Archive for the 'Articles' Category
While the big dance number at this year’s Melbourne Arts Festival has to be the Merce Cunningham residency, there are some other equally remarkable choreographers on show. Take Jérôme Bel for instance, the enfant terrible of French contemporary dance, whose work has garnered that heady mix of consternation, castigation and celebration synonymous with avant-garde.
A relatively […]
In the midst of rehearsals for his upcoming Melbourne Arts Festival production, This Show Is About People, Shaun Parker took time out to talk to us about the work and what brought him to it.
Parker graduated from the VCA dance school in 1992 and is credited as the director-choreographer of This Show Is About People […]
On her last day in the office before taking a well-deserved overseas jaunt, I caught up with Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), to talk about this year’s program from her perspective.
There is something wonderfully seasonal about Melbourne’s festival circuit. The winter solstice comes and goes and, even though the […]
Coming from a noble line of traditional Khassonké griots, Habib Koité assimilates rock and jazz influences into his classical guitar training. Having played with Bonnie Raitt and The Art Ensemble of Chicago, he came to WOMAD with his seasoned West African band Bamada.
Bill Cobham is a legendary drummer who has played with the likes of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Oscar Peterson over the course of his 30 year career. This month, he comes to Australia to play the WOMAD festival in Adelaide so I spoke to him about his long life in music and the path […]
Melbourne has a habit of reminding itself that it’s the second largest city in Australia but often forgets that it’s also the third largest Greek city in the world. From tzatziki to saganaki, Hellenic culinary traditions have successfully permeated the Anglo-derived mainstream over the decades with the result that everyone knows olives are for more […]
There are few things in art more ubiquitous than improvisation. Yet cinema, a relatively young art form, has still to find a method with which improvisation can be used to inform the entire creative process. Sure, there have been famously brilliant scenes of improvised acting or unplanned strokes of directorial genius but improvisation in these […]