Next week we'll proudly launch our brand new website, a home not only to informed and constructive reviewing but also to video, sound, music and other works for you to experience, whether on computer, tablet or phone, with each accompanied by a critical appreciation. As well, we're reinvigorating RealTime Traveller and RealTime TV, commissioning new video works for our Gallery and video essays about diverse art practices, highlighting video art by emerging artists in Critical Video, and digging into RealTime's treasurehouse of review for the revelatory Deep Archive. Next week's RealTime will take you straight to the new site. In the meantime, enjoy this edition in which the body is the vehicle for self-examination, historical reflection and new dance, and the subject of a visual artist's probing gaze. Keith, Virginia, Lauren

BalletLab surges into the future with a home of its own and as a presenter, writes Andrew Fuhrmann, offers a powerfully complex satirical dance theatre performance from New York artist Jack Ferver.

New works from Melbourne's Paea Leach and dancers from Townsville's Dancenorth engaged Bernadette Ashley with their inventiveness and the challenges they presented this highly skilled company.

In Melbourne's The Drill Hall, built in 1937, Jude Walton conjures with dance and music a disappearing past—a space haunted by wartime loss, grief and fragile recollection.

Nola Farman and various personae have been "stealthily upping the neo-Fluxus quotient in the seaside suburb of Clovelly" with, among other things, Flight, an exhibition with a sense of the absurd, writes Keri Glastonbury.

Jonathan W Marshall enjoys the rigorously precise playing of the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble in a program of predominantly Russian compositions that transcend easy labelling.

In Angelica Mesiti’s Relay League, Lauren Carroll Harris sees the artist "finding new ways to encompass other disciplines, like dance and music, while retaining what’s unique about video art."

Mr Burns opens this week at Sydney's Belvoir, so we're re-running Ben Brooker's welcoming review of the Adelaide premiere of this incisively funny post-apocalypse American play.

Zoe Barker attends the Resonant Bodies Festival, encountering a rich diversity of characterful voices, techniques and performance styles in a field too rarely celebrated.

This week come with us to the UK to meet provocative dance duo Project O, to Mexico for a travelling film festival that confronts corruption, to the US for a film by an Australian that casts citizens as participants in the scenario of a legendary murder, to the Gold Coast for a young artist's take on globalised culture and to Brisbane for a possibly self-mythologising performance by a Sydney ensemble. Visiting Australia from New York, photographer Lili Almog challenges our perceptions of the veiling of women and Japan's techno-wizards teamLab reveal four new works for you to contemplate on this very screen if not in reach of the Sydney gallery where they, and Almog, are exhibiting. From suburban Carlton, Shopfront presents potent new work by young theatre artists at Belvoir and we urge you to take a look at Conor Bateman's video essay Cameraperson to person, widely viewed when it premiered in last week's RealTime. Keith and Virginia

At Belvoir, Sydney's Shopfront premieres The Carousel, a powerful all-female production about young co-dependent sisters "working through a kind of madness towards release without abandoning their love for each other," writes an impressed Keith Gallasch.

London-based dance collaborators Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley tell Osunwunmi about the anti-assimilationist ethic that drives their performances beyond the constraints of racism and traditional notions of virtuosity.

Ann Deslandes reports that Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna's Ambulante documentary festival gamely plays in all kinds of cinemas and public spaces, with a 2017 focus on violence and corruption.

Luke Goodsell finds that a surreal hybrid documentary about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey opens onto a wider examination of performance and the construction of popular myth.

In Brisbane, Sydney ensemble Applespiel investigates the mystery of a missing founding member in a performance that exploits the podcast format with verve, writes Kathryn Kelly of Jarrod Duffy Is Not Dead, if less convincingly when it departs from the platform.

Visual artist Kiah Reading's first solo exhibition, presented at the The Walls on the Gold Coast, ranges from witty, dreamlike video with provocative text art to dramatic embroidered cloth designed by Reading and sewn in Peru.

With discerning wit and an engaging aesthetic, A New York photographer exhibiting in Sydney's Head On Photo Festival addresses the veiling, religious or not, of women and its connections with the history of portraiture.

Screen works by Japan's teamLab were a highlight of Adelaide's 2016 OzAsia Festival. Sample the superb animation of crashing waves and the slowed sweep of brushstroke art in these evocations of traditional art now showing in Sydney.

You might have missed the first of our video essays in last week's RealTime. We had a great response to Conor Bateman's account of how Kirsten Johnson has shaped her own film from those she shot for leading documentarians.

This week's reading and viewing: refugee writing as literature; everyday Chinese snaps rescued from a recycling plant; and a celebration in Paris of the work of seminal video art maker Peter Campus.

RealTime in real time: change is on the way. In coming weeks we'll launch a new website with special features including commissioned and critiqued video and audio works. As a prelude, we present the first of our commissioned video essays, Cameraperson to person, in which Conor Bateman deploys video to appreciate the workings of Kirsten Johnson's significantly inventive film. It's a joy for us at RealTime to be able to present and respond to art with a greater range of means while sustaining the power of the word at a time when criticism is seriously embattled, giving way to a deluge of likes, stars and tweeted one-liners. The image above is from a percussion work by Australian composer Kate Neal, Never Tilt Your Chair, an exemplar of art's capacity to endlessly invent and mutate, fusing the everyday, theatre and high precision playing from three skilled musicians. Keith & Virginia

Memoir? Collage? Experimental documentary? In the first of RealTime's video essays, Conor Bateman brilliantly reveals how Kirsten Johnson has shaped Cameraperson from films she shot for leading documentarians.

Leading percussionists Louise Devenish, Leah Scholes and Vanessa Tomlinson combine to realise theatrical scores by Kate Neal and Mauricio Kagel with virtuoso playing and a highly tuned sense of comedy.

After the apocalypse, survivors without electricity and only their memories mine the lode of the TV series for cultural survival, writes Ben Brooker in an incisive review that reveals the deeply engaging play's even greater referential reach.

Tina Kaufman reflects on previous attempts to establish a cinémathèque in Sydney, a stop gap and a much-needed new proposal for a city with an underdeveloped screen culture.

Luke Goodsell asks Richard Sowada what the American Essentials festival of indie US films he's curated tells us about film audiences, filmmaker aspirations and lessons for Australian directors.

Jim Jarmusch's latest, Paterson, with Adam Driver is a thoughtful film of intense stillness, a portrait of a working class New Jersey and an ode to the art of the everyday.

Read why the ABC's Seven Types of Ambiguity doesn't work; see how Escape from New York predicted Trump's America; and ponder art's response at Adelaide's Samstag to relentless human assault on the oceans.

RealTime will be reporting from Stranger With My Face international film festival of women's genre cinema in Hobart this week. Stay in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for our on-the-ground updates and live streams.

Nature and the internet: two kinds of plenitude, one of its own making (it bred us) and one of our technological own. They offer commonality, solace and inspiration; exploited, they turn against us. The good news in this edition is that our inherent art-making continues to be succoured by nature in the beautiful bush of Bundanon and its artist residencies where Trevor Flinn becomes Arthur Boyd's Nebuchadnezzar and Next Wave's Kickstarter emerging artists become one with nature and each other. In Kandos, artists populate the NSW country town and adjacent countryside with art. Conor Bateman reveals an astonishing internet wealth of streamed video art that will both challenge and inspire [Ben Russell's experimental film Atlantis, above]. Rogue Agents, at Firstdraft, projects a new wave of cultural and biological evolution while the horror film Raw confronts us with our fears—and regressive temptations. Much to chew on. Keith & Virginia

In a wonderfully vivid account of his residency, artist Trevor Flinn immerses himself in a restorative Bundanon, feeling “increasingly drawn to the landscape that Arthur Boyd made his own, and compelled to respond intuitively...”.

Next Wave Artistic Director Georgie Meagher, actor William Zappa and choreographer Rhiannon Newton reflect on their recent residencies at Bundanon, treasuring the escape from the everyday and the restorative power of nature.

Lauren Carroll Harris travels to Kandos in regional NSW to experience Cementa17, witnessing a town and surrounds turned over to innovative art and ecological thinking, raising key questions about local engagement and infrastructure capacity.

In Julia Ducournau’s Raw, a "brutally perceptive portrait of adolescent transformation," "the struggle between human caring and the all-consuming cannibalistic urge, is never downplayed nor simplified," writes an engrossed Katerina Sakkas.

Conor Bateman reveals an often overlooked expanse of streaming portals making available video art by the likes of John Baldessari, Ben Russell and Australia's Karrabing Film Collective to a global audience.

In the first of Firstdraft's international exchanges, London's Auto Italia South East populated a performance night in Sydney with "cyborgs, body hackers, trans identities and chthonic ones...find[ing] agency in new modes of technological shapeshifting," reports Laura McLean.

This week the UK's Performance Magazine [1979-1992] is accessibly archived online, John Clarke's The Games Series 1 is ready to relish courtesy ABC iView and we spot a delightful picture book for 4-8 year-olds about 19th century computer programming pioneer Ada Lovelace.

Courtesy of Monster Pictures, pop on the T-shirt, head off to Julia Ducournau’s horror film with a reassuring friend and ponder humanity's darkest urges.

Most of my encounters with contemporary art and film over recent weeks haven’t happened by visiting a gallery, museum or cinema. Rather, contact's been made via my laptop, smart phone, a giant screen in a public transport space and reflections on the future of film festivals. In RealTime this week I interview the curatorial director of Wynscreen, which delivers moving-image art to travellers passing though Wynyard Station. Ever preoccupied with the horror genre, Katerina Sakkas reviews Olivier Assayas’ technological arthouse ghost story, Personal Shopper, in which a grieving woman (Kristen Stewart) interacts with a mysterious presence via text messaging. Cameron Williams considers the ways that video-on-demand platforms are changing Australian screen culture and challenging film festivals. And in the theatre work Passenger, John Bailey finds himself immersed in a kind of live cinema. The contemporary screen is a radical shape-shifter. Lauren, Acting Assistant Editor

Addressing alarming data and chatting with Melbourne International Film Festival's Michelle Carey, Cameron Williams estimates the power or not of Amazon and Netflix to limit choice in Australian international film festival programming.

Katerina Sakkas admires Kristen Stewart's performance in Olivier Assayas' not-quite horror film Personal Shopper in which the everyday assumes a haunting uncanniness.

Lauren Carroll Harris interviews curator Alessio Cavallaro about screen works programmed for Wynscreen, a media art installation built into Sydney's Wynyard Station, and the expectations held for developing an art-conscious public on the move.

Passenger, its audience in a bus, overhearing a conversation as the cityscape sweeps by, is "almost live cinema," and Aeon, in which the audience performs—instinctively—is like "an Orphic passage, an animal transformation," writes an engaged John Bailey.

The Substation’s director, Brad Spolding, tells John Bailey about successfully meeting the challenges of supporting edgy art-making and welcoming a curious and willing local audience.

The Farm (Gold Coast) and Co3 (Perth) unite to create Frank Enstein, a dance work for younger audiences based on the series of books for children but upgraded to adolescent longing for love, realised with powerful choreography and a great sense of fun, writes Kathryn Kelly.

We mourn the passing of John Clarke, writer and performer, and the loss of the wry eye he cast on the increasingly self-parodying state of Australian politics in Clarke and Dawe and, looking back, on bureaucracy in the brilliantly incisive The Games, a classic.

Translation looms large in RealTime this week as our reviewers tackle the relationship between experience and its distillation into art. Is failure of translation fundamentally more likely than success, asks Andrew Fuhrmann, confronted with the strengths and weaknesses of works in this year's Dance Massive. How meaningful is Asia TOPA's invitation for its audiences to witness or enter heightened states in works that blur the line between lived experience and art [image above: Attractor]? Jana Perkovic is disturbed by abstraction not anchored to any palpable materiality in Chunky Moves' Anti—Gravity and Luke Goodsell perceives a gap at the centre of Rosie Jones' The Family: a failure to explore the life of the woman who led that destructive cult. Matthew Lorenzon enjoys Chamber Made Opera and the Sichuan Conservatory of Music 's Between 8 and 9, which deals directly and playfully with how we can speak about music. Reviewers are translators too, transforming art experiences into their own art, failing or succeeding in expanding and intensifying the looping conversation that art prompts. Keith & Virginia

A strand of performances in the Asia Triennial of Performing Arts from Yumiko Yoshioka, Pichet Klunchun, TAO Dance Theater, Takao Kawaguchi and Lucy Guerin Inc with Dancenorth evokes states of transcendence, trance and possession, writes Andrew Furhmann, but to what ends?

Matthew Lorenzon is taken with Chamber Made Opera and Sichuan Conservatory of Music's Between 8 and 9, with its evocation of a teahouse in which each table delivers a discrete, harmonious cross-cultural musical experience.

Addressing five works in Dance Massive 2017, Andrew Fuhrmann ponders the challenges of transforming experience into dance, tenuous links with our modern dance past and works too long for their own good.

There's much to admire in Chunky Move's Anti—Gravity, a collaboration between choreographer Anouk van Dijk and Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, writes Jana Perkovic, but abstraction denies the work flight.

An Australian paranoid sect which, from the 1970s to the early 90s, stole children, indoctrinated and drugged them with LSD, is the subject of Rosie Jones' documentary The Family. The film is strong on imagery, writes Luke Goodsell, but short on nuance.

A painting of a dead African-American, by a white artist in the Whitney Biennial, triggers further intense debate over rights to representation. Also watch Mira Soulio's finely observed film about Australian documentary photographer Robert McFarlane, a master of the black and white image captured in available light.

Keith Gallasch listens to Tarhu Connections, a CD in which Ros Bandt's playing of a hybrid instrument, the eloquent tarhu, epitomises the album's success in building cross-cultural relationships that will sustain and renew tradition.

This immersive double CD features music, voices and soundscapes of the Mediterranean and the Pacific, brought together through Ros Bandt's playing of the tarhu in collaboration with myriad musicians.

There are times when we all need backbone, literally and skilfully displayed in Gravity & Other Myth’s Backbone [image above] and metaphorically in shapeshifting Silvia Calderoni's performance in MDLSX, a wild and frank declaration of a transgender self. Also in the Adelaide Festival, Indigenous performer-composers William Barton and Deborah Cheetham strengthen Australian contemporary music with their innovations. Next up in post-festival Adelaide is Long Tan, a product of the resolve of playwright Verity Laughton, Brink and STCSA to bravely face the realities and myth-making that constellate around the Vietnam War battle. In Melbourne, artist Ash Keating submits his vast new paintings to theatrical lighting design and in Hobart the fascinating Unconscious Collective sync our heartbeats. Next week we boldly plunge into Dance Massive and Asia TOPA. Keith & Virginia

Silvia Calderoni's riveting performance in MDLSX conveys the challenges of growing up transgender, compelling us to face the limits of ingrained beliefs which, writes Keith Gallasch, are deeply embodied in language—and takes it on.

Delighting in the festival's music program, Chris Reid finds himself totally immersed in a Chamber Landscapes concert featuring works by Aboriginal artists William Barton on yidaki and Deborah Cheetham in song, performed with the Australian String Quartet.

Works by Adelaide's Gravity & Other Myths, Israel's L-E-V and France's Jérôme Bel reveal tensions between technique and aesthetic aspirations, writes Ben Brooker.

On her visits to Ash Keating's studio, Amelia Winata witnesses the artist's emotional swings as he paints the large canvasses that designer Matthew Adey will illuminate in Gravity System Response, a bold collaborative experiment in art-making and audience engagement.

Ben Brooker interviews Verity Laughton about the practical, moral and philosophical complexities involved in writing Long Tan, a play drawing in part on verbatim material from participants in a near-mythologised Australian victory in the Vietnam War.

In Hobart, Andrew Harper sinks into a sleek, comfortable chair in the Cardiophonic Lounge for Unconscious Collective's Colloquy of Hearts to see if his heart can beat in sync with another's pulse.

From urgent discussions about the future of Sydney’s film culture to Teju Cole's photographic criticism that rewrites art history, here’s a sliver of the week’s necessary art reads.

With the Adelaide Festival's sense of celebration (as in the image above from Barrie Kosky's wondrous Saul) and gravitas still resonating, it was a pleasure to hear that Arts Minister Mitch Fifield has shut down the Catalyst Fund. The return of $61m to the Australia Council was cautiously welcomed by the small to medium arts sector, hoping that funds will definitely now go directly to those for whom they were originally intended. Some 60 arts organisations have gone unfunded, some barely sustained by state government funding, others not, careers floundering, while Catalyst became an electoral slush fund and lucky dip for large arts organisations, festivals, academics and questionable arts ventures benefitting from the suffering of others. The return of funds might look like a victory for art in the culture wars, but there's a lot of catch-up to do, funding levels are less than adequate and Coalition arts policy set at zero. At the very least, we can be thankful that we still have an Australia Council for the Arts while we feel for US artists as President Donald Trump goes gunning for the NEA. Keith & Virginia

Ben Brooker is taken with Betroffenheit's dreamscape account of grieving as trauma; admires the unaffected account of the complexities of everyday life in Wot? No Fish!!; and is compelled by Intimate Space to reflect on public limits imposed on people with disability.

With fidelity and ingenious invention, Barrie Kosky and collaborators have transformed Handel's oratorio into a glorious opera in which, writes Keith Gallasch, a kiss, a touch and an embrace lift the work out of the 18th century into the present.

The extremity of Thomas Ostermeier's vision of Richard III and Lars Eidinger's brilliant performance as the villain king puts Shakespeare's genius and our very conditional empathy for Richard to the test, writes Keith Gallasch

Volker Gerling's engaging flipbook portraits of strangers taken on the artist's walking tours across Germany prompt reflections on “truth" and the "unseen" in photography, writes Virginia Baxter.

Caroline Wake sees in Kip Williams' rivetting production of Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica the imminence of the personal, cultural and political transformation that will come with inevitably greater engagement with Asia.

Lauren's reading this week finds images of Brutalist buildings in Paris with a connection to Sydney, an insightful account of the theatrical framing of Asghar Farhadi’s film The Salesman, and a fine example of the fusion of personal narrative with theatre criticism.

Craig Bary's powerful new dance work, In Difference, is a call to move beyond crude debate about same-sex marriage to nuanced understanding of the issue and respect for lives laid bare, writes Jodie McNeilly.

Jonathan Marshall detects a contrasting complementarity between Back to Back's Lady Eats Apple, about the religious making of a flawed humanity, and Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe's Meeting, with its competition between mankind and its machines.

Although it promises the potential for developing empathy, Dan Edwards writes from the Australian International Documentary Conference that VR looks set to reignite "ethical debates, long a part of documentary practice....with a vengeance."

Matthew Lorenzon reviews Ensemble Offspring’s International Women’s Day performance, US new music group Eighth Blackbird and Tilde 2017, a fascinating Melbourne experimental music festival.

Welcome to our International Women’s Day E-dition, which includes Lauren Carroll Harris’ report on promising new directions offered filmmakers and audiences by female-focused film festivals. Above, the team at Women in Film & TV NSW pose in the outfits they wore for their funny and forceful “End the Sausage Party” protest against the low number of nominations for films made by women in the 2016 AACTA Awards. Elsewhere in this E-dition, a cohort of female RealTime writers respond to a variety of out-of-the-ordinary works in the Perth International Arts Festival (Jana Perkovic), Supercell Contemporary Dance Festival (Kathryn Kelly) and Asia TOPA (Sally Sussman and Madeline Roycroft). Demands are rapidly escalating for gender equity and freedom from discrimination and violence in the face of surging dictatorial politics overtly hostile to women's rights. RealTime celebrates women's creative capacity to prevail. We’re off to the Adelaide Festival! See you again on 22 March. Virginia & Keith

Lachlan Philpott's Little Emperors conveys with theatrical verve the oppressive weight of obligation borne by the progeny of China's one-child policy, writes Sally Sussman.

Madeline Roycroft revels in the interplay between Garin Nugroho's film, Satan Jawa, and the score composed by Iain Grandage and Rahayu Supanggah and played live by 20 gamelan players and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

On seeing The Red Detachment of Women, Sally Sussman swings “between excitement at seeing such a vibrant rendition of a ‘Model’ work and reluctance to validate such striking art performed, as it had once been, totally in the service of dirty politics.”

Jana Perkovic applauds American playwright Richard Nelson’s trilogy, The Gabriels, set across the 2016 election year and vividly portraying “a group of three-dimensional individuals, their lives spent navigating the consequences of grand narratives, without ever over-identifying with them.”

Opus No.7 (Russia), Betroffenheit (Canada) and Exit/Exist (South Africa) reveal radically contrasting means for expressing loss, its enduring impacts and attempts at accommodation, writes Jonathan W Marshall.

Idiosyncratic works focused on our relationships with water, sport (women’s) and political power trigger reflection on connections between self, community and history, writes Jana Perkovic.

Lauren Carroll Harris speaks with Sophie Mathisen, Kirsten Stevens and Whitney Monaghan about the role of women's film festivals in achieving gender parity for filmmakers with increased support and inventive audience-building.

Kathryn Kelly engages with fascinating works about female eros, passing and power from Switzerland, China and Australia in Brisbane's new Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance.

Loop into hallucinatory video, an online realm dedicated to the Carel Fabritius painting The Goldfinch and articles about a James Baldwin documentary, the 19th century origins of "empathy" and how refugees stay in the loop via mobile phones—and you can help.

Andrew Fuhrmann interviews Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen and Chunky Move Artistic Director Anouk van Dijk about ANTI—GRAVITY, a collaboration in which ideas, Eastern and Western, about the body, spirit and clouds manifest in dance and design.

At In Between Time, Cock and Bull, Forced Entertainment, Lucy McCormick and Dickie Beau transport Timothy X Atack with the thrill of not-knowing, of absorption in relentless looping and awe at the transformable body.

In Bristol at the In Between Time Festival, Osunwunmi finds herself in a cemetery (playing dead), participating in secular vespers and then voodoo dancing ("You're all going to die, so dance!"). Live art, full of lateral life lessons.

Kagerou and Time's Journey Through a Room—two subtly engaging productions from Japan made in the wake of "Fukushima"—compel John Bailey to address our use of words such as "sympathy" and "closure" and how we name disasters.

John Bailey writes of mallakhamb, an ancient Indian sport juxtaposed with circus art in Circa's One Beautiful Thing, that it's fascinatingly "not quite like anything else." In Next Wave's Lukautim Solwara, wonderful god-like figures embodied by Maori, Pasifika and Aboriginal artists performed amid Indigenous artworks at ACCA.

From melodrama to site works, Iranian productions in the Fadjr International Theatre Festival in Tehran display "highly skilled performances, a mastery of storytelling and the subtle political jab," writes Megan Garrett-Jones.

Artistic Director Karen Therese tells RealTime that the Powerhouse Youth Theatre production Tribunal is more timely than ever as 6,000 refugees from the Syrian crisis arrive in Western Sydney's Fairfield. Tribunal is showing now.

The appeal of performances in Vancouver's PuSh Festival that evince the materiality of bodies and spaces is lessened as artists push for meaning, writes Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, also noting the theatrical genre-fication of durational performance.

An artist peaking late in his career, British filmmaker Ken Loach's latest film has been met with far-reaching critical acclaim and political debate. It's the story of an older working-class man who finds emotional solidarity with others discarded by government.

Plastic shopping bags in hand, cast members, including a cohort of NIDA students, each become Tiananmen Square’s Tank Man in the much-anticipated Sydney Theatre Company production of UK playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica. (Listen to our interview with director Kip Williams about his approach to this epic play.) The title conjures, first, the chimera—a beast from Greek mythology with a lion’s head, a goat’s head rising from the creature’s back and a tail ending in the head of a snake—and then its embodiment as a hybridised China and America. These nations are dangerously co-dependent: mutually hostile and intricately entwined economically. Australia’s foreign policy is habitually oriented to the US while our economic dependency on Chinese purchasing power grows daily. How will we position ourselves as ‘Chimerica’ threatens to unravel? Cultural groundwork is being laid by Asialink, APT, OzAsia, Asia TOPA and others, but the Australian Government faces a major political challenge. Keith & Virginia

As tensions escalate between co-dependent superstates China and America, STC Artistic Director Kip Williams and Keith Gallasch discuss Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica, its alarming timeliness and the director’s determination to maintain a sense of human scale in a three-hour, large-cast epic.

Liz Lea's BOLD, a new festival that celebrates legacy over nostalgia, features mature artists in performances, talks and workshops addressing a rich, living dance heritage from diverse cultures. Adam Broinowski previews the program.

Transport for NSW’s Wynscreen, impressively installed in Sydney’s Wynyard Station, currently features doeanddoe’s Woven Moments, a video work designed to relax the harried traveller. Lauren Carroll Harris met two of its makers, Beatrice Chew and Su-An Ng.

From a revelatory story about film with a thousand storylines to a podcast about the productivity of adult boredom, RealTime editors recommend the week's best art reading and listening.

The Walls’ 2017 program of site works, installations, feminist performance art, residencies and “provocative and charismatic artists” will include a collaboration between the Gold Coast’s adventurous Miami Beach gallery and a Miami, Florida counterpart, writes Kathryn Kelly.

In Roger Williams' acclaimed 2016 documentary, a young autistic man's intense identification with the heroes and sidekicks of his favourite 90s Disney films provides him and his family with the roadmap to growing up.

