Late last year the NSW Government announced its intention to demolish and redevelop Waterloo’s high-rise towers and surrounding public housing. This decision involves displacing over 4,500 elderly, disabled and low-income people who live there.
The Drover’s Wife, written by Leah Purcell and directed by Laticia Caceres, was recently at the Belvoir Theatre, with a magnificent Leah Purcell taking the role of the drover’s wife.
A South Sydney Community Aid (SSCA) initiative, Redfern… Waterloo by photographer Gary Bonner, was exhibited at 107 Projects, Redfern from August 23 to 26 and will be exhibited at the Orchard Gallery, Waterloo from October 8 to November 10.
However, Christie appears more interested in the warping effect of evil upon human personalities rather than in the employment of the well-known “little grey...
In Beirut Adrenaline the exciting Théâtre Excentrique presents us with a powerful, deeply moving, and often painfully funny exploration of that most bitter of human conflicts, civil war. A brilliant script brought to life by incredibly good performers under the compassionate direction of Anna Jahjah, gives us important insights into how people endure the fragmentation of their homeland but maintain hope for the future.
Meeting dancer and choreographer Jasmin Sheppard, whom I remember vividly as the courageous but tragic Patygarang in the Bangarra performance of the same name, she seems weightless as if she might float away unless anchored to the foyer armchair.
OUR Land People Stories brings three unique and awe-inspiring contemporary dance performances to the stage at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House. The wonderful clan Bangarra once again astonishes its audience with dazzling choreography, the power, dynamism and grace of their dancing, the authenticity of their storytelling and the originality of soundscape and design.
Meeting dancer and choreographer Jasmin Sheppard, whom I remember vividly as the courageous but tragic Patygarang in the Bangarra performance of the same name, she seems weightless as if she might float away unless anchored to the foyer armchair.
Louise Virgona has been a resident of Waterloo for three years. Several of her portraits are of well-known Waterloo residents. Louise’s solo show at the Orchard Gallery (South Sydney Uniting Church) features various prints (drypoint, lithography, lino-cut and silk-screen) and photographic works spanning the last 15 years.
These cuts seem particularly disturbing to little theatre as news has emerged of additional projects funded by Catalyst, the government’s new funding program for...
Speaking via mobile to Vicki van Hout as she catches a train, I find my own meaning for an expression used by a former student of hers: to vickify. I would define it as “to travel at high speed through uncharted territory with dedication and humour”.
The King Street Theatre has pledged itself to present theatre that is “controversial, but fascinating and satisfying food for thought” and Is It Time fulfils this mission. The issue of euthanasia remains controversial in our society and Ashley Jones’s play under the competent direction of Barry Walsh makes a strong case in support of an intelligent, loving elderly couple’s right to choose the point at which they will end their life.
Engaged as we are in the build up to an election, French-Canadian Carole Fréshette’s Seven Days in the Life of Simon Labrosse presented by the innovative and exciting Théâtre Excentrique is wonderfully, hilariously relevant.
Speaking via mobile to Vicki van Hout as she catches a train I find my own meaning for an expression used by a former student of hers: to vickify. I would define it as “to travel at high speed through uncharted territory with dedication and humour”.
The deeply engaging One Billion Beats was co-written by Indigenous poet, filmmaker and scholar Romaine Moreton and award-winning playwright Alana Valentine.
Alana Valentine’s play is set in Broome’s emergent gay community, and Ladies Day at the Broome Cup is background to a brutal revelation of its potential dangers. However, Ladies Day is concerned with much more than sexuality and gender in regional WA.
Both talented young artists feel that being artist-in-residence has offered them an invaluable experience.
Jovana says that the program helped her immensely both professionally and...
Ochres enabled its audiences then, and now in this celebratory revisiting, to experience the sacredness of the connection between earth, people and spirit integral to Aboriginal life.
Traditionally, Desdemona is characterised as both innocent and passive but the facts of Shakespeare’s play show her to be headstrong and passionate. She refuses...
The creation of an expo-style “village” provided an opportunity both for the public to connect with the work of organisations involved in the pursuit...
