My RealTime years: art, writing & terror

At a time when “politics takes no notice” of art, Richard Murphet looks back with passion to the revelatory works he wrote about for RealTime, with a sense of community and a freedom to engage beyond the parameters of ‘reviewing.’

Notes from the sound underground

Gail Priest

Reflecting on her emergence as a writer on (and practitioner of) sound art over two decades, Gail Priest maps a wonderful constellation of artists, events, reviews, video interviews and phases in the development of a diverse and now pervasive artform.

Black dance, BlakDance, companies & culture

Jeremy Eccles

In a 2009 interview Bangarra’s Stephen Page worried about the absence of other Indigenous dance companies. In 2018, Jeremy Eccles speaks with BlakDance’s Merindah Donnelly, surveying key players, emerging companies and the politics of funding.

Climate Century: countering apocalypse

Ben Brooker

In acts of radical imagining, performances in Climate Century, produced by Vitalstatistix, place their audiences inside fantasias that evoke imminent doom and surreal alternatives, writes Ben Brooker.

Editorial 14 November 2018

Once again Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art has produced a program of small scale performances of often visceral intensity and formula-testing inventiveness, including works from Taiwan, Japan and Indonesia. We felt honoured to be part of this year’s festival with RealTime in real time (image above), a five-hour conversation about art in the 25 years of the magazine’s publication.

Liveworks: RealTime in real time pix

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

As part of Performance Space’s Liveworks, RealTime writers from around Australia gathered with artists and readers to consider the enormous changes in the arts 1994 to the present in an informal five-hour conversation that variously free-floated, hit home and entertained.

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.