Sunday Arts Magazine

Rohan Shearn talks about the arts in Melbourne.

She Wrote The Letter, directed by the highly acclaimed Cathy Hunt, going on at St Martins Theatre in South Yarra from April 5 until April 11. The play is also doing a La Mama season from June 22 to July 3.

Very briefly, the play is an adaptation of thirty years of letter writing between a New Zealand woman and a woman from the former East Germany. Tania McNaughton, the New Zealand woman who the play is about is also in the cast of two with Maria Nordenberg.

Following sell out shows and hard fan crushes in the UK, musical comedy dynamo Amanda Jane Pritchard is back home and back on stage at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with an expanded, amped-up version of her hit Edinburgh Fringe show, Google Amanda Jane Dildo.

She’s been sacked for gross misconduct, has two failed marriages and three broken engagements, was once a high-flying PR maven working with the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Matt Preston and has fallen on her face and broken her front teeth three times (but only fell in love with one dentist).

And that’s just in real life.

On stage, Amanda Jane will grab you by the balls and politely hold your hand through an off-beat excursion of ridiculously naughty tales and oddly familiar tunes.

“I corrupt popular songs from the likes of Britney Spears, Kylie, Elton John andThe Beatles and weave wild (but true) tales from my mentally disordered and colourful life,” says Amanda Jane.

All her songs are drawn from her life pre and post Bipolar Diagnosis in 2015. “Bipolar diagnosis changed my life. Part of my journey of recovery and mental health has been about being honest and facing my fears. This show does all those things in the biggest and best possible way: it bares it all.”

“I’m also really happy to be returning to the stage in Melbourne in line with World Bipolar Day on 30 March. I hope my show can raise a bit of awareness about what it means to be bipolar, and hopefully dispel some myths along the way.”

Since Paul Grabowsky first approached  Yaron Lifschitz  with the invitation to create a new work to premiere at MPAC, the two have workshopped three completely different concepts. As Yaron commented, “Each worked in their own way but the world decided to keep changing and our art evolved. At some point things came together. We agreed on a show that takes us back to our most essential ingredients – bodies, light and sound in the service of ideas that create powerful emotions. Infused with a fierce humanity and great circus skills.”

The work is being performed by seven extraordinary acrobats . 18 year old Holly Rose Boyer packed her bags to join Circa in late 2021, and has already performed in 3 Circa works, , Paul O’Keefe performed his first professional gig 25 years earlier and has toured from outback Australia to Broadway New York.

Over the past two decades, Circa has forged a reputation as the most artistically audacious circus on the planet. With productions ranging from large scale operas and vast choreographic spectacles through site specific adventures and intimate chamber works, the breadth of its vision is unparalleled.

In 2021 Circa was the only Australian performing arts company to be performing internationally.  Yaron Lifschitz started this year in France for performances of Circa’s María de Buenos Aires at Opéra de Lyon,  visited the US for the first time in two years for performances of Sacre and Humans 2.0. He went on to Sydney Festival for Italian Baroque and is now back in the studio creating On by Circa at the company’s home base in Brisbane.

As Paul Grabowsky commented, “As we emerge from restrictions of the last two years, borne equally by universities and the performing arts, it is exciting to announce the return of Monash University to the forefront of new Australian performance with this important achievement.“

Hans The German took his talents to the international stage on America’s Got Talent – and now he’s hoping to bring the world to him. The flamboyant and colourful cabaret performer has become a tourist ambassador for his adopted home state of South Australia

On the first night of winter, artists, fruit bats and other creatures of the night pulse through a city reawakened.

A festival three years in the making, built by and for Melbourne, RISING invites you to get lost, go deep and shake loose.

A surge of art, music, performance and ceremony in the heart of Melbourne, RISING

electrifies the city from 1—12 June 2022.

An awe-inspiring and timeless

design by a multidisciplinary team led by Australian

architect Angelo Candalepas and Associates was today

revealed by the Victorian Government and the National

Gallery of Victoria (NGV) as the winning design for NGV

Contemporary, Australia’s largest gallery dedicated to

contemporary art and design.

Candalepas and their team of 20 leading architecture,

design and engineering firms from around Victoria and

Australia will create a powerful and sophisticated work of

contemporary Australian architecture for the people of

Victoria. This new 30,000 square metre Victorian

landmark will celebrate the central role of art and design

in contemporary life and features dramatic arched

entries, a spherical hall spanning more than 40-metres-

high and more than 13,000 square metres of display

space for art and design, including exhibition galleries

and an expansive rooftop terrace and sculpture garden with stunning vistas of Melbourne.

The arrival experience is focused around the visually arresting omphalos (the Ancient Greek word for the centre of the

earth): a central spherical hall that soars more than 40 metres upwards through all levels of the building, connecting to

a lantern in the sky. Monumental in scale, this colossal orientating hall will be an enveloping gallery for the display of

large-scale artworks, and will also allow visitors to move through the building via a spiralling pathway. As visitors travel

through this space, they will be offered an unforgettable architectural experience as they journey between the

building’s levels, finally emerging on the spectacular rooftop terrace.

