STC’s Three Sisters: seeing double

Keith Gallasch

Keith Gallasch tries to forget Chekhov’s Three Sisters and see the STC adaptation on its own terms, but finds deeply engaging performances denied a supportive conceptual framework.

Editorial 8 November 2017

This week we offer our third and final set of reviews of the Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, an invaluable event in a city where independent contemporary performance, live art and dance often seem scattered and sparsely programmed across the year.

Liveworks: CARRION: Magnificent mutancy

Cleo Mees

Cleo Mees experiences Justin Shoulder’s CARRION as “a dream-space… of fantastical proportions” in which occurs “a profound melding of costume and body, a mutual transformation which produces creatures that feel real, through and through.”

The Warmun Wreck

Jon Rose

Jon Rose’s wonderfully vivid account of the second in the Wreck Projects in which a retired car in Warmun in the East Kimberley becomes a potent musical instrument reveals the challenges and pleasures of a unique venture.

James Hullick: Sound artists just gotta have fun

Keith Gallasch

For Melbourne Music Week, James Hullick, Artistic Director of JOLT, promises “a wild sci-fi sound art/acousmatic/chamber music/pop art experience” with hard-core philosophical enquiry framed by humour.

Grace Under Pressure: a call for mutual caring

Keith Gallasch

David Williams and Paul Dwyer’s Grace Under Pressure is sensitively crafted verbatim theatre rich with the observations of those who are responsible for us in hospitals and whose own lives are subject to often inordinate pressures, writes Keith Gallasch.

Andrée Greenwell’s Cinéaste: reflections & refractions

Keith Gallasch

Cinéaste Vol. 1 is a fascinating assemblage that allows composer Greenwell to lovingly reflect on the idiom of film scoring and to inventively refract her own compositions, yielding aural gems: riffs, ostinatos, hooks and soundscapes, the stuff of movies actual and imagined.

Sky Blue Mythic: Angela Goh’s fantastical myth-making

Keith Gallasch

More essay than review, Keith Gallasch’s response to Angela Goh’s Sky Blue Mythic explores the relationship between experiencing a powerfully disconcerting work, reviewing it and engaging with the artist’s account of it.

Narcifixion: Watching the narcissists

Keith Gallasch

Anton’s vigorously propulsive, grimly funny dance work, Narcifixion, about screen-bred narcissism provokes Keith Gallasch, watching a finely streamed performance, to appreciate the logic of its structure and respond to its account of a complex condition.

Rakini Devi’s nightwork: the performer as visual artist

Keith Gallasch

The exhibition Inhabiting Erasures powerfully attests to a passion to arrest the wrongs done to women, conjures a magical otherworld of female strength and beauty and exquisitely reveals painting to be the foundation of Devi’s practice.

Excellent everyday Kathak: Raghav Handa’s TWO

Keith Gallasch

With amusing conversation and exquisite partnering dancer Raghav Handa and tabla player Maharshi Raval reveal much about collaboration, Kathak dance and the testing of boundaries.

Album review: Offspring Bites 3: En Masse

Keith Gallasch

From Ensemble Offspring potent works by Alex Pozniak (dramatically assaying weight in music), Holly Harrison (a witty take on instrumental and other distortions) and Thomas Meadowcroft (a gently vibrating meditation that opens out to a pulsing expansive vision).

Editorial Thursday 27 August 2020

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

The highly successful 2019 exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, which celebrated the interplay between RealTime and the artists Martin del Amo, Vicki Van Hout and Branch Nebula, is now exhibited online. We also interview instigator and co-curator Dr Erin Brannigan about her motivation for mounting this innovative exhibition. In another bold archival venture, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari have created Timely Readings, a visual mapping of live art in Australia.