Lucy Neal, a theatre-maker and community activist, has been an active player in Transition since its beginnings and was co-founder of Transition Town Tooting...
Lore is both sensational and profound, powerfully exploring the concept of the title, a body of traditions and knowledge held by a group and passed on from generation to generation. In the two contrasting pieces making up this unique program, the Indigenous body becomes the means of handing on the past and documenting its transmutation in the present and finding, in the process, hope for the future.
It was a pleasant surprise as I waited outside The Factory for my meeting with Kylie Coolwell to see three familiar dogs rounding the corner and hear the familiar cry “Agro” before Kylie came into view. A well-known figure in Waterloo, Kylie Coolwell is the writer of Battle of Waterloo, which was an attraction at Wharf 1 Theatre from June 1-27. She is also the owner of Agro, Princess and Snoop.
Rhymes with Silence
107 Projects, Redfern
May 16-24, 2015
A timely offering as the Parramatta Eels linked arms this weekend [May 16] in support of the campaign to end domestic violence, Rhymes with Silence, a collection of new short plays, explores its subject with earnest candour. The 13 plays, written by nine playwrights featuring 26 actors working with 12 directors, have been carefully crafted into an artistic whole beginning with despair and ending in hopefulness.
Bright orange signage emblazoned with the words, “innovation, sustainability and community”, welcomes visitors at all major entrances to the Australian Technology Park (ATP). Banners along all pedestrian and bicycle pathways throughout the site also include the word “heritage”, but they all ring hollow to local residents’ groups as the government proceeds with its plans to sell the ATP.
Once again the totally relevant and exciting Théâtre Excentrique has chosen to present a play that disturbs and challenges its audience. The conflict between personal feeling and public policy dramatised by Anouilh’s Antigone is as important to us today as it was to occupied France in 1944, the time of its first performance, and to the fifth century Athenian audience of Sophocles’s tragedy.
An unseasonably cold night in April was leavened by the heartwarming performance of Con Nats’s Haircuts as part of the 33rd Greek Festival of Sydney. In its own gently observant fashion the play celebrates the ways in which the more expressive Mediterranean migration beneficially modified the less expansive Australian culture, and at the same time explores the resistance of communities to change in the iconic little world of the barbershop.
“Central to Eveleigh” includes a stretch of publically owned land known as the Australian Technology Park, which among other things, houses the Eveleigh Locomotive...
On the topic of sex, from Adultery to Zen, there seems no angle left to be viewed. No word, particularly the more visceral, left to be said. However, in the final presentation of Subtlenuance’s Table Talk Trilogy exploring the often socially divisive topics of politics, religion and sex, And Now to Bed offers individual insight into sexual choices, affirming difference and acknowledging the centrality of sexuality in the construction of personal identity and the finding of emotional fulfilment.
The Coalition government took Operation Sovereign Borders – a military-led response to “combat people smuggling and protect Australia’s borders” – to the September 2013 federal election. Apocalypse Theatre initiated an immediate response by inviting playwrights across the country to create plays examining this widely debated policy and the selected plays matched to directors and actors. For 12 nights 24 new Australian works, largely presented as staged readings, consider what it means to seek asylum.
Collaboration between Braverman and Phillippou has created a unique, often amusing but above all deeply moving piece of theatre. “Wot? No Fish!” is a solo performance based on real people and events with no aids other than an initial introduction to the taste of gefilte fish dipped into beetroot and horseradish sauce, a shoebox and an overhead projector. Braverman delighted his audience with his presentation of the family life of a Jewish couple in a twentieth century London’s East End through the artwork of the husband, Ab Solomons.
WATERLOO: On Thursday November 6, from 4 to 5.30pm, The Factory Community Centre hosted a fantastic workshop on making a zine, a self-published booklet, led by prolific zine creator, Nicholas Beckett.
On entering the theatre space the audience is met by an apparently simple but devastatingly beautiful set combining in its elements the themes of this wonderfully presented story of struggle, personal, political and universal.
