Some forty-five years ago, there was very little information and treatment available for mental illness so, when Anne’s first son Jonathan began acting out, getting aggressive, skipping school, and speaking about things no one else could see, the rough road to a diagnosis was only the beginning of the family’s battle to get Jonathan help and safety.
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There are many myths about the colonisation of Australia used to justify the invasion and genocide, to demand gratitude from First Nations people, and especially to erase the language, culture, and lives of First Nations people prior to colonisation. Writers like Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian Bruce Pascoe and plangermairreenner of the Ben Lomond people Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta have worked for decades to dispel some of the myths that persist today. This new play from Palawa playwright Dylan Van Den Berg takes up the task to rewrite the understanding of queerness amongst First Nations cultures.
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The world of big finance is deliberately obscured such that the average person isn’t aware of a problem until the economy comes crashing down around them and they lose all their savings. It’s part of the appeal of movies like the Big Short or Wall Street, which part the curtain on banks, brokerages, and the intricate financial systems that hold them all together. Beth Steel’s 2016 script shoulders its way behind the scenes of the 1981 US Recession, specifically, and the banks that made it possible.
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The scientific theory of the multiverse, where there are infinite universes in which every possibility may have already happened, is a difficult idea to wrap the mind around but we play with these hypotheticals all the time. What would my life be like if I hadn’t met that person? How would my life be different if I hadn’t taken that job? Or maybe, what would I do if I ever got sick?
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Perhaps you’ve had the experience of being trapped in a conversation with someone emphatically asking, “What does art do? What is the point of it?” Or maybe you’ve been the one doing the trapping. Either way, it became a desperate, high-stakes question when the COVID-19 pandemic began ripping through the art scene in 2020 and Australian artists were hung out to dry without their audiences. And, yet, the question of art’s purpose stretches back centuries, as illustrated in this second production of the year from the Sydney University Musical Theatre Ensemble.
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China is a prominent topic of conversation in Australian media, especially in recent times with shuffling political positioning between China, America, and Taiwan or between China and the Pacific island nations. As close neighbours, Australia likes to keep an eye on China, for better or worse, but we’re not the only ones as the term “Chimerica”, coined in 2006 by historian Niall Ferguson and economist Moritz Schularick to denote the relationship between the United States and China and its impact on global economic and cultural systems, indicates.
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A community of college students are left reeling after a pair of their fraternity brothers perpetrate a horrible crime against a sorority sister, leaving her hospitalised and unable to speak. In an examination of the after affects of sexual violence, How To Defend Yourself considers the ways these students are being failed by the institutions around them and a society that does not adequately interrogate its rape culture.
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Life can be dull or repetitive and it makes you numb to your own desires. Then one day someone pops up and encourages you to walk on the other side of the street for a while and suddenly the world is new again. At least that’s the plot of some of the best romantic comedies out there, and Crossing Delancey is no different.
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If so much of the world doesn’t make sense for adults then one can only imagine how children square the unfairness and hypocrisy around them. For this one young boy, many things are confusing like witches and God and injustice but then some things like love and happiness and fun couldn’t be simpler.
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The spirit of collaboration and love of movement comes alive in the Dance Bites program for 2022 from FORM Dance Projects and Riverside Theatres. Let’s DANCE brings together a double bill of movement works roots in connection, reciprocity, and collaboration between artists, performers and audiences, and art and technology.
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Night Writes 