RealTime E-dition 8 February 2016

RealTime E-dition

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As we wrap up our intensive Sydney Festival coverage—looking back with pleasure on a finely curated, richly themed program of memorable works—we turn to Asia TOPA, an exciting new triennial festival in Melbourne centred on Asian performance and promising works that will challenge the senses and widen Australian horizons. Also in this E-dition, Chris Reid travels to Hobart to take in MOFO's excellent electronics-focused program. Next week we anticipate the Australian International Documentary Conference [AIDC], also in Melbourne, at ACMI, and preview the Adelaide Festival's dramatically distinctive 2017 program.

Keith & Virginia

ASIA TOPA: PERFORMING ASIA IN & WITH AUSTRALIA Stephen Armstrong and Kate Ben-Tovim give a vivid account of key works in their impressive new festival of Asian and Asian-Australian performance in Melbourne.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL: ART TAKES ON DESPAIR Vicki Van Hout witnesses artists resolutely challenging the despair of being a child warrior in the Congo, a young Indigenous Australian in the AIDS 80s and a solvent-sniffing child in a First Nations reservation in Canada.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL: CULTURES, WORDS, LIVES, LIMITS The Encounter, The Season, SHIT, Ich Nibber Dibber: four potent works which reveal great cultural relativities and assay the power, limits, excesses and abuses of language, writes Keith Gallasch—with a dissenting response to The Encounter.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL: ART AT LABOUR'S LIMITS Gecko's Institute and Dimitris Papaioannou's Still Life test their performers to extremes of effort and powerful image-making in vivid accounts of the limits of capability and empathy.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL: DANCE IS THE GAME Champions is an intriguing work about dance viewed through the prism of football and drawing on the kindred states of mind, body and movement that these forms share. Executed with sharp observation, wit and a sense of grandeur. But is it a winner?

SYDNEY FESTIVAL:
BEYOND SADNESS
Katerina Sakkas finds Another Day in Paradise, a posthumous survey show of paintings from the Bali Nine prisoner Myuran Sukumaran, ultimately life-affirming in its display of the artist's passion.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL:
UNDOING IMAGINATION
James Whiting finds that Kasper Holten's psychosexual interpretation of the great Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s 1926 opera King Roger for Opera Australia comes at the expense of the work's sense of divinity.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL:
MORE THAN A BIO-OPERA
Mary Finsterer and Tom Wright's engaging new opera, Biographica, about prophetic Renaissance scientist and troubled parent Gerolamo Cardono is strongly realised by Sydney Chamber Opera and Ensemble Offspring, writes Keith Gallasch.

ANOTHER SIDE OF MARY
James Whiting witnesses the powerful transformation—in word, performance and design—of Mary, Mother of Jesus, from icon into a palpably real mother full of pain and doubt. Now playing.

MUSIC'S EVER EVOLVING ELECTRONICS
In Hobart, Chris Reid relishes MOFO's focus on theremin, ondes Martenot and the synthesiser, the festival drawing on a rich heritage and realising new potentials for electronic and electro-acoustic works.

LAUREN CARROLL-HARRIS JOINS REALTIME
We welcome Lauren Carroll Harris to the RealTime team. A writer, researcher and artist, she'll be Acting Assistant Editor and will develop content for our forthcoming new website.

RealTime E-dttions are published by Open City an Incorporated Association in New South Wales. Open City Inc is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy [VACS], an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. RealTime’s Principal Technology Partner is the national communications carrier, Vertel.

Opinions published in RealTime are not necessarily those of the Editorial Team or the Publisher.

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