Like journalists, documentary filmmakers are increasingly having to compete with the dictatorial purveyors of "alternative facts." Worse, it's happening at the very moment when adept deployers of social media technologies can promulgate blatant untruths with viral ease. Spin doctors emerged in the 1990s and then, a decade ago, satirist Stephen Colbert outed gut-feeling, evidence and logic-free "truthiness," which has now come totally into its own. Outright lies and glaring contradictions are served up without even the gloss of spin. So it's timely for the 2017 Australian International Documentary Conference to address the challenges for the documentarian in a "post-truth" world and, at the same time, assay the—at first glance unlikely—potentials of gaming and VR technologies for generating honest, immersive, interactive engagements with eras, cultures and ideas. Keith & Virginia

Dan Edwards interviews Australian International Documentary Conference Director Andrew Wiseman about this year's event, which includes Australian VR luminaries Lynette Wallworth and Oscar Raby in conversation with leading US innovator Navid Khonsari.

Dan Edwards takes a close look at the Guardian Documentaries featured at AIDC and the role of Head of Documentaries, Charlie Phillips, in developing more complex screen works.

Previewing Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy’s 2017 program, Keith Gallasch is taken with a strand of productions, epic and intimate, that portray intense states of being with an exciting array of theatrical means.

Two Adelaide-based companies, Restless Dance Theatre and Gravity and Other Myths, will make their Adelaide Festival debuts this year in Artistic Co-directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy’s first of three programs, writes Ben Brooker.

Win a double pass to the opening night of the remarkable TAO Dance Theater's '6' and '8' in Melbourne's Asia TOPA, a celebration of Australia's connections with contemporary Asia.

Riled by the inadequacies of works on show in a Nam June Paik retrospective in Tokyo, Philip Brophy is compelled to reassess the artist's status as the godfather of video art.

In Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong, New Zealand writer-performer Jo Randerson reclaims her Viking heritage as a proud member of the Bastardos clan and seeker of justice, writes Renée Newman.

From the erosion of land art to the rise of fake art in the US, stay in the loop with what RealTime editors are reading about this week.

This Australian-Vanuatuan film, one of the loveliest, most underseen films of recent years, is a nominee for Most Outstanding Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars.

As we wrap up our intensive Sydney Festival coverage—looking back with pleasure on a finely curated, richly themed program of memorable works—we turn to Asia TOPA, an exciting new triennial festival in Melbourne centred on Asian performance and promising works that will challenge the senses and widen Australian horizons. Also in this E-dition, Chris Reid travels to Hobart to take in MOFO's excellent electronics-focused program. Next week we anticipate the Australian International Documentary Conference [AIDC], also in Melbourne, at ACMI, and preview the Adelaide Festival's dramatically distinctive 2017 program. Keith and Virginia

Stephen Armstrong and Kate Ben-Tovim give a vivid account of key works in their impressive new festival of Asian and Asian-Australian performance in Melbourne.

Katerina Sakkas finds Another Day in Paradise, a posthumous survey show of paintings from the Bali Nine prisoner Myuran Sukumaran, ultimately life-affirming in its display of the artist's passion.

Vicki Van Hout witnesses artists resolutely challenging the despair of being a child warrior in the Congo, a young Indigenous Australian in the AIDS 80s and a solvent-sniffing child in a First Nations reservation in Canada.

James Whiting finds that Kasper Holten's psychosexual interpretation of the great Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s 1926 opera King Roger for Opera Australia comes at the expense of the work's sense of divinity.

The Encounter, The Season, SHIT, Ich Nibber Dibber: four potent works which reveal great cultural relativities and assay the power, limits, excesses and abuses of language, writes Keith Gallasch—with a dissenting response to The Encounter.

Mary Finsterer and Tom Wright's engaging new opera, Biographica, about prophetic Renaissance scientist and troubled parent Gerolamo Cardono is strongly realised by Sydney Chamber Opera and Ensemble Offspring, writes Keith Gallasch.

Gecko's Institute and Dimitris Papaioannou's Still Life test their performers to extremes of effort and powerful image-making in vivid accounts of the limits of capability and empathy.

James Whiting witnesses the powerful transformation—in word, performance and design—of Mary, Mother of Jesus, from icon into a palpably real mother full of pain and doubt. Now playing.

Champions is an intriguing work about dance viewed through the prism of football and drawing on the kindred states of mind, body and movement that these forms share. Executed with sharp observation, wit and a sense of grandeur. But is it a winner?

In Hobart, Chris Reid relishes MOFO's focus on theremin, ondes Martenot and the synthesiser, the festival drawing on a rich heritage and realising new potentials for electronic and electro-acoustic works.

We welcome Lauren Carroll Harris to the RealTime team. A writer, researcher and artist, she'll be Acting Assistant Editor and will develop content for our forthcoming new website.

Wesley Enoch's first Sydney Festival was buoyant with the sense of occasion anticipated in our interview last December. Some festival-goers have been excited by what they've experienced as "a decolonising of the festival," with its strong programming of Indigenous artists. Others have been thrilled by the sensory and formal adventurousness of a range of works. This E-dition is the first of two focused on the festival. Next week Nikki Heywood will respond to Still Life and Institute, Vick Van Hout to Prize Fighter, Blood on the Dance Floor and Huff and James Whiting to King Roger. We'll also address The Encounter, SHIT, The Season, Champions and have another look at Biographica. Elsewhere this week we take you to Venice, Pakistan and then Adelaide for something international from Lloyd Cole. Good to have you with us for 2017! Keith and Virginia

Nikki Heywood finds herself, "senses upended," in the world of the deafblind in Michelle Stevens and Heather Lawson's Imagined Touch and is then witness to Dancenorth's delving into the nature of causality with Japanese collaborators in Spectra.

Choreographer Eko Supriyanto's renowned Cry Jailolo and a new work Balabala (about female power) are entrancing dance works that celebrate young regional Indonesians' passionate engagement with their culture on the international stage.

Keith Gallasch is transported by the high calibre of performance and sheer inventiveness evident in 1967: Music in the Key of Yes, Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument, Gabriel Dharmoo's Anthropologies Imaginaires, Rautavaara, and Nicole Lizee, Sex, Lynch and Video Games with the Australian Art Orchestra.

Cat Jones' Scent of Sydney draws Keith Gallasch literally by the nose into a world of personal reflections on the city triggered via smells associated with place, power, protest and nature in a wonderfully contemplative installation.

Julie Vulcan describes profound efforts by Ukrainian, American and Australian artists (Casey Jenkins, James McAllister) to reorient thought and perception via the body in the Venice International Performance Art Week.

Alistair Noble applauds the Sydney Chamber Opera premiere of Mary Finsterer’s Biographica in which the composer "re-processes Renaissance musical language but not simply as pastiche; this is something more profound."

Ben Brooker interviews Roysten Abel, a man with a mission to sustain the musical imagination and abilities of children often dulled by negligent education. Manganiyar Classroom is performed by 35 six-16-year-old Pakistani boys.

Garth Davis' feature film Lion, based on a memoir by Saroo Brierly, takes Kirsten Krauth beyond reviewing to a brief personal memoir about an adopted brother and her own role as mother.

Glyn Roberts, Co-Artistic Director of Brisbane's Supercell Dance Festival, talks RealTime through its substantial inaugural program, featuring a fascinating array of artists from Australia, UK, Switzerland and China.

Lloyd Cole's synthesiser creation, Identity vs Noise: 1Dn, commissioned by Adelaide’s EU Hawke Centre, allows audiences present and remote to collaborate on the music's evolution, becoming a metaphor for the Centre's focus on population and immigration movements.

Lauren Carroll Harris is drawn into zin's The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too, a fun live art demonstration of "the net's power as an engine of visual culture."

Oh what a year! As the rise of dictatorial state capitalism and the conservative push for a one-size-fits-all culture suggest, we can expect hard times ahead. Our editorial image is from Dmitry Krymov's Opus No. 7, a powerful imagistic account of the fate of Russia's Jews and the compromised composer Shostakovitch under Stalin; it's featured in the 2017 Perth International Arts Festival. We look back over a year in which our coverage ranged across the country, from OzAsia and Liveworks to small regional festivals and hundreds of individual works. Take the holiday season to revive your spirits. We look forward to keeping you in touch with the art that sustains us in 2017. Keith & Virginia

Perth International Arts Festival Artistic Director Wendy Martin and Keith Gallasch discuss works and events in her program that evince a potent sense of place—personal, cultural, ecological and political—newly experienced through art.

Nikki Heywood quizzes director-coach Martin del Amo about moves, tactics and injuries prior to the opening of FORM Dance Projects' all-female football-dance performance, Champions, which will be staged with live commentary from Seven Network's Mel McLaughlin.

Gail Priest interviews olfactory artist Cat Jones about the origins of Scent of Sydney, a new work that portrays the city in terms of the aromatic associations its citizens have when thinking Competition, Extravagance, Resistance, Democracy and Landscape.

In Light Geist at Fremantle Arts Centre, curator Erin Coates draws gallery-goers into "a series of ghostly, spiritual and cognitive encounters with light," writes Laetitia Wilson.

Liz Bradshaw reports from the Artlands regional arts gathering in Dubbo that ideas practical and radical were in abundance alongside blindspots, including a telling gap between conference and festival.

In a surprising new film by John Gillies, Witkacy & Malinowski: A Cinematic Séance In 23 Scenes, the writer and the anthropologist quarrel on a train trip in Queensland in 1914. Meanwhile the driver and fireman converse absurdly about relativity while pushing their machine to the limit.

Greg Hooper revels in performances by Brisbane ensemble Kupka's Piano of works by Chris Dench in which "any underlying complexity is in complete service to a musical purpose deep with feeling."

At Melbourne's Substation, Gail Priest is entranced by Motorgenic, an exhibition of ever-evolving robotic music makers created by composer, instrument builder and installation artist Robbie Avenaim.

Has Speak Percussion "dislodged the maximising centrality of sonic eventfulness" in their Fluorophone concerts? asks Philip Brophy in his critique of the increasing dominance of theatricality over sound.

Much more than an entertainment about a compulsive sexter, Weiner examines the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, "captured in the fullness of his ambition, passion, intelligence, serial contrition and bizarre self-delusion."

Bangarra Artistic Director Stephen Page's striking debut feature film centres on tensions felt by a young man caught between an ancient, still vibrant Indigenous culture and a competing, feverish modernity played out across Sydney streets and landscapes.

Remembrance & Forgetting. English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, writing about Oscar Wilde in his book Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), notes that "great art, in Wilde's view...enables us to forget ourselves, our rational, conforming, intelligible, law-abiding, too-timid, explaining selves, and this forgetting makes things possible." Within a constellation of works ('great' or not) in an arts festival, we can even more intensely lose ourselves to reverie, joy, passion and bewilderment. Phillips extrapolates: "What we don't know, what we haven't understood, can be the realest thing about us." A good festival demands such openness. But it can also enact remembrance, of what we have forgotten or will forget or never knew, as Wesley Enoch looks to do with his 2017 Sydney Festival, celebrating the 1967 Referendum (which acknowledged the humanity of the Indigenous peoples of Australia), cultural continuity (in the lives of Tasmania’s muttonbirders; image above, Trevor Jamieson in The Season), and with sadness, the art of Myuran Sukumaran. Keith & Virginia

Wesley Enoch’s first festival for the city has tremendous breadth but, at its core, in-depth engagement with the senses, Indigeneity and innovative art-making. Enoch tells Keith Gallasch about his vision, its aesthetics inseparable from its politics.

Keith Gallasch digs through memories, rumours, reviews and video links to select the shows he's attracted to. Some of them will have escaped your attention. Some will take you out of your comfort zone. It's what a good arts festival should do.

Liza Lim's fantastical new opera, Tree of Codes, is populated with strange beings and inflected with the chirping and warbling of bellbirds and magpies. See rehearsals for the Cologne Opera production and hear Lim talk about the work's sources.

Director Katrina Sedgwick’s revisioning of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image boldly embraces its role as a museum, offering expanded audience, industry and artist engagement, and a new position, Chief eXperience Officer.

In Chamber Made Opera's Permission to Speak, composer Kate Neal and director Tamara Saulwick score interviewees' childhood recollections of their parents. Andrew Fuhrmann finds that "while there's much that is sad or poignant in the remembered stories, the overall feeling is of airiness and giddy relief."

But precisely what kind of work, asks Andrew Fuhrmann of dancer-choreographer Matthew Day’s Assemblage #1, a seeming laboratory in which the artist manipulates materials and space in search of a new mode of expression.

With its purpose-built instruments used as lights and lights as instruments, Speak Percussion takes Madeline Roycroft into a world of transformation, featuring complex playing and ecstatic interaction.

The world opens and contracts. The image above is of dance artist Matt Shilcock in his 2015 work The Likes of Me, which he co-directed with mentor Dean Walsh. In For All We Know (or thought we knew) Part II, Dean reflects on what he's learned from his collaborations with artists who have a disability. The exponential growth of talented artists in this field reflects a growing openness in our society to their assertion of worth and our acceptance and acknowledgment of those once considered incapable of autonomy. But there are signs of contraction—a narrowing and potential erasure of hard-won human rights to equality, unexploited labour, asylum and freedom from prejudice. I recall my primary school years in the 1950s when schoolyard-segregated "deaf and dumb" students were the subjects of derision and taunts. The growing call from the right for the freedom to insult with impunity denies freedom from prejudice to those too easily defined as different. Keith

In north-eastern NSW, NORPA’s Dreamland, for the If These Halls Could Talk program, reveals the complexities, passions and stresses of contemporary regional life, played out with verve in the old Eureka Hall.

Dean Walsh describes how working with Restless Dance Theatre, Murmuration, Catalyst Dance and RUCKUS has inspired him, developed self-awareness and helped him build an inclusive methodology for shared performance-making.

With instruments, voices and words, female sonic artists took centrestage in JOLT’s The Book of Daughters. Zoe Barker reports on the final of three nights of passionate performances that resonated with feminisms past and present.

Eduardo Cossio writes that Soundstorm’s The Calm Before, the third in Tura New Music’s 2016 Scale Variable series, not only revealed the strengths of composer and performer partnerings but also a fine blend of formal and intuitive music-making.

Jonathan W Marshall senses playfulness and sadness in Patrick Pound’s juxtaposition of found photographs with documentation and ephemera from the Flinders University Art Museum holdings in 1970s Australian conceptual art.

Dancehouse Artistic Director Angela Conquet’s priorities, she tells Andrew Fuhrmann, are to generate local dialogue and international exchange, bringing dance artists to Australia and facilitating the appearance of Australian artists overseas.

Chris Reid applauds Zephyr Quartet’s Arrivals, a concert addressing the historical and political complexities of migration amid the artefacts of the SA Maritime Museum.

The new abnormal. The international trend towards demagoguery and the diminution of democracy moves closer to home with, among other things, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act under threat from an increasingly right-swinging Liberal-National Government. RealTime this week includes reviews of works that address old norms—rape culture, racism, masculinist popular culture, fear of immigrants—which are finding cancerous new life as they fuse with fact-free, empathy-challenged alt-right, libertarian and One Nation populism. At least now, thanks to Prime Minister Turnbull doing a Howard, we know who we are, part of the “media elite,” oblivious to the concerns of ordinary Australians. Next on the list? Artists? Keith and Virginia

Zoe Barker is taken with Matthias Schack-Arnott’s Annica, a rotating musical instrument that sets its two Speak Percussion players dancing, yielding layered, hypnotic resonances built from brushed and struck stones, shells, sticks, wires, sandpaper, finely tuned chimes and big cymbals.

In Terror Australis, Leah Shelton defiantly runs the gamut of horrors embedded in masculinist Australian popular culture. It’s “an extraordinary testament to Shelton’s wit, intellect and performance energy,” writes Kathryn Kelly.

The future of creative radio broadcasting was vigorously forecast at the Radio Revolten Festival. Hear fascinating works and see many images from this once in a decade event. Sophea Lerner gauges its significance just as the ABC decommissions Australia’s acclaimed creative radio and sound art program, Soundproof.

In Parramatta, Dance Makers Collective listen to their fathers talk about the importance of dance for them and lovingly translate their movement into “a subtle enquiry into male frailties,” writes Tony Osborne. “It challenges stereotypes of paternity and masculinity and exposes a charming vulnerability in older men.”

Just as it’s been announced that Australia will again participate in the next Eurovision Song Contest, Philip Brophy defends the event from the depredations of SBS TV coverage.

Xan Fraser, raped in 1981 at 12 years of age and blamed for it by the court and community, bravely appears as herself in Hellie Turner’s Project Xan, a documentary performance about a still pervasive rape culture.

Jane Goodall sees Zsuzsi Soboslay’s Anthems and Angels, part of her Compassion Plays series, give expression to a sense of loss—of metaphysics and mythology in a culture where communication has been reduced to shouting matches.

With its spooky ambience, curious creations and restless ambiguities, Ella Barclay’s solo show, I Had To Do It, at UTS Gallery induces self-examination about the experience of a pervasively plugged-in existence. Showing until 25 November.

In a self-contained 40-storey high-rise, social relations and services go to pieces as self-interest takes over on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power. Ben Wheatley’s film, has been praised for its “future-retro vision,” “coolly immaculate” design, a fine central performance by Tom Hiddleston and its strongly realised sense of escalating decadence.

Performance Space’s 2016 Liveworks attracted loyal fans, hungry for experimental art and many others, attracted by the unusual. This E-dition features reviews of most of the festival’s diverse works that occupied Carriageworks in a way that made sense of the building. There’s an overview from us of the ‘bigger picture’ that Liveworks offers of our culture, its connections with Asia, the self, Indigeneity and community. It’s a festival well worth celebrating in dark times. Keith & Virginia, Oztrayah, Trumpistan

Angus McPherson finds Jon Rose’s violin museum full of surprises: eerie instruments triggered by capitalism’s data feeds, a fearsome apparition and bracing music.

Keith and Virginia look back over a successful festival that intimately embraced Asia, the personal, some bracingly strange visions and Performance Space’s Redfern neighbours.

In River Walk, the Taiwanese performance artist transcends the festival’s opening night hubbub, and in the one-on-one Cleansing Service surprises Nikki Heywood with a “brazen yet tender act.”

With powerful songs and intriguing stories, Stiff Gins breathe new life into Aboriginal artefacts locked in museums, taking us towards greater cultural understanding and to some very strange places.

With intensely focused movement and powerful image-making, Kristina Chan and collaborators create an unstable world in which extreme weather threatens to plunge us into a black hole of our own making.

From a moving car, Tina Havelock Stevens captured on video a massive storm in Texas, in turn captivating Lauren Carroll Harris with the contemplative immediacy of this big-screen artwork.

A four-year project, 2012-16, by Berlin-based Singaporean artist and performance maker Choy Ka Fai featured as the best of the Liveworks’ program.

With wicked wit, acute autobiographical frankness and dextrous audience co-option, Mish Grigor takes us on her urgent quest to understand her sexuality, drawing on uncomfortable conversations with her family.

For Lauren Carroll Harris, this walking visit to places where artists collaborate with Redfern locals inspires gratitude and prompts thoughts about the challenges involved in such art-making.

The charismatic team of Nicola Gunn and Jo Lloyd conjures a surreal world of relentless chatter, celebrity fixation, hyperactive exercise and perilous co-dependency with wit and anxiety-inducing movement.

Omer and Sharon Backley-Astrachan and Craig Bary and Dale Collier are the latest artists to participate in Catapult Dance’s Propel Residency program in Newcastle. Omer and Craig talk with RealTime about their plans.

This week we traverse, celebrate and reduce distances at the very moment the Turnbull Government attempts to push refugees ever further beyond Australia and our consciousness—out of empathy’s reach. In Sydney’s Fairfield, women of diverse cultures take to the streets in artworks and ethnic celebrations that engender visibility and reduce the gap that is gender inequality. Further west, Casula Powerhouse draws together wonderfully eccentric sculptures from across Australia prior to touring to eight regional galleries. The Book of Daughters places women at the centre of the sonic arts, anticipating future equality and bringing together Australian and Asian performers. Next week, our feature coverage of Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art. Keith & Virginia

Lucy Hawthorne drives from Hobart to Queenstown, climbs a mountain, takes a night-time train trip to a mine, listens to music in a quarry and finds more art in Queenstown’s Boy Scout and Masonic Halls. Unconformity’s the name for a most unusual Tasmanian festival.

“I had to lead the life I led to be able to make my films,” says the great German film director in Annekatrin Hendel’s Fassbinder, showing in this year’s Goethe Institut German Film Fest. It’s an engrossing feature-length documentary about creativity, acting, ensemble and remarkable productivity.

As she vividly recreates her experience of Women of Fairfield, a large-scale MCA-Powerhouse Youth Theatre art event in the streets of Western Sydney, Caroline Wake ponders the complexities of our encounters with the newest of Australians.

Sydney performance artist David Capra senses much in Melbourne peer Mark Shorter’s straddling of a not so passive gallery plinth in Artspace’s The Public Body.

Casula Powerhouse’s Soft Core, an exhibition of contemporary sculpture that magically eschews weight and hardness, offers a delightfully witty and sensual reappraisal of how we see tactilely. On now until 4 December.

JOLT’s James Hullick tells RealTime about The Book of Daughters, three nights of very special music, much of it by innovative women artists, including, from Japan, Noriko Tadano, Yoshimio and Yumiko Tanaka. On this week at Melbourne’s Meat Market.

US choreographer Faye Dricscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Attendance promises connection between dancer and dancer, dancer and audience but, writes Philipa Rothfield, with results more in mind than process.

One of the best films of recent years, Mustang portrays the plight of five young orphaned sisters living increasingly restrained lives in a conservative Turkish village. Beautifully filmed, Mustang balances its increasing tension and claustrophobia with the youngest girl’s spirited sense of possibility.

Resilience & Resistance. Resilience is a strikingly recurrent theme in this E-dition. In Project Xan, a woman appears as herself in performance, reflecting on the consequences of being raped and blamed for it at age 12. Emma Beech in Life is Short and Long conjures intimate conversations she’s had with people facing crises, personal, social and economic. For reviewer Francis Russell, Gosia Wlodarczak’s A Room Without A View (Extended) suggests the power of drawing as a kind of refrain for containing chaos. French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza, performing The Shout in Dancehouse’s Border Lines, writes of being “grounded in the rhythms of Gnawa, a kind of ancient African spiritual music based on the chant-like repetition of refrains and phases.” As Andrew Fuhrmann observes, The Shout and (in the same program) Sarah-Jane Norman’s Take This For It Is My Body, resiliently secure tradition against disintegration but are equally acts of bodily resistance, as are all the works, in their own ways, mentioned here. We’ll be back 9 November; see you then. Keith & Virginia

Twelve-year-old Xan was raped by three young men in 1981. In 2016, she appears in a documentary performance, Project Xan, with a successful career but still traumatised by her memories of being blamed by the court for the crimes of others. Writer-director Hellie Turner tells RealTime about the origins and aims of the work.

Performance-maker Emma Beech gently evokes people in Spain and South Australia, drawing on conversations she’s shared about dealing with “the crises of recession and change, of both the body and the world,” including, writes Ben Brooker, some challenges of her own.

Arts Northern Rivers’ If These Halls Could Talk brings new life to old halls in northern NSW towns with new theatre, film, digital media works and community participation, writes Barnaby Smith.

In The New York Review of Books, the great classical pianist Alfred Brendel reports seeing recent exhibitions that celebrate the centenary of Dada. He pays tribute to artists who challenged every kind of authority with, above all, laughter of a kind much needed now.

Andrew Fuhrmann discerns a political connection between works by French-Algerian choreographer Nacera Belaza and Indigenous Australian artist Sarah-Jane Norman in Dancehouse’s Dance Territories: Border Lines, part of the 2016 Melbourne Festival.

The intimacy and immediacy that made Helen Garner’s book so powerful are absent in Sotiris Dounoukos’ feature film debut, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, writes Kirsten Krauth, “pushing the characters away to somewhere out of reach.”

In A Room Without A View (Extended) at Fremantle Arts Centre, Gosia Wlodarczak fills walls with her drawing over three weeks, suggesting for Francis Russell, a protective song-like refrain that keeps chaos at bay.

In the sequel to Mystery Road, Ivan Sen’s Goldstone probes a mining town’s pervasive corruption with Indigenous detective Jay Swann (Aaron Pedersen) searching for a missing tourist. The film’s vast desert landscapes, a beautiful sacred waterway and the scattered township make for a potent visual experience.

Signs of Life. Will Sydney, Perth and Adelaide’s summer festivals breathe new life into an over-tired, hyperactive, fuzzy formula? Relatively small, artform or theme-focused arts festivals (BIFEM, OzAsia, Next Wave, Dance Massive, Liveworks) offer cogency, communality and a sense of difference with works that collectively take you out of the ordinary. The gigantism of their large peers—international arts and fringe festivals—limits shared appreciation and buries significant works amid all too familiar festival fare. But much can be forgiven if an overarching sense of purpose—social, political and aesthetic, whether or not themed—is evident. From what we’ve learned (details in coming weeks) two of Australia’s forthcoming international arts festivals are showing the signs of life we yearn for. In the meantime, we have reports from idiosyncratic festivals in the Ruhr and Riga, reviews of distinctive works in this year’s Melbourne Fringe and previews of the much anticipated Liveworks—including Thunderhead (image above)—an artstorm about to break. Keith & Virginia

Artist, documenter, provocateur and trickster Choy Ka Fai tells Keith Gallasch about his collaboration with Chinese artists XioaKe x ZiHan, one of two works he’s presenting for Liveworks which reveal unfamiliar dimensions of Asian dance.

