Australian Centre Of Performing Arts / Cabaret Voltaire Are you a Melbourne artist or company looking for a beautiful, central and creative space for theatre rehearsals/performances, band/musical group rehearsals/performances or a visual and photographic exhibition space ?…..Then look no further. Performance venue and rehearsal space available at The Australian Centre of Performing Arts - suit theatre groups / musicians / photographers / workshop seminars. First floor space for hire / lease. Flexible terms / conditions - hourly, daily, weekly or lease agreement. Available Mondays to Fridays 9 to 5 pm. Weekends and after hours optional. Office / admin / marketing / promotional services also available. Contact - ...
Archives for “Theatre”
This South Melbourne open plan office already houses an Event Production Company and an Entertainment/Theatre Production Company and we are looking for some dynamic people to share our office space with. We have approximately 30sqm of free space, already set up with three workstations. Rear courtyard with communal BBQ and water feature add a little pizazz to our space and we invite any one interested to pop in and have a look for themselves.
From Practicing hybrid/interdisciplinary artist seeks studio space with other inspired creatives. 24hr access, lock up & parking required. Fitzroy, Collingwood, City, North & North East suburbs. Flexible warehouse space preferred. Communal rehearsal/jam/gallery space a distinct advantage. Price negotiable, including professional skills trade. Please contact if you have something up for grabs!
I’m sad that the Last Tuesday Society seems to have outgrown their second Fitzroy venue, Yah Yah’s, in 2009 after outgrowing the Old bar the previous year. I’m very pleased for them however that they continue to attract larger audiences to their performances. Their last show for 2009, the second anal Christmas shambles at the Order of Melbourne, was packed and lots of fun, though it was not quite as consistently funny as the previous plagiarism show. The complications of performing on a different stage at a new venue, and more guest acts, reduced the rhythm and flow of the show, ...
Burning Daylight is a contemporary dance and theatre production about the remote north-western coastal town of Broome by the indigenous and multicultural troupe Marrugeku. It was a reasonably entertaining production but on balance I have given it a NOT based on a single criteria – would I recommend it to a friend? And the answer, my friends, is no. Firstly, the positives. Some of the dancing was really exciting – vigorous and energetic and sharp. Many of the movements incorporated acrobatics/gymnastics and muscle-heavy hip hop choreography, which worked most effectively when the dancers moved in unison. I was particularly impressed by ...
I’m an early-bird but there’s not many events that would have me bounding out of bed, grabbing a stupendous strawberry, white chocolate and coconut muffin from Proud Mary and lining up with hundreds of other people at 8:45am at Southbank. But this was one very special garage sale. The Melbourne Theatre Company were moving, and everything had to go for one day only. I wanted to be part of the fake food buying frenzy! The main area in the large warehouse was taken up by furniture and props, but I (and a million other people) made a beeline for the clothing section. ...
Out of the three plays I’ve seen at the MTC this year, Brink Productions and Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling, is an absolute standout. That really says something when you’re comparing it with Tony Award winning, Broadway and West End hits August: Osage County and God of Carnage. When the Rain Stops Falling is intricate, clever and thought-provoking. Trying to describe it is like trying to capture floating mist, but in a bland nutshell you could say that it’s a story about four generations of a family. Although it’s not clear until partway through that the characters are actually linked ...
Can you believe it’s the end of October and they’re erecting the Christmas tree at City Square already? Events this week: preview of The Brothers Bloom with Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz; preview of Jane Campion’s latest film Bright Star, starring the gorgeous Abbie Cornish; glamming it up for homeless shelter charity Many Rooms at the inaugural A Moment in Morocco Docklands Ball on Friday 30 October; checking out When the Rain Stops Falling, the latest production from ...
