Sunday Arts Magazine

Opening on Thursday 22 April at Southbank Theatre, Joanna Murray-Smith’s brand new play, Berlin, is a riveting romantic thriller that pits the dark shadow of history against the dazzling promise of true love. Starring Grace Cummings (Prehistoric) andMichael Wahr (Shakespeare in Love), and directed by Iain Sinclair (A View from the Bridge), this MTC NEXT STAGE commission weaves a universal story of youthful passion into a nail-biting game of philosophical cat and mouse that will keep you guessing to the very end.

About the play: Tom is an Australian abroad. Charlotte, a Berliner through and through. After meeting in a bar, sparks fly between them and she invites him to spend the night at her place. As they navigate the ritual of seduction, their desire gives way to secrets that cannot be ignored and questions neither of them can answer. Does young love stand a chance against the suffocating reach of the past?

For 30 years, Joanna Murray-Smith has been writing plays that have been produced and translated all over the world, in over two dozen languages, including on Broadway, the West End and at the Royal National Theatre in London. Joanna has worked across many forms, from plays to novels, journalism, opera libretti and screen plays. Her plays include Three Little Words,Switzerland, Pennsylvania Avenue, True Minds, Songs for Nobodies, Day One-A-Hotel-Evening, The Gift, Rockabye, The Female of the Species, Ninety, Bombshells and Flame (MTC); L’Appartement (Queensland Theatre); American Song (Red Stitch); Fury (Sydney Theatre Company); Rapture, Nightfall, Redemption, Love Child and Honour (Malthouse Theatre). Joanna has also adapted Hedda Gabler (for the State Theatre Company of South Australia) and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage for Sir Trevor Nunn (Coventry/London). She has been nominated for and won many awards.

Australian Impressionism is a large-scale exhibition of 270 artworks by some of Australia’s most widely recognisable and celebrated artists including Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Clara Southern, John Russell and E Phillips Fox. Along with fan favourites, the exhibition will also present works by artists that audiences might be discovering for the first time including Iso Rae, May Vale, Jane Price and Ina Gregory.

Australian Impressionism will reveal the ways in which these artists worked alongside and socialised with one another primarily Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, who formed friendships in their youth which continued throughout their lives. The group painted together at various times and in various places. Artists such as Jane Sutherland, Louis Abrahams, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin met while studying at the National Gallery School, others, such as Tom Roberts and John Russell, were introduced while travelling in Europe. Some spent their summers painting on Sydney waterfronts, while others remained in Victoria, continuing their education at Charterisville, in Eaglemont.

> Along with the Australian relationships audiences will also be delighted to discover the influence of European artists including Claude Monet, French artist Alfred Sisley and English American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Audiences will be able to view international works throughout the exhibition including a Monet presented alongside John Russell who learnt from Monet the master himself. This influence often came from periods of study abroad in France and England which influenced the style of the Australian impressionist painters.

Another highlight from the show will be new acquisitions of works by Iso Rae, May Vale, Jane Price and Ina Gregory. Works by women of this period are increasingly being recognised as important, yet are often excluded from the Australian Impressionism narrative. This omission is something NGV are redressing in this collection of works by female artists and in the presentation of She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism. These new acquisitions include Iso Rae’s Young girl, Etaples; Ina Gregory’s Charterisville; Jane Price’s Bush scene; Jane Price’s Children playing in a landscape; and May Vale’s New Battersea Bridge & Chelsea Reach from Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

The exhibition opens this Friday 2 April and will be a major exhibition for NGV throughout the winter, in dialogue with the French Impressionism show opening in June.

Melbourne-based artist Güler Altunbas will present an important new exhibition examining the physical and psychological impacts and the hidden nature of gender-based violence. The exhibition will on show in the Linden Projects Space, which is re-opening after being closed for over a year due to the pandemic. Linden New Art is delighted to be able to re-open this space with a such a powerful, socially driven exhibition.

The artist has built a reputation as a strong advocate in the community for the prevention of violence against women and children, with this exhibition highlighting this systemic issue along with her own personal experiences.

Altunbas said: “I’m fortunate to have survived the atrocities in my life to tell the stories of women. I’m giving voice to the voiceless. I am a survivor, activist, advocate and campaigner of prevention of gender-based violence of women and children.”

The exhibition features a series of self-portraits that highlight the hidden elements of violence, and express the connected emotional and psychological conditions of gender-based violence, such as denial, silence, threats, aggression, violation, danger, intimidation, encroachment and resilience.

Chrysalis; Recognition and Restitution includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, printmaking and digital technologies. In 2016, Altunbas was commissioned by cohealth to create a public sculpture encapsulating the stark reality of gender-based violence in our community. The bronze female figure, titled Question Why?, will be on show as part of the exhibition.

Stephen is back talk to the Sunday Arts Magazine team on everything to do with films……

This is a Protest Party!

Serving post-punk, anti-glamour realness, Fuck Fabulous is a radical, multi-artform, variety show with it’s tongue firmly planted in it’s cheeks.