Tina Havelock Stevens tells Lauren Carroll Harris about her art and the giant storm she caught on camera from a car in rural Texas and which she will immersively reproduce onscreen with her own soundtrack in Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art.

In the Ruhrtriennale, Jana Perkovic finds a festival that frames art in terms of the region in which it is staged. Featured works include Björn Bicker’s Urban Prayers Ruhr, Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s The things that pass and Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto.

In theatres and on the streets, writes Lucy Hawthorne, Hobart’s Salamanca Moves dance festival hosts local, national and international dance artists who have audiences thinking, feasting, flocking and partying with shows that reflect on ageing, ability, ritual and “deepspace.”

In the Melbourne Fringe, Andrew Furhrmann discovers dance works by Nebahat Erpolat, Chad McLachlan and Zac Jones which defy literal interpretation, delighting audiences with degrees of sheer strangeness.

At the Open Fields RIXC Art & Science Festival in Riga, Sophea Lerner encounters speculative fictions and microbial collaborations that address the future of money, sex toys for plants, flies that print and personal responsibility for nuclear waste.

John Bailey listens for gender in the voices that speak through performance in a trio of Melbourne Fringe productions from Ryan Good, Marcus Mackenzie and ‘bibliotherapist’ Anna Nalpantidis.

Follow us and check out photos from The Unconformity Festival in Tasmania last weekend.

With intensive coverage of 18 of its shows, we celebrate the success of this year’s festival, OzAsia’s 10th. The annual event was initiated by Adelaide Festival Centre CEO Douglas Gautier, who had previously worked in Hong Kong, and taken to a new level in 2015 and 2016 by OzAsia’s Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell whose eye for innovation and diversity in Asian art and performance of all kinds has given us works with which to see the world and ourselves anew. According to our Adelaide correspondents Ben Brooker and Chris Reid this was the best OzAsia yet. For us it was our first, a storm-defying, mind-bending and sense-expanding experience. One of our great pleasures is to live-in at a festival, responding to it in detail, as RealTime has done this year with Next Wave and the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, and many others over 22 years of arts publishing. We’re eager for even greater cross-cultural insights from and immersion in 2017’s OzAsia Festival. Keith & Virginia

Ben Brooker encounters disorienting works by Luke George & Daniel Kok, Rianto and Hiroaki Umeda at play with submission, gender and sensory overload.

Chris Reid is entranced by teamLab’s digital re-estimations of nature and the art that depicts it and engaged by Roundabout, a rare encounter with Filipino art.

Keith Gallasch responds to the works that most impressed him: China’s Two Dogs, a virtuosic, riotous play-cum-improvisation and two contemplative digital works from Japan’s teamLab (showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 5 January 2017).

The Record, an unlikely piece of programming, featuring 45 Adelaide citizens in a gentle dance, was one of the festival’s highlights, writes Ben Brooker, while Hong Kong’s City Contemporary Dance Company unevenly mixed convention and invention.

Chris Reid discerns in three of the festival’s visual art exhibitions a spiritual commonality among artists from China, Hong Kong and Australia with works that sensorily heighten cultural and political awareness.

After two days of bad weather, OzAsia displayed its mettle with music and film in King of Ghosts, Cambodia’s brilliant young Phare Circus, Adelaide’s Tutti and Asian collaborators in Beastly and Toshiki Okada’s God Bless Baseball, an engrossing parable about sport, family and power.

Winners of the 2016 Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music commence a concentrated season of concerts this week, first at the Unconformity Festival in Tasmania and then on to Indonesia and Melbourne. Ensemble members describe new compositions and the unusual tools with which both aural and visual magic are made.

One of OzAsia’s most powerful exhibitions was Unworldy Encounters at AEAF, featuring works by four Australian and Chinese artists who travelled together through China, Tibet and across Australia. Their journey and their art are documented in this magnificent large format book.

OzAsia 2016 is a festival on fire, right now in Adelaide. Hong Kong digital media artist Kingsley Ng’s Gallery Express (image above) is one of the event’s immersive highlights, a surreal journey back to the present from a future, uninhabitable Earth. Chris Reid reviews three of the festival’s engrossing exhibitions in this edition, including Ng’s Record Light. Sensory transformation figures elsewhere as audiences find themselves directly engaged in Lee Serle’s MULTIMODAL and Ohad Naharin’s Decadance. Another kind of transformation is recorded in dancer Dean Walsh’s deeply personal account of coming to a profound understanding of how he relates to the world, to art-making and disability. We’re off to the wonderful OzAsia and will regale you on 12 October with extensive coverage of the performances, public events and visual arts which are transforming the Australian-Asian relationship. Keith & Virginia

Jonathan W Marshall reviews The Cry by Co3, Dark Matter by Praxis and STRUT’s performance of Ohad Naharin’s Decadance in MoveMe, the city’s major contemporary dance event.

In MULTIMODAL, Lee Serle takes his audience beyond observation into sensory engagement in a multi-faceted dance-cum-installation work, writes Maximilian.

Michael Whaites talks with Keith Gallasch about WAAPA’s graduate dance company, LINK, its guest choreographers and international touring, plus the opportunity to pursue a project-based MA in dance.

In a revelatory account, leading contemporary dance artist Dean Walsh writes about his life, autism and working inclusively with artists with disability.

Co-curator Karen Therese tells us about a collaboration between artists and 100 women from diverse cultural backgrounds to create performative installations in Western Sydney, for a major free cultural event.

Chris Reid discerns in three of the festival’s visual art exhibitions a spiritual commonality among artists from China, Hong Kong and Australia with works that sensorily heighten cultural and political awareness.

Sign up to our mailing list and go in the draw to grab the 15th anniversary edition DVD of this cult classic.

Anxiety is an invaluable coping mechanism, but exploitable. How can we sustainably manage our concerns—crank up the fear voltage, invent new horrors or seek out alternative visions and possible solutions? These are the kinds of questions asked by Lyndon Blue and Francis Russell on seeing exhibitions about art and ecology at PICA in Perth and apocalypse at Success arts space in Fremantle. Hugh Davies reviews Screen Ecologies, an Australian book we’d love to read about the variety of screen-based artist responses to climate change in our Asia-Pacific region—art that’s actually close to home. Often we feel left out of the action—when did our own government last engage us directly in sustainable environmental programs in the everyday? Anxiety is perpetually renewable but only sustainable when rooted in an evolving, nuanced exchange between research, fact and fine imaginings.

Lyndon Blue writes that works in PICA’s Radical Ecologies by Pony Express, Peter and Molly, Katie West, Matt Aitken and Rebecca Orchard variously throw into relief the meaning of ‘radical.’

Reflecting on curator Laetitia Wilson’s Inanition: A Speculation on The End of Times, Francis Russell seeks works that go beyond “the conventional moralism of eco-crisis” to the likes of “the more progressive tropes of science fiction.”

Tom Smith wonders if the metaphorical title for this major Liquid Architecture event extends to encompass critical discourse about sound. Featured artists included Johannes Kreidler, Seth Kim-Cohen, Andrew McLellan, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan and Erik Demetriou.

A significant new book by four RMIT academics critically surveys the responses of innovative Asia-Pacific artists to climate change via many manifestations of the screen, writes Hugh Davies.

Moments of creative encounter and collision in new work from De Quincey Co and Chunky Move's Next Move program.

After its riotous success in 2015, this “one part talent show, one part improvisation laboratory” returns Thursday night this week in Melbourne with an impressive list of contenders and panel of judges.

Matthew Lorenzon applauds the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music’s successful amalgam of the micro and the macro in intimate solos, powerful pairings, large ensembles and a community orchestra.

Virtuoso percussionist Leah Scholes, writes Alex Taylor, reveals “the uncomfortable interaction, the friction, between sound and meaning, and the slippage and failure of language” with theatrical flair.

Conducted by Carl Rosman, ELISION ensemble and ANAM students combined to produce a superb performance of a Liza Lim master work, writes Zoe Barker.

Bec Scully sees in Peter de Jager’s open responsiveness to Xenakis’ unbelievably demanding scores for piano and harpsichord vindication of the composer’s “deep sense of cultural and social responsibility in his art.”

Artistic Director David Chisholm’s Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) again proved itself to be one of Australia’s boldest, intensive arts events. In a mere two and half days, committed audiences, professional, student and community players came together with egalitarian spirit to embrace thrillingly demanding contemporary music, opera, dance and sound art in the city’s centre. The unnervingly brilliant ELISION ensemble, celebrating its 30th birthday, provided three key concerts, two of them involving superb performances from Australian National Academy of Music students, and two with gripping compositions by leading Australian composer Liza Lim, whose 50th birthday was also celebrated. Today, we’re publishing a selection of reviews from the festival’s Music Writers’ Workshop. There’ll be more next week. In our ongoing Arts Education feature, we focus on acting at the Adelaide College of the Arts and on the educational damage being wrought on the Sydney College of the Arts and the culture of Sydney by the NSW Government. Keith & Virginia

Terence Crawford, Head of Acting in this highly productive TAFE College, delineates its advantages, successes and strategies for continuity, drawing on the strengths of young teacher graduates who also speak to Ben Brooker in this report.

Artists with disabilities from Penang’s Stepping Stone and Adelaide’s Tutti Arts come together with leading Indonesian artist Andres Busrianto to create one-on-one experiences that magically challenge the human/animal divide.

After 10 years of teaching in the UK, Liz Bradshaw warns that the potential “death by asphyxiation” of SCA parallels overseas trends, diminishing not just art schools but Sydney as a city and Australian culture.

Claudine Michael finds herself looped within the loops generated by Marco Cher-Gibbard’s laptop processing, Ben Speth’s electric guitar and Matthew Adey’s play with light.

Aaron Cassidy’s The Wreck of Former Boundaries is inspired by Ornette Coleman and Liza Lim’s How Forests Think by the Brazilian rain forest and Eduardo Kohn’s revelations about it. ELISION ensemble does justice to these world premieres, writes Madeline Roycroft.

Matthew Lorenzon feels “cleansed” after experiencing the hour-long arc of dancer Myriam Gourfink’s extremely slow, small movements which trigger the sounds that composer Kasper T Toeplitz transforms into layers of white noise.

David Chisholm pairs harp and guitar and Jack Symonds viola d’amore and percussion in adventurous new double concerti, revealing temptations, possibilities and risks, writes Alex Taylor.

Bendigo’s Argonaut Quartet play four subtly crafted works (Mexican, Chilean and two Australian) rising, from one work to the next, in intensity from musing to outburst, reports Zoe Barker.

Bec Scully vigorously applauds the Australian premiere performance by ELISION ensemble and students from the Australian National Academy of Music of Enno Poppe’s Speicher, one of the most praised and demanding works of recent times.

Out of darkness emerge single players and notes, then rows and geometric clusters in Swiss brothers André and Michel Décosterd’s accumulative creation, triggered from a keyboard by Peter Dumsday and ably played by the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra. It’s “a truly egalitarian work,” writes Madeline Roycroft.

The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music’s Writers’ Workshop participants and their Partial Duration and RealTime mentors pause for the camera before once again facing the music.

We’ll be brief. There’s so much weird and wonderful reading in this E-dition, taking you from the Darwin Festival to Australia’s newest dance festival, Salamanca Moves (UK artist Liz Aggiss above) in Hobart, from Keith Armstrong’s imaginary ecologies to Tim Darbyshire’s human stress-test, from Toshiki Okada’s critical paean to baseball in the OzAsia Festival to ELISION ensemble’s celebratory exhibition in Melbourne and performances in Bendigo and Sydney Chamber Opera’s revelatory take on Dostoevsky. Our ongoing Arts Education feature focuses this week on Adelaide Central School of Art. While art revels in nuance, complexity and passion, the angry forces of absolutism in the new federal parliament line up to do their worst. It’s time to care. We’re off to the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music—follow us on Partial Durations—and will be back with you on 14 September. Keith and Virginia

Check out our coverage of this year's Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music over on Partial Durations.

With drawing at the core of its curriculum, leading artist teachers and successful graduates, this proudly independent art school is offering travel grants and scholarships and gaining a national profile.

Curator Kelly Drummond Cawthon tells RealTime about a must-see new Australian dance festival in Hobart that makes visible all kinds of dance, in theatres, public spaces and with communities and new technologies.

Toshiki Okada, writer-director of God Bless Baseball, tells Ben Brooker that though baseball is loved in Japan and Korea, the game embodies the problematic ongoing cultural presence of America

Artistic Director Daryl Buckley reflects proudly on this new music ensemble’s bold venture, celebrated with an exhibition at RMIT Gallery and performances this week at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music.

Debra Petrovitch finds herself absorbed into the complex worlds, ideas, hope and fears suggested by Brisbane-based artist and academic Keith Armstrong’s solo show, Over Many Horizons, at Sydney’s UTS Gallery.

With a turbulent score and great performances, Sydney Chamber Opera transforms the delirium of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground into a work that is as beautiful as it is existentially ugly.

Nikki Heywood sees in Tim Darbyshire’s viscerally engrossing Stampede the Stampede a “Baconesque body reduced to spinning, spinning, eternally in dust and finally liberated in darkness.”

A provocative play from Ireland about suicide, a participatory exercise in collective government from the Philippines and an Australian play about a child threatened by climate change, each “bring audiences closer to the process of theatre-making.”

Tracks Dance Company walks its audience through a sacred landscape, filling it with dance; cross-gender Javanese dancer Rianto fuses ritual and modern forms; and Finucane & Smith juxtapose traditional cabaret with burlesque.

Where to turn to for the latest in physics and cosmology? To De Quincey Co’s team of dancers, video, sound and animation artists and guest scientists; playing soon in Melbourne and Sydney.

The naked truth E-dition. Revealed this week, Performance Space’s 2016 Festival of Experimental Art features a stellar line-up of Asian and Australian innovators, including Mish Grigor [cover] whose The Talk, about the family and sex, is one of the featured works. In Off the Record, Force Majeure’s performers expose themselves to uncomfortable truths. In Tribunal, Powerhouse Youth Theatre’s stark revelations about our oppression of Aboriginal Australians and refugees render us naked. In Down Under, writer-director Abe Forsythe strips bare the perpetrators of the Cronulla Riots, would-be emperors of the Australian beach. As concerns for refugees and Aboriginal Australians escalate in the face of undeniable facts, the naked truth must displace the lies, denialism and “truthiness” (thanks Stephen Colbert) at which governments excel. Keith & Virginia

Impeded by isolation, difficult bodies, fraught minds and communication failure, the mixed-ability performers in Force Majeure’s Off the Record face the challenges of truth-telling with verve.

At Melbourne’s The Substation, The Screen as a Room illuminatingly tests the relationship between live performance and performative screen works, writes Robert Shumoail-Albazi.

In Powerhouse Youth Theatre’s Tribunal, an actual Aboriginal elder presides over a hearing in which real refugees and a refugee support worker resiliently challenge traumatising codes imposed by the Government.

Our horror film specialist Katerina Sakkas finds Abe Forsthye’s testosterone-loaded Down Under, about the perpetrators of the Cronulla Riots, to be well-crafted and acted, less than funny and truly scary.

Exuberant Performance Space Artistic Director Jeff Khan gives advance notice of an immersive two-week program rich in Asian and Australian experimental art and taking over the Carriageworks complex.

Jana Perkovic applauds Ben Eltham’s Platform Paper, When the Goal Posts Move, a record of how unprecedented, long-term damage has been inflicted on the Australia arts community and cultural policy abandoned.

Launceston’s Stompin, a dance-based company for young people, commits to creating innovative performance and engaging with communities. Former artistic directors Jerril Rechter and Emma Porteus reflect on Stompin’s achievements.

Cleo Mees discovered “a new sense of my own desire” on seeing the Australian premiere of Luke George and Daniel Kok’s BUNNY. Since seen in New York, BUNNY will now play in Adelaide’s OzAsia, inviting audiences into a world of colourful bondage.

In the latest Platform Paper, described by Jana Perkovic as “an excellent work of political journalism,” Ben Eltham guides you through the history of the LNP Government’s assault on artists and the Australia Council.

In our ongoing Arts Education feature, you’ll read about media artist George Khut in-residence at the National Portrait Gallery, his take on digital portraiture and his teaching at UNSW Art & Design; while actor and writer Jane Griffiths tells us about music theatre’s great leap forward at Monash University. We pay special tribute to Australian dance artist Philippa Cullen. As a member of Sydney’s exploratory art community from the late 60s until her death in 1975, she vigorously engaged in cross-artform performance and public dance, visited Africa and India, worked with Stockhausen in Europe and, above all, created works in which dancers triggered music via elegantly sculpted theremins. Young artists today might find inspiration in Cullen’s vision and the communal passion with which she pursued it. Keith & Virginia

Zsuzsi Soboslay sits, draws and talks for Khut’s digital portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery; Keith Gallasch interviews the artist about teaching at UNSW Art & Design.

A $1m donation boosts Monash University’s Music Theatre course and creates residencies for practitioners in the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Jane Griffiths tells John Bailey.

Stephen Jones’ exhibition Dancing the Music: Philippa Cullen is a loving tribute to an Australian dancer who in her short life was a pioneer in dance’s engagement with technology.

Inspired by composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s response to Picasso’s Three Dancers, choreographer Lee Serle has created an abstract but powerfully suggestive work.

Ben Brooker reports from a spirited National Play Festival that writing by Indigenous and Asian Australian writers is driving the evolution of Australian dramaturgy.

Elyssia Bugg witnesses Julie Vulcan’s 23-hour durational performance about the workings of the mind during solitary imprisonment played out on-site, streamed and tweeted.

Tim Darbyshire reveals his motivation for Stampede the Stampede, a powerful solo work in which man is tested by machine. This week at Campbelltown Arts Centre.

The image above is of lecturer Cath McKinnon’s production of Tom Holloway’s Lyrebird, written for and performed by students at the University of Wollongong. In an interview, fellow lecturer Chris Ryan reveals the strange new worlds that UOW Theatre and Performance students will enter on their way to fascinating careers. UNSW senior lecturer Erin Brannigan talks about her Reviewing the Arts course at UNSW, a timely initiative as criteria, standards and platforms undergo radical change. JR Brennan’s The Chat, Andrea James’ Winyanboga Yurringa and Eastern Riverina Arts’ Basin provide this E-dition with exciting evidence of the ongoing inventiveness of Australia’s performance culture. Keith & Virginia

At UNSW’s School of the Arts & Media, Erin Brannigan’s Reviewing the Arts addresses multiple artforms and varieties of criticism via research and intensive writing workshops.

In Grace, circus artist Emma Serjeant portrays the last moments of a woman’s life with a potent melding of voice, video, music and movement.

University of Wollongong Lecturer and director Chris Ryan talks about courses, productions, what busy graduates are up to and looks back on the career that made him the teacher he is.

Philip Brophy engages in activated listening at Inland 16.4: Through Savage Progress, part of a concert series committed to works on the edge between sound and music.

Andrea James’ Winyanboga Yurringa and Angela Betzien’s The Hanging invoke spiritual and cultural archetypes in societies where young women are at risk.

The brainchild of an alliance between two distinct interdisciplinary collectives, Boho Interactive and Applespiel, The Best Festival Ever is “part-theatre show, performance lecture and board game."

John Bailey finds himself in a head-spinning house of mirrors In JR Brennan’s The Chat where real ex-criminals and actors play out tense parole negotiations.

Director Scott Howie, playwright Vanessa Bates and a team of seven writers evoke fears and passions rising from the depths of drought in the Eastern Riverina Arts production Basin.

Welcome to our annual arts education feature, an informal survey of issues, courses, teachers, works and students over coming weeks. As a prelude, WAAPA’s Jonathan Marshall reports on the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference hosted by the University of Melbourne and Rennie McDougall at NYU addresses the complexities of positioning himself as a critic, reflected in Sally Smart’s The Choreography of Cutting (above). In our next E-dition Erin Brannigan describes the workings of her new Reviewing the Arts course at UNSW and Christopher Ryan reflects on the nurturing of performers at the University of Wollongong. Join us in this celebration of the making of a new generation of artists.

In Melbourne Bruno Latour, Peta Tait and Rebecca Schneider re-estimate art’s relationship with the non-human world with ramifications for attitudes to the environment and ourselves, writes Jonathan Marshall.

As he commences a Masters of Journalism in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU, Australian dance artist and writer Rennie McDougall ponders contradictions inherent in arts reviewing.

Ann Deslandes reports from Rio de Janeiro, site not only of the 2016 Olympics but also Ocupa MinC, a significant, protracted occupation by artists of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture.

Zoey Dawson’s Conviction and THE RABBLE’S Cain and Abel propel John Bailey to reassess a too-easily dispensed critical cliché.

In WA playwright Nathaniel Moncrieff’s A Perfect Specimen, a showman exploiter is the aberration rather than his exploited wife, a renowned 19th century “human ape,” writes Jonathan Marshall.

For his 2016 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, David Chisholm programs a piano-triggered orchestra, ELISION ensemble, a junk opera and wall-of-sound ritualistic noise.

Leah Scholes and Phoebe Green pair to perform works by some of Australia’s most inventive composers, writes Matthew Lorenzon on the Partial Durations blog.

As we sense the world crumbling around us, environmentally and politically, it’s some relief to see artists in the 2016 OzAsia Festival and others appearing here attempting to rebuild through understanding the nature of suffering, nurturing empathy and envisaging new ways of thinking and being. They play with form, media and mood, but speak with a directness that is increasingly evident in the arts in testing times. On the other hand, there’s pleasure to be had from works that disconnect us from the intensifying demands of the everyday, such as the must-see media art works of dancer Hiroaki Umeda, teamLab, Mikuni Yanaihara and Kingsley Ng featured in the 2016 OzAsia Festival. They’re not frivolous, revealing instead the potential for creative responses to the same technologies that produce our assumed reality. Keith & Virginia

Keith Gallasch loops into Urban Theatre Projects' Simple Infinity, a gently surreal world in which Ultraviolet, Olive Green and Midnight Blue live ‘on the spectrum,’ seeking connection through words, music and gesture.

In The Astronaut, Samantha Chester takes flight in a gentle reverie depicting a woman’s childhood recollections, memories of the Moon-landing, Elvis Presley and the rituals that sustain her.

In a passionate account of his 2016 festival, Director Joseph Mitchell reveals key works and issues at play in bold works in theatre, experimental performance, media art and thrilling hybrids.

Convalescing artist Julie Williams created a performative video from her bed, layered with images of a Blue Mountains site that offers spiritual succour. Read Virginia Baxter’s response and see the video.

Dance artists came from across Australia to Canberra to work with David Pledger to create new works that address their role as “canaries in the coalmine of democracy.”

Director-writer Andrea James tells Keith Gallasch about her new play, Winyanboga Yurringa, which takes six Aboriginal women back to country to deal with issues of repatriation, drug-taking and children at risk, but with strength found in humour.

Opening this week at Fremantle Arts Centre, Matthew Ngui celebrates democracy with an installation, Every Point of View, in which viewers enter a PVC forest of opinions written with light and sound.

Amid the dust, actual and metaphorical, that pervades the film, Katerina Sakkas witnesses the emergence of mythic dimension in Ivan Sen’s crime thrillers.

Apply now to be mentored by the Editors of RealTime and Partial Durations in an intensive writing workshop at the wonderful three-day Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music.

In game-playing, art made sacred and a drone’s eye view of a threatened Earth, Andrew Furhmann witnesses new forms designed to change cultural attitudes.

Change and transformation are pivotal to this E-dition. In Unseen, performance artist Lauren Simmonds uses illusion to reveal an unseen world behind the everyday, uniting us all. An injury compels circus artist Emma Serjeant to reinvent her practice for a new work, Grace. Actor Raoul Craemer becomes both troubled grandson and fascist grandfather in his play Pigman’s Lament. To duel with his animated self as The Ramayana’s Jatayu, Raghav Handa transforms into Ravana in Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent. On seeing Ranters’ Come Away with Me to the End of the World and Anni and Maude Davey’s Retro Futurismus, John Bailey reflects on how we render others, the past and future as eccentric. PACT, Sydney’s Centre for Emerging Artists, runs programs that turn eager young practitioners into confident artists, but Australia Council defunding threatens to defuse that transformative power. Director Katrina Douglas and supporters are determined to push on: continuity is the foundation for transformation. Keith & Virginia

Kathryn Kelly is impressed by Raghav Handa’s superb dancing and Deakin Motion Lab’s arresting digital art In Mens rea: The Shifter’s Intent, but sees room for their improved interaction.

Malcolm Whittaker’s interview with Director Katrina Douglas reveals the value of the organisation’s nurturing of emerging artists through 50 years of vibrant programming and the need to support its fight to survive.

In Unseen, Elyssia Bugg sees performance artist Lauren Simmonds magically transform the everyday, revealing in her refractions an uplifting unity.

In Ranters’ Come Away with Me to the End of the World and Anni and Maude Davey’s Retro Futurismus, John Bailey senses our uneasy dealings with eccentricity.

Circus artist Emma Serjeant (Circa, Casus) tells Kathryn Kelly how an injury has transformed her practice in a new work, Grace, directed by John Britton.

A man who embodies self, pig and fascist grandfather faces his doom in Pigman’s Lament, a solo performance by Canberra actor-writer Raoul Craemer, directed by Paolo Castro.

Nicole Ma’s award-winning feature-length documentary, Putuparri and the Rainmakers, now on DVD, offers profound insights into the lives and beliefs of the people of the Great Sandy Desert, forced to live in Fitzroy Crossing and other towns, but maintaining their connections to country.

