Archive for the 'Reviews' Category
This year’s Adelaide Festival was awash with dialectical entanglements: cultures melding, disciplines merging, texts colluding. The artist takes the given and makes it new or, in some cases, newish. vs macbeth In Vs Macbeth, the given is William Shakespeare. And the new is danger. The Sydney Theatre Company’s Residents and Adelaide’s own Border Project teamed [...]
It is a truism to say that Hofesh Shechter’s dance pieces are as much about music as they are about choreography—in the double bill of Uprising and In Your Rooms, Shechter is credited with creating both. Indeed, his interest in their combination is hardly novel ground for dance, but his capacity to synthesise their impact [...]
Phillip Adams’ choreography sometimes repeats a physical action until it achieves the transcendent extremity of a ritual. By taking on the subject matter of mass hysteria and apocalyptic cults, where the held breath of expectation is clothed in mantras and cyclical behaviours, he has found a fitting underpinning. In BalletLab’s 2007 Brindabella, the piece was [...]
The titles of Lucy Guerin’s recent works have been marked by clarity and transparency, even literalness. Structure and Sadness dealt with the aftermath of grief caused by the West Gate bridge collapse. Melt was a duet for two water molecules that move from ice through to steam. Corridor limited itself to a long traverse stage [...]
The Hong Kong Arts Festival began as a private initiative in 1973. One year later, in a moment of belated British pragmatism, Chinese was finally recognised as an official language by the colonial administrators, though the Arts Festival cannot necessarily be held responsible. So, in this part of the world, millions of people were taking [...]
The Band’s Visit begins with a gently absurd level of theatricality. Not the kind of camp histrionics that Baz Luhrmann starts his movies with, but rather the stylised simplicity of Akira Kurosawa or Roy Andersson. In the opening shots, cleaners at the airport walk across the frame from edge to edge, creating an implicit proscenium [...]
Sometimes curation is nothing more than serendipity and sometimes serendipity bears all the hallmarks of curation. This month in Melbourne, the stars have aligned and the fortunate populous has the opportunity to see an exhibition (Intimacy) and a film (Hunger) that in their symbiosis would make a truly excellent day-night double bill. The provenance of [...]
Purgatory is a temporal noun. There are no clocks in the Inferno or in Paradise—there is no time in eternity. But Purgatory is immanently ephemeral. At least, that’s how Dante would have it. Purgatory is also theatre. It is a morality play writ large, where the actors are sinners and the curtain call is the [...]
In Antony Hamilton’s debut full-length work, even the title, Blazeblue Oneline, has a cheekily obscure but rhythmically exact quality. The tone is vigorous and brash, masculine but childlike and when mysteriousness creeps in, it isn’t long before things pop back into multicoloured joy. Hamilton’s concept for the piece began with a desire to meld dance [...]
Michael Haneke is not a facile filmmaker, so one has to wonder why he bothered remaking his fourth feature film some ten years later with nary a change in sight. As it turns out, the reason is facile. The original Funny Games was a disturbing Teutonic take on Hollywood-style violence. But apparently not enough Americans [...]