Sunday Arts Magazine

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & Live Nation present

                             TO BARBRA, WITH LOVE

An 80th Birthday Celebration for Barbra Streisand

with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Caroline O’Connor, Katie Noonan, Elise McCann and Ryan Gonzalez 

21 – 23 April 2022, Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

L – R: Caroline O’connor, Katie Noonan, Elise McCann and Ryan Gonzalez

The inimitable music legend Barbra Streisand turns 80 in April 2022 and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra celebrates this monumental occasion with four stunning performances at Hamer Hall.

Under the baton of Vanessa Scammell, Australia’s own musical theatre royalty Caroline O’Connor will be joined by multi-talented, genre-hopping vocalist Katie Noonan and two of Australia’s hottest musical theatre artists Elise McCann (Merrily We Roll Along, Matilda The Musical, Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door) and Ryan Gonzalez (they/them) (Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jersey Boys), in an extraordinary tribute to one of the greatest musical talents in modern history.

With an illustrious career spanning six decades, Barbra Streisand is a multi-award-winning performer, director and producer of stage and screen, and one of only a few elite artists to hold the rare EGOT (Emmy, Golden Globe, Oscar and Tony).

One of the best-selling female music artists of all time, Streisand’s record-breaking 52 gold and 31 platinum albums feature some of the world’s most loved songs from The Way We Were and Evergreen to Send in the Clowns, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers andGuilty.

Join brothers Eden and Josh as they try

to break free of repeating the same

show every night and explore the

infinite Megaverse.

With the arrival of covid and the move to

digital, Game Boys Comedy honed their

skills with two Digital Fringe shows. They

want to explore what they learnt in the

digital space and bring it to the live theatre

experience. In Escape to the Megaverse

they’ll be using live video feeds, green

screens, immersive sound design and

custom lighting to explore the intersection between technology and live performance.

Escape to the Megaverse has themes of repetition and revision as they seek to critique their own creative

process and invite the audience to be a part of the show and leave their own unique stamp on the evening.

They’ll be experimenting heavily with the use of live video feeds in various ways – digitally including audience

members in the show while they sit in their seat, using their screen as a portal to interact with live digital

versions of each other, even producing a live sitcom using audience member phones as cameras.

Game Boys Comedy is a unique collaboration between brothers Eden and Joshua Porter, and Melbourne

based audiovisual designer Kinetic Screen. For the past 7 years they have been delighting audiences with

their festival shows. They’re known for seamlessly combining technology and live performance in increasingly

complex ways. Over the years they’ve honed their unique form of comedy, combining razor sharp writing,

improvisation with the audience and literally hundreds of audio/visual cues. Escape to the Megaverse is their

most ambitious show yet.

STATION is pleased to present Particle Days by Jon Cattapan, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. With a vibrant practice spanning over 45 years, Cattapan is recognized as one of Australia’s most-highly respected artists. Atmospheric in nature, the artist’s new suite of large-scale paintings subject colour saturated panoramic city vistas, figurative groupings and data-scape mark making.

Particle Days physicalizes that which the artist imagines to ‘float invisibly in the world’, specifically referring to the sharing, duplication, extraction and collection of data and aptly more recently, virus particles. With duality, Cattapan’s conceptual parameters are reflected in a process of scanning and piecing together found and personal imagery that become compositional references for which he paints fields of colour, grid patterns and illuminating flares of light that indicate a presence or energy.

Enveloping in scale at over 3 meters in length, The World is Turning 2022 is a significant new painting that captures the artist’s sense of restlessness with the world through passages of light and dark that metaphorically speak to the flux of encountering conflict and peace.

Underpinned by contemporary global culture and recent history, Particle Days negotiates the artist’s heightened consciousness of a ‘turning world’ that negotiates digital spheres, networks of communication, disputed territories and emotional states of being.

To accompany the exhibition, the artist is launching a new publication titled Jon Cattapan: Threshold Signs 2008–2021 on Saturday 9 April 2022 at STATION, Melbourne.

Paul talks to the Sunday Arts magazine about upcoming events.

A young ragtag militia must quickly and efficiently clear a building of

those deemed old or infirm. In our world stripped of wealth, resources

and the current social hierarchy – young people now have the

competitive advantage.

Trapped in one apartment is a woman in her fifties who wants to survive

so that she can see her son one last time, to ask forgiveness. What does

a mother owe a son when the world is collapsing?

