performance

The following performances were staged in an artist studio, a former ball room, a proscenium hall, an explosives factory, a recital centre and a church hall.

This was a knockout ‘One Woman Show’ as part of the Comedy Festival by Liz Kingsman at the Malthouse. A brilliant theatrical performance of wit, pathos, honesty, revealing a ‘woman stumbling through [her] 20s in a fiercely honest, darkly comic way". On stage, Kingsman shrugs: "I guess I'm just relatable." It was certainly relatable to the packed out audience! 

The Spooky Men’s Chorale was a spooky experience; it was all that one did not expect. The singing, the narrative, the empathy, the engagement were spooky. 

https://music.apple.com/au/album/picture-in-a-frame/1019747801?i=1019748070

It was a generous and poignant concert that turned the Recital Centre into a collective experience. 

The concert concluded with singing and dancing to ‘I wanna dance with somebody(who loves me)’. Sounds spooky? It was the finale with the recital hall turned into a dance hall. It was an enthralling experience.

Clare Bowditch sees the personal as political! In a happen chance performance due to a cancellation she took to the stage with her friends to entertain, engage and enthral a sold out 2 hour concert. It was Bowditch at her confident, conversationalist yet raw and emotional best. Wearing her heart on her sleeve and her mother’s petticoat the concert ended in raw emotion but with such power in her voice. The band engaged musically and in conversation as she weaved her way through their own musical talents. Taking to the piano she did a solo number as the band relaxed on the steps of the stage. They too were mesmerised. We left the Ballroom along with a crowd that had experienced something old, something new and for Bowditch maybe cathartic. We were bought back to earth on Sydney Road waiting for a distant tram as the cars and pedestrians grappled with the midnight hour.

‘Planet City’ 2020 at the The Ian Potter Centre: NGV is devised, designed and directed by Liam Young. It proffers a response to the climate emergency, a giant sustainable city occupying a fraction of the Earth’s surface freeing up the rest for rewilding. The Great Endeavour 2023 response is the construction of a global system of greenhouse gas extraction and storage that together remove huge quantities of gases from the atmosphere. Fanciful?  Well perhaps walk up Swanston Street to the RMIT Design Hub and enter the deep basement and experience ‘Wild hope: Conversations for a Planetery Commons’. This an exhibition that requires a planetary thinking, and ‘a move vital to the survival of human and non-human life on Earth. On offer is a ‘world where urgency and imagination converge and where art, design and research become catalysts for regenerative change within the context of the climate crisis’. 

Whatever you chose it’s evident that we on Earth have a problem!

‘Against the Wind’ is a proactive and evocative title for an exhibition by Photo- Media artist Jody Haines. The ‘immersive projection exhibition’ draws together film, dance and sound in a Bluestone Church Arts Space in Footscray. It presents a spiritual connection to Country against a Christian backdrop. The title for the work draws on the Pete Seeger and Silver Bullet Band song which explored the ‘space between care and indifference’ The work responds to the space and its place in time.

 

Last night was the opening of ‘Closer Together’ at the RMIT Gallery. The exhibition reflects the 25-year cross-cultural relationship between the Hong Kong Art School and RMIT’s School of Art. So why ‘Closer Together’ you may we’ll ask! In the Chinese classic text ‘Tao Te Ching’ the world is made up of ‘what we know and what we don’t know, which are ultimately the same’.   ‘Closer Together’ therefore proposes that ‘togetherness, creative dialogue and art-making can help us understand this – that through these processes we can come to better know the mysteries of the unknown’. Worth a visit to test how the text is made ‘real’ by 15 artists from the Hong Kong Art School and RMIT.

‘Worstwood Ho’ by Samuel Beckett at the  Explosives Factory(Theatreworks) in St Kilda was a blast from the 40 year past for its writing and performed by Robert Meldrum who was a former member of the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory who I knew during my stint with the Group in the late 70’s. The play is directed by Richard Murphet also from Pram Factory days. Described as ‘a man on his own grappling with the task of thinking about central, existential questions’ it is a play that requires the actor to inhabit a person and a place that is both revealing and indecipherable in its quest for meaning.

Annual Secret Art Lounge open day April 2023

featuring current artwork by Maggie McCormick, Elisabeth Weissensteiner and Chris Bold. Watch out for 2024.

Swamp pop* with Tommy McLean accompanied by CC Adcock last night at Memo.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=26qB_zTRzKs * Swamp pop is a music genre indigenous to the Acadiana region of south Louisiana and an adjoining section of southeast Texas. Created in the 1950s by young Cajuns and Creoles, it combines New Orleans–style rhythm and blues, country and western, and traditional French Louisiana musical influences.