Apply now to be mentored by the Editors of RealTime and Partial Durations in an intensive writing workshop at the wonderful three-day Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music.

It’s a painful time. The LNP won the election, narrowly. Artists lost, enormously. But the sector and supporters fought hard, creating a unanimity of purpose with which to hold governments to account from now on. Students and staff at Sydney College of the Arts are hurting with the announcement of their college’s absorption into UNSW Art & Design. They’re fighting it, transforming pain into action. Suffering and its management are directly addressed in this E-dition in a Virtual Reality experience created by Eugenie Lee which simulates chronic pain (image above) and in an Irish dance work about angst wrought by separation. Other works reviewed look back to the arts politics of the 20th century (Colin Bright Syzygy Band and Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto) for inspiration and a sense of continuity while the Manifesta 11 biennale treats its host city, Zurich, as a socio-political art site and Terrapin Puppet Theatre and playwright Angela Betzien tackle a dysfunctional future with the ancient arts of clowning, tale-telling and puppetry. In Croatia, Jana Perkovic experiences intimate, deeply engaging performances that resolve in joy. Where there’s art, there’s hope. Keith & Virginia

You’re looking at 80,000kg of treated human waste—Zurich’s daily output—in huge cubes in Manifesta 11, a biennale of experimental curation in which the city is the subject, reports Marco Marcon.

In a VR headset in an anechoic chamber, in Eugenie Lee’s Seeing is Believing, Keith Gallasch experiences a disturbing simulation of chronic pain that offers insights into the nature of suffering. Experience it now.

At Croatia’s Perforations Festival of intimate performances, Jana Perkovic speed-dates in Market of Love and is entranced by Necastive, a nude dance work, tense, macabre and then joyous.

Ireland’s Liz Roche Company dances “a somatically stirring meditation” on suffering wrought by time, distance and displacement writes Jodie McNeilly.

Two Beckettian rogues get into a twist over an orphaned creature they’ve sold to evil plutocrats in Angela Betzien’s new play for Hobart’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre. Now playing in Melbourne.

Because it’s two hours well spent with 12 characters skilfully realised by Cate Blanchett in an above all intensely cinematic, deftly staged and syncopated installation full of wondrous visions. Now showing at AGNSW.

Reaching back into the 20th century to periods of hip innovation and political defiance, the Colin Bright Syzygy Band makes playful and powerful new music.

In her review of the Sydney Film Festival’s Virtual Reality program, Lauren Carroll Harris encounters a work about incipient blindness which is at once wonderfully immersive and deeply empathic. We turn to art for the sustenance with which to understand and face reality, or to evade it. We often do both at once, finding in art a refuge from which we can reflect on painful reality at a distance. In Britain, a Prime Minister, in appeasing the right-wing of his party, has made real the rank nationalism, xenophobia and racism of Brexit. Artists will suffer, losing access to the EU’s £1.3 billion Creative Europe funding program, to visa-free movement, training programs and the benefits of “the largest export market for the UK's creative industries, totalling 56% of all overseas trade in the sector.” In Australia, we face the harsh reality of the Turnbull Government’s depredation of culture and its cowardly, non-binding, right-wing accommodating gay marriage plebiscite. We hope that the brave art we respond to in this e-dition will provide some solace and strengthen our collective resolve to fight for art beyond the 2016 election. Keith & Virginia

A graveyard for developing empathy, a mad but wise mountain and material artworks made virtual; these are some of the small, personal artgames that are providing a meeting point for video gaming and art-making, writes Liam Gibbons.

At the Sydney Film Festival, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, in which sound plays a pivotal role in sharing the experience of a man’s incipient blindness, convinces Lauren Carroll Harris that VR can make art.

Humans behave like chimps; a family, cats included, relocate to the wilds; a profoundly patient camera transforms our sense of the world; and a space courier witnesses Fukushima-like destruction across the universe in the REVELATION Perth International Film Festival.

“The work's emotional pulse is in the ordinariness of Jacob Boehme's need for love and for a sense of belonging,” writes Andrew Fuhrmann of an artist’s affecting performance about facing the challenges of living with HIV.

Amid funding challenges but with undimmed spirit, the National Play Festival headlines new plays, introduces works by Asian-Australian, Indigenous and New Zealand playwrights and features intensive discussion led by prominent writers.

In Mens rea: the Shifter’s Intent, Raghav Handa, creator of the celebrated Tukre, brings together his Indian heritage, his experience in performing for Aboriginal choreographers and transformative digital animation.

Roy Andersson’s Venice Gold Lion Winner, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, captivated cinema audiences with absurdist humour loosely centred around two salesmen selling joke toys, badly.

In his Q&A appearance on Monday night, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull revealed a profound ignorance of his government’s mishandling of arts funding when quizzed by singer Katie Noonan. He insisted that the Australia Council has been better funded under the Abbott-Turnbull Government, that most Catalyst Funding went to regional arts (37% in fact) and used Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre (he clearly didn't know who they were) as an example of a regional company that might not otherwise have been funded had it not been assisted by Catalyst. Browse Catalyst funding results and you’ll see familiar names of organisations usually funded by the Australia Council, some now additionally advantaged, while some larger players have taken the opportunity to source funds that were once the province of the small to medium sector which now faces a bleak future. Former Arts Minister George Brandis envisaged a broader and more competitive funding model; instead, he and his successor have catalysed an aberration: brutal, chaotic and divisive. Make your vote count, but not for an out of touch, uncaring Turnbull. Keith & Virginia

In Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Secrecy and Despatch, 30 works, constellating around an 1816 massacre west of Sydney, powerfully reflect on violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada.

The inimitable Program Director of the idiosyncratic REVELATION Perth International Film Festival guides us through a 2016 program rich in features, documentaries, shorts and surprises.

As Melanie Jame Wolf enacts and reflects on her lap-dancing career in Mira Fuchs, Varia Karipoff decides that in this case too much information is just enough.

At the Lorne Sculpture Biennale earlier this year, prize-winning essayist Stephen Wright encountered a site-specific performance that resonated like “a low-tech outtake from Bowie’s Blackstar.”

Works from the 70s and 80s by Roger Smalley performed by Decibel confirm the late composer’s adventurousness and the strength of his legacy, writes Alex Turley.

In Dancenorth’s If_Was_, though working from shared materials, choreographers Ross McCormack and Stephanie Lake create radically different visions of human struggle, adaptability and potential.

Greg Hooper finds himself engrossed in the brilliance of the hi- and lo-fi blend of South Korean video artist Taeyoon Kim’s video works at Brisbane’s MAAP Space.

Australia, step up in Fallujah humanitarian crisis! “Australia’s investment in aid in Iraq is just a few per cent of the hundreds of millions of dollars we spent on our military intervention.” Donate now. (Image: Civilians flee Fallujah in Iraq, June 2016, AFP)

Reality takes a hit. Vancouver’s Fight with a Stick immerses its audience in the immensity of non-human “vibrant matter.” Chunky Move’s Anouk van Dijk teasingly tests the real/virtual borderline. Cassandra Tytler’s I’m Sorry subjects the gallery-goer to the rantings of a domestic violence perpetrator as performed by the artist. Yirra Yaakin (image above) conjures the ghosts of rebels who lost their heads to a colonialism that haunts us still. Meanwhile we’re spooked by Arts Minister Mitch Fifleld, a smooth decimator of arts ”jobs and growth.” Only the electoral defeat of the Turnbull Government on 2 July will deliver arts jobs and growth—freed of ministerial manipulation.

Yirra Yaakin’s latest success gives voice to historical figures, black and white, trapped, writes Jonathan Marshall, in an Expressionist post-colonial limbo.

Fight With a Stick plummets its audience into a world where material objects become aggressive and tangible spaces collapse, reports Mikis Vrettakos from Vancouver.

In Lucid, writes Andrew Fuhrmann, Anouk van Dijk creates “a mechanism of fascination, amplifying our uncertainties about the real and unreal…stirring vague passions and deflecting critical reflection.”

Admiring Cassandra Tytler’s video installation, Philip Brophy writes that the artist’s performance “mirrors the inauthentic posturing of the repeat [domestic violence] offender.”

With a strong convergence of performance, movement, sound and design, director Vicki Van Hout’s new production of Jane Harrison’s play about Australia’s Indigenous Stolen Generations reveals its enduring strength and sad relevancy, writes Virginia Baxter.

A new book, I Shudder to Think, by the late Margaret Cameron recalls and deepens our understanding of her remarkable performances but equally declares her a poet and thinker of high standing.

From Ladyfinger Press a copy of Margaret Cameron’s book of her performance scripts, reflections on the very personal roots of their creation and an emerging philosophy of being and performing.

Composer Samantha Wolf, dancer Gemma Dawkins and pianist Alex Raineri talk with Matthew Lorenzon about making music and movement with egg shells.

Click on the image above to read about the June 8 Artspeak National Arts Election Debate, growing arts industry unanimity against the Government over its treatment of artists, and the June 17th Arts Action Day. Neither the future of Australia’s Indigenous peoples nor the environment yet figure in the election campaign. In this E-dition reviews of political visual arts exhibitions and documentary filmmaking (image above from Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs) keep us mindful of this, but art is busy now protecting itself too from government.

Three exhibitions in Adelaide confirm that Australian political art is alive, kicking, inventive and deeply felt, reports Chris Reid.

At the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, Dan Edwards sees Kelrick Martin’s Prison Songs, a spirited documentary about Aboriginal incarceration, as an exemplar of how to forge cinematic empathy.

Sydney’s “disability-led” performance ensemble tackles the nightmare rush of the everyday with humour, drama and wisdom.

Dancenorth’s Artistic Director reveals the influences, adventures, theories and synchronicities that have shaped both career and vision.

Choreographed by Stephanie Lake and Ross McCormack, Dancenorth’s bold new artistic experiment, IF_WAS_, opens this week in Townsville and then tours.

Composers reveal the pleasures and growing anxieties generated by the modern city in Melbourne’s Metropolis New Music Festival.

Tension between our imperfect selves and idealised virtual alter egos is powerfully if unevenly played out in Larissa McGowan’s Mortal Condition, writes Ben Brooker.

A mockumentary classic about bureaucratic bungling and corruption in the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the ABC TV series (1998, 2000) is more relevant than ever. Offer closes 15 June.

A musical proto-brain, an Alzheimer Symphony and the rise and rise of conceptualism in dance constitute food for vigorous thought in this e-dition. But a real no-brainer is the necessity to rigorously protest the Turnbull Government’s brutal depredation of Australia’s complex, highly effective but extremely vulnerable arts ecology.

Tasmania’s Justus Neumann moves Zsuzsanna Soboslay to tears with his “tragically funny” account of an actor struggling to recall lines from King Lear.

Four exhibitions of works by emerging artists range across self-portraiture, cross-cultural meditation, art fakery and Indigenous knowing.

For UNSW Galleries’ The Patient, bio-artist Guy Ben-Ary’s other brain (grown from his own cells) jams with leading Sydney musicians, 10-12 June. Read Gail Priest’s interview with the artist to see how it’s done.

What is “the choreographic” and what, hand in hand with conceptual choreography, does it mean for dance as art galleries increasingly embrace performance, asks Keith Gallasch.

The Afterglow season at Sydney’s PACT features powerful performances from Angela Goh, Thomas ES Kelly, Annaliese Constable and Amrita Heppi & Jahra Wasasala

Thanks to Madman Entertainment we have 3 more copies of Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s engrossing 2015 feature-length documentary account of the life of Peggy Guggenheim. Closing date 8 June.

The appalling news of the defunding of Australia’s premiere national festival for emerging artists—alongside other crucially innovative organisations—did not prevent Next Wave Festival from excelling nor dimmed its spirits. It played to full houses, delighting audiences and triggering invaluable conversations about mutating artforms and key cultural issues. With five emerging arts writers and mentors Andrew Fuhrmann and Jana Perkovic in our DanceWrite workshop, we experienced the pleasures and provocations Next Wave engenders, all working day and night for each participant to produce a set of reviews. This involved intensive group discussions, shared reading and close editing. We thank our participants and mentors for their energy, commitment and company, and Hannah Matthews of Sharing Space for inviting RealTime and Next Wave to collaborate on this venture.

In Angela Goh’s conceptual choreography Maximilian perceives a shedding of cultural conditioning and an appreciation of pure, naked motion.

To reveal the work’s patterning, its sense of ritual and potential for transcendence, Alison Finn focuses on Lilian Steiner’s choreography which eventually gives way to a possibly sublime visual experience.

In his “clear and measured” challenge to cultural stereotyping, writes Alison Finn, Thomas ES Kelly “deploys humour and political optimism to counterpoint sequences of stormy movement.”

In a work that is both sensual and violent, Miriam Kelly sees Amrita Hepi and Jahra Wasasala as boldly owning but also challenging their heritage while dealing with cultural stereotyping.

Although left with questions about the experience, Chloe Chignell lets herself go with Lilian Steiner’s offer of transcendence via dance, sound and a very large painting.

Beyond vivid images of abduction, possession and reanimation, Elyssia Bugg experiences a “cool and unflinching emptiness” in Angela Goh’s “post post-everything” creation.

Maximilian witnesses intimate movement, powerful dance and expressive language as testifying to the strengths of Indigenous women addressing their relationship to each other and women of the past.

A classroom motif is central to Thomas ES Kelly’s engaging dance theatre challenge to audiences to go back and unlearn preconceptions about Aboriginal people, writes Elyssia Bugg.

Chloe Chignell applauds Angela Goh’s anti-illusionist performance for its embrace of the actual, creating “real affect” with “absurd images in real space and real time.”

Miriam Kelly relishes “the subtlety and power” given to abstraction by Lilian Steiner’s slowing of time with which she deepens her audience’s attentiveness.

Simon Eales takes in a bizarrely humorous dance work, CAMEL, a witty, sensorial music performance-cum-installation, The Horse, and two passionate performances by Indigenous artists in [MIS]CONCEIVE and BlaaQ Catt.

Just released by Trasmission on DVD, this much lauded film from director Todd Haynes—adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel about a lesbian relationship in 1950s New York—features fine performances from Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

The 2016 Next Wave Festival is underway. Jane Howard reviews eight of its opening productions. We’ll be responding to more performances, visual arts shows and the festival’s dance program with reviews by RealTime’s DanceWrite workshop participants. To date it’s been a dancing year for RealTime, and for good reason, given the choreographic focus of Stephanie Rosenthal’s Biennale of Sydney and the remarkably diverse dance works we’ve reviewed in Hobart, regional Tasmania, Campbelltown, Townsville, Perth, Adelaide, Vancouver and New York. The Keir Choreographic Award has provoked even greater debate the second time around, with a valuable focus on the criteria for selection and judgment and what these indicate about the nature of contemporary dance. We also report on PROPELLED in Newcastle, a much smaller but significant program supporting emerging artists and also, like the Keir, with a focus on interdisciplinarity.

Immersed in the festival’s opening weekend, Jane Howard is impressed by a diversity of practices and experiences, a strong female presence and works from artists with disabilities along with queer, feminist and Asian-Australian practitioners.

Sydney-based Ghenoa Gela wins the jury and audience awards with a work that grapples with the challenge of maintaining traditional Torres Strait Islander dance while engaging with contemporary Western practice.

Andrew Fuhrmann completes his coverage of the semi-finals, ‘reviews’ the jury decision and discusses opinions circulating about the award’s procedures and its value.

Keri Glastonbury delights in dance that works close to its audience and transforms grim, punitive spaces into magical, liberating ones in Catapult’s PROPELLED at Newcastle’s The Lock-Up gallery.

Attentiveness to the sounds of the natural world heighten our sense of the infinite riches of the Earth’s threatened biospheres. Environmentalist sound artist Leah Barclay records and then plays these sounds in urban and other surprising surrounds.

The bold Sydney-based disability-led theatre ensemble is about to premiere Speed of Life, which asks how can people with disabilities manage the manic pace of contemporary society. They look to nature and to fellow Cambodian artists for clues.

Listen to an engrossing new podcast with Jakob Bragg discussing his sensual new orchestral work Atmosphoria and read reviews of Metropolis New Music Festival and Syzygy Ensemble concerts.

AUSTRALIANS, END THE INCARCERATION OF ASYLUM SEEKERS. End sickness, mental illness, self- and sexual abuse. End suicide, torture, manslaughter and murder. End hopelessness. AUSTRALIANS, ADMIT RESPONSIBILITY. For first making war on Iraq. For creating refugees, denying them basic human rights, treating them as criminals. AUSTRALIANS, END ‘THE PACIFIC SOLUTION.’ It is no solution. Move beyond compassion. Exercise imagination, strategise and act. AUSTRALIANS, CLOSE OFFSHORE DETENTION CENTRES. Respect the rights of refugees. Bring them to Australia. Invite those whose claims have been processed to live and work among us. Treat other asylum seekers rapidly with new, humane processing. AUSTRALIANS, END THIS REFUGEE HELL OF OUR MAKING. THIS HELL WE TOO INHABIT, WITH GUILT AND SHAME FOR THE HURT WE DO. Keith & Virginia

Hobart’s Stranger With My Face International Film Festival impresses Katerina Sakkas with its mix of strong films by female directors, reconsideration of the horror genre and sense of community.

The choreographer of Fanatic and Skeleton pushes further into her engagement with popular culture, asking, “What would computer game characters be capable of doing in reality?”

Elise Hearst and Andrea James come together as writer-performers around William Cooper, the legendary Aboriginal activist who in the 1930s protested Nazi maltreatment of Jewish people.

In writer-director Tony Reck’s Dirty Pictures, “the ensemble cast—all excellent—glide seamlessly between arrested moments of violence, despair, relief, mania and boredom,” writes Jana Perkovic.

The first semi-finalists, writes Andrew Fuhrmann, exemplify the award’s “bringing together of multiple artistic, philosophical and critical practices in performance.” The finals play out at Carriageworks this week.

Across 2016-17 this exhibition, rich in images, forms and ideas is touring five states. Sample the show now.

Eva Orner’s internationally distributed documentary shames Australians for their maltreatment of refugees. National release 28 May.

Children and young people are at the centre of this E-dition. Triggered by research into the negative effects of electronic tools on the bodies and minds of children, Dancenorth transforms confined digital manipulation into vivid, expansive physical play. At London’s Tate Modern the young, and adults too, dig into the history of live art by recreating seminal works. In Stephen Page’s feature film Spear, a young man seeks reconciliation with his own culture by finding a place in men’s business. Margot Nash’s The Silences, a beautifully crafted film memoir, returns the filmmaker to her childhood to grapple with her fraught relationship with her mother.

Arts Minister Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst grant scheme has become a showcase for highly publicised and strategically staggered grant announcements that have about them the whiff of pork barrelling.

In Townsville, the digital world is banished as children, parents and Dancenorth come together to realise an amazingly magical, lo-fi interactive world.

At London’s Tate Modern, kids, parents and others learn about and give new life to performance art and live art classics and rarities, writes Madeleine Hodge.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Artistic Director turns to film in an attempt to find a place for contemporary Aboriginal men’s business.

John Bailey declares Zoe Coombs Marr’s Trigger Warning “such a meta-theatrical tour de force that it threatens to alter the comedy landscape in profound ways.”

Filmmaker Margot Nash’s feature length memoir, centred around a troubled mother-daughter relationship, is a work of crystalline beauty, sadness and release. Now showing!

In its 5th year, Glasgow’s festival of performance and live art is at once outrageous, contemplative and communal, writes Megan Garrett-Jones.

In this e-dition, Nikki Heywood and Rennie McDougall, both writers and performers, find their states of being altered by idiosyncratic dance works. McDougall’s patience is tested as he struggles to engage with a performance by NY dancer Heather Kravas, acknowledging the challenge to reviewing that the work presents and the complexity with which its theme, “Women are not objects,” is realised. Heywood watches naked Australian dancers working with French choreographer Xavier Le Roy become animals and plants, their gaze implicating and reorienting the audience. Digital art, with VR now back in the picture, can reconfigure our perceptions, but so can dancers performing in unadorned spaces. Keith & Virginia

Heather Kravas epically rolls with a pillow and beats it to the point of exhaustion. Reviewer Rennie McDougall is compelled to estimate his patience and the subjective nature of reviewing on his way to understanding the work.

At Brisbane’s La Boite, Circa wonderfully transforms this trio of Modernist theatre heroines into acrobats but, asks Kathryn Kelly, precisely to what end?

Judith Abell travels to northern Tasmania to see Stompin youth dance company engage with the young people of a community deprived of local industry.

If you missed our brief account last week of dancer Meryl Tankard’s performance memoir for Nina Beier’s The Complete Works in the Biennale of Sydney, here it is, this time with photographs and a brief video.

Nikki Heywood finds “my mind letting go, letting desire for spectacle subside, desire for meaning drop away” as dancers working with Xavier Le Roy metamorphose into wild animals and plants.

Benjamin Kolaitis asks how we would react to Climate Change if the data really hurt. This and other propositions floated tonight in Mechanical Cognition, presented by Nature Strip and Liquid Architecture.

Shot on a small camera and smuggled out of Iran, this is the third instalment in Jafar Panahi’s fascinating “cinema of confinement,” in which the filmmaker “moves through a public realm from which he is officially excluded.”

Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s engrossing 2015 feature-length documentary account of the life of Peggy Guggenheim, conjures an empathetic portrait of a wealthy art benefactor whose tastes in art were ahead of the times.

Soon after the revelatory Victory Over the Sun, the 20th Biennale of Sydney produced another striking performance, Manger, a profoundly visceral work featuring Musée de la danse, from Rennes in France, in a one-off performance. The Biennale’s keynote address was delivered by the company’s director, choreographer Boris Charmatz, an apparently unusual choice but one in tune with the Biennale Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal’s passion for bringing ephemeral works into the art museum, if from a very different position and raising critical questions about current threats to public space. In another foray into motivation and vision, RealTime presents a substantial interview with Phillip Keir, founder of the Keir Choreographic Award and an artist who turned to publishing the Australian Rolling Stone magazine for 20 years before returning to the arts as a benefactor. Also in this edition, Philip Brophy takes glorious exception to Lady Gaga’s 'tribute' to David Bowie at the 2016 Grammys. Keith & Virginia

Phillip Keir reveals a background in the arts which has motivated his Foundation’s collaborative approach to supporting artists.

Working with video, artists collaborate with scientists to ponder challenges to water quality and especially the Great Barrier Reef. Screening this week in Cairns and in exhibition in Mackay in May.

“More pathetically Las Vegas than I could have imagined,” writes Philip Brophy of the pop queen’s Intel-sponsored performance at the 58th Annual Grammys.

At Carriageworks, director of Musée de la danse Boris Charmatz described his creation of a living dance archive and asserted the need to regenerate public space. At the MCA Meryl Tankard archived remembered fragments of her dance career.

In a bleak, vast, unused section of Carriageworks, the 13-strong Musee de le danse performed Manger for the Biennale of Sydney, devouring paper, writhing, moaning, growling, fighting, reciting and singing in glorious harmony.

Perth contemporary music ensemble Decibel performs works commissioned from leading French experimental composers Eliane Radigue (with US collaborator Carol Robinson) and Lionel Marchetti.

One of a mere handful of incisive films to deal with the horrendous impact of the Global Financial Crisis on homeowners, Ramin Baharani’s engrossing feature tells of one victim who, to survive, crosses the line to join the cruel dispossessors.

The promotional image heading this week’s E-dition is from Amrita Hepi (Bundjalung NSW/Ngapuhi NZ) and Jahra Wasasala’s (NZ) Passing, a collaboration in hip hop and contemporary dance with costumes styled by installation artist Honey Long. Passing “maps two bodies under pressure from the responsibility that comes from being of mixed cultural background,” and is one of a number of works in 2016 Next Wave featuring Indigenous artists in a program rich in diverse forms and invention.

In the Biennale of Sydney’s performance program, Justene Williams and Sydney Chamber Opera brilliantly resurrect the Russian Futurist anti-opera, transforming it into an opera for our times.

Virginia Baxter encounters the subtly unfolding tragedy of Norwegian dance artist Mette Edvardsen's performance No title, part of the 2016 Sydney Biennale.

Artistic Director Georgie Meagher talks us through a program full of new names, intriguing works, potent collaborations and national engagement.

Katerina Sakkas finds much to admire in Simon Stone’s feature film debut including evocative cinematography and immersive sound design.

In Vancouver, Alex Ferguson is haunted by Betroffenheit, Kidd Pivot & the Electric Company’s account of unspeakable trauma incurred by those suffering PTSD and addiction.

Cadi McCarthy, Artistic Director of Newcastle’s Catapult Dance, tells us about Propel, her cross-artform residency program; two of its works will appear as installations at Newcastle’s The Lock-Up.

In this Blacktown Arts Centre production, artists confront us with the plight of peoples in our region whose lives are already challenged by the harsh realities of climate change.

This acclaimed two-day, live-in production, which premiered in Avoca in 2015, travels to the regional Victorian towns of Steiglitz and Eganstown over coming weekends.

Works by international and Australian composers are played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at Carriageworks to an audience greedy for new music.

In the first of a series of podcasts, made in partnership with Making Waves, Matthew Lorenzon interviews composer Jessica Wells about a new work for harp which you can also listen to.

Leading New York dance reviewer Deborah Jowitt presents a five-day workshop, part of the Keir Choreographic Award Program. Dance reviewers, arts writers, journalists and bloggers and dance practitioners are encouraged to apply.

