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Trust, Schaubühne photo courtesy Perth Festival |
perth festival
If you needed a reason to head west this summer, some of the offerings at the Perth Festival should float your boat. When we saw Trust at Berlin’s Schaubuhne last year, we hoped that this innovative theatre-dance work would hit the festival circuit and here it is! Trust is a socially critical and sometimes comical work in which Falk Richter’s lateral text is spoken but also inventively danced/moved by a multi-skilled team of actors and dancers co-directed by Richter with choreographer Anouk van Dijk (RT95). The program also features Out of Context: for Pina, Alain Platel’s Les Ballets C de la B tribute to Pina Bausch which our writer Jana Perkovic described as “emotionally penetrating and deliriously enjoyable” (R98). Lucy Guerin Inc performs its disturbing Human Interest Story (RT99); Steve Reich presents the Australian premiere of his acclaimed new work 2 x 5; and Bang on a Can All Stars bring rivetting works by Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, Thurston Moore, Steve Martland and David Lang. 2011 Perth Festival, February 11- March 7; www.perthfestival.com.au
ten days on the island
True festival junkies will then move on to cooler climes for Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island in March. We’ll have a full preview in RealTime 101, but a sample of the program might whet your appetite. Power Plant from the UK will transform the Botanical Gardens into a series of sound and light installations “where the nocturnal beauty of the gardens is the real star.” New works and commissions from local and interstate artists include Craig Walsh’s magical Digital Odyssey projections at Sullivan’s Cove. In Dance Marathon, Canadian company bluemouth inc somehow creates a “fun show” inspired by the dance endurance contests of 1920s and 30s America. Chamber Made Opera presents the first part of their Minotaur project, a contemporary chamber reconstruction of Monteverdi’s lost opera, L’Arianna. Launceston’s youth dance company, Stompin’, premieres I Love Cars, “a site-specific, multi-art mash-up exploring our enduring love affair with motor vehicles.” Tasdance’s Artery brings together four choreographers—Trisha Dunn, Alice Lee Holland, Solon Ulbrich and Adam Wheeler—and Scottish composer/ choreographer/musician/writer Billy Cowie’s Stereoscopic combines “stereoscopic filmmaking with inventive dance choreography and sound scores for an immersive 3D encounter.” In the Dance Hall series you can dance yourself silly to music “from Greece to Haiti, from Trinidad and Tobago to Zanzibar, and with the sounds of Pacific reggae.” Ten Days on the Island, March 25-April 3, www.tendaysontheisland.com
stop(the)gap
Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion is a major international Indigenous moving image project developed for the 2011 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival (BAFF) in partnership with the Samstag Museum of Art. Curator Brenda L Croft has selected works that “challenge preconceptions of contemporary Indigenous expression and address themes of human rights, environmental concerns, cultural security and negotiating diversity.” She says, “Some of the most provocative and illuminating moving image work today is being created by Indigenous new media artists—yet there has been no international focus on this work until now. Despite physical distances, Indigenous communities around the globe are linked through their shared colonial histories, each bearing scars borne of dispossession, injustice, inequality and misrepresentation.” The project explores the connections between cinema and the visual arts, and will feature moving image exhibitions, film screenings, outdoor projections and discussions. Filmmaker Warwick Thornton has been commissioned through the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund to create a new work for the project. Other participating artists include r e a and Genevieve Grieves (Australia), Dana Claxon and Rebecca Belmore (Canada), Alan Michelson and Eric Lord (USA) Nova Paul and Lisa Reihana (Aotearoa /NZ). Stop(the)Gap, Samstag Museum of Art, Feb 24-April 21, 2011, www.unisa.edu/samstagmuseum; www.adelaidefilmfestival.org
push international festival of performing arts, vancouver