Docklands and Bundoora. That’s a pretty big contrast. And perfect comedy material for a fringe festival hit from The Bedroom Philosopher, Songs from the 86 Tram. The 86 is my home tram and I can tell you it’s a carriage of character compared to my former tram (No 8 to Toorak – homogenous and perfectly groomed). Justin Heazlewood, the self-described love child of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, sings the story of the 86s (’we are tramily!’) interspersed with occasional monologues from the mumbling tram driver, some cheerful tram ‘dings’ and the beep-beep sound of a Metcard being validated. Heazlewood expresses the ...
This week’s it’s all about Fringe, Fringe, Fringe: Melbourne Fringe Festival #5 – Opening night of the drama She’s My Baby, billed as “Two Monologues, One Couple, Sixteen Years Apart” and showing at the Trades Hall on Tuesday 6 October; Melbourne Fringe Festival #6 Comedy show 21 – ‘Cause you’ll only turn it once (probably a good thing) at Northcote Town Hall on Wednesday 7 October; Melbourne Fringe Festival #7 Two man sketch show Metrosketchuals at The Glasshouse Hotel on Thursday 8 October; and Melbourne Fringe Festival #8 How could I resist a show called Songs from the 86 Tram– that’s the tram full of mentalists ...
Candy Bowers wanted all the critics to introduce their reviews by saying that Who’s That Chik? features ‘a girl in skin tight dance pants’. So if you’re expecting crisp white linen suits and the perfect diction of God of Carnage, you’re in the wrong theatre. Candy B’s self-written, autobiographical show is billed as ’a hip hop tale of a brown girl with big dreams’. I’m not much of a hip hop-er (RM recently had to explain Snoop talk to me….off the hizzle, for shizzle) so I didn’t really know whether I’d like the show or not. Which just proves why we should ...
Melbourne Fringe Festival #3: Tale of the Golden Lease by four blokes in jeans, otherwise known as Vigilantelope. While the rest of Melbourne was getting celebrating/commiserating over the grand final, I sat in a dark room at the Lithuanian Club and got transported to heaven, hell, the prehistoric era and a fish and chip shop. Tale of the Golden Lease is a wild story about the race between God and Satan to find the lease for Earth and thus control the fate of humans, all before (Father) time runs out. Naturally such an important religious topic involved a couple of Olympics opening ...
OK – long story short. UK theatre duo Ridiculusmus are conducting a play reading of Goodbye Princess, their new work-in-progress (hopefully for London’s National Theatre), at this year’s upcoming Melbourne Fringe Festival. And…..I’ve been allocated the part of ‘Blogger 1′ because Ridiculusmus found out that I was a blogger! Blogger 1 is based on a British theatre blogger called Chris Goode, so as part of my intense acting preparations using the Stanislavski method, I thought I might try to write my next few theatre posts in the style and tone of Chris Goode. Honestly, I tried, but I found it too ...
After the big-hitting August: Osage County, the Melbourne Theatre Company is bringing another award winning play to Melbourne, this time Tony Award winner Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. Misbehaving children seems to be the theme of the month for me, what with the Chris Tsiolkas talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival and this play. God of Carnage is essentially a comedy four-hander focused on two sets of parents who come together because one of their children has hurt the other. Their meeting starts off with a veneer of civility over coffee and clafoutis as they try to discuss the matter in ...
The last performance as part of the Arts House’s Green Saturday Matinees was the most enjoyable production for me. While The Ballad of Backbone Joe didn’t make any deep statements of social commentary and explore thought-provoking issues, it was inventive and fun. The Suitcase Royale are a trio of rag ‘n’ bone musicians whose style I would term ‘Louisiana swampy blues’ and their theatrical performances combine their song-writing skills with comedy, slapstick, shadow images and puppetry. The Ballad of Backbone Joe was a dime novel mystery about a boxing match, a dodgy abattoir owner, a girl in a red dress with ...
In my experience, fringe theatre can go two ways – quirky and interesting or really really bad. After the fiasco that was Spectacular last week, I was a bit scared about what the Arts House’s second week of Green Saturday Matinees would bring me. The stage for Shamelessly Glitzy Work was decked out in a curtain of glittery lurex with three microphones arranged like a Pointer Sisters set. As the lights went down, three girls dressed in primary-coloured suits approached the mikes, smiling and nodding in an unnerving and benevolent manner. They then started a humorous incantation of the kind of inanities you overhear in ...