In this intimate 90-minute play, one family’s struggle becomes a war cry

against complacency.

#NoExemptions is written by Angela Buckingham and directed by icon

of independent theatre Susie Dee. Produced by The Shift Theatre,

this story is a walloping of intergenerational justice. In the near future,

young people hold their parents to account for environmental collapse.

A family reuniting for the last time, confronts each other with complicity

in the crisis – intimate, intense, told with a twist and shot through with

apocalyptic black humour.

Liz Jones, Artistic Director of La Mama, describes this as a story about

what happens to people under extreme stress.

Imminent danger informs every aspect of the production, from sound

design by multiple Green Room Award nominee Ian Moorhead, to set

and costume design by winner of the Beleura John Tallis Design Award

Sophie Woodward.

La Mama Theatre, 205 Faraday Street Carlton VIC 3053 Australia | [email protected] | +613 9347 6948 | www.lamama.com.au

La Mama is financially assisted by the Australian Government through the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government

initiative, the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and the City of Melbourne through the Arts and Creative Partnerships Program. We are grateful

to all our philanthropic partners and donors, advocates, volunteers, audiences, artists and our entire community for helping us rebuild La Mama. Thank you!

L a M a m a P r e s e n t s

#NO EXEMPTIONS

Rohan is back talking about the Arts.

Fascination with the private lives of reigning monarch has fueled speculation, rumour and debate for centuries. Surrounded by a plethora of courtiers, chroniclers and political schemers, the lives of royal rulers have historically attracted greater scrutiny than those of ordinary citizens. While royal privilege brought greater freedom from prevailing moralities and laws for monarchs who chose not to conform with social expectations, so too did their hierarchical prominence deny them privacy. The personal physician to Louis XIII of France, Jean Heroard, logged minute and intimate details of the king’s daily life for almost three decades, including for example the monarch every bowel movement.

Surviving records from various eras document the tastes and inclinations of hereditary rulers who were controversially same sex attracted. In modern times, the decline of traditional monarchies has been matched by the rise of a new kind of royalty known as gay icons or queer icons, with whom regardless of their personal sexuality or gender identity, queer people have felt an affinity through their social and political struggles. Historical figures such as Marie-Antoinette and Oscar Wilde have attained this status, as have numerous actors and performers, including Judy Garland, Madonna and Kylie Minogue.

From the home to the artists studio to the streets, physical spaces have often sought out by queer people as sites of refuge, safety, desire, community, and resistance. One such space is the bathhouse, which has long been a meeting place for queer people, often men, to engage in sexual activity. The endurance of this queer space has been inscribed into artworks across centuries, from Albrecht Durer’s coded depiction of men being entertained by musicians as they wash and socialize, to Hoda Afshar’s intimate photograph of men embracing amid the steam.

 

A similarly persistent queer space is that of the nightclub, which is represented in such works as Paulien Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Moving backwards, set in what the artists describe as ‘an abstract club’ and Viva Gibb’s photograph of Melbourne’s former hybrid queer venue Trish’s Coffee Lounge. The occupation and reclamation of public space by queer people is also explored by several artists, including Tourmaline, whose video work Atlantic is a sea of bones, records the Hudson River, Meatpacking District and piers in New York as active sites for Black, queer and trans life in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

Representations of queer love, desire and sensuality throughout history range from coded to overt, and often focus on the body as the site of emotion and sexuality. These works reveal intimacy, create erotic atmospheres, and depict pleasure. The art historical genre of the nude provided the opportunity for artists to explore eroticism in the guise of figurative studies and various narratives, particularly in periods when queer genders and sexualities were demonized. Artists would often use coded signifiers to indicate meaning to viewers ‘in the know’. Intimacy and romantic love appear sometimes in the frame of the work, as in Mary Cockburn Mercer’s Two women, and at other times are conveyed through the artist’s tender view of their subject, as in Agnes Goodsir’s The letter.

With the shift to postmodernism in the late twentieth century, representations of the body were recognized as shaped by various ideologies and politics. Artists including Tracy Moffatt and Brook Andrew invite us to understand the body as a form onto which the viewer imposes their desires and which equally has agency to resist presumptions. Eroticism is communicated through references to sexual practices and subcultures, and through fashion and sculpture that revel in the sensuality of bodies.

 

 

Peter Tully Love me tender, necklace 1977 plastic, paste, opaque synthetic polymer resin, mirror, enamel paint on colour offset lithograph 38.4 × 14.0 × 1.4 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1978