Come with us. Follow this train track deep into a world at once familiar but rendered anew by leading Australian video artist Daniel Crooks in his new work, the installation Phantom Ride. The artist has generously prepared a selection of excerpts for RealTime readers around Australia and beyond—just enough in which to immerse yourself, and if you’re in Melbourne, to take you to ACMI where the work is showing. Also this week, our final reports from the Adelaide Festival, focused on adventurous music and provocative dance, and Melbourne’s Festival of Live Art in which remarkably diverse works co-inhabit the ‘live art’ realm, some perhaps contestably, but all revealing the increasing number of ways artists are engaging with audiences. On the Gold Coast video works by performance art duo Clark Beaumont comprise an immersive installation and, on the south-eastern NSW coast, participants of differing abilities have collaborated to realise Hyperreal Tales, a five-screen video installation that reflects their lives and dreams. We’re taking an Easter break and will be back with you on 6 April, ready, with an election likely looming, to take the Abbott-Turnbull Government to task for its destructive mishandling and manipulation of the arts and artists’ lives. Make sure you read the ArtsPeak letter sent to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull this week.

In their distinctive ways, Adelaide’s ADT, Vancouver’s The Holy Body Tattoo and Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch address the abuse of power, whether exercised against nature or individual and collective well-being.

Chris Reid experiences an expanded sense of the interplay of sound, time and space in the two-day Tectonics event and an appreciation of the ever evolving potential of the string quartet in Exquisite Corpse and Alleged Dances.

Together, a parade celebrating the great art transgressors, a night of one-on-one intimacies in a city hotel and a performance by an artist who transcends received notions of disability, reveal the breadth of live art’s scope.

Watch excerpts from this five screen video installation as director and choreographer Philip Channells talks about its evolution from intensive collaboration with Shoalhaven locals. Opens 2 April in Nowra, NSW.

Read the interview and enjoy a sample from Phantom Ride, another giant step forward by video artist Daniel Crooks in his sublime recalibration of our sense of time and space. Now showing at ACMI.

The Brisbane performance artists do video at The Walls on the Gold Coast, enthralling Kathryn Kelly with the mesmerising eeriness of their creations.

Urszula Dawkins engages with Festival of Live Art performances at Theatre Works and Footscray Community Arts Centre that fit the bill, if not always at first glance.

Gail Priest is drawn in to the subtly morphing and engagingly disorienting sound and video world of this Sydney-based musician and visual artist.

In these un-nuanced times, we desperately need to pay attention to the lives of others or submit to our undoing at the hands of heartless neo-liberals, wildcard demagogues and more and more dictators. There’s a lot, explicitly and implicitly, about empathy in this edition, about going beyond sympathy to understanding. It’s explicit in works like A Mile in My Shoes at the empathy-themed Perth International Arts Festival. Sometimes we need to be displaced or disoriented to come to understanding: No Guts, No Heart, No Glory places its audience in a Perth gym to hear British Muslim women boxers tell how the sport gives them strength and meaning. In Romaine Moreton and Alana Valentine’s One Billion Beats, our understanding of an individual Aboriginal life is radically juxtaposed with excerpts from 100 years of Australian film and 150 years and more of pseudo-science that have long crippled our sense of empathy. There’s much more in this edition about art that encourages our attentiveness to each other, the world and, not least, how we react to an astonishing variety of art experiences in a time of great mutability.

In the event’s first week artists seduce audiences with everyday tech devices while others defiantly assert the messy and erotic body, reports Andrew Fuhrmann.

Witnessing the artist encompass autobiography, live art and stand-up comedy in her All About Women ‘talk’ at the Sydney Opera House, Lauren Carroll Harris decides July is an idea-maker.

From the UK come Muslim women boxers, a dancer undaunted by disability and religious prejudice, and an installation that literally allows you to walk in the shoes of others, whose voices speak to you of their lives.

Romaine Moreton performs her poetry, tells personal stories about growing up black and, with scenes from Australian feature films and instruments of science, powerfully delineates the interplay between a life and racist ideology.

In the Perth International Arts Festival, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoiu attempts to transcend the divisions engendered by holy scriptures and Lia Rodrigues, unleashing the power of bodies and water, reinvigorates ‘flood’ as metaphor.

Darren Jorgensen welcomes as an antidote to pervasive ‘nice’ art a wild outdoor event that “touches the raw nerve of automobility.”

Artists, arts workers, presenters and producers in an international conversation in Brisbane grapple with understanding and challenging the conditions that shape their market.

With experimental verve independent companies tackle communication from very different angles; in Stone/Castro’s The Country, evasion undoes a paradise and in Tiny Brick’s Deluge information overload is made palpable.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s gripping feature documentary The Look of Silence follows a man who quizzes people responsible for killing his brother in the 1965 mass slaughter of Indonesian citizens.

This week we go regional, to Albury’s wonderful, new media rich MAMA and to a new work featuring Circa inspired by a Wollongong undergoing transformation. We guide you through the dance-led performance terrain of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, applaud musician Adam Simmons’ fusion of durational performance and research, query the high standing of Sue Brooks’ Looking for Grace, and feel the power of Romeo Castelluci’s Go Down, Moses in Ben Brooker’s report from the Adelaide Festival. Can Malcolm Turnbull do a David Cameron and seize the upper and lower houses of Parliament, even if he has to conduct a double dissolution to pull it off? What he might not anticipate is the steadily accumulating anger of artists, many already cheated of their futures by the George Brandis funding heist and Mitch Fifield’s favouring, with the plunder, of a commercial business in the first Catalyst round. The first challenge of the year to this policy-free disgrace has come from ANU’s Sasha Grishin and, rightly, is directed at the Prime Minister. It’s just the beginning.

Director Jacqui Hemsley reveals to Ann-maree Ellis the local, national and international ambitions of the recently opened and highly wired Murray Art Museum Albury.

Highlighting the central role of performance, dance especially, in the 20TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY, RealTime provides you with a guide and handy timetable.

Yaron Lifschitz and Keith Gallasch chat about Circa’s collaboration with Merrigong Theatre Company, a work that reflects the changing urban geography of Wollongong and presents director and performers with new challenges.

The sheer aesthetic power of Romeo Castellucci’s distinctive vision is deployed to question notions of freedom across the span of human existence, writes Ben Brooker

Katerina Sakkas is less than impressed with grating tonal gearshifts in Sue Brooks' much-lauded new feature film.

Ben Brooker sees a greater kinship between the trilogy and The Tudors than with A Game of Thrones, let alone anything by Shakespeare.

The Melbourne musician’s 100 performances with collaborators over a month confirm a sense of community and provide actual research data for its future.

Listen up! In a world of encroaching noise, of forest felling, the grind of failed mining ventures, of wars and demagoguery, sound art can take us into places of mindful attentiveness to the environment.  Sound artist Philip Samartzis heads this E-dition with his engrossing account of a visit to Antarctica. You can hear some of the sounds he recorded. We’ve also provided links to other polar artistic ventures, should you feel tempted to explore. Sounds are precious, especially those of challenged environments; but so are instruments with which humans make sound, not least a generation of analogue synthesisers. Rapid technological progress constantly banishes equipment to the rubbish tip and diminishes the arts archive by leaving many works unplayable. However, sound artists Robin Fox and Byron J Scullin are keeping a huge collection of such machines alive and available, preserving the past and opening up sonic possibilities for the future of Australian art.

Recording katabatic wind, ice, buildings and human movement, Philip Samartzis realises he “has not experienced a place so mutable, so confounding.”

Robin Fox and Byron J. Scullin tell Gail Priest about the huge collection of analogue synthesisers and other instruments they’re about to make available to sound artists and musicians. Listen to some of those machines.

Ben Brooker and Paolo Castro discuss the evolution of Stone/Castro’s production of The Country, leading UK playwright Martin Crimp’s unnerving account of ennui and evasion.

Dancer Kaori Ito’s fraught entanglement in the thousands of strings of director Aurélien Bory’s design for Plexus, in the 2016 Perth Festival, conjures for Jonathan Marshall a contemporary sense of existential being.

Nerida Dickinson witnesses 2016 Perth Festival performances in which artists deal with violence, religious attitudes to disability and how to manage in a collapsing cash economy.

Jonathan Marshall yearns for fewer words in James Berlyn’s otherwise engagingly intimate account of his life in the 2016 Perth Festival.

A 1980s experimental art thesis ‘played live’ at La Mama gets Matthew Lorenzon thinking about the music experience.

Seeking depth? Come with us into Spanish-Australian artist Dani Marti’s visceral exploration of objects and bodies; South African artist William Kentridge’s collaged excavation of Modernism’s big hits; Montreal choreographer Daniel Léveillé’s dig into the histories and possibilities of the dance duet; Charlie Kaufman’s in-depth animated account of a failure to sustain intimacy; and works in the PuSh Festival that demand and reward deep attentiveness. Images and video links, with which you can gain some further sense of these works, accompany a number of our writers’ evocative reports. Dig in. Virginia & Keith

While admiring much of William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour, Jonathan Marshall queries the cogency of the artist’s ‘popularising’ of Modernist avant-gardism.

Musing on the francophone dance tradition, Jana Perkovic encounters intriguing new works from Daniel Léveillé and Kevin Trappeniers, choreographers a generation apart.

Laetitia Wilson discovers that the viscerality of Dani Marti’s remarkable sculptural works is even more potent in his disturbingly intimate video works

“[Q]ualities of lingering, of spatial tactility and deep listening” attract Alex Ferguson in works from France, Lebanon, Australia, US and Canada.

Charlie Kaufman’s bold venture into animation takes you into the mind of a man in a hell of his own making—and perhaps ours too in a neo-liberalised culture.

Matthew Lorenzon surveys the 2016 programs of adventurous Australian music makers, including the renowned Elision ensemble in concert and an RMIT Gallery retrospective.

Let’s go international. After covering the Climate Games in our first E-dition of the year, we return to Paris where Philip Brophy experiences EXIT, an attempt to engage with the scale of climate and political change. At the Tokyo Performing Arts Market, Philipa Rothfield finds herself engrossed in Pichet Klunchun’s transformation of elaborate folk ritual into contemporary dance. In New York, where he’ll regularly correspond for RealTime, Australian dancer and writer Rennie McDougall interviews influential choreographer Miguel Gutierrez (pictured).

Philip Brophy resumes his AUDIOVISION columns, querying the effectiveness of data spectacle in the Paul Virilio-inspired screen installation, EXIT.

John Bailey embraces confounding works by Dan Wotherspoon (AUS) and Penelope Skinner (UK) now playing at La Mama and Red Stitch Theatre.

At the Tokyo Performing Arts Market, Philipa Rothfield witnesses the gods descend to Earth in Pichet Klunchun’s Dancing with Death.

Hear Keith Gallasch test his responses to the Sydney Theatre Company’s Arcadia and The Leaps’ Perch, playing at Belvoir for the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras.

Choreographer Miguel Gutierrez talks with Rennie McDougall about interdisciplinarity, unselfconsciousness, intimacy and his latest work, Age & Beauty.

In the US, a licensing dispute allows a play to be staged but not reviewed and a wild, performative critique of playwrights’ portrayal of women receives a ‘cease and desist’ order.

Get knotted! And enjoy it in the hands-on bondage performance of BUNNY. Or immerse yourself in the luscious entwinings of Dani Marti’s art at the Perth International Arts Festival. Or, yell it at the Australian Government for their cruel mishandling of the refugee crisis, the non-debate they’ve engineered on tax reform and Arts Minister Mitch Fifield’s Catalyst outcomes, revealed to be nothing more than the kind of work the Australia Council already funds.

Seduced by dancers Luke George and Daniel Kok’s BUNNY, Cleo Mees revels in its artistry and the freedom to bind and be bound in this Campbelltown Arts Centre dance commission.

Watch Spanish-Australian artist Dani Marti, a master of knots and maker of densely woven relief works, discuss Black Sun, his exhibition now showing at the Fremantle Arts Centre for the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival.

Australian Performing Arts Market Producer Dave Sleswick reveals how he’s keeping conversation about the arts and their social and cultural significance central to the forthcoming 2016 APAM in his Exchange program.

Keith Gallasch delivers the final instalment of his Sydney Festival coverage impressed by small-scale works of large import.

Watch this change.org video in which children on Nauru describe the appalling conditions in which they live and sign the GetUp! Let Them Stay petition.

Merrigong Theatre Company CEO Simon Hinton adds his voice to responses to the Dana Waranara conference, asking what new cultural, presentation and financial models are required to further Australian Indigenous dance.

Marrugeku’s much-praised Cut the Sky is strong on imagery but less than cogent with its loose hybridisation of forms writes Keith Gallasch.

Keith Gallasch sees a good idea in UK playwright David Grieg’s The Events, but is angered by its loaded scenario and lack of thematic follow through.

The Family Law is satirical, self-deprecating, moving and downright funny. Enjoy the first series on DVD courtesy of Madman Entertainment.

Welcome to the second of our weekly editions, this time with performative video art centre-screen—Kawita Vatanajyankur’s Work series, Campbelltown Arts Centre’s Video oediV and Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, featuring Cate Blanchett.

Virginia Baxter spends time with Thai-Australian artist Vatanajyankur’s exquisitely beautiful Work series video images with their unnerving mix of wit, pain and contemplation.

Video oediV reveals the durability and inventiveness of video art, not least for women in this significant all-female international exhibition—now showing.

Have you been seduced by Todd Haynes’ Carol, or like Katerina Sakkas, sensed that something elemental is missing?

Brendan Woithe talks with Oliver Downes about ideas, collaboration and composing for Australian Dance Theatre’s The Beginning of Nature which premieres at WOMADelaide 2016.

Judith Abell witnesses another dimension to Mofo 2016—Syncing Feeling, performed by Townsville’s Dancenorth to a score by Melbourne dancer-composer Alisdair Macindoe.

At Mofo 2016, Andrew Harper encounters a performed graphic novel, poet Kate Tempest making music, Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan’s mock water cannon with matching protest, monstrous sounds from Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie and Contemporary Art Tasmania’s Exhaust.

In the second of his three responses to the 2016 Sydney Festival, Keith Gallasch declares Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s FASE and Vortex Temporum the best of the festival’s fine offerings.

Cate Blanchett features in a multitude of roles in German video artist Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto which resurrects and freshly delivers manifestos from the golden age of declaration of intent. Catch it at ACMI now.

Angus McPherson is buffeted and calmed by major works for organ and ensemble from Austin Buckett and Simon James Phillips in their Sydney Festival performance.

The great French composer, conductor and musical infrastructure builder died on 5 January, aged 90. Matthew Lorenzon considers his legacy, musically and politically.

Following on from Sumugan Sivanesan’s vivid report on the Paris Climate Games last week, Minneapolis-based Northern Lights surveys exhibitions, installations and video works in ARTCOP21.

South Australian director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown) continues to address the nature of evil in this striking rendition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.

When you last saw us, we were still in print and, on our cover, heading into Romeo Castellucci’s Go Down Moses MRI (Adelaide Festival, 25-28 Feb). Now, we’re coming to you from deep inside the machine, going entirely digital with classic RealTime reviewing, increased commentary, new features. Come with us!

A breakthrough conference heralds greater reach for Australian contemporary Indigenous dance. Vicki Van Hout reports, with additional responses from Angharad Wynne-Jones, Liza-Mare Syron and Andrea James.

On the ground for the Paris Climate Games, Sumugan Sivanesan details the brilliant arts strategies activated at the 2015 Climate Summit, and the awards, like the I Pissed Myself Cup, for most effective creations.

In the first of two reports, Keith Gallasch embraces a cut-above Sydney Festival, reviewing Sydney Chamber Opera’s Passion, Thalia Theater Hamburg’s Woyzeck, Meow Meow’s The Little Mermaid and Stephanie Lake’s Double Blind.

In the Sydney Festival, amid mountains of cardboard boxes, Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson muses on memory, working its magic on Virginia Baxter with its wit and very real illusions.

Christopher Brett Bailey assaults himself and audiences in the Sydney Festival with grimly comic paranoid fantasies, while Forced Entertainment drolly speculate opposing futures. Teik Kim-Pok takes home some lessons.

Delia Bartle feels the power of percussion of every kind at Mofo 2016 inside Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art.

Moment by moment Andrew Furhman is absorbed in Atlanta Eke’s Miss Universal but asks, what of its durability.

High anxiety and simmering anger. That’s what many Australian artists have been feeling over Xmas. Keith Gallasch readies you for the ongoing funding battle.

NOW OPEN FOR APPLICATIONS: Shared Space and Next Wave Festival present DanceWrite, a five-day workshop with mentors and the editors of leading Australian performing arts magazine RealTime. Closing date Wednesday, March 9, 5pm.

In The Loop, artists and readers recommend great websites. First up is adventurous circus performer—on the streets, in the dark and with iPhones—Skye Gellmann.

Director Maya Newell focuses on the experiences of children with gay parents in a film that has relevance for all families. 3 copies thanks to our friends at Madman Entertainment

In December look out for the final print edition of RealTime, our 130th. Profiler 13 anticipates the move with interactive works and a dance documentary you can access immediately.

Andrew Fuhrmann speaks to Eke about her practice and her latest work, Miss Universal, commissioned by Chunky Move.

We take a look at Dutch composer and multimedia artist Michel Van der Aa’s engrossing interactive online video work commissioned by the Sydney and Holland Festivals and made freely available online.

Sydney-based artist and curator Roslyn Helper has enterprisingly initiated New Physics, an "online exhibition that presents ten Australian artists who produce a collective though diverse aesthetic investigation of the dislocative effects of the internet".

Interview with Pippa Samaya, a 27-year old recent RMIT graduate in commercial photography who has made an engrossing, self-funded and ambitious 50-minute documentary, Dancing in the Now, freely available online.

Lauren Carroll Harris reviews this vastly imaginative and precisely realised video, sound and installation work, in its recent incarnation at Sydney's Carriageworks.

Jon Rose's experience at National Sawdust in New York inspires him to imagine a model for a sustainable music culture in Sydney against the odds of power and property values if without optimism about Australian arts philanthropy and state arts funding.

Experimental arts have gone national, but what does experimental actually mean? A series of discussions at the National Experimental Arts Forum, hosted by the art laboratory SymbioticA in Perth, sought to clarify this question.

Stephen Whittington delivers a rallying cry for the liberation of sound in a wittily provocative manifesto.

With a focus on sound, Profiler 12 has plenty of coverage from BIFEM 2015, and a preview of Glasgow's Sonica festival. Plus, OZASIA, interviews and artist profiles.

SITEWORKS 2015, Bundanon's annual ‘welcoming of Spring’ gathering will host a range of artists, academics, environmentalists and horticulturalists for a one-day exploration of the theme and/or provocation “the feral amongst us.”

Stretching from abiogenesis to the Anthropocene Age, Zoe Scoglio’s purview reaches across deep time and space and draws in ideas from the geological to the ceremonial.

Interview with Indonesian sound and installation artist Jompet Kuswidananto, who are part of Sonica, Glasgow's ever-growing international sonic arts festival.

Ben Brooker spoke to Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, founding member of Indonesia’s highly regarded Teater Garasi, and director of its immersive dance-theatre work, The Streets.

Spectra, by Townsville-based contemporary dance company Dancenorth and Japanese Butoh collective Batik, is an example of OzAsia's emphasis on cross-cultural collaboration.

Now in its ninth year, SUFF is one of the city’s longest-running specialist film festivals. Running 17-20 Sept, at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville.

At BIFEM 2015 hands-on digital visual and musical magic from Amplified Elephants in a celebration of human evolution and meta-listening.

Three pianists, three harpists and three percussionists become one in an exhilarating account of a modern classic.

For BIFEM 2015 Finland’s Defunensemble present works ranging from an alto flute reverie with electronics to raw electric guitar-led sublime organised chaos.

In a performance at once vivldly theatrical and engagingly cerebral, France’s soundinitiative does Bernhard Lang doing Deleuze doing Beckett.

The Argonaut Quartet and children from St Martins Youth Arts Centre respond to Christophe Bertrand’s Quatuor No.1 in an adventurous new music program.

Pianist-composer Erik Griswold’s epic encounter with prepared piano at BIFEM 2015 yields more than the Wallpaper Music of the work’s title.

Profiler 11 situates itself firmly in Asia, with reports from Ansan and Seoul in South Korea, and an interview with OzAsia Festival director Joseph Mitchell. Plus artist profiles and more.

Keith Gallasch speaks to the exuberant and passionate Joseph Mitchell, Artistic Director of Adelaide’s upcoming OzAsia Festival.

Tristan Meecham and Bec Reid (Fun Run, All The Queens Men) and Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey (Megaphone Project) report on their experiences at the Ansan Street Arts Festival in South Korea.

Gail Priest headed off to Seoul in search of the future, in particular what the future might sound like, and discovered a plethora of galleries and artistic activity.

CEO Michael Dagostino discusses CAC’s forthcoming program of three works, I CAN HEAR DANCING. Three years in the making, it dispenses with the usual hierarchy to bring together contemporary musicians and choreographers on an equal platform.

Rug up and immerse yourself in Carriageworks’ monumental 24 Frames Per Second dance-screen installations [ends 2 Aug] and Sue Healey’s On View: Live Portraits at Performance Space [ends 25 July].

Jason James is a Tasmanian based artist, lighting designer, video designer, curator, and a multitude of other things. His most recent works, Angry Electrons and Crevasse, were shown at Dark MOFO Festival in Hobart.

Sydney based b*boy and independent choreographer Nick Power, tells us about his first full-length independent work, Cypher.

Profiler 10 addresses the political. Changes to arts funding, an apology to the survivors of immigration detention, environmental art from Queensland, preview of a public lecture on body art, plus more.

Keith Gallasch charges Arts Minister George Brandis' 2015 Arts Budget decisions with grand larceny.

See video from Brisbane-based Igneous' FLUIDATA, an immersive performance/installation about Queensland waterways, premiering 13 June

Caroline Wake proposes a national apology, to be delivered by a future Prime Minister of Australia, at the time of her choosing.

Cairns-based Bonemap elaborates on its vision for the integration of performance, media, audience and ecology; see excerpts from their 2014 work, Nerve Engine

Musify+Gamify's combination of performance and exhibition features developments in interactive design with talents as diverse as 7bit hero, David Kanaga and Ensemble Offspring

Kirsten Krauth is enthralled by choreographer Michelle Heaven's discombobulating In Plan at the Castlemaine State Festival

Leading American body art theorist to deliver a free lecture at the University of Sydney

Writers in an intensive RealTime reviewing workshop in Albury-Wodonga offer 4 perspectives on playwright Vivienne Walsh's powerful and poetic This is where we live.

Writing and mentoring, Matthew Lorenzon is in Perth for the 2015 Totally Huge New Music Festival; read the reviews as they come in, starting with Johannes Sistermanns' cling wrap installation Space/Pli.

With Lawrence English's Open Frame to premiere at Sydney's Carriageworks in July, read Gail Priest's 2014 profile of this leading Australian producer of exploratory electronic music.

This edition of Profiler is all about hearing it straight from the horse's mouth, with new in-depth interviews, reviews and more...

The newest addition to Hobart's art scene is Electrona, a contemporary three-day music and arts festival dedicated to the digital arts.

Stephen Carleton welcomes the return of a dedicated queer performance festival to Brisbane in this review of Melt: A Celebration of Queer Arts and Culture.

From bacchanalia to quiet contemplation, Fiona McGregor writes about the experience of Day For Night.

Realtime speaks to Jo Lancaster, one half of acrobat, about clowning and the brilliance of stupidity.

Megan Fizell talks to Australian visual artist Todd Fuller about "trace".

Tura’s Totally Huge New Music Festivals draw together an impressive range of composers, great players and diverse audiences.

"These people in Endgame are in very real circumstances; they’re just not the circumstances we know; they’re very real to them.”

The second biennial Cementa festival features sound art, installation, performance, electronic art, music, street art and more.

"It’s called Crack because it caught all the things that fell through the Writers’ Festival cracks.”

Find out if the long-lived biennial APAM is the right forum for you to showcase your work to local and international producers.

Happy New Year and welcome (in a week or so) to the Chinese Astrological Year of the Sheep which promises creativity, healing and peace. Here's hoping! In fact hope is a bit of a theme in Profiler 8. Read on…

Co-conceiver and choreographer Dalisa Pigram and storyteller/dream catcher Edwin Lee Mulligan discuss the process of creating Cut the Sky, premiering at the Perth International Arts Festival, followed by WOMADelaide.

Oliver Downes revels in the rhythmic and timbral complexities of this release by new duo tetema (Anthony Pateras and Mike Patton)

Oliver Downes travels further down the road less travelled in the full transcript of this email interview with Anthony Pateras.

New writer Joel Markham appreciates the quiet poetry of this watery sound and video installation by the Cad Factory director, currently exhibiting at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.

To kick off 2015 we’ve asked RealTime contributors for a little recap of 2014 and some hints as to their hopes for the year ahead. John Bailey | Ben Brooker | Urszula Dawkins | Nerida Dickinson | Kathryn Kelly | Matthew Lorenzon

News, reviews and discussion of New Music: A joint project between Matthew Lorenzon and RealTime.

Gail Priest spent three months in Bourges, two hours south of Paris, checking out the thriving experimental media art and sound scene and sampling the local beverages.

Banners: Long Grass, Sydney Festival, photo Heidrun Löhr; Tanja Beer, Nick Roux, The People’s Weather Report, Going Nowhere, Artshouse, photo Ponch Hawkes; Melissa Garcia Aguirre, Desapareciendo/ Disappearing, long durational performance, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, 2014, photo Monika Sobczak; Bryony Kimmings, Tim Grayburn, Fake It Til You Make it, photo Richard Davenport

RT Profiler 7 remembers Margaret Cameron, leading Australian actor, writer and director, with an obituary and archival links to reviews of her work. Plus, realtime tv interviews with artists Ken Thaiday and Kate McMillan, contributor profiles, and more.

