Tuesday, 28 September 2021

Together Experiences - 3 videos from Arts Centre Melbourne Sept 2021

This looks interesting. Three video by artists. kh

Together Experiences -Arts Centre Melbourne -3 videos  

Media Release 28 Sept 2021
Arts Centre Melbourne has launched a powerful new storytelling campaign showcasing the importance of the performing arts to Victorians as it looks towards a future reopening. 

Together Experiences, an emotive series of short films created pre-COVID by Melbourne-based agency, Brands to life® shines a light on the unique and positive impact of the performing arts on the state’s diverse community. 

 Photo by Mark Gambino

The first three films focus on three individuals whose lives have been significantly impacted by the performing arts and Arts Centre Melbourne.

Choreographer Stephanie Lake discusses the creation of her large-scale work Colossus, an Arts Centre Melbourne commission and a lifelong dream to create a work exploring the complex unison and wild individuality of humans.

“There’s no question we’re in troubling times. There’s incredible division. A single leaf is interesting, but thousands of leaves moving in the wind is breathtaking,” says Lake.

Lauren Hayes, who was born blind, explains how audio description makes her theatre experience complete while Thomas Smith talks about Arts Centre Melbourne’s Tech Connect Regional Training Program which allowed him to pursue his dream of working in theatre from his home in Swan Hill.

The Together Experiences film series will be shared over nine weeks and lead into the time when Arts Centre Melbourne can begin welcoming artists back to its stages and audiences to its venues. The films will be shown through a digital media campaign as well as on Arts Centre Melbourne’s website and venue’s digital screens. 

“Since we closed our doors last year, COVID-19 has separated us: artists and arts workers from stages, audiences from venues,’’ says Arts Centre Melbourne CEO Claire Spencer AM.

“These films speak directly to our role as Victoria’s arts centre – a gathering place connecting all Victorians with the art that inspires them, and artists, makers and presenters with the stages where they belong.”
_END

 

Saturday, 25 September 2021

Hamlet STC & MTC, Sept 20 1995 *****

 

NB: I just found this review from 1995. From the vantage point of 2021, I know this was an exceptional  production with an extraordinarily talented cast that included Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Richard Roxburgh, Peter Carroll, and directed by Neil Armfield. This was a treat! KH

 Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Produced by by Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company

 At Playhouse Theatre until October, 1995

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on around 20 Sep 1995

Stars: 5

 

Nothing shatters the spirit like grief and Shakespeare's Hamlet is saturated with souls grieving for death, abandonment or betrayal. Richard Roxborough's Hamlet is a copybook study of grief: shock, sadness, disconnection from his body and environment, fear, disbelief, self-doubt followed by unbridled rage.

 

Roxborough has earned his Sydney Critic's Award for his idiosyncratic, compelling and prismatic characterisation which glints in the light as he turns it. His prince has a subtlety and dynamic range which resonates, shifting easily from underplayed youthful carping and melancholia, through physical incapacitation to cynicism, physical comedy then full-blown anguish. 

 

How easily we forget the effect of grief on we frail humans. Hamlet loses a father, a lover then a mother. Ophelia her lover then father and Laertes father and sister. Their grief is palpable, almost unbearable to behold. The men turn their aching anguish outward to revenge a wronged loved one. Ophelia turns her pain inward.

 

There is a delicacy and reality in Neil Armfield's finely tuned, rhythmic production which plays the actors like instruments which weep and wail with torrents of emotion. He gives them their heads, never overstating either comedy or pathos. It is an ensemble piece with many of this exceptional cast playing multiple roles.

 

Peter Carroll as the donnish "prating old fool", Polonius, almost steals the first half of the play. Geoffrey Rush commendably underplays Horatio, the loyal, ever-watchful eye of objectivity.

 

 Jacek Koman has a still and regal composure which makes Claudius all the more insidious. Cate Blanchett's mad scene as Ophelia was profoundly distressing yet lyrical. Her pale muddied skin and clothing heightened the fragility of her physical and spiritual self.

 

The whole piece is served perfectly by the soundscape (Paul Charlier) and the design (Dan Potra) with distressed warehouse walls and cold tiling create a chill, grey, discomfiting palace for this greatest of all tragedies. The tiny shrine lights and flowers on the wall remind us constantly of the dead who will be remembered.

 

KATE HERBERT