Award winning choreographer Tra Mi Dinh closes the program with a preview of 7 Dances for 7 People, her new ensemble work premiering at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre from 9 to 19 September as part of Darebin Arts Speakeasy and the Darebin FUSE Festival Open Access program. Inspired by one of humanity’s oldest and most mysterious obsessions, the number seven, Dinh describes the piece as a hypnotic ritual of precision, endurance and devotion, performed by seven exceptional dancers. She explains how composer Tilman Robinson’s score underpins intricate choreographic patterning, and how lighting designer Rachel Lee and costume and set designer Geoffrey Watson create an otherworldly atmosphere in which bodies appear, dissolve and reconfigure. Drawing on her personal connection to the number seven and its symbolism across cultures, Dinh invites the audience to experience the work as a physical and emotional journey rather than a puzzle to decode, transforming numerical obsession into movement that shifts between majestic imagery, machine like exactness and bursts of frenetic energy.

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NGV Senior Curator of Australian Art Beckett Rozentals joins the show to introduce Margaret Preston, the first major retrospective on the artist in more than twenty years. Opening at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Fed Square on 4 September 2026 and running until 31 January 2027, the exhibition brings together a substantial body of work, including iconic still lifes and woodblock prints, alongside sculpture and archival material. Rozentals discusses the curatorial approach that situates Preston’s modernist practice within its historical context while placing her work in dialogue with contemporary First Nations artists who respond to her use of Indigenous visual vocabularies. The conversation touches on how this retrospective offers a groundbreaking new perspective on Australia’s modernist master, inviting audiences to engage both with the beauty of Preston’s imagery and with the complex questions it raises about appropriation, influence and national identity.

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Choreographer Zoe Bastin appears on Sunday Arts Magazine to talk about The River, described as a new site responsive contemporary dance work set within a natural riverside amphitheatre at Bungies Hole in Werribee. Bastin outlines her interest in working with landscape as collaborator, drawing on the textures, sounds and shifting light of the river environment to shape the choreography. Framed within the context of Melbourne Fringe Festival, she speaks about the challenge and exhilaration of presenting dance outside conventional theatre spaces, inviting audiences to experience movement, water and terrain as an intertwined performance. The segment highlights the planned two performances on Saturday 3 October at dawn (7:30am) and dusk (6pm), emphasising the different atmospheres created by dawn and evening along the riverbank.

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Curator Hamish Sawyer joins the program to mark forty years of Linden New Art, connecting the gallery’s anniversary exhibition Time Moves Through These Walls: 40 Years of Linden New Art with the broader celebrations around its 40th Anniversary Fundraising Gala, Back the Future. The exhibition, running at Linden’s Acland Street home in St Kilda, traces the layered histories of the site from pre colonial Yalukit Willam Country through private residence and hotel to contemporary art space, foregrounding Linden’s pioneering role in experimental practice. Sawyer discusses how this history feeds into the gala’s focus on future ambitions, as Linden gathers artists and supporters to raise funds for upcoming exhibitions and public programs while honouring four decades of bold, community engaged contemporary art.

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Accordionists Sofia Chapman and Svetlana Bunic bring a playful, street level energy to Sunday Arts Magazine with their celebration of the accordion in the festival they describe as Freshly Squeezed. Drawing on upcoming performances at Wesley Anne, 250 High Street, Northcote, and Ragtime Tavern, 206 Tyler Street, Preston, they share their enthusiasm for intimate venues where audiences can sit close to the bellows and feel the music’s pulse. In conversation, Chapman and Bunic talk about the accordion’s versatility across folk, jazz and experimental traditions, and how their programming aims to showcase the instrument’s expressive range while building a community of players and listeners around these neighbourhood stages.

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Curator Ian Jackson joins Sunday Arts Magazine to delve into ENCORE! 50 Objects. 50 Years. One Collection, a landmark exhibition drawn from the Australian Performing Arts Collection at Arts Centre Melbourne. Presented at the Australian Museum of Performing Arts (AMPA) from 16 September 2026 to 9 May 2027, ENCORE! celebrates fifty years of Australia’s performing arts history through fifty carefully selected objects. Jackson reflects on the curatorial process behind this anniversary project, explaining how the breadth of the collection across circus, dance, music, opera and theatre has shaped the exhibition’s narrative and its invitation for audiences to revisit defining moments of Australian stage culture.

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Director Kitan Petkovski and actor Aya Taur discuss Savager by Patricia Cornelius, a blistering and provocative work that tears into the rituals of mateship, violence and power. Their production at Theatre Works in St Kilda brings the intensity of Cornelius’s writing to the stage with sharp focus. Savager runs from 2 to 12 September.

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Alana Seal, co curator of Quiet Corners, explores the art of Ame Bale and the exhibition’s celebration of a pioneering Australian painter. The show highlights Bale’s sensitivity to place and atmosphere, drawing attention to quieter moments within the visual field. Quiet Corners is on at Town Hall Gallery, Boroondara Arts in Hawthorn, until 17 October.

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Roslyn Oades introduces The Enormous Radio, a concept driven performance in which a constellation of radios sparks an uncanny encounter with the animal world. Presented by Substation and Chamber Made as part of the Fringe Festival, the work invites audiences into a sonic landscape that blurs the familiar and the strange. It runs at Substation, Newport, from 30 September to 10 October.

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Andrew Chapman shares the story behind Green Bus, a fifty five year photographic journey through the streets of Melbourne. His exhibition charts decades of change, character and community across the city, offering a long view of urban life. The work is on display at City Gallery, Melbourne Town Hall, from 3 September to 19 February 2027.

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