Art Smitten

Ben, Silvi and Christina chat to producer Olivia Satchell and director Christian Taylor about Tipping Points, their 24-hour play project centring on climate change that will be performed on June 22, 7-9pm at 1000 £ Bend (361 Little Lonsdale Street) as part of the Emerging Writers' Festival.

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This weeks Friday Nights included a headline act by Two Steps on the Water, a extravagant chandelier and a reviewer entranced in the art of Van Gogh and Love: Art of Emotion 1400 - 1800.

I find that the two components that make or break the Friday Nights experience is the music and the art.

This weeks Friday Nights had exhibitions that emphasize emotion and mood. It only made it more suitable that the headliner for this week had so much gumption and feeling in their songs. The three piece punk/heavy folk band, Two Steps on the Water gave such a colourful performance that complimented the often varying tones of Van Gogh's art pieces. Their set also had heaps of humour implanted between songs. In every wolf whistle, lead singer June Jones was there to alert everyone "there are no wolves in the NGV".

People filled every room to offer, perhaps to feast their eyes on the amount of art available on display. If you are heading to the Friday Nights in the future don't forget to check out the other exhibitions like love that the NGV has also opened up for the public. A particular favourite of mine was the exhibition with a ceramic of a dog that looks like a Chihuahua in a beard and a locket of a noblewoman where she is holding her prized squirrel. The aesthetic and atmosphere of the night as usual was chill. A new art piece, The Chandelier, dawned the centre of the Gallery. Art goers circulated it. It became a nice centrepiece for the night.

Everyone was free to move around talk and be engaged in this cultural experience. Art and Music a perfect mix. Be sure to attend the next Friday night at the NGV next Friday where The Fauves are playing.

Written by Maria Dunne

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There's something very romantic about going to an art gallery at night time, especially one as grand as the NGV. The high ceilings and wide open spaces are really beautiful. It would be really cute to take someone there on a date and afterwards get a hot chocolate and sit by the river, just a suggestion.

Van Gogh and the Seasons was curated by Sjraar van Heugten The exhibition begins with a short 9 min video detailing important points and shifts in Van Gogh's life. I really enjoyed this part of exhibition, it was interesting and easy to understand. Then you walk into the next part of the exhibition, a narrow walk way the kind of zig-zags around, it had big blocks of writing to read on the walls, which made this part of the exhibition very congested and I found it hard to keep my attention on the text.

Next was a grey U-shaped room with Van Goghs early works.

Then it moves into the main event of his prints and paintings. The dull grey then turns into black and white with scrims in between sections. The artworks are split into seasons which they represent, soall the works that look summery are together in one section, the winter in their own section ect. To me Van Gogh is far from interesting in his style in comparison to today's contemporary artists but acknowledging that he was experimental for his time is very important and this exhibition captures that importance very well. Due to his popularity it was incredibly crowded and hard to navigate, there was lots of text to read on the walls, a lot of people stood still to read these getting around was difficult, I would really suggest going at an off peak time so you can really take in the work.

There's a number of bands playing at these events. I was lucky enough to catch Two Steps on the Water, a local group belting out emotionally charged folk punk. They really made the night for me. Most of the audience were sitting down in front of the stage which made the mood feel very gentle and kind. The music is nostalgic yet modern and June Jones voice and is ethereal, even at times when she is screaming into the microphone.

This exhibition recently opened on April 28th. The exhibition run until the 9th of July and is open on every Friday night until 10 pm, with live music, artist talks and food and beverages. It’s a great mix of old and new, highly recommended.

Written by Finley Fletcher

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Silvi, Ben and Christina chat to actor Dion Mills about Red Stitch and Little Ones Theatre's production of The Moors, playing at Rear 2 Chapel St, St Kilda East until July 9.

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Christian chats with and hears a live performance from Jason Fleming's solo tribute show, James Taylor: Bittersweet and Low, playing at the Caravan Club (95-97 Drummond Street, Oakleigh) on Saturday June 10, 8pm.

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Maria chats with Gemma Paintin, one half of the Bristol-based live art duo Action Hero, currently in residency at Arts House in North Melbourne performing a handful of pop-culture-focused works.

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Jack reviews the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s May concert, Unfinished Romance – Rossini & Schubert.

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20th Century Women is the latest film from Mike Mills, whose previous film Beginners came out a full six years ago – but the wait has certainly been worthwhile. He’s managed to follow up what was a rather lovely and tender film with an even lovelier and even more tender one, a film that encompasses a sprawling range of themes and sentiments.