The second of the Green Saturday Matinees presented by Arts House was a performance by UK group Forced Entertainment entitled ‘Spectacular‘. Well. I’m not sure how to describe what was possibly one of the worst theatre performances I’ve ever been unlucky enough to attend. I think the play was supposed to be a rumination on the absurdity of death when represented in theatre and the suspension of reality required by an audience seeing actors play dead. What actually transpired was 75 butt-scratchingly boring minutes of banal, low-level patter by a guy in a skeleton tracksuit interspersed with a woman retching and ...
Arts House, a contemporary arts organisation in North Melbourne, is presenting a series of contemporary performances called Look Out, with the first events happening in August. As part of the organisation’s commitment to offset its carbon footprint, it’s offering free tickets to Saturday matinee performances if you arrive at the venue by an emission-free mode of transport, such as a walking, bike and public transport. Green Saturday Matinees are such a great idea and the two performances I attended were a full house. ‘Once and for all we’re gonna tell you who we are so shut up and listen‘ was a theatre ...
First there was the History Wars. Now we have the Theatre Wars. The battle lines are drawn, the forces marshaled, the trenches dug, the artillery called in. And it’s about time, if you ask me. We need to confront these issues head on. We need to breach once and for all our great Australian silence. I know, [...]
Mayumana is a 85 minutes of all-singing, all-dancing, slapstick energy and it’s inevitable that it will be compared to the last all-singing, all-dancing , slapstick show that Melbourne hosted, Cirque de Soleil. The difference with Mayumana is that the thumping rhythm of the show is provided by the acoustic properties of the body and a series of unusual props. So much of the beat comes from the troupe drumming on plastic buckets, steel cans and wheelie bins, slapping their thighs, arms and chests, stamping their feet, breathing down long plastic tubes like a didgeridoo and even dancing and leaping with glow-in-the-dark ...
I almost missed this show. So many people independently told me it wasn’t worth a crumpet that I actually believed them. Which just goes to show, when the mass of opinion runs against a piece of theatre, it usually pays to investigate further. As it turned out it was only because of the determined campaigning of a [...]
To celebrate the new home of MEL: HOT OR NOT, I’ve decided to test trial a little interactivity on the blog. Basically, I have a double pass to see Mayumana at the Arts Centre for 8pm Wednesday 22 July and I would like to take one of my readers as my date! Movement creates music in Mayumana, a pulsating mix of beat, music and movement, intertwined with humour and joy. Direct from Israel, Mayumana is a dynamic and emotionally charged theatre experience for all to enjoy! Touring successfully around the world in over 24 countries, Mayumana comes exclusively to the Arts Centre ...
FamousWhenDead Gallery is fresh contemporary art space in Melbourne. It is located on the fringe of the CBD downtown area and only a 2-min walk away from the Queen Victoria Markets. It is a space for art and thinking, and for art and meeting. Throughout the year the gallery presents a changing exhibition program, with an emphasis on work by young and emerging artists. It is set to explore new approaches and forms, places and cultures, themes and ideas. The gallery’s focus is on street and urban art by local and international artists. It acknowledges Street Art as a global phenomenon and ...
The Village Roadshow Theatrette is a fully-appointed theatrette with fixed seating, located at the State Library of Victoria. Audio-visual equipment is controlled from a touch screen console located on the raised stage. Integrated equipment includes a Sony video/data projector, VCR, CD and DVD,document camera, microphone network and house lights.
It’s been two years since Lee Lewis published her trailblazing essay Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre Platform Papers (# 13, 2007). In it she asked, among other things: At what point will a (non-white) actor with discernibly accented English be cast in a Pinter? Julian Meyrick has now answered that question. His production of The Birthday [...]
