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This is Macbeth, amplified. An explosive retelling of the famous story, MANBETH is a fast, furious and physical Shakespearian performance collaboration between the new Band of Creatures and Tanya Gerstle’s OpticNerve Performance Group (‘YES’,‘Five Kinds of Silence’.)

“Tanya Gerstle makes the stage sexy and dangerous.” Kate Herbert. Herald Sun, 2008.

MANBETH comprises ten exciting young actors from the nation’s best acting schools: VCA, NIDA, and WAAPA; the best new male stage talent performing as an ensemble in Shakespeare’s most turbid and bloody tragedy.

Still the original Shakespearian English, still the classic tale of murder, greed and ambition, but now told with all the gut bursting urgency, drama and flesh of a World Wrestling Royal Rumble.

NB: This performance contains partial nudity and strong adult themes. Recommended  for a mature audience.

For the past thirty-five years Judy Holding has been a regular visitor to the Northern Territory escarpment near Cannon Hill. In this visually spare landscape, so rich and crowded with sensations and accumulated knowledge, Holding imagines a world of reciprocity and interconnectedness.

Holding has developed a sensual language of symbols to convey the energy of place that exists within the Australian landscape. Working across various media, Holding’s watercolour drawing and collage, lino-cut printed artist books and sculptures describe the imaginative life of the landscape itself. 

www.judyholding.com

Image: Bim String Picture, H62xW57cm, watercolour, ink, collage on magnani paper, 2010

In early 2009, Ethiopian/Australian painter Tamirat Gebremariam set out to witness the devastation caused by recent bushfires on the outskirts of his hometown, Melbourne. In response he has painted a stunning series of abstract works, creating swirling forms in oranges and burnt pinks.

They are works that have a close affinity with nature but they are not natural. There is a hyper-quality about them–an intensity in their focus, colour and affirmation. Their nature is metaphysical.

Unrepresented is an exhibition of five outstanding independent visual artists including emerging artists Ted McKinlay, Chloe Vallance, Nicholas Jones and Ben V Walsh alongside established independent artist Christopher Koller.

Coinciding deliberately with the Melbourne Art Fair, which is an exhibition of leading contemporary art chosen and presented by over 80 national and international galleries, Unrepresented responds to the vagaries and minefields of the art world that contemporary artists encounter. While most artists see representation by a gallery as the best possible situation, others deliberately remain outside the accepted system.

Unrepresented is curated by Walk to Art director, Bernadette Alibrando who has delved beneath the surface of Melbourne’s commercial gallery scene, and has selected five diverse artists who are excellent at their craft, have refined concepts, conceptual and emotional content in their work, underlying drive and have chosen to remain independent.

Unrepresented culminates with the forum The Artist’s Survival Kit.

Image: ‘All roads lead to where we stand’ by Chloe Vallance.

Wine has been generously provided for the Unrepresented exhibition opening and The Artist’s Survival Kit by the Daylesford Wine Company.

How is it possible to enter old age with grace when there’s so much to be done, things to achieve, places to go, loves to be loved and sex to be had? The characters in Do not go gentle… are not settling in for their twilight years – they are in a ‘rage against the dying of the light’ as they make one last and enormous journey in their life.

The premiere of a brilliant prize winning play by Patricia Cornelius, dealing with existential questions of love, death, loss and happiness.

An outstanding cast directed by Julian Meyrick and featuring Paul English, Jan Friedel, Rhys McConnochie, Terry Norris, Anne Phelan, Pamela Rabe and Malcolm Robertson.

See this page for more information on Do not go gentle…,  or this page for information on limited mobility access.

The group exhibition Unrepresented culminates in The Artist’s Survival Kit, an afternoon of relevant and pragmatic discussion about the contemporary arts scene, artists’ survival, and their expectations.

Speakers include:
Marcus Westbury (arts writer – The Age),
Tom Lowenstein (arts accountant and collector),
Bernie Alibrando (curator),
Christopher Koller (artist).

The forum will be adjudicated by fortyfivedownstairs founder and Artistic Director Mary Lou Jelbart.

The Artist’s Survival Kit is presented with support from the Portland House Foundation.

Image: ‘Level 1 Any Port In A Storm’ by Ben Walsh.

Wine has been generously provided for the Unrepresented exhibition opening and The Artist’s Survival Kit by the Daylesford Wine Company.

Anton Chekhov, is known the world over for his writings on love and yet the most memorable of Chekhov’s love stories is not one that he wrote, but rather one that he lived – with Olga Knipper, actress and leading lady of the Moscow Art Theatre. The story spans six short years, in which they play evolving roles – first as playwright and actress, then as lovers, then as husband and wife, and finally as invalid and caretaker, until Chekhov’s untimely death at the age of 44. Most of that time they spent apart by necessity – she at the Moscow Art Theatre, he in exile in Yalta, suffering from consumption. And yet they  shared more than a full lifetime of love and theatre as their relationship flourished and survived almost insurmountable obstacles through a constant stream of letters.

