Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson may well get lost in the promotion of other exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, but it is one not to be missed. Charting Crowley and Balson’s artistic journeys from the 1930s to the 1960s and their shared commitment to abstraction, it is an elegant, beautiful show that affords the rare opportunity to experience their work in depth.

These words put the case for and against Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in a nutshell. Kihara speaks with the authority of a Pasifika, a transgender Japanese-Samoan artist who wittily restaged two dozen Gauguin paintings as colour photographs in her Paradise Camp series. Kihara dressed and posed Fa’afafine – men living and dressing in the manner of women – and her work cements the iconic status of Gauguin’s ‘wonderful’ imagery.

Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie continues its triumphant procession at home and abroad with Black Swan State Theatre’s production in Perth, under the direction of Kate Champion. A hit at its première at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019 and in post-Covid seasons in Melbourne, Broadway, and the West End (winning the 2023 Olivier Award for Best New Play), not to mention in South Asia and Northern Europe, it now arrives in Perth, where Miller received her first mainstage production (of Dust) in 2014.

For the past thirty years, breakthroughs in video and sound technology have, for better or worse, seeped into live performance. For better in the case of Kip William’s production of Suddenly Last Summer and Lindy Hume and Dave Bergman’s Winterreise for Musica Viva. For worse with David Livermore/Opera Australia’s ludicrous Anna Bolena and Ivo van Hove’s self-indulgent All About Eve.

The contrast could hardly be more stark. Late last year, Red Stitch’s production of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Sarah Goodes, began life at the company’s eighty-seat theatre nestled in East St Kilda. It sold out, became the talk of the town, and attracted positive reviews. Usually, that’s how things end.

This year marks the centenary of Giacomo Puccini’s sudden death in Brussels while being treated for throat cancer. He was the most famous and celebrated living opera composer. However, Puccini’s posthumous reputation suffered in the latter half of the twentieth century; an infamous comment by renowned musicologist Joseph Kerman in 1952 describing Tosca as ‘a shabby little shocker’, was representative of much of academia’s attitude during this time.

In the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House, expectations were high for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Horizon, a double bill featuring works by Saybaylag (Saibai Island people) of Zenadth Kez (the Torres Strait) man Sani Townson and Deborah Brown of the Wakaid clan, Meriam (Murray Island), who were in collaboration with Māori choreographer Moss Te Uruangi Patterson (Ngāti Tūwharetoa).