Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

  Performance Space and Liveworks Festival presents World Premiere, CARRION – Justin Shoulder, in Bay 20, Carriageworks, Wilson St, Redfern. 25 – 28 October, 2017. Performance Space and LIveworks Festival present, CARRION, in a new Performance Art piece created by Justin Shoulder. From the program notes: Justin Shoulder is an artist working in performance, sculpture, video and nightlife/community events production. His main body of work the “Fantastic Creatures” are invented alter-personas based on queered ancestral mythologies. These creatures are embodied through hand crafted costumes and prostheses and animated by their own gestural languages. Shoulder uses his body and craft to…

Ken Unsworth in collaboration with Australian Dance Artists presents, RESTRAINT(S), at the Ken Unsworth Studio, 137 Belmont St Alexandria. October 26-31. Australian Dance Artists: Choreographers and Performers: Susan Barling, Anca Frankenhaeuser, Patrick Harding-Irmer and Ross Philip with Creative Collaborator, Norman Hall, have for the 13th time created a dance work with the participation of Australian artist Ken Unsworth who has created the Set and Installations for each of the sections of this experience in the theatre. Unique costumes by Elia Bosshard and the Lighting by Roderick van Gelder add to the vividness of the work. As well, an original score…

Photo by Heidrun Lohr Seymour Centre and The Big Anxiety – Festival of Arts+Science+People present, GRACE UNDER PRESSURE, by David Williams and Paul Dwyer in collaboration with the Sydney Arts and Health Collective, in the York Theatre at the Seymour Centre. 25 – 28 October. GRACE UNDER PRESSURE is a new work of verbatim theatre. Verbatim theatre is a type of ‘documentary’ theatre in which the script is created from the spoken words of real people gathered in interviews. This work involved the health industry and concerned itself, principally, with the nurse and doctor experience, with each other and the…

Photo by Clare Hawley, Asparay Photography Rocket Productions in association with bAKEHOUSE presents SHE RODE HORSES LIKE THE STOCK EXCHANGE, by Amelia Roper, at the Kings Cross Theatre (KXT), in the Kings Cross Hotel. 20 October – 11 November. SHE RODE HORSES LIKE THE STOCK EXCHANGE, written in 2014, is by an Australian playwright, Amelia Roper, who has been working and living in Los Angeles for some time. Two couples: Amy (Matilda Ridgeway) and Henry (Tom Anson Mesker), Max (Dorje Swallow) and Sara (Nikki Britton), friends because of business contacts – Amy and Max having worked as rivalling investment bankers together…

  Sitting in the Old Fitz Theatre in a newly configured traverse space with only a blond wooden floor between my audience companions on the other side, and the lighting changes – a suited figure begins to talk to us (the leader of a chorus?) – a man we come to know as Lawyer Alfieri (David Lynch) – introduces us to the situation and premise of the play in an extremely direct way (no expositional time wasting here). We learn quickly what is at stake in A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. We absorb it carefully and take it into an…

Photo by Prudence Upton Ensemble Theatre presents, THE KITCHEN SINK, by Tom Wells, at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli. 14 October – 18 November. THE KITCHEN SINK is a British play by Tom Wells, first shown at the Bush Theatre, London, in late 2011. It is a domestic soap-opera concerning a very ordinary British provincial city family and some of their neighbourhood denizens, all facing life-making turning-points that will initiate necessary change and so the inevitable scary adjustments, be they economic, emotional, social, spiritual, or, all of the former. Changes that will require a leap of faith that will turn out OK.…