This play is the passionate and enduring record of their extraordinary love affair directed by multi award winning director Ariette Taylor and produced by multi award winning company A.C.T (formerly Petty Traffikers) it promises to be a piece not to be missed. You are invited to see the first showing of the play at a public reading to be given by husband and wife team Stewart Morritt and Anastasia Malinoff.

UK based Australian pianist, Tristan Lee returns to fortyfivedownstairs with a beautiful programme of Liszt, MacMillan and Rachmaninoff.

The first half of the programme consists of some of Liszt’s most impassioned writing commencing with the Three Petrarch Sonnets and Ricordanza.

The second half of the recital includes the celebrated contemporary Scottish composer, James MacMillan’s Piano Sonata of 1985.

Rachmaninoff’s set of Etudes-Tableaux Op. 33, bring the programme to a rousing close with a musical and physical ‘tour de force’

Programme:

Liszt- Sonetto 47 del Petrarca
Sonetto 104 del Petrarca
Sonetto 123 del Petrarca
Étude d’Exécution Transcendante No. 9 ‘Ricordanza’
Bagatelle sans tonalité
Rhapsodie hongroise No. 4

— interval —

MacMillan- Piano Sonata (1985)
Etudes-Tableaux Op. 33 (complete)

Tristan Lee is an Australian pianist currently residing in England.  Lee has recently gained a Master of Music Performance (with Distinction) from the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester) and is enjoying a busy performing schedule playing for audiences throughout the U.K., Europe and Australia.

X-Field is a collaborative group who work across the disciplines of art, architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism. We have identified the gaps that conventional practice has marginalised as fertile grounds for intervention: places of becoming, transaction, negotiation and improvisation.

X-Field will feature work by Charles Anderson, Richard Black, Mel Dodd, Sand Helsel, Andrea Mina and SueAnne Ware

Image: ‘Tidal Garden (detail), 2009′ by Richard Black .

An unexpected invitation to join an expedition to Cape York turned out to be the genesis of this exhibition of landscape paintings. As the trip’s photographer, James Yuncken accumulated an abundance of material.

“Creating a genuine sense of place demands more than just careful handling of all the details in the source material. I wanted to create as near as possible a sensual experience, to enable the viewer to enter that space, that landscape, experience its atmosphere, physical conditions and the sensations that shaped my experience of that location at that time.” James Yuncken

Image: ‘Safe Fill Level’ by James Yuncken 117 x 79 cm, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 2010.

Michael Grant is a businessman from the suburbs. Wayne Stevens is a killer, living in an unpredictable world of crime, drugs and violence, constantly teetering on the edge of life and death.

Grant and Stevens want each other’s lives. Grant’s violent longings are quelled by domestic concerns and his inability to escape from ordinariness, while Stevens yearns to become the quintessential suburbanite. When their paths finally cross, it seems they may have the opportunity to exchange fates. Shots explores Melbourne’s different worlds and the ways in which they co-exist and sometimes collide.

Shots is part of Flashpoint, rehearsed readings of winning scripts from The R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards.

A young woman returns home and finds herself wide awake in a sleepy little town. Alice is a bit of a space cadet. Everyone in Tathra thinks so, too. She wants to land. She wants to fit in. She has to fit in – her family needs her to sort herself out. However, no one in the town is really as normal as they look.

Return to Earth is a play about family, friends, love, sacrifice and re-connecting with the world.

Return to Earth is part of Flashpoint, rehearsed readings of winning scripts from The R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards.

Rhonda Is In Therapy deals with the overpowering grief of a mother after the death of her child. In order to survive the death of her beloved son, Rhonda Stoldt self-medicates by creating a therapist to talk to; this delusion shapes her daily life with her husband, surviving child and lover. Rhonda’s inability to deal with her loss has so changed her own emotional and intellectual landscape that she cannot determine what is real and what is imagined.

Rhonda Is In Therapy is part of Flashpoint, rehearsed readings of winning scripts from The R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards.

Run away to the Carnival, where circus stars and sideshow queens, poets and daredevils, painters, playwrights, aerialists and food artistes concoct a heady mix of unforgettable entertainment under a handmade starry sky

From Finucane & Smith, the world’s pre-eminent purveyors of provocative variety and intimate spectacle, including the award-winning The Burlesque Hour, comes the surreal indoor Carnival of Mysteries. Inspired by some of life’s most profound mysteries, this complex, multilayered, seductive and wild artistic experience will leave Festival audiences begging for more!

Overhead, underfoot and throughout four extraordinary intricate sites, the Carnival of Mysteries seduces audiences with the work of 30 unique artists commissioned to respond to the Mysteries of Innocence, Passion, Mercy, Forgiveness and Love.

Behind the intricate hoardings of ‘Sideshow Alley’ intimate pleasure halls offer entertainments for one to ten people; in the gorgeous ‘Pleasure Gardens’ tables, chairs and refreshments curve around the walls and spectacles surprise throughout the night; in the hidden ‘Shrine’ the grand piano plays for those in a reflective mood; and in the jewel of the Carnival crown, the hand decorated ‘Tent Of Miracles’, a new show can be seen every ten minutes. This Festival experience will linger on in your dreams long after the Carnival is over.

See attached schedule for performance times.