I'm playing panel host for the next Things on Sunday event at the Malthouse.
I'm hoping to host a fascinating conversation between two very interesting
minds, Paul Carter and Richard Frankland. And there will be colour and
movement too - we're promised a little bit of multimedia. So do come.
As the first of the 2006 Things on Sunday program at the Malthouse Theatre,
join our esteemed panel in exploring the curious journey to establish
historical truthı. Writer and artist Paul Carter, as well as indigenous
film maker, playwright and activist Richard Frankland, are led by writer and
poet Alison Croggon as host, as they discuss this fine line in how
Australians imagine our past and present.
"Imagining History", Merlyn Theatre, The CUB Malthouse, 113 Sturt Street,
Southbank 3006. Sunday 26 February at 2.30pm
Review: Too Beautiful for Garbage , written and performed by Romi Trower,
directed by Richard Lowenstein. Design by Anna Borghesi, lighting design by
Michele Preshaw, sound design David Franzke. Chapel off Chapel.
Welcome to a world composed entirely of surfaces: the spinning hallucination
that is the "nightclub industry" in New York. Romi Trower's series of
skilfully enacted monologues gradually peel back its glamorous illusions to
reveal its predatory emptiness: it's fast, addictive, disillusioning,
destructive.
The premise is simple: you become a "promoter" and organise parties to
publicise the new and glamorous nightclubs. You want an invitation list of
men with money and women with looks: most of all, you want the "A" list
celebrities. You give them a free drink and then they spend thousands of
dollars quaffing Kristal champagne or ingesting the range drugs that you
also thoughtfully provide. If they are massively wealthy men, you drape
them with beautiful models. You want a long line of the unwanted outside the
club, so those inside feel exclusive.
Glittering before you is the lure of the epoch-making deal, the next big
thing. And behind you is littered the human trash that floats in the wake of
your dreams. And in between? Something like an infinitely deferred present,
like that infinitely deferred pay cheque: a sense of living inside a video
clip: a kaleidoscopic whirl of hustling and drugs and appearance,
appearance, appearance.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Blogosphericals
Almost a decade ago, when I first began exploring the net, theatre seemed
like the last bastion: so deeply rooted in real time and physical space,
perhaps, it's been slow to catch up with the prose and conniptions of
cyberdiscussion. Poets, being unwanted anywhere else (I joke! I joke!),
moved there wholesale; poetry zines, blogs, forums, listserves, author pages
and so on are out there in (literally) their millions. But no more: it's
standard for theatre companies now to run websites and theatre zines and
forums are flowering like Paterson's Curse - recent new Melbourne additions,
both responses to a lively independent scene, are Theatre Alive and
Melbourne Stage Online , which I'm told will soon introduce a discussion
forum. And, of course, blogs are spreading like an ever more insidious
virus. As some of the mainstream press indulges an ever more flippant
philistinism (check out this belief-beggaring piece , only the latest of a
series, by Age arts editor Raymond Gill) real discussion - enlivened by the
possibility of interaction across continents - moves ever more steadily onto
the net.
So permit me to point out some recent items of interest, the mere tip of an
iceberg...
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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