The 2016 Next Wave Festival is underway. Jane Howard reviews eight of its opening productions. We’ll be responding to more performances, visual arts shows and the festival’s dance program with reviews by RealTime’s DanceWrite workshop participants. To date it’s been a dancing year for RealTime, and for good reason, given the choreographic focus of Stephanie Rosenthal’s Biennale of Sydney and the remarkably diverse dance works we’ve reviewed in Hobart, regional Tasmania, Campbelltown, Townsville, Perth, Adelaide, Vancouver and New York. The Keir Choreographic Award (our coverage here, here and here) has provoked even greater debate the second time around, with a valuable focus on the criteria for selection and judgment and what these indicate about the nature of contemporary dance. We also report on PROPELLED in Newcastle, a much smaller but significant program supporting emerging artists and also, like the Keir, with a focus on interdisciplinarity.
We’ll be back on 25 May after a week away at Next Wave. As the election campaign unfolds, maintain the arts rage.
Virginia & Keith
NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL Immersed in the festival’s opening weekend, Jane Howard is impressed by a diversity of practices and experiences, a strong female presence and works from artists with disabilities along with queer, feminist and Asian-Australian practitioners.
KEIR CHOREOGRAPHIC AWARD: PROGRAM 2 Andrew Fuhrmann completes his coverage of the semi-finals, ‘reviews’ the jury decision and discusses opinions circulating about the award’s procedures and its value.
PROPELLED Keri Glastonbury delights in dance that works close to its audience and transforms grim, punitive spaces into magical, liberating ones in Catapult’s PROPELLED at Newcastle’s The Lock-Up gallery.
KEIR CHOREOGRAPHIC AWARD WINNER
Sydney-based Ghenoa Gela wins the jury and audience awards with a work that grapples with the challenge of maintaining traditional Torres Strait Islander dance while engaging with contemporary Western practice.
LEAH BARCLAY Attentiveness to the sounds of the natural world heighten our sense of the infinite riches of the Earth’s threatened biospheres. Environmentalist sound artist Leah Barclay records and then plays these sounds in urban and other surprising surrounds.
CHASING ASYLUM
Eva Orner’s internationally distributed documentary shames Australians for their maltreatment of refugees. National release 28 May.
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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