Yang Liping Contemporary Dance. Brisbane Festival, September 27. Melbourne Festival until October 8. Yang Liping’s exquisite Under Siege is like the richest of sauces, distilled and reduced until only the essentials remain. The setting is China about 2000 years ago as one dynasty, the Han, bloodily replaces another. Yang’s episodic, impressionistic work strips away the immensely…
Tag: Melbourne Festival
The festive season
THE last crumbs of Christmas cake have scarcely been brushed from the lips, the last Champagne bottles are not yet in the recycling bin and New Year’s resolutions are still full of shiny potential. ‘Tis the season for rest, recreation, family and friends. Or, for those of us whose calendars are ruled not by the…
In which I fail to stop my list at 10
THIS year I saw more than 200 performances and, over the past week or so, have written about the people, plays, operas, dance works and musicals that spoke to me most strongly. Now I cull the list to 14 – just because that’s how it turned out – and a supplementary, the last being something…
2013: a retrospective
Here’s my take on the year’s high points. As many have noted before me, “best” is a useless word when applied to the cornucopia available in the arts. Here are the people and productions that most inspired me. “A SHORT show is a good show,” we all carol (me and my fellow critics) as we…
Room of Regret, Life and Times: Episodes 1-4
Room of Regret, Theatre Works, St Kilda, October 27 Life and Times: Episodes 1-4, Melbourne Arts Centre, October 26 THE Rabble’s Room of Regret could have been expressly ordered by the Melbourne Festival to illustrate the essential unknowability of the critical process. As part of the festival’s investigation into the art of the critic I…
Criticism in the digital age
Having been asked to take part in a forum on criticism in the digital age for the Melbourne Festival – it was held at the Wheeler Centre for books, writing and ideas – I wrote an opinion piece for The Australian on the subject. It happens to be exactly a year since I retired after…
Sun
Hofesh Shechter Company, Melbourne Festival, October 13. SUN finds Hofesh Shechter in a jocund mood, or what passes for it. The title implies warmth and light. Facsimile sheep wander and gambol. Every now and again a woman leaps up from the front row of the auditorium to utter a brief, piercing scream and then sits…
The Rite of Spring/Petrushka
Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Brisbane Festival, September 26. MICHAEL Keegan-Dolan’s Rite of Spring does honour to the most unsettling dance score in history. The Fabulous Beast founder and choreographer doesn’t shrink from nature at its most primaI, red in tooth and claw, but understands that while a community can be full of darkness and harm,…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 