ArtsLab is Shopfront Arts Cooperative’s annual emerging artists’ festival, and each year offers a new, exciting and varied program. See it this year, writes Catherine Skipper, as your support will help to ensure a vibrant future for the arts in Australia.
In At What Cost? writer Nathan Maynard addresses hard truths from Tasmania’s past that must be told. It also tackles vexatious issues of the Australian post-colonial present.
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls of Tehran explores how entitlement, conspicuous consumption and a life without meaning other than self-advertisement have usurped the values of modesty, charity and belief.
Wudjang: Not the Past mixes the world of the song cycle with the energy of dance. But it is through its use of the Mununjali language that we absorb a feeling, a reverence, for Country about which and through which Stephen Page is telling both his own story and our story.
Playwright Tom Holloway explores why people would queue to sit in a chair and lock eyes with an artist in a gallery and other meaty questions in the world premiere production of The Museum of Modern Love in January 2022.
The Boomkak Panto at Belvoir is a fairy tale, and the villains loudly booed by the willing audience meet a bad end and the queer AF love story triumphs – a great night on the town.
Filmed over five years, I’m Wanita is the story of Wanita Bahtiyar, flamboyant country singer from Tamworth, as she heads to the US to realise her lifelong dream of recording an album in Nashville, honkytonk capital of the world.
The World’s Best Film
Director: Joshua Belinfante
15th Annual Sydney Underground Film Festival
September 9-26, 2021
Joshua Belinfante was studying to be a solicitor when he was told...
SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert is Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first new full-length work for three years, and in keeping with their unique signature style it combines authentic storytelling, superb technique and a powerfully emotive performance.
The uppermost theme of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is not merely large-scale change but how to adjust to a change that is already in the process of taking place. Consequently Eamon Flack’s up-dated, thought-provoking and up-beat adaptation and staging of Chekhov’s much-loved play has much of importance to offer to our present, uncertain times.
The declared mission of new company, Fuser Production, is “to stir the human spirit” and incite “awe, challenge and inspiration through original and compelling art” and Intact, its debut performance, is deeply engaging and awe-inspiring.
You could watch TV or Netflix, but if you really wanted a completely absorbing and dynamic 60 minutes of entertainment you could see Tiny Universe, co-presented by Milk Crate Theatre and Shopfront Art Co-Op. Showing for a very short season, Tiny Universe deserves a longer season and a more extensive audience.
Bringing Martin Sherman’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s rich and sprawling novel A Passage to India to the compact stage of the Genesian would have posed many challenges. Apart from a large number of characters and costumes, a diversity of locations, the narrative is in no haste to reach its haunting conclusion.
David Ireland’s award-winning satire Ulster American takes as its target the current Western concern with constructing inclusive and equal cultural identities.
Dogged offers theatregoers a unique and startling theatre experience. Unflinchingly facing the problematic relationship between black and white people in Australia, it is a brilliantly conceived, powerfully realised and deeply confronting parable.
Talking to Harriet Gordon-Anderson as she walks to rehearsals at 8.30am for Belfast-born David Ireland’s hard-hitting play Ulster American is an invigorating experience.
Monologues work well in an intimate space, and the small King Street Theatre Popupsairs venue works well for Sylvia Marie Keays in Paul Gilchrist’s Live a Little. As Tilly, a young woman who has an uneasy relationship with herself, with others and with the truth, Keays is by turns insouciant, witty and distraught.
In Stop Girl award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent Sally Sara offer us a semi-autobiographical story of grief and guilt, trusting that we will respond with understanding and compassion. Directed with integrity by Anna-Louise Sarks, the play offers a moving validation of the concept of moral injury.
Gratefully, we welcome back Monkey Baa Children’s Theatre to the stage after a year’s absence. Their first 2021 production, an hilarious and imaginative musical adaption of Pete the Sheep, based on a whimsical tale by Jackie French and Bruce Whatly, adapted by Eva Di Cesare, Sandra Eldridge and Tim McGarry, with lyrics by Phil Scott, is dynamic and absorbing entertainment for the 4 to 84 year olds.
The Secret of Chimneys is lovely fun. There’s a body, a stolen letter, a secret code, a hidden black diamond necklace and a missing person along with a gallery of wonderfully exaggerated and beautifully performed characters under the strong direction of Molly Haddon.
Jeremy Goldstein is the creative force behind Truth to Power Café, a cathartic theatrical experience in which people of all ages, beliefs and backgrounds...
