessed and poetic, she’s irreducible to 21st century individualism or idealised feminism in director Imara Savage’s ruthless adaptation with new writing from Savage and Emme Hoy that gives voice to Joan’s saints.

Editorial 8 June 2018

Our grand archiving project is well underway. For the first time online you’ll soon be able to browse RealTime editions 1 to 40, a telling record of 1994-2000.

Farewell Tom E Lewis, 1958-2018

Recalling his superb 2014 Sydney Festival performance in The Shadow King, RealTime mourns the death of the Aboriginal actor, singer and cultural leader.

Unwrapped: new life for independents at the Opera House

Keith Gallasch

Reviewing the first season of Unwrapped and welcoming the appointment of Fiona Winning as Sydney Opera House’s Head of Programming, we look back to 2002 when Virginia Hyam announced her first program for The Studio.

Readymade Works’ very Happy Hour

Keith Gallasch

Martin del Amo and Anton, Nikki Heywood and Tony Osborne, and Kathy Cogill manifested intriguing personae in a program with which curator Julie-Anne Long celebrated the art of too-little-seen experienced independent Sydney performers.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s The Howling Girls: Voicing trauma

Keith Gallasch

Pictorially and sonically immersive, Sydney Chamber Opera’s wordless The Howling Girls is a remarkable celebration of the voice and a continuation of the feminist project to depathologise and give voice to the extremes of women’s experiences.

Editorial 1 May 2018

Happy May Day — International Workers’ Day! And welcome to our 2018 series of occasional reviews and, soon, copious surprising highlights from and reflections on 24 years of RealTime publishing, culminating later in the year in a number of open forums.

Thank You

A huge thank you for the multitude of phone calls, cards, emails and ever-escalating social media messages responding to the announcement that we’ve ceased regular publishing of RealTime.

Editorial, 13 December, 2017

Reality check. This is the last edition of RealTime. It’s been an extremely difficult and a very sad decision to make to draw the magazine to a close — to cease weekly publishing this year. In 2018, the magazine’s 25th year, we will complete the archiving of the deeply personal, totally consuming project that the magazine has been for us. It’ll be a year of reflection and celebration for RealTime’s many contributors, readers and supporters and, we hope, provide an enduring legacy — a unique record of a period in which the arts have radically transformed. You can read more about our decision here.

You’ll hear from us from time to time in 2018, but for now we wish you a much-needed, resuscitative holiday season and thank you for being part of our venture into art that makes a difference. Virginia & Keith

MY MY MY: Amala Groom’s Have you seen MY Emily?

Keith Gallasch

In Have you seen MY Emily?, a wickedly amusing six-channel video installation, artist Amala Groom, performing multiple roles, recreates a tense conversation about cultural ownership with the wealthy owner of an Emily Kngwarreye painting.

NORPA’s Djurra: Dreaming theatre

Vicki Van Hout

Vicki Van Hout travels to Lismore to see NORPA’s Djurra, a multidisciplinary production with deep cultural roots, physical theatre, musical and visual strengths and rich potential for script and performance development.

A home for experimentation: new music in Adelaide

Chris Reid    

Chris Reid speaks with Stuart Johnson aka Wolfpanther, the curator of the Hotel Metropolitan’s Metro Experimental Night, who reveals a program rich in diverse genres in Adelaide’s developing new music scene.

Editorial 6 December 2017

This week we’re foregrounding dance with reports from Cleo Mees and Nikki Heywood on the Interchange Festival. Produced by Sydney choreographic laboratory Critical Path, it focused on issues of identity, ability and intercultural exchange via forums, workshops and dialogue with international artists.

Interchange Festival: The Start and the End of the Body

Nikki Heywood

Matters of site, proximity, language, alchemical states, excess and ritual constellate around the body in Nikki Heywood’s report on the Interchange festival’s final day of workshops, talks and forums.

JOLT’s musical myth-making

Elyssia Bugg

While appreciating the experimentation and sense of joy that JOLT brings to the field of sound-based performance, Elyssia Bugg is uncertain of the capacity of the ensemble’s new works to fully engage her.