Channels Festival 2017 officially launches this Friday 1st September! You’re invited to join them at The SUBSTATION from 6pm to celebrate the festival launch and official opening of the group exhibition Future Tense and Australian premiere of A Mountain Close Up is Only Rock by UK artists Kihlberg & Henry. Exploring the concept ‘futures of’, Channels 2017 showcases new and exciting contemporary moving image by over 90 Australian and international artists across multiple venues around Melbourne. Channels is the only Australian biennial dedicated to presenting video art and culture in a dynamic and inclusive festival of free exhibitions, screenings, workshops and public programs. FESTIVAL LAUNCH + OPENING NIGHT Date: Friday 1 Sept, from 6pm Location: The SUBSTATION FREE /// no bookings required SCREENING Video Visions Date: Friday 8 Sept, 7pm Location: ACMI, Cinema 2 Tickets: $15 Full, $12 Concession, $10 ACMI Members BUY NOW Selected from over 470 submissions from around the world, Video Visions draws on contemporary positions in video art to present Read More »
Peril’s Nithya Iyer sits down with Angharad Wynne-Jones to discuss the recent program of works exploring identity, belonging, and decolonisation. What inspired the recent program of works regarding belonging and identity at the Arts House? My perception is that discussions around race, and gender, and all sorts of identities, are really fiery right now. That feels like a very exciting, energetic space. Combined with a sense of ‘what it is to be alive in the world right now’, the global politics and the environmental disasters that await us, there is an increasing urgency that I’m seeing in artists work that is not just questioning or positioning identity, but challenging power in a really direct way. At Arts House, in most of the work that we program, the artists are interrogating and creating a politic or politics. But sometimes the intention of that work is different. It might be that an Read More »
Inside Chinatown, a risqué club attempting to establish itself as the first of its kind in Shanghai, perhaps in all of China, a vaudeville dream unfolds night after night, mesmerising audiences with showgirls in various states of undress, dancing in perfectly timed cabaret and tantalizing solo performances. Alcohol flows and music plays. But behind its glitzy front, the club is barely scraping by in a seemingly endless cycle of debt, made worse by brewing feuds between the talent, and a dysfunctional management who just can’t seem to get it together. In her new book, The Good Girl of Chinatown, Jenevieve Chang offers her story as a leading member of the infamous burlesque dance troupe, the China Dolls of Chinatown. Chang shares intimate – sometimes scandalous – details about the lives of performers and patrons inhabiting the club within an account of a path that led her from Australia, to London, Read More »
This workshop is a chance to meet and learn from award-winning poet, writer and researcher, Dr Quinn Eades. The workshop focus will be on writing from (rather than about) life experiences and the body, particularly around gender and sexuality. Quinn will discuss the politics of life writing, and the ways that writing stories from ‘other’ bodies can broaden minds and promote social change. Quinn will share information about his own writing practice, and then set a series of writing exercises, some of them to music. If you haven’t written for a long time, think your story is not important enough to write or have dreamt of writing but never put fingers to keyboard or pen to paper, then this workshop is for you: you will leave with words. Book now! Sunday 27 August, 12–2 pm Bloodhound Corner Bar & Kitchen Tickets: $30
The different shades of place and displacement Arts House is presenting a series of installations, performances, spoken-word events, readings and conversations during July, which will reveal and explore the complex relationships of place and belonging. Arts House Artistic Director Angharad Wynne-Jones said the works, which run from 19 – 30 July 2017, explore narratives around the violence of colonialism, the migration of people as refugees or those asserting new futures, and our connection to the land on which we live on. “Twelve lead artists and their collaborators from across the globe, and around the corner, are bringing their urgent, powerful explorations of histories and possible futures to Arts House in July,” said Wynne-Jones. Artists include multi-media spoken word maestro Nástio Mosquito with his work Respectable Thief. Known for his performances, videos, music and poetry with an intense commitment to the open-ended potential of language, Mosquito comes to Arts House via Read More »
Presented by Griffin Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Michele Lee is an important emerging voice in contemporary Australian writing. Ambitious in form and idea, her observations on race, gender and power can be both sharp and tender. With Rice, Michele sets the personal politics of two women against the politics of global food production. Nisha is a high-flying young executive at Australia’s largest producer of rice — precocious, headstrong and determined to become Australia’s first female Indian CEO. She’s presently closing in on a secret deal with the Indian government, which will place her company at the centre of India’s rice distribution. Working late every night, Nisha encounters Yvette, the ‘Chinese cleaner’ of her office building. As the nights wear on, she soon realises that Yvette has more to offer than merely clearing away her dishes. The two form a powerful, if unlikely, bond as they navigate the complexities of their lives. Rice won Michele Read More »
