The action raced from musical soundscapes to didactic melodramas. From animalistic lycra to a japanese tale of love and ogres. Whilst Tiananmen Square rubbed shoulders with a local paper mill, Murray Bramwell was getting to know the nature of the beast itself.
Now that Come Out has gone back inside for another two year period of planning and preparation, it is a good time to take stock. This has been the ninth festival and with its theme, Designing Our Future. …
Continue Reading Back to topArchaos
Wayville Showgrounds
Any display of pyrotechnics depends on precision and planning, and Archaos, Cirque Revolutionaire from France, has an especially fearful symmetry to it. What makes this show remarkable is the intelligence that drives it – hardly a gesture or joke is without reverberation, every sign is significant. Archaos offers many signs for the times.
Not that we are talking dry semiotics here. Stunt riders hurling 44 gallon drums, vandals with chainsaws, pyromaniacs and menacing clowns, spin in …
Continue Reading Back to top1990 Adelaide Festival
Murray Bramwell
Reviewing an arts festival is a bit like being locked up in a sweet shop. You can savour only so many creams, crunches, pralines and truffles before a drowsy numbness pains the sense and the pancreas tires of life. The effect of this kind of exquisite burn-out can be that you mistake satiety for dissatisfaction and blame Clifford Hocking for it.
There have already been harsh exchanges about the jaded responses of local reviewers and …
Continue Reading Back to topA Matter of Chance
The Kosh
Odeon Theatre
The most decisive events often depend on the slightest chances, the longest coincidences, the merest whims. Vladimir Nabokov, master of pale ironies and constructor of crystalline prose, wrote A Matter of Chance in 1924. It concerns a Russian emigre couple, separated by circumstances, who, unknown to each other, are both travelling on the Berlin-Paris Express.
The woman, neurasthenic with hunger and anxiety, has been following various leads in the hope of being …
Continue Reading Back to top1990
Adelaide Festival
Murray Bramwell
It is now only twelve sleeps before the 16th Adelaide Festival opens its many gates, doors and curtains. Already some shows have sold out and others are not far from it. The Vienna Singverein’s Requiem with Erich Bergel and the Sydney Symphony has completely sold out and you will soon have to sing for tickets to their unaccompanied concert of choral music. Some Elder Hall concerts have sold out- including those by Paco Pena and …
Continue Reading Back to topWhose Beach is it Anyway?
by Greg McCart
Kite Theatre Company, Queensland
Directed by Sue Rider
Design: Paul Edwards, Composer: Barry Ferrier
Cast: Tim Mullooly, Susi French, Lil Kelman, Elaine Cusick
For their contribution to Come Out 89, the Kite Theatre Company flew in from Brisbane to present a show for littlies entitled Whose Beach is it Anyway? Karah, a young suburban kid, comes across a hidden beach inhabited only by seagulls, a turtle, a crab and a brown booby …
Continue Reading Back to topInterpreting the New Dreaming
Come Out 89 Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Now that the eighth biennial Come Out Festival has come and gone there is time to reflect on what is a quite remarkable youth arts festival. For 16 years Adelaide has hosted a gathering of performers, participants and audiences which has become such a familiar part of the cultural landscape that it is almost taken for granted.
For that reason any commentary on Come Out should begin by praising …
Continue Reading Back to topThe 1989 Come Out festival has ended and yet again this remarkable event has focused activities in all areas of youth arts. The more than fifty events involving .hundreds of performers and audiences of many thousands are only part of a chain reaction of activities generated in schools and communities in the metropolitan area and throughout the state.
In fifteen years Come Out has expanded and consolidated such that it is almost taken for granted locally. It is worth saying …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Adelaide Festival Centre Trust is gearing up for a sort-of off-peak festival next month. After all the debate about whether the Adelaide Festival should be an annual or biennial fixture, Trust administrator Rob Brookman is packaging a series of performances plucked from the Sydney and Perth festivals for those sybarites tired of January’s excess and those committed enough to music and dance not to notice the near-molten state of their credit cards.
The three main events being presented are …
Continue Reading Back to topThe New Dreaming
Come Out 89
Murray Bramwell talks with Michael Fitzgerald.
Since it began as a row of tents in the Adelaide Parklands in 1974, Come Out has become a major youth arts festival virtually unrivalled in the world. Its reputation for quality, diversity and the sheer scale of its mobilisation is a credit to the energy and commitment of a succession of directors and administrators and an army of teachers and arts workers. Come Out has continued to …
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