she/her Brisbane/Meanjin I like fancy cocktails, pro wrestling, and spooky shit.
Breaking attendance predictions made for every year up until 2019, the 2016 Brisbane Anywhere Festival has cemented itself as one of the most successful in the festival’s history – excellent news, just as cuts to arts funding are already causing damage to the industry’s small to medium sector groups. Productions this year took place at abandoned…
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Earlier this month, the line-up for the 2016 Brisbane Festival dropped, and this year’s theme is ‘Welcome to Youtopia‘. To celebrate the reveal, and to start getting you all super pumped for a jam-packed September, we’ve compiled a list of the ten shows you’d be mad to miss. We’ve left the countdown in the capable hands…
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Brisbane comedian Jenny Wynter will be jetting off to France later this year, to take up a prestigious screenwriting residency at Marseille WebFest. The opportunity comes courtesy of Melbourne WebFest, who chose Wynter’s pitch for comedy Viking Mama as the winner of their inaugural Pitch Perfect Award. A joint venture between Melbourne WebFest and ABC…
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Perth’s FRINGE WORLD Festival has released it’s annual Festival Impact Report, which covers the significant and positive social, cultural, and business impacts the yearly event has on both the city and the state as a whole. 713 events were spread across 159 venues, featuring 3,381 artists, both local and international. It is recognised as the third…
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Best selling author Nicole Alexander holds a unique place in the book world as the only female author in the rural literature genre making Australian rural history accessible through her popular fiction. Dividing her time between writing and managing her family’s agricultural holdings, passed down through the generations since 1893, Nicole’s novels are rich with historical detail and…
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Showcasing the work of over 20 artists from refugee backgrounds, Casula Powerhouse will present a free exhibition, featuring 65 works that aim to humanise both the current refugee crisis and similar situations from global history. With 22 international and Australian artists behind the 65 works on display, over 120 years of refugee history will be…
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Now in its 6th year, the Festival of Performing Arts (FOPA) has announced the major acts for the three day festival, which will take place from the 2nd to the 4th of September, in the Surf Coast of Lorne, Victoria. Heading the line-up are Tom Gleeson, Denise Scott, and All Our Exes Live in Texas. Started by the Lorne Community Arts…
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Sydney Theatre Company are set to start a run of The Hanging, by 2013 Patrick White Fellow Angela Betzien in late July. The production will feature Puberty Blues and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries actress Ashleigh Cummings in her STC debut. The Hanging follows the aftermath of the disappearance of three teenage girls in the Melbourne hinterland. When…
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A celebration of iconic Aussie musician Kylie Minogue will open at Arts Centre Melbourne in September. The free exhibition, Kylie On Stage, will focus on some of the singer’s most magical moments from concert tours throughout her career, featuring costumes dating as far back as 1989. “Touring and live performance has been such a big…
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Presenting 33 masterpieces from the collection of Jacques and Natasha Gelman, an exhibition featuring the work of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera has opened this past weekend at the Art Gallery of NSW. Two of modern art history’s most famous names, Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are as famous for their communist leaning…
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On July 9th, Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre will play host to some of Australia’s hottest comedians, singers, and media personalities, all coming together in support of those affected by the mass shooting at gay nightclub Pulse on June 16th. Part glittering show of solidarity between the Australian and American gay communities, and part concentrated effort to…
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Opening this weekend at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation gallery, in Sydney’s Paddington, After Voices is an immersive art installation from award winning Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto. Drawing inspiration from the fall of Surhato’s New Order, and his own experiences of social hysteria and trauma, Kuswidananto’s multi-disciplinary installation features a series of life-size ‘ghost figures’ on parade throughout…
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George Eliot’s 1860 novel is to receive the theatre treatment this winter, with an adaptation by Helen Edmundson set to première at St Kilda’s Theatre Works from July 28th. Presented by OpticNerve, and directed by company founder Tanya Gerstle, The Mill on the Floss follows the story of Maggie Tulliver, a young woman stifled by the…
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Inspired by the true story of iconic artist Pablo Picasso and his four legged muse, Lump, Picasso and His Dog, presented by Darebin Arts Loud Mouth, and Lemony S Puppet Theatre will open these school holidays. Sausage dog Lump arrived at Picasso’s Cannes villa in 1957 with his owner, the photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, and wound up staying…
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SWELL Sculpture Festival, the largest outdoor art exhibition in Queensland, has revealed the 55 artists that will be taking part in the 2016 event, held in September on the Gold Coast. Over a ten day period, Currumbin Beach will be transformed into a free outdoor gallery, featuring 50 works by both Australian and international artists….