The design also features a number of exciting architectural spaces that will complement the exhibition galleries,

including a large café directly connected to the expanded public parkland and a new NGV design store. Making the

most of the building’s unique location, the scheme boasts a breath-taking public rooftop terrace and sculpture garden

accessible from a rooftop, restaurant and members’ lounge. The rooftop offers expansive vistas of Melbourne’s CBD,

parklands and the Yarra Ranges never-before-seen by the general public.

Befitting a purpose-built, twenty-first century gallery, the design features large format and highly flexible exhibition

spaces with state-of-the-art display systems enabling the NGV to present significant works of contemporary art and

design of unprecedented ambition and scale. The extent of exhibition space will allow the NGV to present international

blockbuster exhibitions while simultaneously offering a dynamic program of thematic and focused presentations drawn

from the NGV’s rapidly expanding permanent collection of Australian and international contemporary art and design.

Offering a rich and all-encompassing cultural experience, the design also offers educational spaces, studios and

laboratories for conservation of artwork.

With pathways through the building that connect the parklands to Southbank, NGV Contemporary will unify the

surrounding Melbourne Arts Precinct by connecting together the wider neighbourhood and reshaping the urban

experience of this important part of the city. In providing a unique architectural landmark for this complex triangular-

shaped site, the winning design provides a generous and highly accessible building, with large arched public entries

from the new public parkland, Southbank Boulevard and the corner of Kavanagh Street.

The building’s eastern façade incorporates a multi-level veranda, offering an external pathway between the building

levels, as well as expansive views over the surrounding public gardens and Melbourne’s skyline.

UNEARTHED engages both physical and digital landscapes. The artwork features a mural with contemporary re-workings of Yorta Yorta shields by Lorraine Brigdale and enlarged micrographs by Betty Sargeant from PluginHUMAN.

The mural, which will be a permanent feature, includes an icon that connects audiences with a microverse. When audiences hold their phones to the icon, they access an explorable digital landscape created by Akshat Nauriyal. This microverse is a parallel universe that exists alongside our non-digital reality. The mural and microverse can be viewed 24hrs a day.

During the festival opening weekend (March 18-20), the mural will be transformed after dark into a projection mapped light experience created by Justin Dwyer.

“In this project is an opportunity to unite a First Nation woman’s contemporary view of traditional Aboriginal war shields together with contemporary ideas in scientific imagery, illumination and video art,” says Lorraine Brigdale. “The collaboration prioritises Aboriginal art as an integral part of the visual imagery, encouraging a conversation around cultural awareness which is always this artist’s intention”.

Betty Sargeant says, “We use the name ‘microverse’ as a way to describe a small independent digital landscape. People don’t need to download an app or log in. We’ve worked hard to keep this experience independent and to ensure ease of access. The UNEARTHED microverse reflects a kind of alternate universe. One that coexists side-by-side with our non-digital reality. People can experience it by scanning a code that’s embedded in visuals of the UNEARTHED mural.”

The circular patterns in the mural have been made from micrographs and mathematical noise. Sargeant photographed the microscopic detail of wasp wings and Dwyer applied mathematical noise to the images. This created circular motifs that fuse scientific imagery with computer generative processes.

The fall of Saigon in 1975 triggered a mass exodus of South Vietnamese from their homeland by sea. It is estimated that anywhere between one to two million people would eventually flee the country, of this it is estimated that half perished at sea. One of the lucky ones was Quí Văn Nguyễn.

1988 was a pivotal year for Dung Nguyen as he emigrated from South Vietnam to Australia, to join Quí Văn Nguyễn, his father.

1988 is the point of arrival and the point of departure, the end of one journey and the start of another; yet it is one story, Dung’s story told in fragments. 1988 is misaligned, disjointed and cyclical, it borrows from the memories of the Vietnamese people, but is corrupted by a sense of nostalgia. It intertwines personal narratives, diverse music practices, history, and cultural legacies, in seeking to understand how and why we come to occupy the spaces we find ourselves in.

Consisting of 9 compositions that bleed into one another, the individual musical practices of the players in the ensemble come together to collectively tell this story with Dung. It is a moment of togetherness that is owed to the richness of his experiences and that of the Vietnamese people.  Accompanied by a dynamic and experimental visual design using vintage slide projectors to present personal and archival images, 1988s compositions interweave with the whir and click of the technology, creating a unique musical texture that reflects and highlights the stories being told.

1988 is composed by Dung Nguyen and Peter Knight for the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) with visual design by Phuong Ngo. It proposes a rich context for the cultural and musical practices highlighted in the work, their place in contemporary Australian culture, and their relationship to the Vietnamese diaspora experience.