We’re starting 2015 with an experiment in collaborative creative writing. What happens when you ask ten academics to write a story together? Taking our cue from the Exquisite Cadaver game played by Surrealist…
- Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University
There aren’t many things I miss about London. Waiting for the 22 bus on evenings of interplanetary cold: no. Inching down Oxford Street through crowds like rows of rugby prop forwards: not really. The…
Tragedy is a peculiar thing. More than a style, different from genre, it cuts across art forms to carve out its own non-Euclidean aesthetic space. In the 4th century BCE Aristotle, in his Poetics, famously…
One of the loopier actions of the eccentric Roman Emperor Elagabalus (inventor of the whoopee cushion) was an edict calling for all sex scenes in imperial theatres to be performed live and not simulated…
What use are Shakespeare’s plays? Back in the day, when my wife and I were dirt-poor arty types and lived in a hovel that declined the profligacy of doors, a two-volume hard-back edition of his collected…
Drama and its core principles are to be found in theatres while the real world goes on outside, right? Wrong. And recent events bear this out. Dramaturgy is the art of managing events in time for the benefit…
As with other emissions of choice opacity – horoscopes, Bible stories, RBA economic forecasts – cultural policy announcements invite construal of their mystical meaning. Nothing is quite as it seems. On…
The Louvain library in Belgium and its priceless collection of medieval manuscripts were destroyed by German soldiers exactly 100 years ago today – and so it is timely to ponder the links between education…
Around 89,960. That’s the number of meals we can expect to eat if we live to the age of 82. Take an average of men and women’s life expectancies (79.9 + 84.3 ÷ 2), x 3 meals a day, x 365 days a year…
Last year in Australian theatre a rare event took place: a sector-wide debate about the role of classic adaptations in the national repertoire. But the discussion had darker resonances and was clearly…
Things to remember if you are a federal minister for the arts: In arts policy, as in the arts, how you do things matters as much as what you do. Good ideas become bad ideas if your tone is wrong or you…
Meet Dr Patricia Baker; not a medical doctor but a doctor of scrapology, founder of SCRAPS, the Society (for the) Care, Repair (and) Analytical Probing (of) Scrapbooks. She has an alluring range of CSI-like…
At the heart of the Homer’s Coat production of An Iliad, currently playing at the Adelaide Festival, is that most of Homeric of things, a list. In a narrative compression as consummate as any in the epic…
You meet someone. Someone different. Someone attractive, open, free. Let’s call him Davos. You start seeing a lot of each other, hanging out as a couple. As always when you’re in a relationship, a degree…
Measurement determines estimation; estimation determines calculation; calculation determines comparison; comparison determines victory. So wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War 2,000 years ago. Since that time…
The cultural dollar is tight. Why spend taxpayers’ money on mounting Wagner operas rather than – say – erecting a mile-high statue of Kyle Sandilands on the moon warning alien civilisations what to expect…
Why doesn’t Australia get culture? What is it about culture that defeats our perception to the point where, like an unwelcome magic trick, it vanishes as an object of collective concern? For a country…
Australia needs a cabinet-level portfolio dedicated to managing culture, one of the country’s leading cultural commentators, Julianne Schultz, said at a breakfast address in Sydney today. The Ministry…
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