A farewell with links to reviews of her work and her own "Art & care: where life and death connect."

Virginia Baxter's 2000 interview with Margaret Cameron and Ian Scott yields wonderful insights about the nature and demands of acting.

Renowned Torres Strait Islander artist Ken Thaiday talks with Keith Gallasch about his major exhibition, which showcases a range of his works, traversing dance, installation and kinetic sculpture.

Artist Kate McMillan discusses her work The Moment of Disappearance, an immersive landscape of sound and video that traces legacies of the Enlightenment to their colonial manifestation in Australia.

Chris Reid talks to emerging curator André Lawrence about 135th Meridian-East, a major exhibition of artwork by 14 NT and SA artists, presented at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide.

John Bailey talks to this award-winning playwright and performer about his take on masculinity, abuse and the relationships between violence and power.

Matthew Lorenzon discusses "making the invisible visible" with the multi-talented Julian Day.

This is the conclusion of our survey feature where we asked a number of art couples about their collaborative practices.

RT's visual arts and dance correspondent in Townsville on the extra level of appreciation that reviewing allows.

Independent choreographer Vicki Van Hout talks about her lifetime focus on interests outside that discipline, and affirming her cultural identity through her work.

News, reviews and discussion of New Music: A joint project between Matthew Lorenzon and RealTime.

RT Profiler 6 looks at performance from a number of angles. Plus there are profiles and a special report by Keith Gallasch who's been checking the fine print of the Australia Council's 5 year plan. And don't miss our survey on art-making couples.

Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company talks with Keith Gallasch about some of the highlights of the 2015 season.

Julie Vulcan chats about recent and upcoming live art as well as her artistic trajectory from visual to performing artist.

Ben Brooker chats with Cat Jones about her artistic research into neuroscience, our senses and perception.

Tim Watts, one of the minds behind It's Dark Outside and The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik, talks with Keith Gallasch about the formation of the new company The Last Great Hunt and their upcoming show Falling through Clouds.

Urszula Dawkins is drawn in by the detail writ large in David Rosetzky's recent large scale video work at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)

Gail Priest delves into the hauntological with Hobart-based artist Matt Warren, discussing his most recent release, iii - real and imagined scenarios.

Keith Gallasch fills us in on the Australia Council’s new Five-Year Strategic Plan which includes a highly responsive grants model and welcome clarity of purpose in the organisation’s goals and sense of advocacy.

Making art with the one you love. Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton | Clocked Out (Erik Griswold & Vanessa Tomlinson) | Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro | Andrew Morrish & Rosalind Crisp | Sally Rees & Matt Warren |The Ronalds (Shannon & Patrick) | Starrs & Cmielewski (Josephine & Leon)

RT's Hobart-based correspondent (and Horror Film Festival director) Briony Kidd shares her thoughts reviewing and contexts.

RT's Online Producer talks about working for RT for 15 years and her passion for words and sounds.

Over at the RealTime affiliated music blog Partial Durations, Matthew Lorenzon offers generous coverage of the recent Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music.

If Winter is getting you down, the waft of jasmine and arts festivals in the air should remind you Spring is on its way. In Profiler 5 we get the run down on both the Melbourne and Darwin Festivals from their dynamic directors and so much more.

Creative Director of the Melbourne Festival talks with Keith Gallasch about highlights in her 2014 program including Heiner Goebbels' When the mountain changed its clothing; Trisha Brown Dance Company's From All Angles; Falk Richter & Anouk van Dijk's Complexity of Belonging and more.

Atlanta Eke (Keir Choreographic Award Winner), Jane McKernan (People's Choice Award), Matthew Day & Sarah Aiken discuss their works and reflect on the experience of being a part of this inaugural award.

Keith Gallasch talks to Festival Director Edwina Lunn about what makes the Darwin Festival unique. She runs us through some of the highlights including Rimini Protokoll's 100% Darwin; Punkasila & Slave Pianos' The Lepidopters and Temporary Territory by the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa.

UK artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd chats with Gail Priest about her penchant for fun, frolic and carnival. She's been working with Campbelltown Performing Arts High School students to make a performance and video for the epic exhibition The List, opening at Campbelltown Arts Centre 8 August.

Filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz discusses with Dan Edwards her debut documentary about her mother's flight from Poland during the Second World War and a complex mother-daughter relationship haunted by trauma.

Benjamin Brooker talks to the artistic director of this unique theatre company about the national tour of Sons& Mothers and their new project, Echoes… of Knowing Home, a multidisciplinary work by playwright Alexis West and Indigenous performers with disabilities.

For Profiler 5 we’ve asked some impeccably attired artists how they view fashion; how fashion influences their work; and their thoughts on the slippage of fashion into art and art into fashion. Darren Sylvester | Elizabeth Ryan | Lian Loke | Laura Jane Lowther | Ivan Cheng

Composer/producer Lawrence English talks to Gail Priest about the political motivations behind his latest album, Wilderness of Mirrors (Room40), his most arresting sonic statement to date.

Dancer/choreographer Natalie Abbott chats with Gail Priest about her latest work Maximum which sees Abbott teaming up with a body builder to "ask questions of our bodies together."

RT's Darwin-based writer shares her thoughts on theatre reviewing in the growing performance culture of the Territory.

RT's fourth Profiler explores life and death—how the struggle for survival can bring out the best in us. And in case it's getting too melancholy we have fascinating travel tales from artists in our Dreaming Cities survey plus more.

Artist, writer, director Lynette Wallworth talks with Keith Gallasch about the making of Tender as part of The Hive Fund initiative. Includes trailer footage of Tender, courtesy of ABC 1.

Interview with visual artist Pilar Mata Dupont about her video work Purgatorio, commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre for the upcoming exhibition, The List.

Keith Gallasch interviews composer Michael Smetanin about his opera, with a libretto by Alison Croggon, based on the life and poetry of Russian artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, presented by Sydney Chamber Opera & Carriageworks.

John Bailey talks to the co-directors of this community-focused project looking at HIV and survival in the 21st century.

Keith Gallasch talks with writer & presenter, Hetti Perkins about the second series of this inspiring program about Indigenous art in Australia.

Benjamin Brooker talks politics, art and public space with the artistic director of Adelaide's Open Space, the mulitdisciplinary arts organisation that has evolved out Knee High Puppets.

For Profiler 4, we’ve asked a selection of artists to tell us about a city that gets their creative curiosity piquing and how that place has influenced their practice or a particular project. Featuring Lawrence English, Paul Gazzola, Janie Gibson, Cat Jones, Teik-Kim Pok, Jodi Rose, Jon Rose, David Young

In light of a new series of concerts by Speak Percussion—Richard Barrett Percussion Portrait, (SIAL, RMIT, 26 July) and Transducer (Arts Centre Melbourne, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, 1-2 Aug)—Matthew Lorenzon reflects on the company's innovative output over the last 12 years.

Kathryn Kelly chats with veteran dancers Zaimon and Lizzie Vilimanis about their debut dance theatre production which explores the dynamics of captive and captor.

Urszula Dawkins chats with artist Lily Hibberd about old cinemas in the Latrobe Valley featured in her exhibition and performance presented as part of The Cinemas Project, curated by Bridget Crone.

RT's Sydney-based writer ruminates on the role of the review as record in theatre and performance.

RT's Sydney-based writer on dance waxes philosophical—her other passion—about the relationship between writing and movement.

CD reviews: Benjamin Carey et al.: _derivations reviewed by Matthew Lorenzon and Austin Buckett: Grain Loops reviewed by Henry Andersen

Keith Gallasch on The disenchantments of Stephen Dillane; or Tacita Dean discovers contemporary performance

The third in our Profilers offers multiple art journeys— to the country, the heart of darkness and even to the stars.

The Wired Lab Artistic Director Sarah Last talks us through the immersive experiences offered at this year's Wired Open Day in Muttama, regional NSW.

Director Carlos Gomes and performer-devisor Katia Molino discuss the making of Theatre Kantanka's latest show Club Singularity, presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre (16-17 May, 2014) and Performance Space in association with National Art School (21-24 May, 2014).

Chris Reid is impressed by the return to aesthetic curation illustrated by Mitzevitch's Adelaide Biennial and his reconfiguring of the gallery.

Rebecca Conroy ponders the processes of art making in community through the lens of Aphids' Drive-in project in Dromana, Mornington Peninsula with observations from the company's Artistic Director Willoh S Weiland.

Virginia Rigney contemplates Bennie's response to the unintentional legacies found in the Fern Studio, Bundanon.

Jeanti St Clair on this extensive retrospective of Wojak's painting practice, at The Cannon Gallery in the Northern Rivers region of NSW.

Oliver Downes explores the folk phantasmagoria of this idiosyncratic songwriter.

Gail Priest asks this trio of ambitious Newcastle-based performance makers about their recent production Spent.

A creative individual’s desire for ideas is unquenchable. For Profiler #3 we’ve asked artists to tell us about the words, pictures and sounds that have influenced their practice overall and what’s currently keeping them tipsy. Featuring Phillip Adams, Martyn Coutts, Alex Davies, Lucy Guerin, Samuel James, nova Milne, Soda_Jerk, Sam Songailo, Lindsay Vickery, Julie Vulcan

RT's Melbourne theatre correspondent tells us about his writing adventures as a five-year-old and why he's still doing it.

RT's WA visual, media and hybrid arts reviewer tells us how she sees the relationship between text and art.

Over at the RT blog, Keith Gallasch continues the discussions around art, empathy & action with an in-depth look at Kym Vercoe's seven kilometres north-east and an interview with Rimini Protokoll's Stefan Kaegl

Welcome to RT Profiler 2 featuring our first wave of FOLA coverage plus video conversations with visiting international artists Isaac Julien (UK) and Chiara Guidi (Italy). And so much more… see below.

FOLA artists Nicola Gunn (Person of Interest), Tristan Meecham (Game Show), Sam Halmarack (Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites) and Beth Buchanan (I Know That I Am Not Dead) respond to the question: What is Live Art?

Nicola Gunn talks with Gail Priest about Person of Interest, a work-in-development made in collaboration with Nick Roux, presented by Theatre Works as part of FOLA, Melbourne.

UK artist Sam Halmarack talks with Gail Priest about Sam Halmarack & the Miserablites, presented by Arts Houses as part of FOLA, Melbourne.

Tristan Meecham talks with Gail Priest about his large scale participatory spectacle, Game Show, made in collaboration with Aphids and Bec Reid.

UK artist Isaac Julien, currently exhibiting PLAYTIME at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, discusses some of the finer points of filmmaking with Keith Gallasch.

Italian director Chiara Guidi (Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio), facilitator Jeff Stein and assistant to the director (interpreter) Nadia Cusimano discuss the development of the upcoming children's theatre show, Jack and the Beanstalk, at Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Do our creative deeds have an impact on social and political views? We’ve asked ten artists how they see their practice contributing to the debate about the power of art.

Brooke Olsen chats with Alex Murray-Leslie & Melissa Logan about music, art, technology and audience engagement.

Keith Gallasch in conversation with performer and theatremaker Deborah Leiser-Moore about her latest show KaBooM: Stories from Distant Frontlines.

Annette McLernon tells Gail Priest about the past, present and future of FORM, the growing hub for contemporary dance in Sydney's west.

Christy Dena asks this Brisbane artist about his augmented reality game-making in Armenia.

Gail Priest responds to Bennett's visceral augmented reality project based on tattoos.

We asked ex-pat photomedia artist Peter Volich for a photo essay of the city which he currently calls home.

Meet our Sydney-based film writer, Katerina who is also a visual artist, a horror specialist and RT's advertising sales manager.

Our Sydney-based writer, Oliver Downes is rapidly shaping up to be an all-rounder having so far covered, film, music and theatre.

Welcome to RT Profiler, our new online format for 2014. We'll be publishing 7 chunky issues across the year focusing on people—bold experimenters in the arts with big ideas.

Feel the atmosphere of Australia's most eclectic music festival, MONA FOMA in this video of performance excerpts and interviews with Conrad Shawcross & Ken Farmer (The ADA Project), Robin Fox (RGB Laser) and Russell Haswell (noisemaker).

Robin Fox talks in detail about the development of RGB Laser premiering at MONA FOMA 2014 and artistic life with a Creative Australia Fellowship.

Listen to the conversation between German choreographer Sasha Waltz (Dido & Aeneas), Nadia Cusimano and Martin del Amo. The event was co-presented by Critical Path, the Goethe Institut and Sydney Festival and they have kindly let us reproduce it here.

Oliver Downes chats with The Necks' pianist Chris Abrahams about the power of repetition, collectivity and letting the music take you there.

Keith Gallasch talks with Kim Machan, director of MAAP, about surviving perilous funding cuts to present an ambitious touring program of Australian and Asian media art

Over 30 artist tell us about their bold and adventurous art projects in 2014. Part 1 - A - G: Abbott | Armstrong | Benjamin | Brown Council | Chamber Made Opera | Clocked Out | Cursio | Darbyshire | del Amo | Dixon & Dixon-Grovenor | Djuki Mala Company | Dyer | Eke | Ensemble Offspring | Franzmann | Gleave

Part 2 H-W: Haren | Hine & Rae | Hope | IETM Satellite | Khut | Lake | McGowan | Marynowsky | Mauro-Flude | Meecham | Oades | starrs & cmielski | Stern | Thoms | Ughetti | Whittaker | Williams | Wilson

Our Adelaide-based performance writer shares his thoughts on reviewing: "I always begin a review with this thought in my mind: art would exist without criticism, but criticism would not exist without art." More

Astrid is our Perth-based writer who explores an intuitive approach to both performing and writing. "The best thing about writing about performance is that it forces me to stay with the work for a much longer period than just the time of the show itself."

a forum for debate and discussion about adventurous contemporary art practices. 1st post: Keith Gallsch on Not Happy Orstraya Day

Latest reviews: 3 Shades Black: Homophonic, Midsumma Kim Tan, Lizzy Welsh, et al. : Oscillations Chris Rainier, I was a Bum Once Myself: The Boxcar Revelations of Harry Partch

Jessica Sabatini is drawn in by the collective engagement and ghostly habiliments of Luke George's recent work about spirituality and mysticism.

Anne Thompson is captivated by the sensuality of Leigh Warren's latest dance work focussed on Cambodian-born dance artist Xiao-Xiong Zhang.

The artist's account of this community engaged project creating a multitude of new musical instruments from bikes, as part of the Canberra 100 celebrations.

Sarah-Mace Dennis (QLD/London) is an interdisciplinary artist working across text, photomedia, performance and video investigating themes of history and memory. Here we discuss her recent large scale public artwork for Queensland Multicultural Centre and the State Library as well as her upcoming works exploring consciousness and social change.

Rachael Dease (WA) didn't intend to be a singer or a theatre director but she now is both. She talks with us about her major project to date, City of Shadows, a music theatre work inspired by the extraordinary archive of forensic photos from the Police & Justice Museum.

Jon Rose is one of the most prolific composer/musicians in Australia. To complement his recent contribution above, we've gathered together all Rose-centred content into a handy compendium.

Anne Thompson Anne Thompson is an academic, dramaturg, director and reviewer of dance for RealTime. Most recently she instigated our Women in Performance feature. Here she shares with us what prompted her to start the series.

Over 2013/2014 RealTime will be featuring arts activities in regional Australia. Our current focus is on the Riverina & Eastern Riverina regions. Includes interviews with key arts organisations, artist profiles, coverage and documentation of arts events in the area.

You’re History: Performance Space 30th Birthday, Syd;  Super Discount, Back to Back, Malthouse, Melb; Beautiful One Day, Ilbijerri Theatre Company, version 1.0, Arts House, Melb; Birthing Things in the Spirit: The Water Birth, David Capra, Campbelltown Arts Centre; Arden vs Arden, The Hayloft Project, Darebin Speakeasy, Melb; Aorta, Stephanie Lake, Chunky Move, Melb; CRITNIC, Nat Cursio, Melb; SDS1, Ahilan Ratnamohan, PICA, Perth; Ngalpun Mudth (Our Home), NAISDA Indigenous Dance Showcase, Carriageworks, Syd; Melbourne Now, NGV, Melbourne; Lift, Kate Murphy, Breenspace, Syd; Insight Radicals: MCLEMOI, Syd; Archana Hande artist talk, spaced, Perth; Corridor, CACHE in POINT, Syd; West Head Project & Peggy Glanville Hicks Address, New Music Network, Syd/Melb; seensound: visual/music, Loop Bar, Melb; the NOW now 2014 Launch, Syd; Dennis O’Rourke Memorial, Chauvel, Syd; Fallout, Lawrence Johnston, Dendy Newtown Syd

2014 Synapse Residencies, ANAT, ART-Town: call for artists; Hatched, Ensemble Offspring; Skip Ahead, YouTube & Screen Australia; Amplify Your Art, Accessible Arts

Keith Gallasch is sucked into the vortices of madness in Simon Stone's Hamlet and Sam Strong's The Floating World

Greg Hooper revels in the intensity of Francisco Lopez' performance at this year's Open Frame festival

Patrick and Shannon Ronald create hyperreal photographic installations that play with scale, dimensionality and interactivity. They talk with RT about some of their projects and why they live and work in region.

When musician, composer Jason Richardson moved to the Wagga region around 13 years ago it prompted an interesting shift in the way that he made music. Inspired by the Wagga Space Program and Alan Lamb, the environment itself is now Richardson's instrumental palette, as his most recent work with the playgrounds of Leeton illustrates.

Latest reviews over at the RT Matthew Lorenzon blog: Arcko Symphonic Ensemble X-ray Baby; Zine: World’s Only #3; Speak Percussion, The Black of the Star; The Crowd ACO, ANAM & The Consort of Melbourne

Corroboree Festival Sydney: Dance Clan 3, Bangarra Dance Theatre; born in darkness before dawn, Nicole Foreshew, Australian Museum; string theory: focus on contemporary Australian art, PICA; Karen Casey, Dream Zone, Fremantle Art Centre; The Adventures of Namakili & I Am Man, Brown’s Mart & New Blak Territory, Darwin; The Changing Standards of Dialogue, Other Projects, Metro Arts, Brisbane; ANTI–MUSIC: 1979–1983, Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane; Tiny Stadiums, PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Sydney; Live Art Development Agency, UK

Hatched, Ensemble Offspring; Skip Ahead, YouTube & Screen Australia; Amplify Your Art, Accessible Arts. Still in the loop: Public Art, Heffron Hall, City of Sydney; Westspace call for 2014; Exposure Summer Intensive, Tasdance; CJZ/Rock Surfers New Writing Commission; Editor, Un Magazine; Waterwheel Symposium Call for Participation

Greg Hooper is charmed by this meticulous recreation of memories played out in realtime by Korean video artist Yeondoo Jung

Zsuzsanna Soboslay analyses both the fine features and flaws in this new opera set during the 2003 Canberra Bushfires, presented as part of Canberra 100

Nicola Fearn is moved by this personal account of family lineage and loss told by descendents of Alyngdabu, a Kungarakan woman in 1900s

A performer, writer and artist, our Canberra correspondent Zsuszi Soboslay says: "Writing uncovers things I sense but around which I may not yet have a framework."

Brisbane writer Kathryn Kelly only ever wanted to be dramaturg when she grew up. "I have always wanted to review. Not in the snarky journalistic tradition that is the excuse for most of what fills up newspaper columns in Australia, but in the wholehearted and generous dramaturgical tradition…"

This is a Door, Pop-Up Playground, Melbourne; Wagnerlicht, Arts Centre, Melbourne; R&J, The Breadbeard Collective, La Boite Indie, Brisbane; Standing Bird Two & Verge, The Blue Room; Trace Recordings, UTS Gallery; Brendan Lee, The Great Divide: RevHeads; Markus Popp, National Film and Sound Archive; Performa, New York

Public Art, Heffron Hall, City of Sydney; Westspace call for 2014; Exposure Summer Intensive, Tasdance; CJZ/Rock Surfers New Writing Commission

Tony Reck encounters the wrath of Sylvia Plath in this complex monologue based on the poet's last days, directed by Laurence Strangio and performed by Caroline Lee

Bernadette Ashley is swept up by the emotional storm conjured in this collaboration between Townsville's Dancenorth and Opera Queensland

One of RT's Brisbane-based writers tells us a little about what makes him tick. "I’m describing myself first and foremost as a cultural geographer these days…"

Chris Reid is impressed by visiting US Composer Alvin Curran's music which " flits about like an overactive, laterally-thinking mind, jumping from one idea to another, taking the listener on a journey of dramatic musical contrasts."

Six artists, each in a room in the Grong Grong Motor Inn in the Riverina for a week in August. Check out the project via some of the artist's documentation.

2high Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse; Carnival of the Bold, Changemakers Festival; My Avant-Garde Is Bigger Than Yours, Kings ARI; Crash Course, James Berlyn, PICA; [CTRL][P] Objects on Demand, Object Gallery; Lorraine Heller-Nicholas, Love Story, Videobrasil; Daniele Puppi 432 Hertz, Cinema Rianimato e Dintorni, AEAF; Sonica, Glasgow

Waterwheel Symposium Call for Participation; Editor, Un Magazine; Courthouse Arts Visual Arts Program; CCP Salon 2013. Still in the loop: AEAF—emerging + experimental curators; Renew Sydney: Leichhardt; First Draft Directors 2014-2015

A site-specific event by Vic McEwan, Mayu Kanamori, Shigeaki Iwai and the Coleambally community. Watch our video interview with director Vic McEwan, featuring comprehensive footage of the event, and read the review.

Tony Reck is invigorated by King's use of expressionist acting techniques in his grotesque interpretation of the Ibsen classic that revealed Christianity's failure in the face of death and the void.

Urszula Dawkins is impressed by this inaugural festival's in-depth investigation of video art now, through the lens of then.

Over at the music blog Matthew Lorenzon reviews The Black of the Star by Speak Percussion and The Crowd by ACO, ANAM & The Consort of Melbourne

Simple Forces, Joyce Hinterding, BreenSpace, Sydney; Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century, MUMA, Melbourne; The Double World, tranSTURM, Newington Armory, Sydney; Bogong ELECTRIC, Bongong VIC; Crossing Roper Bar, AAO, WA tour; Big Dance in Small Chunks, Form Dance Projects, Riverside, Parramatta; Sons and Mothers, No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Space Theatre, Adelaide

AEAF—emerging + experimental curators; Renew Sydney: Leichhardt; 107 Projects Applications for 2014; First Draft Directors 2014-2015

Keith Gallasch chats with James Eccles from this improvising string quartet about the upcoming concert Composed NOISE featuring seven newly commissioned works. Please Note: Due to unforseen circumstances these concerts have had to be postponed.

Keg de Souza describes herself as an “anarchitect.” This amalgam comes closest to encapsulating her practice which involves architecture, environmental design and activism.

Miranda Wheen is a dancer you just can't take your eyes off. Here she discusses intercultural collaboration and the possible connection between Eddie Obeid and his pelvis.

RealTime Managing Editors Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter have been onsite mentoring five writers from Darwin and Alice Springs to produce reviews of works in the final week of the 2013 Darwin Festival program.

Melbourne Festival, quick picks from local works; Niteworks, Bundanon; This Is Not Art, Newcastle; Festival of Toy Music, Brisbane Powerhouse; Wedhus Gembel, Snuff Puppets, Melbourne; Not About Face, Luke George, Dancehouse, Melbourne; Aaron Bradbrook, Perth Centre for Photography; Yeondoo Jung, MAAP Space, Brisbane; in/Visible Women, Magdalena Australia, Brisbane; Women’s issues continued… Live Art Development Agency

Sculpture at Scenic World 2014; AWG, Platform X: Transmedia Storyworld Writing. Still in the loop: raumlabor workshop, Tin Sheds Gallery; Nude models, Deborah Kelly, Sydney Biennale; Public Art major works, City of Sydney; Revelation Film Festival 2014; Blacktown Arts Centre Residencies

Keith Gallasch surveys what's in store this year with new director David Malacari at the helm. Malacari hopes to offer a festival that "introduces communities to each other, making the culture more than a sum of its parts."

Ben Brooker contemplates momentary tragedies and fragile mortalities in this production by State Theatre Company of South Australia

Pia van Gelder has a love of "heirloom machines" and is in pursuit of an "AV Mysticism." Here she discusses the Tetra Synth the Mountain Operated Synthesiser.

With a PhD in psychology and a considerable talent for boxing, Michaela Davies is not to be messed with. Here she discusses her Compositions for Involuntary Strings and the live boxing installation Game On.