It’s set in Southern California in 1979, and centres on Jamie, a fifteen-year-old living with his single middle-aged mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), in a house she rents out to punk photographer Abby (Greta Gerwig) and hippy handyman William (Billy Crudup). Rounding off the main ensemble is Jamie’s best friend Julie (Elle Fanning), a troubled teen who spends much of her time staying at Jamie’s house.

We grow close to these characters as we learn intimate details about their past, present and future and go through their pleasures and pains alongside them. It’s the rare type of film that not only introduces a relatively large core cast of five but also makes you care about each one of them equally and deeply. By the end, you realise that they’re all very special people, unique people, but that they’re just people, and that there’s billions of other people and that you’re one of them. It’s the feeling of simultaneously mattering a lot and not mattering in the slightest.

The script is among the strongest of recent years. There’s an almost literary quality to the dialogue, with most characters being given a selection of sweeping epigrammatic lines like: “wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed”, or: “whatever you think your life is going to be like, just know, it’s not gonna be anything like that”. The narrative unfolds naturally, incrementally, at once mirroring life and yet crystallising it. It manages to take in all of the characters’ lives from beginning to end while still focussing on this one specific point in their lives, the summer of 1979.

This sense of time is also conveyed exceptionally well through music, not only through the gentle score by Roger Neill but also through the songs chosen to make up the film’s soundtrack. These are songs that evoke an array of moods, but also songs that function to contextualise the story and characters in a certain place in history and the world. It’s also used quite meaningfully to develop the characters’ identities. Indeed, music forms an integral part of the story itself, with clubs and concerts and dancing to record players in the bedroom featuring heavily in the film.

There is one element of 20th Century Women that did kind of bother me, though. Despite the interesting and well-crafted female characters and the fact that it’s called “20th Century Women”, it’s still a story told through a man, since the main narrative thread is the coming-of-age of a teenage boy and the way the women around him shape him as a person. Yes, it’s a semi-autobiographical film about how Mills himself was shaped by the women around him when he was growing up, and, yes, it does make a change from films primarily about men, but it’s still a concern.

That quibble aside, however, 20th Century Women is beautiful, clever and emotionally complex. There’s a lot of feelings condensed into these two hours. It’ll make you laugh, it might well even make you cry, and, after experiencing all these characters’ lives, it will almost definitely make you sit down and take stock of your own.

20th Century Women is in cinemas June 1st.

Written by Ben Volchok

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Wild Bore is a new theatre production by three comedians, Zoe Coombs Marr, 
Ursula Martinez 
and Adrienne Truscott. It is a meta theatrical production where the three performers analyse and deconstruct theatre criticisms, drawing material from real reviews they have received and other brutal reviews of other theatre productions. A lot of the themes of the show revolve around their experience of being ‘female comedians/theatre artists’ and the sexism and misunderstandings and backlash they receive. It’s very farcical and crass and is delivered in a very satirical tone.

It opens with the three performers bums at a long table reading reviews of the show performing as theatre critics, this image is repeated through the whole show. Then there is an ‘interval’ and the curtains part and there’s a giant long table and the performers are wearing bum hat mask sort of things and continue with the critiquing of theatre critics, it then gets a bit surreal and there’s a big scene where they are all eating food and it’s really wacky and bizarre. There is then a series of very short vignettes exploring the same themes as pervious. It ends with a monologue by a third performer Krishna Itsha, they are a trans person of colour and their monologue is about their feelings about Wild Bore. Then there is a choreographed dance scene where all four performers dance naked.

I overall had a pretty good time, I do feel like I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t reviewing it, I felt pretty anxious a lot of the time but still was having a ball. I was so ready to tear apart the cisexism/white privilege in my review and then Krishna came out and put a lot of my thoughts about that in the show and I was like dang, they got me.

All the performers were great, and really fun to watch, I just love watching Zoe Coombs Marr on stage, she’s just got such a great thing going on, I want to see more and more from her, I don’t know what else to say, she’s just really great.

Krishna's monologue was one of my favourite parts of the show, it was very powerful and felt like the most important part of the show, what a champ!

Go see this show if you want to have a good time, don’t go to review it, it’s too hard! God knows why I signed up to review a show about theatre critics, what a silly move.

Written by Finley Fletcher

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