Melbourne based costume designer, Eugyeene Teh, is a standout in his field, a striking talent with a flair for spectacular, purpose made, fashion architecture for theater. It is this seemingly innate connection to the explicit particulars of dynamic stage costume design that has made Eugyeene the obvious go-to for productions like Nakkiah Lu’s Blaque Show Girls, and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. More recently, Eugyeene has directed his talent into works by Little Ones Theatre, a company he’s formed alongside director – Stephen Nicolazzo, and fellow designer – Katie Sfetkidis, which is dedicated to examining gender and queer aesthetic. The Moors, by US playwright, Jen Silverman, is the latest in a line-up of Little Ones Theatre releases. It’s a provocative and fantastical tale, set in the dark heath of Victorian England. Two sisters, Agatha (Alex Aldrich) and Hudley (Anna McCarthy), Agatha and Hudley, tread through a dismal, isolated life Read More »
I have been performing my book Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor in various cities around the world. As a ‘recovering academic’ I have found that my writing and theory do not just belong on the page. Keeping it in this realm means narrowing the number of people who can actually engage with my work, which looks at transnational Indian dancers as gendered, racialised labourers, whose work in the cultural sphere has remained invisible. This invisibility is a result of the enduring politics following anti-Asian exclusion laws in the USA and the White Australia Policy in Australia. What has been interesting to audiences is the continued relevance of anti-Asian immigration laws as they affect Asians now in Australia, USA, UK and other parts of the world. She was whirling and twirling and stamping her feet Wearing a beautiful Gagra choli Like an Indian princess A white woman in New Read More »
My father is an engineer by profession. Had he had a choice when he was younger, he might’ve become a professor of physics. He might’ve also been a happier man, having chased his vocation and lived a fulfilling career. Instead, in the year 1973, he had risen from poverty to graduate from one of the most prestigious universities (on a scholarship) and pass the rigorous banking examination (for which only a tiny fraction of the half a million applicants a year qualify) – all to obtain an entry-level position at a bank earning a paltry salary. Wages were abysmally low back then, before the country opened its markets and invited the foreign investment boom. It didn’t seem possible, and probably wasn’t, for him to chase a career as an academic. He had to support my grandparents and not just financially. He had to do what my grandmother had taught him Read More »
Part gothic thriller and part black comedy, The Moors is a tale of seething tensions and repressed passions tormenting Agatha and Huldey, who are eking out an isolated life in the wild and inhospitable heath.
A review of HerPlace: Women in the West Victoria University at Metro West 7-31 March 2017 Certificates, signed photographs, a signed football guernsey, manuscripts, botanical specimens, books, artworks and a typewriter. These were the physical remains of women’s work in HerPlace: Women in the West. This was the second exhibit of HerPlace Women’s Museum Australia which is proposing the creation of a women’s museum in Melbourne. The exhibit profiled 10 women from the Western suburbs of Melbourne and “celebrates the work, achievements and historical significance of women through moving image, photographs, biographical accounts and personal artefacts”. Video interviews and written biographies were placed around the edge of the exhibit, separated from the objects which were in showcases in the centre or on other walls. This made it difficult to connect the individual voices with the relevant objects. The object labels were mostly depersonalised descriptions of the object. Exceptions were the Read More »
Woman Hard work is etched in my bones. I see it in my mother’s restless hands, the way she jiggles her knees or bites her fingernails when she sits down to rest. I saw it in the spotlessness of both my grandmothers’ houses – in the way that they never sat down until everything around them was pristine. As much as I long for the order of these houses, I have learned to sit in the chaos of my home and look only at the screen or book in front of me. But the restlessness has stayed with me. I check work emails both earlier and later than I should. I work early in the morning and later in the evening. Before I had a child, my ideal working hours would have been roughly 8am to 7pm. I’ve been forced to truncate my hours into more or less 9 to Read More »
I remember the exact moment when, years ago, I came across Joan Didion’s rendering of the self as expressed in a private notebook: “the implacable I”. Who could be less forgiving than the self? The phrase stayed with me for a good time afterwards; I was stunned by the profundity such simple words could give away. This same feeling came back to me recently in my reading of Durga Chew-Bose’s debut essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood. “Isn’t it curious how some fonts appear more dogmatic than others? How italicized neon pink on a book of non-fiction is suddenly: Commentary!” an observation she offers in the book’s opening essay ‘Heart Museum’ prompted me to take another look at the cover, only to realise that its minimalist beauty was scarred by a smudge. Had I spilled water on my book? It was unlike me to be that careless. Read More »
Fanfiction takes someone else’s old story and, arguably, makes it new, or makes it over, or just makes more of it, because the fan writer loves the story so much they want it to keep going (Jamison, 2014). ———– “What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?” read one of the trivia questions at the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF) ‘Late Night Lit: Fandom’. Why did it sound familiar? Where had I heard it before? Like most of the questions that night, that brilliant, fun night, the answers escaped me. I was too focused on my spiel that evening. It was my first time participating in a panel at a writers’ festival. Dazed, I pinched myself. This was real. I couldn’t believe it. Who would have thought that eight months after I sent the proposal—as a dare—I would end up participating at the Emerging Writers Festival. ———– Through some Read More »