Matthew Lorenzon was joined by local writers Steve Paraskos and John Barton to deliver daily reviews of Tura's biennial new music festival

OzAsia, Adelaide Festival Centre; Art and About, City of Sydney; Gigi Scaria, Dust, Ian Potter Museum; Memory Collective, Toowoomba Art Gallery; User Generated Architecture, Tin Sheds Gallery; Martin Friedel’s Underworld Songs, Astra; Whips and Tendril, Campbelltown Arts Centre

raumlabor workshop, Tin Sheds Gallery; Nude models, Deborah Kelly, Sydney Biennale; Public Art major works, City of Sydney; Revelation Film Festival 2014

Urszula Dawkins talks with Michaela Gleave about the humbling wonder of the universe explored during her CSIRO residency, resulting in an exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery

Gail Priest speaks with Eugenia Lim, one of the co-directors of this new festival exploring video in multiple manifestations including screenings, installation, performance and parties

Malcolm Smith takes in this innovative collaborative project bringing Australian and Indonesian musicians and artists together to create surprising sights and sounds

Super Discount, Back to Back, STC, Sydney (plus real discount offer); Flock, Weave Movement Theatre, Melbourne; Nought, ADT, Samstag Museum, Adelaide; Kate Murphy, Probable Portraits, Shepparton Art Museum; Open Frame, Room40, Brisbane; Embedded & Primavera, MCA, Sydney; Drawn to Experience, POP Gallery, QLD College of Art

Blacktown Arts Centre Residencies; Fisher’s Ghost Prize, Campbelltown Art Gallery; House Proud 2014, Boroondara City Council; version 1.0 masterclass Still in the loop: Melbourne White Night; Summer Studio Residency, Penrith Regional Art Gallery; Fast+Fresh Dance, FORM Dance; FlickerFest call for entries; Workshops & Residencies, Lucy Guerin Inc; Next Generation Placement, ASSITEJ; Forever Now

Suffering election campaign anxiety, depression, fear and panic, Keith Gallasch checks out causes and cures.

New RT writer Jessica Sabatini reflects on other anatomies and ecosystems in this new dance work

Gail Priest detects raptures and ruptures in this concert by two electroacoustic groups at the Sound Lounge, Sydney

On the eve of the 2013 Ars Electronica, expatriate artist Matthew Gardiner gives us the run down on where to eat, drink and be merry when not taking in this annual festival for art technology and society

Curating Cities, NIEA, Sydney; ikono On Air Festival, international; Post Life, ICE, Sydney; 2013 Brisbane Festival; arte magra: from the opaque, AEAF, Adelaide; 30 years, Creative Arts, University of Wollongong; Sydney Underground Film Festival; Melbourne Recital Centre; The boat goes over the mountain, Happy Dagger Theatre, The Blue Room, Perth

Melbourne White Night; Jump Mentoring; Summer Studio Residency, Penrith Regional Art Gallery; Fast+Fresh Dance, FORM Dance; FlickerFest call for entries Still in the loop: Workshops & Residencies, Lucy Guerin Inc; Critical Path Responsive Residencies; Next Generation Placement, ASSITEJ; Forever Now

Zsuzsanna Soboslay is impressed by emerging choreographers and young dancers taking flight in this collection of new dance works under the guiding vision of Daniel Riley McKinley

Zsuzsanna Soboslay enjoys the delicacies and nuances of this production exploring the welfare system by former and current UTP directors Alicia Talbot and Rosie Dennis

Lauren Carrol Harris is drawn in by the lo-tech high-concept performance works from Applespiel, Nick Keys and we do not unhappen

Urszula Dawkins vicariously enjoys spelunking around the Arts Centre Melbourne via this new multiscreen video commission

Private Dances, Northcote Town Hall; Windows to the Sacred, S.H. Ervin Gallery; Festival of Slow Music, Ballarat; This Fella, My Memory, Carriageworks; Salomé & City of Shadows, Helium, Malthouse; In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, PICA; Alvin Curran, Melbourne, Sydney

Workshops & Residencies, Lucy Guerin Inc; Indigenous Production Scholarship, Metro Screen; Critical Path Responsive Residencies; Bivouac 2013; Next Generation Placement, ASSITEJ; Blue Mountains Film Festival

Keith Gallasch is taken with Daniel Riley McKinley's idiosyncratic choreography, Jacob Nash's striking design and Banagarra's powerful dancers in Blak

Jodie McNeilly rummages through Martin del Amo's choreographic wardrobe to see what's in store in this upcoming show of short solos presented by Form Dance Projects

Dan MacKinlay queries the imbalance between art, biz and hype at this year's Sonar Festival of Advanced Music and New Media Art

Over at the music blog Matthew Lorenzon reviews Aviva Endean, Intimate Sound Immersion; and Simon Charles checks out Directly or Indirectly no. 1 Callum G’Froerer, Dave Brown, Joe Talia and James McLean

Over 30 articles and 6 video interviews covering of ISEA2013.

Darwin Festival; Arts House Season 2; Vitality, Dirty Feet & Chronology Arts, Seymour Centre; Floored, Victoria Chiu, Dancehouse; Hedda, This One Show & The Blue Room Theatre; Ten Hands, Topology tour; Stuck Pigs Squealing, Night Maybe, TheatreWorks; Capital Jazz Project, Street Theatre; Dark Matter, Soda Jerk, UTS Gallery; Tura, Totally Huge New Music Festival; Ian Potter Cultural Trust 20th Anniversary

Asialink Arts Residency Program applications open; MONA Scholarships, Tasmanina; Gasworks Midsumma call for works, Melbourne; 2013 Expanded Architecture at the Rocks. Still in the loop: Metro Screen Seminars, 2high Festival 2013 artist call out, Tele Visions call for screen work; Bundanon Artist Residencies; PauseFest

Gail Priest talks with artistic director Eliza Sarlos about the big dreams that will overtake Cockatoo Island during the Underbelly Lab and festival

Philipa Rothfield gets a sneak preview of independent choreographer Nat Cursio's upcoming production for The Substation, Melbourne

Keith Gallasch is deeply impressed by the heroic efforts of Michael Kieran Harvey in this epic 90-minute piano recital featuring works by Raymond Hanson, Elliot Gyger and Harvey himself.

Keith Gallasch reflects on what's present and what's missing from this compact selection of video works by Indigenous artists curated by Merindah Donnelly at Carriageworks

Over at the Matthew Lorenzon/RT music blog reviews of Invenio, Luminesce; Ellen Winhall, My Sister’s Song and Forest Collective, Shared Lines

Janis II, The Commercial & MCLEMOI Galleries, Sydney; Owen Wingrave, Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriageworks; Shilpa Gupta, MAAP Space, Brisbane; Suburban, Ian Strange, NGV, Melbourne; Russian Resurrection Film Festival, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Byron Bay; South Australian Living Artists (SALA); NMN: Tangents And Cycle ~440, Sound Lounge, Sydney

Metro Screen: Indigenous programs & Storyworld Seminar; 2high Festival 2013 Artist Call Out, Brisbane Still in the loop: Tele Visions, call for screen work, Bundanon Artist Residencies; Australian Writers' Guild 2013 INSITE Award; Abbotsford Convent, Spiritous 2014; France 24 – RFI Web Documentary Visa D’or Award 2013; PauseFest

Astrid Francis worries at the imbalance between empathy and irony in this recent production based on accounts of alien abductions.

Kirsten Krauth, unabashed fan-girl, enjoys the wit, whimsy and revenge of the nerds that constitute the pop-TV impresario's take on a Shakespearean classic

Matthew Lorenzon surfs the multiple narratives offered in this all-abilities sonic arts show featuring The Amplified Elephants and BOLT Ensemble at Footscray Community Arts Centre

Over at the Matthew Lorenzon/RT music blog reviews of Invenio, Luminesce; Ellen Winhall, My Sister’s Song and Forest Collective, Shared Lines

Winter Season, Arts Centre Melbourne; Old Kings in Exile, Soundstream Collective, Adelaide & Melbourne; 4A: The Capital Gains Consultation Project, Teik-Kim Pok, Sydney; White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, Malthouse; Hello, Becky Hilton & Producciones La lagrima, Melbourne; Here&Now13, Lawrence Wilson Gallery, Perth; Home 3, Olaf Breuning, IMA, Brisbane

Tele Visions, call for screen works; City of Sydney, accommodation grants Still in the loop: Bundanon Artist Residencies; Australian Writers' Guild 2013 INSITE Award; Abbotsford Convent, Spiritous 2014; France 24 – RFI Web Documentary Visa D’or Award 2013; Waverley Artist In Residence Program 2014; PauseFest

Alex Lazaridis Ferguson looks for good game in the seventh edition of this leading Canadian arts festival taking in works by Dana Michel, Thomas Ostermeier, Marie Brassard, Markus Ohrn and Xavier Le Roy

Julian Knowles reviews the latest Currency House Platform Paper on the value of music in Australian society

Jon Rose critiques the recent City of Sydney public conversation on the state of live music in the city

Over at our music blog Matthew Lorenzon reviews the new album Practical Mechanics by Nonsemble

Queensland Music Festival; TeleScope online screenings, Melbourne International Film Festival; Intra-action, MOP Gallery; Taking Centre Stage–Telling Indigenous stories in Australian theatres, NIDA; My Life in the Nude, Maude Davey, La Mama; Ensemble Offspring, Sizzle, Petersham Bowling Club; Persona, Fraught Outfit, Malthouse & Belvoir; Personal Space, Tanya Lee, Fremantle Arts Centre; Instrument Builder’s Project, iCAN, Yogyakarta

Bundanon Artist Residencies; Australian Writer's Guild 2013 INSITE Award Still in the loop: Abbotsford Convent, Spiritous 2014; France 24 – RFI Web Documentary Visa D’or Award 2013; Digital Associates Program, QUT Creative Industries Precinct; Waverley Artist In Residence Program 2014; PauseFest

Matthew Clayfield's erudite take on the "trickle-down formalism" of this curious faux classic

Judith Abell attempts to crack the technology case in this exhibition of works by Tasmanian artists developed during Networked Art Forms: Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits festival, curated by Nancy Mauro-Flude

Keith Gallasch probes the premise of data noise in this work of minimalist dance and maximalist sound present by Performance Space & The National Art School

Over at our music blog guest writer James Nightingale on this recent concert of Asian influenced new music at Campbelltown Arts Centre.

NAIDOC Week, national; Live and Deadly, Carriageworks; My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; The Western Australian Composers Project Concerts, PICA; Finucane & Smith’s The Glory Box…Paradise, 45 Downstairs; Collaborateurs, Artereal; With Open Arms, Blindside; Cache in Point, Red Rattler; congratulations Christy Dena QUT's Digital Writer in Residence

Abbotsford Convent, Spiritous 2014; Quickfire Residencies, Performance Space; ADT Youth Ensemble; France 24 – RFI Web Documentary Visa D’or Award 2013 Still in the loop: Dancehouse, Housemates Performance 2014; Small Screen 2014, Screen Space; Digital Associates Program, QUT Creative Industries Precinct; Waverley Artist In Residence Program 2014; PauseFest

Katerina Sakkas is mesmerised by McKenzie's debut feature, a meditation on country, friendship and belonging.

Revelation: Perth International Film Festival; Show Off, Performance Space at Carriageworks; Helium Season, Malthouse; pulse:heart:beat, Synergy, TaikOz, City Recital Hall; Staging Broome Stories, Playwriting Australia; Fright or Flight, 3 is a Crowd, Judith Wright Centre; Box of Birds, Anne Ferran, Stills Gallery; Vocal Folds, Gertrude Contemporary

Digital Associates Program, QUT Creative Industries Precinct; Dancehouse, Housemates Performance 2014 call; PauseFest, installation proposals; Waverley Artist In Residence Program 2014; Small Screen 2014 proposals, Screen Space; Brisbane Fringe Festival 2014 registrations open

Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch experience the augmented reality of a Metaverse Makeover and navigate The Portals with Executive Producer Ricardo Peach

Somaya Langley gets connected via The Portals artist talks

Anne Phillips experiences new ways of sensing the world in Keith Armstrong's 'walkshop'

Keith Gallasch delights in the perceptual play of these 3D illusions

Keith Gallasch is bemused by this dark aural installation by Keith Armstrong, Lawrence English and Michael Candy

Usrzula Dawkins summary of this provocative presentation from the WikiLeaks founder

Keith Gallasch enjoys the riverside walk of electric wonders on the banks of the Parramatta River

Gail Priest reviews this eclectic collection of mediated music making

Lisa Gye takes in Mark Hosler's adventures in illegal art

Keith Gallasch explores more of this extensive exhibition curated by Felicity Fenner

Darren Tofts on the cross-generational analogue/digital collaborations

Mixed-reality game creator Troy innocent talks about invading Sydney

Alex Davies discusses his attempts to rupture time and space in his epic mixed-media installation at Carriageworks

Keith Gallasch wanders through the uncanny valley of three robotic artworks

Urszula Dawkins selects a few highlights from ANAT's Synapse survey exhibition

Gail Priest contemplates her insignificance during Ryoji Ikeda's audiovisual data onslaught

Interview with Oron Catts, curator of this bio-art exhibition

Interview with Nigel Helyer, curator of this exhibition of ecologically inspired sound art

For quick responses from Urszula Dawkings, Gail Priest, Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter check out the ISEA2013-in-RealTime Blog

Greg Hooper enjoys the ambience of industry in this site-specific collaborative concert.

Shane Eastwood speculates on possible altered states of being offered by this upcoming exhibition from Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art

Gail Priest talks with curator Andrew Batt-Rawden about this mini-festival of new music

When performance art works from the past are re-enacted by others, what can that mean? When live art creates intimate and visceral encounters, what precisely is the art involved? A taster of what's coming in RT115.

Frequently messages land in our inboxes that get us calculating our frequent flyer points. This week a cluster of perverse pleasures—Bill Viola, Bouchra Ouizguen, Belarus Free Theatre, and Mackenzie Wark—lures us to London.

Version 1.0, Major Minor Party; Moduluxxx; NMN: Altman & Brooks; 16th Spanish Film Festival; Melbourne International Animation Festival; Elvis Richardson, Slide Show Land; Tony Albert, Projecting our future; Loading The Silence, Linda Kouvaras

Call For Proposals, Conduit Arts, Melbourne; Templeberg Residential Writing Fellowship. Still in the loop: Librettist Workshop, Chamber Made; City Of Melbourne Annual Grants; Stephen Cummins Bequest Residencies, Performance Space; Beijing Residency, 4a Centre For Contemporary Asian Art; Workshops; Channels Video Art Festival

Alex Lazaridis Ferguson is intrigued by the melding of fact, fiction, biography and myth in a selection of shows in this year's festival including She She Pop's Testament, Boca del Lupo's Photog and Tim Crouch's I, Malvolio.

Greg Hooper experiences time-shifts and curious landscapes in two video works by this pioneer Chinese video artist

Australia's largest photography festival infiltrates Sydney galleries May-June. Previewed exhibitions include: Jimmy Pozarik & Tom Goldner, Global Gallery; Barbara McGrady, Redfern Community Centre; Anton Kuster, The Muse, TAFE Sydney Institute; Dean Tirkot, MOP Gallery; Kourtney Roy, Customs House; Cordelia Beresford, Gaffa Gallery

La Boite Indie Season 1; Lineage, Form Dance Projects; Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013, AGNSW; Everyday Rebellions, Gertrude Contemporary; Suncorp Twenties, Sydney Theatre Company; Joachim Koester & Frances Stark, Ian Potter Museum of Art; Stories Then & Now, Performance 4a & Carriageworks; Goodbye Jamie Boyd, Buzz Dance & Monkey Baa

Sensing Sydney, Carbon Arts, City of Sydney, Dramaturgy Internships 2013, Playwriting Australia, Librettist Workshop, Chamber Made, City of Melbourne Annual Grants.

Dan Edwards interviews Sari Braithwaite about the upcoming program of documentaries, narrative features and shorts.

Gail Priest strolls through a Jurassic rainforest infiltrated with art.

"Second only to Berlin for easy living and arts stimulation, Brussels is a mecca for performing arts in particular. The healthy competition between the Flemish and Wallonian communities that share the capital leads to a disproportionate number of arts institutions, festivals and events."

Moving Image I, Critical Path; Direct Democracy, MUMA; Bloom — Space, AEAF; Undone, Arts House; Paul Dresher, Double Duo; Film Real – Black Screen, NFSA & Footscray Arts Centre; Peter Dailey, Apparition: The Syndicate Ii, Fremantle Arts Centre; Networked Art Forms & Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits, CAST; May Music, Conduit Arts Initiative; Diffuse, UTS

Beijing Residency, 4a Centre For Contemporary Asian Art; Stephen Cummins Bequest Residencies, Performance Space; ISEA13 Workshops, Critical Path; workshops, Networked Art Forms & Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits, CAST; emerging producers, Backbone 2High Festival 2013; Call for scores Campbelltown City Council

Thematic selections of articles and reviews from our enormous back catalogue with commentary including Art & asylum: politics, ethics, aesthetics; Australian Indigenous film; Contemporary Chinese cinema; and Art & disability: new geographies of the body

Jake Wilson on the ambiguities of advertising and politics in this film about Chile's 1988 referendum on democracy

Chris Reid is more than impressed by the breadth and ingenuity of composer/violinist Jon Rose revealed in this 3CD box set released in celebration of the artist's 60th birthday. We also have 2 copies of Rosin to giveaway!

Opal Vapour, Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, Mobile States; robots at Artspace; Composition to Movement Festival, CPL/UNSW; Eve & Eve, Rebecca Agnew, 24HR Art; R&J, Expressions Dance Company; Living in the Ruins of the 21st Century, UTS Gallery; Friday Nights, Metro Arts; Hatched & Digital Now, PICA; Natalie Abbott, Physical Fractals, PACT; No Child, Nilaja Sun, Theatre Works; Shadowlife, Bendigo Art Gallery; Uta Uber Kool Ja, Army Of Love, Judith Wright Centre

Arts House Season 1, 2014; Revelation Perth International Film Festival; Exploring Modular Synthesis Workshop, Wired Lab; The 2013 Hive Production Fund; Arstpace Curatorial Fellowship; Channels Video Art Festival; Proximity Festival; Heartlands Refugee Art Prize; HIDDEN: Rookwood Cemetery Sculpture Walk

Sophia Kouyoumdjian explores the newest art conglomerate—Cementa, in Kandos, regional NSW—featuring site-specific installations from over 60 artists

A four-storey windmill, brainchild of Joey Ruigrok van der Werven and Paul Gazzola, will enhance both the physical and cultural landscapes of the Rocks Precinct, Sydney

Metropolis New Music Festival; Kaldor Art Projects #27: 13 Rooms; Trio A/Dance is hard to see, Sara Wookey; C3West Ultimate Vision, Monuments to Us, Lara Thoms & Workout, MCA; Wang Gongxin, MAAP Space; The Big Picture, Stills Gallery; Big Game Hunting, Fiona Hall, Heide; The Agony, the ecstasy and i, The Blue Room; Oi You!, Urban Art Festival; The Past is a Foreign Country, Paper Cut Collective & Tantrum

Exist Conference; Next Wave 2014; Cultivate dance theatre lab, Force Majeure; ABR Voiceless Fellowship; Nka Foundation, artist residency Ghana; Leisa Shelton workshop, JWC

Chris Reid admires this cd and book exploring the relationship between music and poetry

March 12-24 RealTime is in residence at Melbourne's Dance Massive. Reviews of works by Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc, Marrugeku, Antony Hamilton, Lee Serle, Stephanie Lake, Larrisa McGowan, Matthew Day, Natalie Abbott, Tim Darbyshire, Jo Lloyd, Russell Dumas, Sandra Parker, Ashley Dyer and more…

video interviews from Dance Massive 2013 including Anouk van Dijk, Antony Hamilton, Dalisa Pigram, Stephanie Lake, Lee Serle & Tim Darbyshire plus 2011 interviews with Gideon Obarzanek, Ros Crisp, Luke George, Trevor Patrick and more

A joint blog project between Matthew Lorenzon and RealTime for news, reviews and discussion of New Music. Currently covering Metropolis New Music Melbourne: Thomas Adès, Matthew Herbert, Mira Calix, Ensemble Offspsing, Syzygy, Speak Percusions + more

Dan Bigna is unmoored in a maelstrom of spontaneous music making at Canberra's free improv and experimental music festival, SoundOut

Matthew Lorenzon is not convinced by the "forceful repetition of platitudes" and the fugue of affairs in this film about a New York string quartet

Some complementary reading from Resonate Magazine's Insight series, published by the Australian Music Centre including Cat Hope, Jon Rose, Peter Knight and Clocked Out

I should have drunk more champagne; Onside & 6 Women Dance; MKA Group Show; Waterwheel World Water Day Symposium; Grant Stevens; Drawn from Sound; Melbourne Queer Flm Festival; Message Sticks; Speak Percussion, MaerzMusik; ANAM Australian Voices; The Bell Ringer’s Ball; Made in China, Australia

Forever Now & Adhocracy residencies, Vitalstatistix; ISEA conference registrations, Sydney; Gasworks Circus Showdown; NSW Creative Industries Action Plan; upcoming Australia Council deadlines

Sarah-Jane Norman shows us around her installation and discusses the performances that make up Unsettling Suite, part of the Matters of Life and Death season at Performance Space, Sydney

Keith Gallasch with more Sydney Festival fare: Peter Pan, Belvoir; School Dance, Windmill & STC; It's Dark Outside, Perth Theatre Company; Masi, The Conch Theatre; The moment I saw you I knew I could love you, Curious UK; The Rape of Lucrece, The Royal Shakespeare Company; The Rite of Spring, Raimund Hoghe; Ligeti Morphed, Ensemble Offspring; Murder, Erth Pysical and Visual Theatre

Gail Priest talks with Ten Days festival director Jo Duffy about her plans to intensify the festival experience and continue the creation of lasting legacies for culture and infrastructure across the state

"Writing makes you think. It thinks for you."

"I write about art to steal my way into the middle of it."

Flesh & Bone, KAGE; Jaap Blonk Australian tour; ArtMonth, Sydney; Inaudible Visions, Oscillating Silences, Isabelle Delmotte, Ballina; WOW Film Festival, WIFT plus Seen and Heard, Red Rattler; Le_temps: explorations in phenology, UTS Dab Lab; Dream Telepathy, Remote Space; Imagining the Capital: Canberra on Film and Cinema’s Golden Summer, NFSA; Old Tote celebrations, NIDA

Call for proposals: Underbelly, Sydney; Sydney Fringe; SITUATE art in festivals, national; Dimanche Rouge, Tallinn, Estonia; Artspace residencies, Sydney & Montreal; The Cube, QUT, Digital Writing Residency; upcoming Australia Council deadlines

Jake Wilson explores the three final additions to Koji Wakamatsu's filmography screened at the 2012 Busan Film Festival in Korea, just a few weeks before the filmmaker's untimely death

Director Chris Drummond discusses Brink's collaboration with the English Touring Theatre to create Thursday, a theatre piece inspired by London bombing survivor Gill Hicks, premiering at the Adelaide Festival

Kate Carr, new writer to RealTime, is impressed by the idiosyncratic selection of spontaneous sounds over several nights of the 2013 NOW now festival

Keith Gallasch talks with writer/performer Matthew Whittet about flights of fantasy and feats of invisibility in School Dance created by Windmill Theatre (directed by Rosemary Myers) and presented as part of the Sydney Festival by Sydney Theatre Company

"I cringe at using “cultural” as Scotland is so caught up in its own distinctiveness from England and its proud history (and there’s lots to be proud of) that everything can become a little tartan-tinted. But Glasgow bucks that trend by looking outward and is genuinely awash with contemporary, vivid and living culture."

Performance Space ups the ante with this season of works about the big questions, featuring Reckless Sleepers' The Last Supper, Brian Lucas' Performance Anxiety, Sarah-Jane Norman's epic Unsettling Suite, a dare-devil Night-Time, a death-fueled Clubhouse and more…

Yellamundie, Carriageworks; National Play Festival, Perth; AWF Playwriting Awards announced; Harvest, PACT Centre for Emerging Artistst; Until Then, Then, The Public Studio; The Subjects, ANAT; Richard Bell: Lessons on Etiquette and Manners, MUMA; Tools, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Beam Contemporary; seminal German sounds: Einstuerzende Neubauten & Pole tours

Urban Theatre Projects, _SPACE residencies, Bankstown; R E Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Award, VIC; Studios & exhibitions Gaffa Gallery, Sydney; Police Lane Gallery, Ballarat; Physical Theatre Lab, IUTGE, Austria

RealTime's coverage of the NOW Now festival from 2002 to the present

Keith Gallasch talks with writer/performer Matthew Whittet about flights of fantasy and feats of invisibility in School Dance created by Windmill Theatre (directed by Rosemary Myers) and presented as part of the Sydney Festival by Sydney Theatre Company

Gail Priest revels in John Cage's liberating philosophies in this series of concerts presented by the Sydney Opera House featuring New York's Bang on a Can All-Stars, including an all-in Musicircus

Keith Gallasch contemplates lineage and legacy evidenced in the final concert in this centenary series, Permission Granted, performed by Bang on Can All-Stars with Ensemble Offspring

Philip Brophy is haunted by the hypnagogic in Peter Strickland's film Berberian Sound Studio recently screened at ACMI

Cleo Mees entres a tear in the fabric of invisibility with Julie-Anne Long's suburban dance poem, presented by Performance Space as part of Sexes

Victoria Carless admires the ambition of and big dreams behind The Colony, the premier work of this new Cairns-based performance company

"I cringe at using “cultural” as Scotland is so caught up in its own distinctiveness from England and its proud history (and there’s lots to be proud of) that everything can become a little tartan-tinted. But Glasgow bucks that trend by looking outward and is genuinely awash with contemporary, vivid and living culture."

Taking place in brisk Bristol UK, IBT13 offers many tantalising live art diversions including fake moons, strolls through the woods, intimate conversations and audience led revolutions.

