In this fortnight's Update: Monash launches new Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts; the year of Anchuli Felicia King; Tim Munro and Ten Thousand Birds; The Wheeler Centre and the $150,000 Next Chapter writers project; and a giveaway!

Belgian theatre director Ivo Van Hove has an appetite for bringing cinema to the stage. As artistic director of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam since 2001, he has directed stage adaptations of three Ingmar Bergman films, made work inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni, and staged a version of John Cassavetes’ 1977 drama ...

An explicitly racist advertisement for a skin-whitening treatment, the eponymous White Pearl cream, has gone viral. The pastel offices of ClearDay – the Singaporean cosmetics company behind the ad – become the backdrop for a disastrous attempt at damage control. Presided over by manager Priya Singh ...

Dr Johnson famously defined opera as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’, and so it proved on the opening night of Opera Australia’s autumn season – at least until the curtain went up. Lights down, photography admonition underway, conductor due any moment, we became aware of a strange incident in the gloom, as a solitary figure ...

A shift in the European mind is taking hold. The stable democracies of Germany and the Netherlands contrast sharply with an unstable France and a demagogic Italy. The northern tier has an increasing authority, politically and culturally. Art historically, the Amsterdam–Berlin axis challenges the hegemony of the Paris–Rome accord ...

In some ways, the title of this forty-year survey is at odds with Juno Gemes herself. There is nothing quiet about Gemes’s vision or her passion for telling stories that challenge preconceptions and cultural norms. Perhaps where the notion of ‘quiet’ comes from is in her subtle narratives, which are wrapped in concepts of the ordinary ...

‘I’m starting to see why Canada is so appealing,’ says Deb (Lily James) to her older sister Ollie (Tessa Thompson) as the two of them sit on the kitchen floor of their mother’s house trying to figure out their lives. Their mother has died after an unspecified, difficult illness; Ollie was her live-in carer and still sleeps on the sofa, out of habit and grief ...

Louis Nowra’s much-loved play Così is often held up as the archetypal great Australian comedy, a larrikin farce in the vein of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982). But as the years roll by and the play’s sensitivities diverge from contemporary standards, it increasingly seems to share more in common with Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ ...

In this fortnight's Update: Bill Henson + the Sydney Art Quartet; Nicholas Carter conducts the ANAM Orchestra; the 2019 Archibald Prize finalists are announced; Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton sweeps ABI Awards; SBS releases new free-to-air movie channel, and some giveaways!

There is a scene in Kenneth Branagh’s British film, All is True, where the earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen) tells William Shakespeare (Branagh) that The Bard has lived ‘a small life’. As the Southampton points out snidely, there have been no scandals in Shakespeare’s backstory, no drunken gallivanting on ...