Karen Cummings – The Conversation

Alex Vaughan

December 10, 2025

Cowbois reimagines Hollywood’s Wild West – with a wonderful queer twist

Karen Cummings, University of Sydney

In the play Cowbois, rugged individuality and hyper masculinity are challenged and eventually replaced by joy, freedom and resistance.

Daniel Boud

June 27, 2025

Cats at 40: a dazzling cast – stuck in an outdated show

Karen Cummings, University of Sydney and Simon Kenway, University of Sydney

In this re-launch, the score, direction and choreography are almost identical to what we saw back in 1985. And the choreography remains the heart and soul.

Joan Didion’s The White Album at Sydney Festival created a space for community and connection at the heart of a crisis. Reed Hutchison/Sydney Festival

January 14, 2020

At a performance of The White Album, I found the community I needed in a time of crisis

Karen Cummings, University of Wollongong

I saw the performance the first day the smoke was clearing. We need connection to find a way forward; I found it in the theatre.

Performers in Speechless, a new opera by composer Cat Hope, co-commissioned by the Perth Festival and Tura New Music. The opera is a response to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report into children in immigration detention. Toni Wilkinson

May 22, 2019

In a notoriously sexist art form, Australian women composers are making their voices heard

Karen Cummings, University of Wollongong

Despite the exclusion of their creative work from mainstream opera companies, Australian women composers are creating spaces for themselves, writing work that tackles urgent social issues.

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