In this fortnight's Update: Melbourne International Jazz Festival preview by Des Cowley, Clunes Booktown, Nicole Car makes her ACO début, ANU Press launches a record label, Dark Mofo 2018, SSO's Playerlink!, Arts & Minds 2018, Laurie Anderson at HOTA, the Emerging Artist Award 2018, and music and film giveaways ...

Marius Petipa’s ballet La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer), written in 1877, could be seen as the grandparent of Bollywood musicals. It has all the ingredients: Solor, a prince who loves Nikiya, a low-caste temple dancer; a conniving Brahmin high priest who lusts after her; Solor’s father, who has promised him to another man’s ...

After the vast proportions of her 2013 play, Chimerica (seen here in 2017) – a multi-scene, huge-cast exploration of American–Chinese relations – Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children – a one-set, three-character play – might seem like something of a chamber piece. But if it is physically small in scale, thematically it is even more ...

Although this not-to-be-missed offering from the National Gallery of Victoria has been billed as a ‘two-part exhibition’, it is a much more complex entity than that. In the words of the three lead curators – Cathy Leahy, Judith Ryan, and Susan van Wyck – it ‘explores different perspectives on Australia’s shared history in ...

The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui was the final play written in the extraordinarily prolific period of Bertolt Brecht’s Scandinavian exile (1939–41), a period that, among other works, produced the first version of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan, Mother Courage, and Herr Puntila and His Man Matti ...

Last year, Akram Khan, England’s leading Asian dancer–choreographer, stunned the dance world community when he announced he would stop performing in 2018 and that his last show would be Xenos, meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’. It premièred at the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, on 21 February, and reached ...

In this fortnight's Update: Australian Festival of Chamber Music 2018, Behind Closed Doors (CuriousWorks and Screen Australia), The winner of the Cornish Family Prize for Art and Design, Artists take up residence with Black Swan State Theatre Company, Art in Tasmania's Tarkine wilderness, and giveaways from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Transmission Films.

Madnesses pile up in The Death of Stalin, too fast and too numerous to itemise. Victims of tyranny are snatched away in the dead of night, locked in basements, or pushed down staircases at Chaplinesque speed. The terms of engagement change halfway through a conversation: forbidden thoughts are now doctrine ...

If one were tempted to cast round for a theme or a set of motifs that could be discerned from this year’s Adelaide Festival, it might be Rilke’s ‘Who speaks of victory? To endure/survive is all.’ Not as a default position, but as a celebration of those left behind, of those who tell the stories of those who have struggled and ...

Desdemona’s plangent, soaring phrase at the end of the ‘Willow Song’ in Verdi’s penultimate opera, Otello, has been described as the last despairing cry of the bel canto. After many years of relentless tragedies, Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff, would be a bubbling and effervescent comedy – only his second in his illustrious career ...