Editorial 22 August 2018

RealTime will take performative shape on 21 October. Titled RealTime in real time and part of the just launched 2018 Performance Space Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art program, it’s a five-hour open conversation focusing on a quarter of a century of extraordinary change in the arts — for artists and audiences and not least reviewers. Writers from around Australia will gather with local reviewers, artists, RealTime readers and performers to map out where we’ve been and might be going. In this edition, Ben Brooker and Zsuzsanna Soboslay (along with Chris Reid, Philip Brophy, Virginia Baxter and Katerina Sakkas in recent editions) provide preludes to RealTime in real time. Ben reflects on the works that mattered in his years with RealTime and the negatives that continue to limit bottom-up arts development in South Australia and which are met by artists with resilience and a commitment to nurturance. Zsuzsanna recalls from her decades of writing for RealTime, overseas and around Australia, pivotal experiences that are telling about the complexities of a writer’s responsiveness to art. We hope you’ll join us for RealTime in real time and will tell you more about it in our next edition. Good reading and recollecting! Keith & Virginia

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Top image credit: Jeremy Broom, Catalogue of Dreams, Urban Theatre Projects, photo Fred Harden