Editorial 26 July 2017

Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival proves more than ever to be vitally enticing with a program featuring great artists and works unfamiliar to Australian audiences. This week in an interview with Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell we focus on key performance works including those from Japan by theatre-maker Kuro Tanino, conjuring haunting inner worlds, and leading composer and experimentalist Keiichiro Shibuya, probing the mind of a virtual performer, the massively popular Miku Hatsune (image above) in The End, an opera he’s written for her. An acclaimed five-hour play from Singapore’s W!LD RICE courses through 100 years of the city state’s history. Next week we look at inventive Asian-Australian collaborations and, later, the festival’s fascinating visual arts showings. As Peter Dutton takes control of state power and foreshadows the end of compulsory voting with his referendum by postal vote — in the age of the internet! — OzAsia invites a greater sense of distance from what it is to be, often all too lazily, Australian. Keith & Virginia

–

Top image credit: The End, Keiichiro Shibuya + Hatsune Miku, photo Kenshu Shintsubo courtesy OzAsia 2017