Cementa, Kandos, NSW; The Transmuted Signal, Frequency Oz radio/net broadcast; Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez' What The Body Does Not Remember, Adelaide Festival; SoundOut, Canberra; Blak Nite Cinema, ACMI; Glenorchy Arts and Sculpture Park (GASP), Tasmania; Colour Box Digital Media Exhibition, Footscray; Sonic Acts: The Dark Universe, Amsterdam

Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship; Brisbane Festival, independent performance works; International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2013, Perth; Bayside City Council Artists-in-Residence; Chippendale Creative Precinct New World Art Prize; Western Australia Contemporary Dance Initiative, Australia Council; Horror Filmmaking Bootcamp, Hobart; Borough of Queenscliffe's 150th Anniversary Art Awards

Lee Wilson and Matt Prest discuss the making of Whelping Box, recently presented by Performance Space (with co-creators Mirabelle Wouters and Clare Britton).

Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters discuss their upcoming project, Concrete & Bone Sessions part of Sydney Festival 2013

A brief survey of Branch Nebula's work over the last ten years, via their coverage in RealTime with introduction by Keith Gallasch

Chris Reid revels in the performative play and complexity of Slovakian composer Daniel Matej, special guest of the Soundstream Festival, Adelaide

Courtesy of the Seymour Centre Reginald Season we have 3 double passes to give away to The Share by Adelaide company five.point.one.

A digest of Resonate Magazine's features highlighting female composers and musicians working across a range of musical forms and genres

Gail Priest conducts an SMS text interview with Brian Fuata about his slippery acts of writing and performance

Tura New Music celebrates its 25th Birthday in style, with four concerts, a party bash and swanky soiree.

The OtherFilm festival takes on Brisbane, Melbourne, Meredith Music Festival and Adelaide with its 2012 iteration which goes beyond "celluloid" to explore "other" media

Encoded, Stalker, Sydney; On Loop, Ensemble Offspring, Sydney; International Space Time Concerto Competition, Newcastle; Body Fluid—The Seven Cycles, John A Douglas, Chalkhorse, Sydney; 241 years, Morrish, Osborne, Jeynes, Rohrig, Dancehouse, Melbourne, Sidetrack, Sydney; The Conversation, Jon Mark Oldmeadow, Claudio Tocco, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne; UpRaw online art & exhibition, Sydney

Tanja Liedtke Fellowship; Aphids Indigenous Mentoring Program; Vivid Light expressions of interest; Creative Partnerships with Asia, Australia Council

Keith Gallasch talks with Robyn Archer, Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra 2013 about the year long celebrations.

Chris Reid is impressed by the many ways east meets west, contemporary meets classical at the Adelaide Festival Centre's annual OzAsia festival

Varia Karipoff is mesmerisd by the complex web spun by Gareth Hart in this solo dance theatre work as part of the Melbourne Fringe

"…As a Sydney-sider in Auckland things can seem alarmingly familiar…a parallel universe where just a few small details have been altered…"

More realtime tv video interviews including Ensemble Offspring, Stu Buchanan, Joel Stern, Garry Stewart, Kate Champion, Lara Thoms, Jon Rose, Gideon Obarzanek, Cat Hope, Kusum Normoyle, Marina Rosenfeld, Eugene Ughetti, Luke George, Rosalind Crisp & more...

We don't need a map, brings the desert experience of the Martu people to the Fremantle Arts Centre with works on paper, media-art collaborations, cultural workshops and an actual chunk of the Pilbara

Paris-based experimental performance festival Dimanche Rouge teams up with Exist, Tape Projects and Ptarmigan to present an evening of streamed performance and live art

Lady Electronica, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane; Cloudy Sensoria, Bundoora Homestead, Melbourne; Hail, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, national release & exhibition, Melbourne; Kusum Normoyle, Accord with Air: Tjentiste (2011-2012), Peloton, Sydney; Liverpool Biennale 2012: Uninvited Guest, FACT, UK; Random International’s Rain Room, Barbican

A collection of articles on Indigenous filmmaking published in RT since 2002: includes feature films, shorts, festivals, issues, interviews and the RT/AFC publication Dreaming in Motion

Keith Gallasch talks with festival director Philip Rolfe about the tasty South Asian banquet of performance, dance, music and food about to be served up in Sydney's west

Keith Gallasch celebrates Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's visionary En Atendant and Cesena at Carriageworks

Astrid Francis is disturbed and compelled by this 21st century post-Freudian ‘prequel’ devised by Matthew Lutton, Tom Wright and Zoë Atkinson

Rishin Singh offers an insider account of what happens when you take a bunch of city improvisors to the outback

"…Santiago currently sits alongside Sao Paulo as one of the two world capitals of graffiti. Street art has played an important role and reflects the history of political and social events in the city…1000s of examples (and I am not kidding) located on every street corner. "

Sydney Opera House celebrates the centenary of John Cage's birth with a mini-festival featuring New York ensemble Bang on a Can All-Stars and Sydney's Ensemble Offspring

PauseFest returns to Melbourne in November celebrating the future with industry panels, workshops and a jam-packed screening program

Deanne Butterworth, Twinships, West Space, Melbourne; Mish Grigor, Winner, Firstdraft, Sydney; Gaelle Mellis, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk, Vitalstatistix, Adelaide; First Amongst Equals (Part II) curator Leigh Robb, PICA, Perth; Swedish for Argument, curator Holly Williams, UTS Gallery, Sydney

Spaced: art out of place, IASKA, expressions of interest; In-Habit and Seedpod, Punctum, expressions of interest; ISEA 2013, call for conference participation; Melbourne Filmmaking Summer School, University of Melbourne; Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards nominations

Ensemble Offspring co-directors discuss the thinking behind their eclectic programming of contemporary classical and new music, the ensemble's longevity and aims for audience development

Chris Reid surveys the activities of Adelaide-based composer/pianist/educator Stephen Whittington including his recent John Cage Day celebrations at Elder Hall

Keith Gallasch shares his hurried notes from the inspiring after show talk with Rosas choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker discussing En Atendant & Cesna at Carriageworks, part of the Biennale of Sydney

Free downloadable sounds to tickle your cilia from artists recently featured in RT Ensemble Offspring - Professor Bad Trip Lesson 3 Thembi Soddell - Artefact Performance (excerpt) Lawrence English - Coprinus Comatus Eugene Carchesio - Circle Music 4

…Munich is a babe in the most non-gendered sense of the word (purely because I don’t know the gender of Munich yet). He/She is an elegant androgynous creature, not afraid of its past, its future or the over-use of primary colours when dressing…

Crack Theatre Festival, TINA, Newcastle; South Australian Film Corporation 40 year anniversary celebrations; Synaesthesia, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania; The Other Film Festival, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall; MCA: Primavera 2012 & Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro, Sydney; Marco Fusinato, The Color of the Sky Has Melted, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

107 Projects, Redfern, Sydney; The Arts Platform, Surry Hills, Sydney; Next Wave, Kickstart national applications; New Music Network Mini Series, national applications

NZ correspondent Sally Ann McIntyre probes the implications of sound in this exhibition curated by Caleb Kelly and Aaron Kreisler featuring work by Australian and New Zealand artists

Jana Perkovic is mesmerised by this live film/theatre adaptation of the Strindberg classic, currently in repertoire at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin

Gail Priest looks at digtital broadcasts and distribution of live performance, with reference to the recent iTunes release of Wayne McGregor's 2008 work Entity

Katerina Sakkas considers the lightness of being in this Australian take on the rom-com, hitting cinemas in October

micro-guides for arts adventurers to the world’s most intriguing cities including Detroit, Beijing, Yogyakarta, Wroclaw, Beirut, Shanghai, Berlin, Hong Kong, Barcelona, New York, Sarajevo, Turku

This year's annual showcase of performance, visual art and film from the Asian region graces Adelaide in September, this time with an Indian flavour

Experimenta's 5th biennial of media art is about to launch with an enticing range of commissions and contributions from Australian and international artists

TarraWarra Biennial, Yarra Valley, Victoria; UNDER_SCORED, Brisbane; iD Digital Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; 13 Voids, Mark Themann, AEAF, Adelaide; Fearless, Milk Crate Theatre, Carriageworks, Sydney; CCP Declares: On the nature of things, CCP, Melbourne OPPORTUNITIES: The Right Foot Project, Dirty Feet

In association with the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations, Carriageworks is presenting the Australian premiere of two new works by renowned Belgian contemporary dance ensemble, Rosas, directed by the legendary choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. We have 4 double passes to Rosas' Cesena, September 15.

Dan MacKinlay is anxiously suspended in time amongst the detritus of art in Serial Space's inaugural celebration of time-based practices

New RT writer Sarah-Mace Dennis is shadowed by memory and media as she experiences this historical video art overview

Zsuzsanna Soboslay queries states of consciousness in this media-heightened dance work exploring hypnogogia by emerging choreographer Adelina Larsson

Keith Gallasch selects some highlights from this leading film school's annual screening festival

Virginia Baxter walks us through some radical explorations in this upcoming festival of hybrid, underground and alternative performance

Sydney Opera House's Spring Dance festival of international and local dance curated by Rafael Bonachela

Jon Rose and collaborators takes the Sound Circus to the corner country (borderlands of NSW, QLD & SA)

MAAP Space, Brisbane; ARTHERE, Sydney: Untitled (colloquial: Atrocity Exhibitions), Jack Sargeant & Linsey Gosper, ALASKA, Sydney; Arcade Assembly, Shopfront, Sydney; Micromachina Aqua, Scott Bain, South Australian Maritime Museum, Adelaide OPPORTUNITIES: World of Women (WOW) Film Festival, call for entries; Backbone's 2high Festival, Brisbane, call for entries; Intensive Training Program, dance, ADT, Adelaide; EU Culture Program applications

Astrid Francis is swept away by the stage magic of It's Dark Outside created by the team behind The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer

Chris Reid ponders infinity and entropy in SA artist Riley O'Keeffe's recent installation which included a performance of Steve Reich's Pendulum Music

Regular RealTime contributor Dan Edwards has curated the program Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos for MIFF including several films previously covered in RealTime

…Like many before me, I fell in love with danger, the wildness and the satisfaction of a rust belt being reclaimed by an urban farming movement and all the possibilities that a post apocalyptic playground could ignite…

Gail Priest is impressed by the double album documenting performances by Alan Lamb, David Burraston, Garry Bradbury, Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox exploring the potentials of the long wires at the WIRED Lab in rural NSW

Free downloadable sounds to tickle your cilia from Ida Duelund Hansen, Chamber Made Opera; Kraig Grady, Clocks & Clouds; David Burraston, The WIRED Lab

Time Machine, Serial Space, Sydney; Everywhere But Here, Blindside, Melbourne; On Edge, Cairns; What's Coming - A Future's Festival, Alexandra Harrison, Dancehouse, Melbourne

National Screen Dance Initiative, Carriageworks; Mobile States Cluster, 2012, national tour; Parallel Universes, Monash University & QUT, The Block, Brisbane; Inject, Herman Kolgen, Bristol, UK Opportunities: Incubator residencies, Vitalstatistix, Adelaide; Queer performance residencies, Performance Space, Sydney; Australia Council Crowdfunding seminars, national

To complement Mike Walsh's review of the Hong Kong Film Festival we've updated the this archive highlight which includes an introduction by Dan Edwards

Stuart Buchanan from New Weird Australia talks with Gail Priest about three years dedicated to promoting eclectic Australian music and what's in store in the future

Mini-doco about Psycho Subtropics, a gathering of Brisbane-based artists and musicians at Serial Space, Sydney, including interviews with co-curator Joel Stern and artist Michael Candy

…Throw a stick in Yogyakarta and chances are you’ll hit an artist…The relaxed pace of Yogya, the city’s reputation as the cultural heart of Java, the fact that it’s home to one of the country’s largest art schools…make it the perfect place to immerse yourself in art…

… Beijing’s real pleasures lie behind the façade of its overbearing government buildings and public monuments, tucked away in the narrow alleys (hutong) of the old city and in hard to find corners. Here a rich culture plays out beneath the city’s surface, trying its best to avoid the watchful eye of the authorities…

safARI, the unofficial fringe of the Sydney Biennale; The Reginald, Seymour Centre's 2012 program, Sydney; Tura New Music and ACO's The Reef, national tour. Opportunities: Ian Potter Foundation & ACMI Moving Image Commission; QUT The Block's Digital Associates Program; plus congratulations to Jason Sweeney on his Ted City2.0 win.

To co-incide with LA’s 13th year, we've gathered together all reviews of the festival since 2002—a comprehensive record of this leading music event.

Jane Howard is treated to a day's worth of Next Wave fare including Joseph L. Griffiths' Shelters, Laura Delaney & Danae Valenza's Hull, Natalie Abbott's Physical Fractals and Aimee Smith's Wintering

Scott Wark is tranported by five time & space warping installations curated by Marcel Cooper and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Jane Howard on the various levels of confrontation and interaction in Liesel Zink's fifteen, Atlanta Eke's Monster Body, Dan Koop et al's The Stream/ The Boat/ The Shore/ The Bridge and Bridget Balodis, Mark Pritchard's Shotgun Wedding

Matthew Lorenzon

Oliver Downes

Matthew Lorenzon

Gail Priest

Oliver Downes

Keith Gallasch

Felicity Clark

Felicity Clark

Video interview with Australian Dance Theatre's Artistic Director Garry Stewart and Keith Gallasch

…Its city slogan is "the meeting place" and in my time here I have come across many artists from Europe and beyond who are attracted to the rich strand of theatre found here...

…Soaring above, gleaming neon and LED emblazoned skyscrapers punctuate an ever-evolving futuristic city skyline…the closest visual and sensorial experience you’ll find to Blade Runner…

…Not only is it indisputably uncool to have money here, the whole city has been structured for the needs of the unemployed.

…When I heard music I loved music, when I saw film I loved film, when I saw painting I loved painting…

A collection of RealTime's coverage of Dance on Screen with an introduction by Erin Brannigan

Mike Walsh is bemused by the shift in the Chinese film industry towards commercialism, evidenced by a rash of rom coms screened at this year's festival

Christen Cornell talks with Chinese artist He Xiangyu about his experiments with this most mythologised of beverages

Matthew Lorenzon's quick guide to the concerto form which is set to be reinvograted by Richard Vella and the University of Newcastle's innovative competition for Australian and international composers

Gail Priest is drawn in by the delicate sonorities of this CD documenting 15-years of collaboration between two leading sound artists

…Its city slogan is "the meeting place" and in my time here I have come across many artists from Europe and beyond who are attracted to the rich strand of theatre found here...

May 26-June 2 offers a week of celebrations and reconciliations with the theatre work Bindjareb Pinjarra, Boomalli's exhibition Winds of Change, ATYP's work-in-progress, Katherine, plus talks, music and more

PACT's annual live art festival will return to the streets of Erskineville May 31-June 9 with performances including Bron Batten's Sweet Child of Mine, Alice Williams' Impossible Plays plus a weekend of installations and incursions

James Cook University's Screengrab award open for entries; NAVA & Crawl Inc's ARIna.org online resource; AFTRS Open & FORM Dance Projects, Dance Film Masterclass with Dr Richard James Allen; YPAA National Symposium, Speaking in Tongues, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre; Colin, Simon and I, Because We Care, The Place London; Creative Australia Fellows and Ars Electronica's Prix Ars awards

Lara Thoms talks with Gail Priest about her quest to collect everyday expertise in her live art work The Experts Project, part of Local Positioning Systems at the MCA, curated by Performance Space

Tony Reck experiences the mysteries of memory and the Collingwood Masonic Temple in Jason Maling & Joseph Giovinazzo's recent participatory performance

…Soaring above, gleaming neon and LED emblazoned skyscrapers punctuate an ever-evolving futuristic city skyline…the closest visual and sensorial experience you’ll find to Blade Runner…

…One sees evidence of the devastation of its troubled past, but all around there is renovation and reconstruction, not just physically— the city is gripped by a desire for cultural change…

Free downloadable sounds from: Jon Rose, Tromber Marina (1982) Thomas William vs Scissor Lock, Dreams of Dreams (excerpt 2012) Shoeb Ahmad, Kitten's Eyes (2012)

Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, Melbourne; The Seizure, The Hayloft Project, Melbourne; Boo Australia, Tim Welfare, Santiago, Chile; Guerilla Girls, VCA, Melbourne; A Hoax, La Boite, Brisbane; CUE FUNKTION, hellosQuare exhibition and residency, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

Auditions for Lucy Guerin Inc’s US tour of Untrained; The International Space Time Concerto Competition, University of Newcastle; Access Space Residencies, Sheffield, UK; Realise Your Dream, British Council, UK; Vagrant open gig series, New Weird Australia; 2012 Kit Denton Disfellowship

Caroline Wake surveys RealTime's coverage of art that has responded to and represented asylum seekers over the past decade.

Chris Reid analyses the shifting theatrical and emotional spaces of Bernstein's Mass, David Chew's Instructions for an Imaginary Man, the Australian Art Orchestra's Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness and the Zephyr Quartet's MICROMacro

Justine Shih Pearson is impressed by the rich archive of the artist's creative process uncovered in this documentary about the life and work of dancer/choreographer Tanja Liedtke

Jane Howard talks with director/choreographer Katrina Lazaroff about her upcoming work exploring our unconscious actions

…Not only is it indisputably uncool to have money here, the whole city has been structured for the needs of the unemployed.

…Three months. Seven million people. 7,417 legit skyscrapers. All on an island half the size of Canberra…

A preview of Performance Space's first season for 2012 at Carriageworks featuring Robyn Backen’s Whisper Pitch, Michaela Gleave's Our Frozen Moment, Victoria Hunt's Copper Promises: Hinemihi and Blood Policy/Aphid's Computer Boy

Ten years young, the Bendigo-based sound collective is having two days of birthday celebrations including Dave Brown, Warren Burt, Rosalind Hall, Justin Bull, The Runny Tadpoles and more

Wade Marynowsky's solo exhibition exploring sculpture, photography and interactive media at UTS Gallery

Sunny Drake's X, Metro Arts, Brisbane; Buru, Marrugeku, North American Tour; Tyger Tyger program, West Space, Melbourne; Moduluxxx—Modular Synthesis Mini-festival, Serial Space, Sydney. Plus opportunities: Brisbane-Singapore exchange; Artspace Studio Residencies 2013; Screen Space proposals 2013; PACT Ensemble 2012; Kathleen Mitchell Award for Young Writers

Dan Edwards surveys some of RealTime's coverage of the uniquely evolving screen culture of the People's Republic of China

Jon Rose, winner of the 2012 Don Banks Award, in conversation with musician and improviser Jim Denley

Dan MacKinlay explores the clefts and crevices of diy media art at Serial Space

Dan Edwards appreciates the power of subtlety in this recent Academy Award winning Iranian film

Gail Priest on the pleasurable challenges of two recent New Weird Australia limited edition CD releases

A run through of events at the new look MCA including Local Positioning Systems, presented with Performance Space

Upcoming activities at Brisbane's Judith Wright Centre to honour the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth

The latest offering from this Lismore based innovative regional arts centre's Generator program

ANAT's Echology Seminars; Waterwheel's live stream of the World Water Day Symposium; He Xiangyu's The Cola Project, 4a Contemporary Asian Art; Sydney Chamber Opera's In the Penal Colony; The Art Centre Melbourne's Contact!

RealTime has double passes to give away to select Message Sticks screenings & talks at the Sydney Opera House and national screenings of Life in Movement, the documentary on Tanja Liedtke by Closer Productions & Antidote Films

Micro guides for arts adventurers including New York, Turku, Sarajevo & Bacelona

Over ten years of coverage of Vanessa Tomlinson & Erik Griswold's Clocked Out new music ensemble

Perth-based composer Cat Hope talks with Gail Priest about her unique approach to composing, scoring and programing new music with her new music ensemble Decibel.

Sound artist Kusum Normoyle talks with Gail Priest about her 'noiseful' interventions into public space.

In this fist batch of realtime travellers we have Nigel Helyer on Turku, Finland; Kym Vercoe on Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina; Jodi Rose on Barcelona, Spain; Michaela Coventry, New York, USA

For soundcapsule #2 we have tracks from Cat Hope, Decibel Eugene Ughetti Dale Gorfinkel Tracks can be streamed or downloaded.

Keith Gallasch is moved and shaken by emerging playwright Rita Kalnejais's fusion of dark drama and high comedy in Babyteeth, playing at Belvoir until March 18

ArtMonth Sydney including Tim Burn's retrospective at Tin Sheds Gallery; Cockatoo Calling - Adam Simmons & Erik Griswold; Melbourne Queer Film Festival; Il Pixel Rosso, and the Birds Fell from the Sky, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall; Vic & Sarah McEwan's Cad Factory, Narrandera; Robots and Avatars, FACT Liverpool, UK; Excerpt Magazine

Keith Gallasch talks with director/choreographer Kate Champion on set about her latest work premiering in the Sydney Festival and then playing in the Adelaide Festival

Urszula Dawkins samples the exotic edible artworks created as part of the Cross(X)Species Adventure Club exploring environmental sustainability

Keith Gallasch gets the run down on Jonathan Holloway's first feast for WA audiences

Teik-Kim Pok is immersed in recent experiential performances by Sydney emerging artists

Keith Gallasch samples Flickerfest 2012's shortfilm competition before it hits the road

Sam Gillies is intrigued by the collaboration between man and machine in recent compositions for the Disklavier

U-Ram Choe, John Curtin Gallery & the Proximity festival of one-on-one art, Perth; World Theatre Festival, Brisbane; Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival & National Indigenous Photo Forum, Melbourne; Carnegie 18: New Music Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne; Sound Kapital, Carriageworks, Sydney; Sculpture at Scenic World, Blue Mountains, NSW; Calls for proposals - ISEA2012; City of Sydney; Serial Space's Time Machine

Dan Edwards cuts through the controversy surrounding the arrest of actress Marzieh Vafamehr, to appreciate the depth and artistry of this Australian/Iranian film

Jack Sargeant questions the decision of the Classification Review Board which sees A Serbian Film banned in Australia and defends filmmakers' right to shock

Shannon O'Neill travels to Sarah Last's WIRED Lab to experience country hospitality and astounding sounds

Regular RealTime writer Dan Edwards tell us a little about himself and why he writes about the arts

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer lecture and exhibition, MCA; The Horse's Mouth, festival of autobiographical performance, The Old Fitzroy; DVD editions - dLux and Shortplay; Melbourne sounds - Robin Fox's Giant Theremin, Cara Anne Simpson's Geo Sound Helmets; Dale Gorfinkel's Out Hear Festival; Shen Shaomin's The Day After Tomorrow and Beijing Residency, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, Carbon Arts, Sydney, Melbourne, Avoca; FotoFreo Fringe call for proposals

As the NOW now festival approaches its 11th year, Gail Priest explores RealTime's coverage of the event over the decade revealing a snapshot of the evolving improv community in Australia.

Caroline Wake looks at some bold solos: Alice Mary Cooper's Clown Lights Stage; Nathan Harrison's The art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise; Bodysnatchers' Gobbledygook; Emeline Forster's Dust; and Meiwah Williams' La dos Fridas

Chris Reid contemplates the viewer as actor in two recent installation works: I may have to see YOU again, Charlie by Collins and Hold me Close and Let me Go/ I've been here before by Harris

Keith Gallasch is intrigued by the cross-cultural collaboration between choreographer Annalouise Paul, dancer Miranda Wheen and classical Indian tabla player Bobby Singh

Attempted censorship of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's On the Concept of the Face, regarding the Son of God in Paris; Amsterdam multimedia group PIPS:Lab in Sydney & Perth; Danielle Micich's Shiver, Performing Lines WA, Perth; Restless Dance Theatres' Debut 3—the dancers direct, Adelaide; Ilbijerri Theatre Company, The Minutes of Evidence Project and La Mama's Coranderrk, Melbourne; State Library of Queensland's Flash Women, Brisbane; Australia Council's National touring framework consultation

Keith Gallasch talks to the 2011 Tanja Liedtke Fellow about her time in Australia

Matthew Lorenzon is impressed by the range of approaches in this annual young composers concert

Lucky prompts Caroline Wake to reflect on how theatre works can best explore people smuggling and the plight of refugees

Brisbane International Film Festival; How Does Your Arts Career Grow?, Adelaide Festival Centre & Carclew Youth Arts; Backbone Youth Arts 2high Festival and Future Voices Forum; Adam Cruickshank, The Half Asleep Pilgrim, West Space; Tashmadada & Creative Non-Fiction's Australian issue essay contest; Hans Van den Broek collaboration, Homeland, FraserStudios, plus Open Day; Pop-Up Oxford Street expressions of interest.

Gail Priest on releases by Gulbenkoglu Gorfinkel; Ben Byrne; Alex White; Ivan Lysiak

RealTime on-site at TURA’s Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth. Daily reviews plus video interviews with Marina Rosenfeld, composer in residence and Eugene Ughetti, Speak Percussion, ensemble in residence

Rules of Play, Tin Sheds Gallery, Performance Month, Peloton, Sydney; Art & About, Sydney; This Is Not Art, Newcastle, NSW; Atlas, Melbourne Fringe; Eighth Blackbird, Sydney Opera House; Site & Sound call for proposals, Leichhardt Council

Caroline Wake examines the invisibility but also the visions of asylum seekers in three recent exhibitions

Douglas Leonard is curiously vivified by the end of the world in the final offering of the La Boite Indie series

Kate Warren discovers big visions and hidden treasures in this year's Gertrude Street Projection Festival

Matthew Lorenzon surveys national and international online resources concerned with the practice of contemporary classical/new music