Ray Lawler, who died this week at 103, wrote Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, one of the most influential plays in Australian theatre history.
- Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University
Our new report asks if achieving environmental sustainability should be a key goal for all Australian performing arts companies.
Breathing new life into a decade-old national cultural policy is a useful beginning. What is required now is an in-depth gestation period to position culture as a public good for the nation.
Drama is an engine of discovery as powerful as media reportage, - with the remarkable advantage of putting humans beings under the microscope, linking opinions to emotions.
In an extract from his book, Australia in 50 Plays, Julian Meyrick reflects on an under-appreciated contribution to Australian theatre by the poet Douglas Stewart.
A new report outlining a national plan for the arts barely mentions two of our most important institutions: the ABC and the Australia Council.
In cult Danish TV series The Killing, detective Sarah Lund displays courage in the face of politicians sadly lacking it.
Two reports — from think tank A New Approach and ex-Grattan Institute director John Daley — say Australian art and culture hasn’t advocated for itself effectively. But we need to try something new.
For a woman with brightly coloured hair and enormous earrings, Art Works host Namila Benson is adept at fading into the background and letting the artists do the talking.
The Chichu Art Museum, on the Japanese island of Naoshima, is a breathtaking place to rethink the relationship between nature and people.
The amount going to arts and culture is a pimple to a pumpkin compared to what’s being pumped into the economy as a whole.
Where the policy debate has focused on a need to ‘rescue’ the cultural sector from the ill-effects of COVID-19, the emphasis must now be on growing it as part of a wider program of public investment.
COVID-19 has shown up a mind-bending contradiction. On one hand, the arts are entwined with our daily lives. Yet culture has disappeared from federal policy. Something has gone fundamentally wrong.
Performing arts centres will be hardest hit by COVID-19. Looking at the fortunes and pressures facing Queensland’s Home of the Arts can help us understand the challenges faced by around 150 centres.
Arguments for Australian culture focus on what it should say to demonstrate its worth - rather than the government’s capacity to listen. Our history of conservative cultural leadership show they can.
New grants to aid the arts and culture sector are welcome. But as we look for distraction and meaning in isolation, a bigger correction is needed to how the government values Australian creativity.
We care less about the arts when there is less to care about. The government of the day has backed Australian arts and culture into a corner and it must start telling its story better to survive.
Was Jesus Christ the first male lead in the history of modern theatre?
The Coalition government’s approach to arts and culture policy has been one of ad hocism and neglect. Perhaps most serious has been the damage done to the Australia Council and the ABC.
This verbatim drama presenting the stories of eight Iranian asylum seekers detained on their island prisons delivers uncomfortable home truths.
La Reprise is remarkable theatre about the murder of a gay man, Ihsane Jarfi, in Belgium in 2012.
Big Shows have a long history – the Romans used flying machines on stage and Medieval mystery plays took over whole towns.
At a time when even accountants are looking for a more compelling understanding of value, it is imperative that the arts – where individual experience is central – resist the evangelical call of quantification.
Stephen Sewell’s 1986 exemplifies the traits of the decade: apocalyptic in feel, epic in scope and unforgiving in length
The 1970s transformed Australian drama. It was a time of imaginative brilliance as the Empire wrote back.
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