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The creation of co-directors Jemma Cole, Sam Whiteside and Thorsten Hertog, Soft Centre is an experimental electronic music and multidisciplinary arts festival held annually at Sydney’s Casula Powerhouse. An amalgamation of the various warehouse party communities that have marked Sydney’s underground movement in recent years, the one-day event seeks to redefine the festival experience via
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Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell talks about this year’s OzAsia line-up with Murray Bramwell. * Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival has come a long way since its inception in 2006. Initiated by Adelaide Festival Centre CEO Douglas Gautier, who brought his extensive list of contacts from the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the program remained in the capable hands
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Mid-summer, one of the searing images burnt into our collective memory was the millions of dead fish floating in the Darling River at Menindee. Extreme climate conditions, drought, low flows and irrigators pumping too much water upstream were all cited as factors in the devastation. The Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) manages the operation of
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2019 is the 50th anniversary of the three-day music festival held near Woodstock, 90 minutes outside New York City. That year, the gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn (actually a bar) in Greenwich Village in NYC stood up to cops who felt free to bash gays. It was a show-down that launched a movement. Also in 1969, new President
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By Daily Review
Down and Out in Paradise subtitled East West. Sex Death, is a memoir (Echo $32.99) by journalist and two-time Walkley nominee Luke Williams. His first book The Ice Age: A Journey into Crystal-Meth Addiction was nominated for both a Walkley and the Nib Waverley Literary Prize. In his new book, he recounts coming down off crystal meth and getting the hell
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We’re not in the Opera House anymore, Toto. It’s cold. The seats are uncomfortably plastic. And the opera is unlike any you’ve probably experienced before. In fact, the drafty, dusty setting – a warehouse in post-industrial Surry Hills, Opera Australia’s scenery workshop by day – befits the creepy nature of the work at hand. But
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A new exhibition in Melbourne and a book on the Bauhaus – the German art school of the 1920s – offer a new history of the avant-garde and art education in Australia, writes Darren Jorgensen. The influence of the Bauhaus is a diffuse one as emigres fled the Second World War to find their place slowly in the classrooms of
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As the lonely, sex-starved, pill-popping housewife Harper Pitt said to the mannequin in the Mormon Center diorama: “How do people change?” “Well,” the mannequin responds, “it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy
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There’s a great scene in the often great Fosse/Verdon, the recent TV bio-series, if we’re to believe it, showing a tense rehearsal of Chicago’s final number before its Broadway debut in 1975. Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb have delivered a closing song for the character of Roxy, the cheeky Nowadays. It’s the perfect
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Rob Reid’s production of The Bacchae (a co-production of Melbourne’s La Mama, and Monash University Student Theatre) at the La Mama Courthouse last month was epic, writes Toby Manderson-Galvin… It was a production,”the likes of which has not appeared in Melbourne, at the very least, in the past couple of decades – but truly, I dare
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