Many people’s only experience with artists is when they view their work as audience members, where much of the in-between of the artist’s life is hidden or unsaid. After his contract ended with a prominent dance company, Rodney Bell Ngāti Maniapoto stepped off the stage into homelessness. Now back home in Aotearoa (New Zealand), he reflects on those contrasting experiences in a mix of dance and storytelling.
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As we continue to face worsening climate catastrophes and conditions, many across Australia are calling on the nation to embrace the traditions of custodianship that Aboriginal people have been using to care for the land for millennia. Ten years on from the first production of Terrain, Bangarra Dance Theatre revisits the meaning and messages of caring for Country under the direction of new artistic director Frances Rings.
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Fewer and fewer people these days have memories of pulling into the local video or DVD rental store to choose the selection of titles you would consume over the weekend. The closure of Blockbuster in 2014 felt like a huge blow to the industry as streaming services like Netflix took over. In the years since, more and more small, independent rental stores have met the same fate. Coil is an homage to those days and the memories so deeply embedded in films.
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Edward Albee’s searing critique of 1960s American polite society is a classic but that doesn’t exclude it from examination as time, opinion, and attitudes change. In this production the text gets held up to the light, prodded a bit; does this thing still hold up? Does it still ring true?
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The first new full-length work from Bangarra in three years tells the stories and knowledge of the Wangkatjungka and Walmajarri people from the Kimberley and Great Sandy Desert regions. The combination of traditional dances, interpretations of true stories, and exploration of colonisation in SandSong are performed in honour of cultural collaborator and Wangkatjungka woman Ningali Josie Lawford-Wolf.
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Image by Daniel Boud
Performance collective Branch Nebula are looking to interrogate the boundaries of “theatre” including opening the form up to interdisciplinary fields of dance and sport and unusual urban modes. High Performance Packing Tape uses everyday materials to construct a homemade aesthetic and redefine theatrical expectations.
Image by Dan Grant
A plane crash, a suicide, an orphan, and a supernatural light that might provide intergenerational electrical powers and telepathic communication capabilities. After runs at Dark Mofo and Home of the Arts in Brisbane, Side Pony Productions and The Last Great Hunt bring their scifi thriller The Irresistible to the Sydney Opera House for UnWrapped.
Image by Daniel Boud
Five young women from Western Sydney have a lot of differences from their personal style to their family history to their cultural upbringing but music matters to all of them as comfort, inspiration, and a field to express themselves as growing and changing individuals. Playlist is about being a woman today with the soaring successes of legal and political freedom in hand with all the other ways woman are still kept quiet and scared.
Image by Daniel Boud
It’s 2019 and death, the one inevitability, is still a taboo subject. Fascinated by the lack of transparency in the death and funeral industry, artist Lara Thoms has teamed up with ex-funeral director Scott Turnbull to lift the lid and answer some common questions about dying in The Director.
Image by Daniel Boud
Ghenoa Gela is a multi-medium performer using dance, theatre, and a bit of stand-up comedy to tell the story of herself in My Urrwai. “Urrwai” loosely translates into English as a personal style or essence so Gela’s solo production represents many aspects of her identity as Torres Strait Islander woman, a dancer and performer, and someone finding her way outside the Western heterosexual binary.
Night Writes 