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Hosted by the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, choreographers Stephanie Lake and Ross McCormack will present an intensely personal double-bill, in a brief run of shows from June 23rd to 25th. Deriving their work from a challenge set by Dancenorth artistic director Kevin Page, Lake and McCormack were asked to to…
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Heather and Dave are expecting. Finding the perfect home for their growing family, they settle down to await the new arrival. But tragedy strikes and a grieving Heather finds no comfort in the new house they were so excited to share with their first born. The Paper House, the debut novel from Anna Spargo-Ryan, follows…
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As part of a joint venture between the Australian Greens party and Perth theatre group The Cutting Room Floor, WA Senator Scott Ludlam is taking over a home in suburbia, for a night of theatre from some of the city’s best and brightest upcoming artists. In Home Open: An Evening of Green, The Cutting Room…
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Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein, forms an unlikely subject for London’s Royal Ballet. Choreographed by Artist-In-Residence Liam Scarlett, the Covent Garden based company’s performance will receive its Australian première, in an exclusive screening event in Sydney later this month. Reunited with composer Lowell Liebermann, and designer John Macfarlane, and featuring principal dancers Federico Bonelli (Victor Frankenstein),…
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Co-comissioned by the Brisbane Festival in 2015, Il Ritorno wowed audiences in the River City last September with its fusion of stripped back acrobatics and baroque opera. This coming August, the creators, Brisbane based circus troupe Circa, are bringing the show to Melbourne, for a strictly limited run. Headed by artistic director Yaron Lifschitz and…
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After a sell out season at the Adelaide Fringe, Danielle Baynes, with Lies, Lies and Propaganda, is set to bring her one woman play, Bicycle, to the Old Fitz Theatre, Woolloomooloo, later this month. A thematic mash-up made up of one part Gothic horror and one part celebration of a female “first”, Bicycle follows a Victorian Englishwoman…
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Splendour in the Grass 2016 is almost upon us, and with that comes the announcement of its arts programs – Splendour Arts and Splendour in the Craft. This year’s Splendour Arts will feature six major pieces scattered across the events site, curated by artist Craig Walsh. The Arch Tunnel Response, a site responsive painting by Melbourne…
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Quarterly magazine The Lifted Brow is nearing its tenth birthday, after thirty issues dedicated to showcasing young Australian literary and artistic talent. The 30th issue is both a milestone publication for the team, and also a swan song for editors Ellena Savage and Gillian Terzis, who have been with the magazine since its relaunch in 2015….
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Supported by VIVID Ideas 2016, Telling Tales: Excursions in Narrative Form opens this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sydney. Running from June 2nd until early October, Telling Tales explores inventive approaches taken by Australian and international artists to the narrative form. Ahead of opening weekend, MCA has released a schedule of events showcasing…
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At the Australian Booksellers Association Conference in Canberra, the 2016 shortlist for the prestigious Miles Literary Award was announced. With a focus on uniquely Australian identities and struggles, this year’s nominees, including three authors shortlisted for the first time, are in the running for a $60,000 prize. Making the 2016 shortlist are: Hope Farm by Peggy Frew…
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Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, lead by director Susanna Dowling, will present a season of Nina Raine‘s awarding winning play Tribes, previewing later this week. In Raine’s acclaimed show, Billy, a deaf man from a intellectual, though comically dysfunctional, Jewish family, meets Sylvia, who teaches him sign language. Exploring the idea of families and communities as ‘tribes’, governed…
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Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre is set to host the world première of Come Away With Me To The End Of The World, a visual, voyeuristic piece of theatre from award winning theatre company Ranters Theatre. Eavesdropping on conversations between three characters, audiences will be taken on a journey through their actual lives and their dreamed realities –…
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Arts sector funding cuts promised during the 2015 Federal Government budget have begun to claim victims, making the future of organisations across Australia ever more uncertain. The small to medium arts sector is set to be the worst hit, a disastrous move that could see many new and emerging talents halted in their tracks. In…
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At the wrap party for the 12th Sydney Comedy Festival, the winners of this year’s awards were announced, including international acts Daniel Sloss and Ivan Aristeguieta, and festival favourite Frank Woodley. The largest festival yet, the 2016 event boasted some 220 shows, and entertained an estimated 140,000 comedy fans. At the Factory Theatre event, festival…
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Ahead of the May 20th announcement of the winners, the Sydney Theatre Company has released the shortlist of plays in the running to for this year’s prestigious Patrick White Playwrights’ Award. Named for Australian playwright Patrick White, the award is presented to an original, unproduced play. The winning playwright will receive $7500, and have the…
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