Director Norman Armour describes this year’s PuSH program as engaging with ‘cityness’. He writes, “The 125th Anniversary Series (a suite of performances and events that looks at questions of urban experience, the everyday, our history and civic identity) is our single most ambitious curatorial undertaking to date...There are a number of boundary-pushing works that invite you to venture from the theatre and out into public spaces. It’s a time to speak to the values and vision we have as a city. It’s a time to affirm how profoundly art impacts individuals, and how radically it can transform societies.” The Antwerp-based company Berlin will present a documentary installation on Canada’s smallest capital, the Inuit city of Iqaluit, and a cinematic portrait of a desolate mining town (Bonanza). Rimini Protokoll continue their 100% series and, after 100%Berlin and 100%Vienna, create an accurate demographic synecdoche of Vancouver on stage, using 100 randomly selected local participants. Boca del Lupo, Vancouver performance company, collaborate with Argentinian writer and director Mariano Pensotti on La Marea (The Tide), a dramatic work presented throughout the urban space over the course of the evening, while the incidental audience can read the characters’ inner thoughts through projected subtitles. It is hard to do justice to the riches on offer. Visit the PuSh website and see for yourself, then make your way to Vancouver. PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts, Jan 18-Feb 6, 2011, http://pushfestival.ca
womadelaide
Adelaide is the place to be in March when Botanic Park will again be the setting for WOMAdelaide, Australia’s iconic four-day celebration of music, arts and dance from around the world. This year’s potent line-up includes Angus and Julia, Afro Celt Sound System, Amadou and Mariam, Joanna Newsom, punk-reggae icon Don Letts, UK DJ Norman Jay, Nigerian singer-songwriter Asa, The Necks, Irish rockabilly singer Imelda May and the big band Juan De Marcos Afro-Cuban All Stars. As always there’s much more than music: France’s Le Phun will spend three weeks leading up to the festival “building six magical installations for their performance piece Les Gûmes (a play on the French word for vegetables), where a surprising society has taken root in a vegetable kingdom and mutated into half-human, half-plant beings.” Dance, with more exciting music, comes in the form of Breathe, a collaboration between Leigh Warren & Dancers, Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Frances Rings and didgeridoo player William Barton. Womadelaide, March 11-14 March 2011, www.womadelaide.com.au
the now now, sydney
In recent years, there’s been a marked increase in experimental music activity over summer. To a large degree this is due to The NOW Now festival, which in 2011 celebrates its 10th year and swaps the crisp air of the Blue Mountains for the gritty city over two weekends in three venues—the Red Rattler in Marrickville, Serial Space in Chippendale and a “secret” venue—People’s Republic of Australasia. As always, an abundance of artists will be ready to spontaneously make music in all manner of combinations. The Un-Australian String Quartet features Jon Rose, Hollis Taylor, James Rushford and Judith Hamman; from Zurich, Jason Kahn will perform on analogue synthesiser with Matt Earle and Adam Sussmann of Stasis Duo fame on electronics; Roil brings together Chris Abrahams, Mike Majkowski and James Waples; and then there’s the warped wonder of Sky Needle—Joel Stern, Alex Cuffe, Ross Manning and Sarah Byrne (see earbash review). Add to this more international artists also presented at Sound Out (read on). The NOW now, Red Rattler, Serial Space, The People’s Republic of Australasia, Jan 21-24, Jan 26-28, Sydney, www.theNOWnow.net
sound out, canberra
The NOW now is no longer alone in the summer time slot, since 2009 there’s MOFO (see interview with curator Brian Ritchie) and now an even newer kid on the block. Canberra’s Sound Out director Richard Johnson spruiks his festival as celebrating the “tremendous growth and maturing within the experimental and new music scene in the Canberra region.” This new event creates an attractive touring circuit in Australia over January for international artists. The NOW now and Sound Out have the joint honour of presenting Yan Jun, pioneering noisician from China; drummer Tony Buck and Berlin-based pianist Magda Mayas; Duo Vulgarités from Canada, who appear to play just about everything from batteries to trumpet; guitarist Kim Myhr from Norway; pianist Cor Fuhler from Germany; and Scandinavian trio The Thing, with Mats Gustafsson on saxes, Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ingebrigt Haken Flaten on double bass. Sound Out, offers four concert sessions over two days at the Street Theatre and will also feature Australian musicians Dale Gorfinkel, Laura Altman and Monica Brooks as well as artists from the healthy local scene such as Spartak, Shoeb Ahmad and Evan Dorria. Plenty of good reasons for a road trip to the national capital! Sound Out 2011, Street Theatre, Canberra, Jan 29-30, 2010, www.thestreet.org.au http://soundout2011.blogspot.com/
RealTime issue #100 Dec-Jan 2010 pg. 47
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