Darren Yap has been a part of some huge moments in Australian performing arts history, from acting in Miss Saigon to being on the directorial team for the Sydney 2000 closing ceremony. Now he's using his talents to bringing new Asian Australian work to the stage.

Also, we meet artists behind a surge of Asian Australian plays on our mainstages right now and Neil Armfield joins us to pay tribute to the English theatre director Peter Brook, famous for his reinvention of contemporary theatre.

British author Benjamin Myers says he likes to be on the margins as a writer and his latest novel, The Perfect Golden Circle, is about the crop circles that appeared in 1989 in the English countryside and explores the type of people who created them.

Also Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell explain their genre-bending book, Mothertongues and Noongar author, Claire G Coleman's mysterious and unsettling book, Enclave, set in a walled Australian city.

It’s time to Get up, stand up, show up- the theme for NAIDOC week 2022. 

Stop Everything presents highlights celebrating the depth of talent from First Nations creatives working in music, television and theatre.

BL is joined by BARKAA, a Malyangapa Barkindji woman from Western New South Wales signed to Briggs’ Bad Apples Music label to talk about the Blak Matriarchy she belongs to.

BL + BW dig into the ABC show, All My Friends are Racist with co stars, Davey Thomson and Tuuli Narkle and award winning screenwriter, Kodie Bedford, discusses the AMC+ original series Firebite, a supernatural series set in an underground mining town in central Australia where First Nations vampire slayers battle a colony of white vampires.

Show notes:

BARKAA: https://www.barkaa.com.au/

Stop Everything with BARKAA: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stop-everything/barkaa-blak-matriarchy/13636952

Stop Everything with Davey Thomson and Tuuli Narkle: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stop-everything/all-my-friends-are-racist/13503708

Stop Everything with Kodie Bedford: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stop-everything/kodie-bedford-joe-rogan/13749530

For NAIDOC Week we're joined by Warren H. Williams, co-creator & star of a unique and stunningly shot new crime series, True Colours, NITV's first foray into longform drama, and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt, who talks about Warriors on the Field, a celebration of Indigenous Australia and its long-standing history and connection with Australian football. Two exciting directors from Finland will also be along.....Juho Kuosmanen and Mikko Myllylahti, for a conversation about Finnish storytelling and their new films, the Cannes winning Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen), and The Woodcutter Story (Mikko Myllylahti), both set to screen in Australia. Plus, Sunil and a very special guest are on the red carpet for the premiere of Thor: Love and Thunder and put some questions to Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth.

Richard Bell is one of the few individual artists curated into Documenta 15, the highly-anticipated global survey of contemporary art. This year, for the first time, it’s been dominated by artists and collectives from the Global South. But the historic takeover has been eclipsed by a media storm ignited by what appears to be a Jewish caricature in a mural painted by Indonesian artist group Taring Padi, since taken down. 

Queensland-born sculptor Sebastian di Mauro who now calls Delaware home, discusses his obsession with materiality and his new exhibition featuring appliquéd army blankets based on the arcane imagery on American dollar notes. 

And we discover the little-known painter Edward Brezinski who lived on the fringes of the hyperactive 1980s New York art scene that produced Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. His desperate bid for fame is charted in the new documentary Make Me Famous which also offers a fascinating insight into the ecosystem of the art business.

Our oldest modern dance company, the Australian Dance Theatre, has been delighting and challenging audiences for nearly 60 years. Now Wiradjuri dancer and choreographer Daniel Riley is at the helm, becoming the first Indigenous man to lead the company.

Also, we meet the winner of this year's Keir Choreographic Award, Tra Mi Dinh, and Wesley Enoch's joyous musical The Sunshine Club returns to the Queensland Theatre stage after 23 years.

For NAIDOC Week, three Aboriginal writers who are grappling with the past: Anita Heiss takes the 1852 Gundagai flood as the starting point for her novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, Tony Birch explores his family history in Dark as Last Night and SJ Norman's, Permafrost, a collection of haunted short stories.

He’s been at the top of Stop Everything!’s interview wish list for awhile and we got him: Taika Waititi talks to Ben Law about his latest film for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Love and Thunder, the follow up to Thor: Ragnarok.

Podcaster Helen Zaltzman catches up with BW to talk about The Allusionist’s upcoming tour of Australia and Auckland, and her recap podcast, Veronica Mars Investigations.

We also take a look at how celebs and the Internet have been reacting to the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe V Wade.

Show notes:

Roe V Wade overturned: an explainer: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107396510/roe-v-wade-is-overturned

Musical artists at Glastonbury react to Roe V Wade decision: https://www.instagram.com/p/CfTMnUFvOuM

Margaret Atwood on Roe V Wade: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/supreme-court-roe-handmaids-tale-abortion-margaret-atwood/629833/

Jia Tolentino on Roe V Wade overturned: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/we-are-not-going-back-to-the-time-before-roe-we-are-going-somewhere-worse

The Allusionist Australia + Auckland tour: https://www.theallusionist.org/events

The Allusionist The Egg’s Warning: https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/kinderegg

Veronica Mars Investigations: https://vmipod.com/

Helen Zaltzman and Kristen Bell on Bullseye: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/07/1078982975/kristen-bell

Helen Zaltzman on Home Cooking: https://homecooking.show/episodes/14

We meet Mandy Walker, the pioneering Australian cinematographer who shot Baz Luhrmann's epic film Elvis. TV writer Wenlei Ma is along with an analysis of where streaming services, particularly Netflix, have gone wrong recently and what they can do to remain relevant in the current landscape, and L.A. based Aussie actor Claudia O'Doherty speaks to us about her career and latest role on a quirky series about class and capitalism called Killing It.

A conversation with artist Daniel Boyd whose work has focussed on reframing Eurocentric images from Australia's past. Plus, Sally Ryan discusses her latest commission, a giant oil painting of Jesus, Mary and Joseph for St Mary’s cathedral in Sydney. She says it's her hardest painting yet. And, returning artefacts taken from Kunwinjku and Gagadju artists in Arnhem Land in the early 1900s.