Category: Sydney Festival

THE CHAT, is a very interesting work. JR Brennan has worked as a parole officer in Sydney’s Long Bay Correctional Centre, and as an artist, created a series of performance workshops with Performance maker and choreographer Ashley Dyers for ex-offenders in the Melbourne area. THE CHAT we are informed in the program note, has been “created in collaboration with participants from these workshops and leading criminologists, is a work that fundamentally challenges our notions of criminal identity and asks the audience to play judge.” This work has been in an evolving process since 2014 and has been performed in Melbourne…

Sydney Festival present, PAUL CAPSIS with Jethro Woodward & The Fitzroy Youth Orchestra, in the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, Festival Gardens (Hyde Park). 17th and 18th January. When one witnesses the talent of Paul Capsis live on stage, it puts much else into perspective. This is the Best Show that I have seen at this Festival and it is the force that is Mr Capsis that makes it so – he is unique, special. He not only has the skills, he has ‘IT’. Paul Capsis is a GREAT artist. Every gesture, from his ‘mad’ costuming, to his excessive wig, and in…

Photo by Prudence Upton Sydney Festival with Daptone Records, present, ORQUESTA AKOKAN, in the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent Festival Garden (Hyde Park) 15 and 16 January. ORQUESTA AKOKAN, is a big band mambo collective, comprised of some of Cuba’s finest musicians and others from New York, celebrating Havana of the 1940’s and 50’s. The band is led by Cuban singer Jose ‘Pepito’ Gomez and piano player Michael Eckroth and Jacob Plasse featuring a crack brass section. The Spigeltent had had all its furniture cleared and we entered into a ‘mosh’ pit style accommodation with the permanent ‘bank’ table and benches surrounding…

Griffin Theatre Company in association with Sydney Festival and Riverside Theatres present, SINCE ALI DIED, Written and Performed by Omar Musa, in the SBW Stables Theatre, Nimrod St, Darlinghurst. 8-19 January. Rapper, Poet and Award Winning Author is Omar Musa. In this memoir monologue performance he is a brown man in a black country talking to, mostly, white people, about how he has felt – feels – stigmatised as being ‘unAustralian’ for most of his life. SINCE ALI DIED is a Memoir Monologue, originating from a young man who has a Muslim Malaysian father (Borneo) and a white Australian mother…

Photo by Joshua Morris Moogahlin Performing Arts and Blacktown Arts Centre present, BROKEN GLASS, for Sydney Festival 2018, at St Bartholomew’s Church and Cemetery, Prospect. 10 January – 21 January. BROKEN GLASS is an installation and performance that has been four years in development. The stories of the artists, Lily Shearer, Liza-Mare Syron, Andrea James, Aroha Graves and Katie Leslie are used ‘to remind us of the impact of colonisation on ancient practices associated with death and mourning in New South Wales and Victorian First Peoples’ communities’ and are based on their personal experiences of death and knowledge of historical…

Sydney Festival, present THE DAISY THEATRE, from Ronnie Burkett of Marionettes, Canada, in the Reginald Theatre, at the Seymour Centre, Chippendale. 6-28 January. Ronnie Burkett is a Canadian Artist who has for the last 30 odd years been the leading ‘light’ and inspiration for the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, and has over that time developed enumerable full length productions for which he has Designed the Marionette, Costume and Set, and single-handedly written and performed with extreme physical and vocal virtuosity, in each of them. (P.S. He does have help: for instance, the Music and Sound Design is by John…