Arts
Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent by Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
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In January 1957, Salvador Dalí appeared on American television in What’s My Line, a game show featuring a segment in which blindfolded panellists tried to work out the identity of a mystery guest by asking only yes-no questions. Dalí did not make it easy for the panel or the host: he answered ‘yes’ every time, not only to ‘Are you a performer?’ and ‘Would you be considered a leading man?’ but also to ‘Do you have anything to do with sports?’ In his mind, he was famous for absolutely anything and everything.
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Policy announcements are a peculiar kind of theatre, and Labor’s launch of its new five-year arts plan, Revive, was a strong example of the genre. It was held at Melbourne’s iconic Espy in St Kilda, a venue where arts audiences were treated to words of encouragement from Minister Tony Burke on his speaking tour to spruik the submissions process in 2022, and where ‘DJ Albo’ once entertained a modest crowd.
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To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
... (read more)We heard the news in the Giardino. Our party had agreed to meet at the American pavilion. James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, co-curator of the Robert Gober exhibit, was going to take us through the show. As the various members made their way through the 49th Venice Biennale to the rendezvous, we learned that the World Trade Centre towers had been hit and that the Pentagon was on fire. Behind us, the American pavilion was quietly closed. On the vaporetto back to the hotel, a Belgian businessman was on his cell phone to his secretary in Brussels. He turned and told us that both towers had collapsed.
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Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, after the old cathedral had been destroyed by German bombing raids in 1940. He dedicated the work to four friends, three of whom were killed while on active service during World War II, and the fourth of whom survived the war but later committed suicide. As an avowed pacificist who had been a conscientious objector during the war, Britten took the opportunity to compose a work combining the traditional Latin Requiem Mass with the anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen: a fellow pacificist (and fellow gay man) who had served as a lieutenant in World War I and who was killed on the Western Front one week before the Armistice was declared in 1918.
... (read more)Visions of Nature: How landscape photography shaped settler colonialism by Jarrod Hore
Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, first performed in 1976, is a dense and difficult play set during the English Civil War. The period may be distant in time but Churchill, working in a broadly Marxist tradition, sees it as an era when fundamental questions of governance were tested by a mass of ordinary people. From whom does the state derive authority, and is a person bound to obey laws they find unjust? Does the existence of private property – those enclosed lands cultivated for the profit of a few – offend against the common good? Do the rich offend God? ‘For a short time when the king had been defeated anything seemed possible,’ Churchill wrote in a 1978 introductory note. The possibilities included, for some, Christ’s return and with it the instigation of an earthly Paradise.
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