August, 2012

There’s no doubt Conversation Piece will amount to just that. And there can be no doubt that Lucy Guerin, choreographer and director of this co-production, is a vital, important, influential and innovative choreographic and theatrical force. But while the premise is irresistible, it doesn’t necessarily make for 70 minutes of compelling theatre. Maybe 20. Or [...]

You know spring is about to be sprung when dance cavorts into The Playhouse of the Sydney Opera House. Spring Dance 2012 is curated by Sydney Dance Company’s erstwhile artistic director Rafael Bonachela and is a liquorice allsorts of movement. First cab off the rank is the iOU Dance Solo Series, entitled Six Solos And [...]

Even the tickets for Tchaikovsky, the second and final of two Eifman ballets currently touring Australia, not only announces the name of the ballet, but notes “choreography by Boris Eifman”. As if his name on the company isn’t explicit enough. Methinks Boris is as much self-aggrandising impresario as choreo, but you probably need that, even now, [...]

Can-can dancers, pyrotechnics, hundreds of elderly ladies audibly swooning and the promise of Dancing with the Stars‘ Todd McKenney’s debut with the company — the 2013 Opera Australia season launch wasn’t one for the purists. But with next year to be packed with a Verdi festival in Sydney, Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Melbourne, a reprisal [...]

Board games are big business. Or so Hollywood would like you to think. Despite the big-screen adaption of Battleship sinking dramatically on its opening weekend earlier this year, we’ve still got Candyland (starring Adam Sandler), Risk and Monopoly (helmed by Ridley Scott) on the horizon for 2013. But long before Tinseltown’s top brass turned their eyes to the dusty recesses [...]

My theatre buddy had it right. Emerging from Sydney Theatre Company’s The Splinter, at Wharf 1, he reached for a cinematic parallel, comparing the effect of Hilary Bell’s play to, say, a classic Hitchcock. Like any good psychological drama, The Splinter is, necessarily, somewhat nebulous, a little inscrutable, open to speculation and interpretation. It is, [...]

Since I’m not, I don’t know what it is to be Russian, but it seems (if political and military history, culture and acquaintance are anything to go by) to involve drama. So does Eifman Ballet. I don’t know if it’s right for me to say so, but I don’t get the sense Boris Eifman, the [...]

FORM Dance Projects and Riverside Theatres, Parramatta are the courageous, collaborating, visionary forces that brought the short season of Tess de Quincey’s Framed, as part of Dance Bites 2012, to Sydney’s west. Let’s hope it transcends those geographical boundaries, as it deserves. The hype that attends the work describes it as “illuminating our inner life”. [...]

It seems (after how many years?) we still haven’t washed this musical out of our hair. I can still vividly picture the cover of the soundtrack album owned by my parents and even sharing a sense of reverence, romance, nostalgia and affection they seemed to harbour for it. It’s another brazenly commercial outing for Opera [...]