We all have a thousand invisible threads tied to us, threads that tug gently as we move throughout our lives. We move like puppets, tugged on by some sort of supreme puppet master. Each thread is a reminder of a former self we chose not to be that still lingers in our memories, our “what ifs”. There might be a thread tied to your pinky, or one that makes your mouth twitch, or one that strings along your feet, taking you elsewhere. We are faced with choices all the time, from the mundane decision of what to have for breakfast to the bigger decisions: whether to turn a hobby into a career, despite its impracticality, or whether to stay with someone who hasn’t really given you a reason to stay. Every time we make a choice, we discard all the other options. All these unmade decisions stay with us, always Read More »
For most Melbournians, the word ‘stripper’ conjures up images of barely clad women gyrating against poles, or a Hollywood heartthrob crunching his six-pack over low-slung jeans. But in the underground nightclubs of Manila, a different kind of stripper exists. One that dances to slow emotive ballads, without props or costumes, and is exclusively the domain of young men. Namely, the macho dancer. Conceived by Filipino dancer, choreographer and visual artist Eisa Jocson, Macho Dancer is a performative dance work exploring and dissecting the physical and emotive vernacular of Manila’s macho dancers. Reversing the roles commonly played in the macho dancer bars, Jocson adopts the seductive ‘masquerade of masculinity’ normally performed by young men, against a woman’s body. Set in the dark and smoky recesses of AsiaTOPA’s XO State Dusk, the rather intimate audience is seated surrounding a long and narrow path – a trademark of the strip tease stage. As Read More »
Last weekend the lofty recesses of Melbourne’s Federation Square were transformed for an experiment in literary cross-pollination. The Jaipur Literary Festival, held each year in Jaipur, India is the largest free literary festival of its kind in the world. Now in it’s 10th year, the festival brings together writers and thinkers from all over the globe – not in the least of which have included Salman Rushdie, Stephen Fry, Oprah Winfrey, J.M Coetzee or His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama – for five days of talks, panels, art and debate. Now it in it’s 10th year, the festival directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple have seen the Jaipur Literary Festival invited into places such as London and Boulder for sister events. A homage to the resonance of the festival with a global audience. This year, the Melbourne Writers Festival, Teamwork Arts and Federation Square, supported by Sidney Myer Fund, Arts Centre Read More »
[Editor’s Note: In mid-2016, Dominic Golding visited various parts of Canada and New York in the USA. In this photo essay, Dominic sketches through prose and poetry the different ways that multiculturalism looks between cities, and in comparison to Australia. All images are copyrighted to the author of this piece, Dominic Golding.] I have had many cosmopolitan eating experiences, like having French crème broche in Winnipeg or Caribbean jerk chicken in Toronto. Multicultural policy in Canada and USA is not just individual consumption. It is embedded as social policy inside cultural institutions, and promoted by companies. It is not about elimination of racism alone. It is about acknowledging difference with our fellow country citizens. Ethnicity is part of the national fabric. Recognising gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability is recognising certain rights. Multiculturalism seeks to minimise social barriers to integration. These photos are a snap shot of multiculturalism at work. Welcome to Read More »
JLF Melbourne is a celebration of the written and spoken word, featuring internationally acclaimed writers and thinkers from India and Australia. In an extraordinary presentation of talks, performances, music and poetry at Fed Square, JLF Melbourne is an exploration of culture, migration, identity and gender issues, politics, the environment, travel and history. Connecting South Asia’s and Australia’s unique identities, the festival brings ‘the greatest literary show on Earth’ to Australia’s City of Literature. With stimulating discussions and live performances, experience the best of South Asian and Australian writing and ideas at JLF Melbourne for one weekend only. The two-day celebration is held in collaboration with Melbourne Writers Festival, Teamwork Arts, Fed Square and Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Asia TOPA. Free entry on Sunday 12 February.
An incisive new comedy skewering race and gender in contemporary Australia from Brisbane-based award winning writer Michelle Law. Step into the after-hours of a suburban Chinese restaurant and meet a family of whip smart women who are definitely talking about you in their native tongue. Set on the Sunshine Coast this hilarious play answers what it means to be an Asian woman living in Australia. Catch an Auslan interpreted performance on Thursday 2nd March at 7.30pm.
‘Psycho Raman 2.0’ is not only a film about crime, but also highlights the many intricacies of India as a fast-developing country. The film captures Mumbai at the crucial time of India’s rising economy, touching on government corruption, the dominance of patriarchy, and a lack of enforced human rights. ‘Psycho Raman’ takes its name from notorious 1960s serial killer Raman Raghav, also known as Psycho Raman. The film opens with a frame that reads ‘This is NOT his story’, and so this should not be viewed as a biography, but rather a portrayal of Mumbai’s crime world. The film shows the city becoming infested by a string of murders, with policeman Raghav (Vicky Kaushal) in charge of investigations. Raghav, knowing the crimes are the doings of Ramanna—a copycat of Psycho Raman—traces Ramanna’s footsteps. The film follows Raghav, cop by day and criminal by night, as he attempts to capture Ramanna. Read More »