Bringing together fierce queers, femmes and rebels in a show that celebrates female-masculinity, rejoices in gender-queer visibility and celebrates femme identities in diverse bodies. Hosted by Yana Alana, this epic ensemble work is where drag, visual art, trash-fashion, dance, circus and live music collide.

With performances by circus icon Jess Love, queer side-show clown Dale Woodbridge-Brown, performance artist Nicci Wilks, dance duo Glitter & Snatch, aerial contortionist Seth Sladen, Drag King Koko Ma$$, performance wunderkammer Gabi Barton and our drummer boi Bec Matthews.

Fuck Fabulous is an epic ensemble work, representing alternative ideas of sexy, reveling in the ridiculous and a collective reimagining of what it means to be Fabulous.

Ali pops in to talk to David and Neil about her recent shows.

After an award-winning season at Edinburgh Fringe Casting Off is coming to the Melbourne

International Comedy Festival at the Famous Spiegeltent, Arts Centre Forecourt, Thursday 28 March

until Sunday 11 April 2021.

An all women, cross-generational show that challenges the conventions of circus and subverts expectations.

The three extraordinary women at the heart of Casting Off are – Debra Batton (61), Sharon Gruenert (42) and

Spenser Inwood (30).

Intergenerational circus with lots to say: the personal is political, fury is fun and the acrobatics downright

dangerous – especially when life gets in the way. Casting off stereotypes, these dynamic Australian women

tumble, talk, fly, and balance precariously.

A disarming, hilarious show about living on the edge and talking about it; and how it’s easier done than said.

Circus that makes you laugh and cry simultaneously. Relaxed, personal and fantastically inappropriate.

Self-directed, hand-knitted, and honouring the life events that get in the way of work, Casting Off is a theatrical

circus experience that celebrates thoughtful, strong, and resilient individuals. A joyous accumulation of

moments that shine a light on women relating to each other in playful, fruitful relationships. Flipping, climbing

and flying to a soundscape of the many disparate texts (lists, poems, conversations, melodies, arguments and

biographies) that embody each day.

Casting Off is non-narrative circus with words that’s easier done than said.

A critically acclaimed one-women play starring Amanda Muggleton, based on the life of

Australian legendary star of stage and screen, Coral Browne, puts the Grande Dame back

in the spotlight where she belongs.

Diva, adventuress, beauty, wit… the flamboyant Coral Browne travelled a world away from her

humble Australian beginnings to become the toast of the London stage in the 1940s.

Sexually adventurous, with a deliciously bawdy wit, Coral was as well known for her glamorous

lifestyle as she was for her memorable stage and screen performances (Auntie Mame, The

Killing of Sister George, Dennis Potter’s Dreamchild and Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad).

She had a string of famous lovers, including Paul Robeson and Maurice Chevalier, and enjoyed

a late-life marriage to the king of schlock horror, Vincent Price.

In this critically-acclaimed one-woman play, the wonderful Amanda Muggleton (The Book

Club, Hollyoaks, Prisoner Cell Block H) brings Coral Browne to sparkling life and puts this

Grande Dame back in the spotlight where she belongs.

Step aside Ivan Aristeguieta, there is a new Venezuelan set to take.

the Australian comedy scene by storm! Making Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2021 Debut.

Sam Serna lived in the notorious Caracas, Venezuela – a violent city which enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous in the world – but even that did not prepare her for how terrifying dating men would be when she found herself single again after 13 years of marriage.

In the world premiere of her debut solo show, Bunny Rabbit, Sam combines storytelling with some spicy stand-up. Her unique background gives her universal experiences of dating a fresh perspective, which is interwoven with her story of escaping the Venezuelan communist regime.

“Right now Venezuela is responsible for the biggest refugee crisis in the history of the American continent, five million people – that’s close to 20% of the population – have left,” says Sam, who emigrated ten years ago with her now ex-husband.

The title of the show refers to those moments where we freeze like scared bunnies when confronted by predators. From surviving life in Caracas, taking the rest of her family to safety abroad, to winding up involuntarily celibate and single again in her mid-thirties, Sam Serna has had more than her fair share of ‘bunny rabbit moments’.

An engineer by day, Sam picked up a mic in 2019 and has been doing the rounds of the rooms since then. She’s had training in improvised comedy with The Improv Conspiracy and cut her teeth on the festival circuit performing in an ensemble showcase as part of the 2020 Adelaide Fringe and a two-hander with Indian-born, Thai-raised “queermedian” Sunanda Sachatrakul. Called “Yes, We Tan!” the show was Broadsheet’s Top Pick for a comedy show in the 2020 Melbourne Fringe. She also co-runs a women and non-binary comedy room, “Raise the Bar”, together with fellow woman of colour, comedian Amna Bee.

Bunny Rabbit takes an irreverent look at sex, anatomy, bodily fluids, pop culture and if you are wondering what it’s like to have all your friends and family mugged at gun point at different times, well, that’s in there, too, in this brand new hour of thought provoking stand-up.

Hayden talks about why this space has opened during a pandemic.