ArtsLab: Unreliable Witness is the youth-led Shopfront Arts Co-op’s annual emerging artists’ festival featuring a program of five works exploring the theme of perception and misperception. Each of these diverse works including two outstanding theatre performances is the outcome of a six-month residency at Shopfront in which young artists, selected from many applicants, are given the opportunity to work with an industrial mentor.
John Donnelly’s gripping The Pass asks us to consider the age-old question: how best to live both an authentic and fulfilling life. Recontextualised in the world of 21st-century elite professional football, the question becomes how much the central character, Jason, is prepared to sacrifice for success and more importantly, how is success defined.
Funny, fast-paced and extravagantly joyful, the exuberant and inventive musical Fangirls lovingly celebrates the millions of teenager girls for whom a crush on a pop idol is a real and transformative experience.
This year’s biennial and fifth Yellamundie Festival, a unique platform for the identification, development and presentation of First Peoples stories, opened up submissions to composers and choreographers.
Deng Deng plays the role of Nigerian Ade alongside Ben Chapple’s Jason, both caught up in the demands of the world of elite sport with its still toxic codes of masculinity and racism.
The award-winning documentary Firestarter – The Story of Bangarra celebrates the impressive rise of the Bangarra Dance Theatre Company over 30 years from humble beginnings to international fame.
The joyous hilarity of the Genesian’s William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged) makes it a worthy rival to its very popular predecessor The Complete Shakespeare.
In her illuminating and dynamic stage adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career writer Kendall Feaver has included material from further afield than the original, drawing on My Career Goes Bung, Franklin’s childhood memoirs and biographical studies. Consequently, we have a fuller and deeper impression of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, an appealingly provocative character, created by the 19-year-old Stella Franklin, and which, while located in personal experience, far transcends it.
Liesel Badorrek, director of CDP Kids’ Summer Spectacular, says that there is something for every child as Australia’s favourite books come to life with three shows and five seasons in January.
Ostensibly, Kodie Bedford’s comedy is about the reunion of a dysfunctional family drawn back to Geraldton by their grandmother’s imminent death. However, on the well-tried principle that comedy makes unpalatable truths acceptable, it is an ultimately hopeful interrogation of post-colonial Australia.
Wicked Sisters is an excellent piece of theatrical entertainment. While it encompasses many themes relevant to our times, the dynamics between the four middle-aged women, former friends reunited after several decades, is completely engrossing.
This dynamic production of The Silver Tunnel, advertised as “a hell of a play in a holy place”, marks the repurposing of the Ashfield Uniting Church as a new Inner West performance space. A brainchild of the Rev. Bill Crews, who has been an advocate for the poor and homeless for over 50 years, this new entertainment space aims at raising awareness and funds for the disadvantaged.
The Genesian Theatre is excited to be reopening on November 6 with Sherlock Holmes and the Death on Thor Bridge. The show was preparing to go into production when the theatre was forced to close owing to Covid-19, but the virus has had a positive side for the Genesian, central Sydney’s oldest operating community theatre.
An important condition of the Archibald Prize is that the portrait of an individual “distinguished in the arts, letters, science or politics” has to...
A delightfully middle-aged Di Adams plays the role of Hester in the Griffin production Wicked Sisters and she is delighted to be back on the stage, and delighted to be in a play by feminist Alma de Groen that feels “even more relevant than ever”.
Producer Luke Holmes is fully conscious that audiences may have become accustomed to watching theatre from the best seat in their own home. Consequently, he and director Davey Seagles are promising theatregoers 70 minutes of escapist fun in Hotel Bella Luna which opens at the Marrickville’s Flight Path Theatre on October 22.
To say that Tenet is a time-travel sci-fi film really doesn’t do it justice. Time isn’t travelled so much as it is scrunched up and folded over multiple times.
Streamed once and once only, but capable of reaching a global audience, Welcome to the Masque is a welcome relief from the constant barrage of Covid-19 media coverage. The title’s play upon “masque”, a form amateur theatricals and a popular court entertainment in the eighteenth century, wittily references the current command or recommendation to wear a mask.
It is difficult at any time for our small not-for-profit local organisations working to support vulnerable people to find sufficient funding. So, imagine the...
The Sydney Theatre Company is plugging the large “theatre-shaped” hole left by the forced closure of public venues to prevent the spreading of Covid-19....
