Identity, gender, sexuality; feelings repressed by tradition explode in an innovative and expressive use of lacquer and oils by Vietnamese artist Giang Nguyen.

My paintings are my voice is an exhibition of recent abstract and figurative paintings by Hanoi based Nguyen.

The themes in Nguyen’s artworks are particularly poignant to the artist; a gay woman facing the challenges of living in a society where homosexuality is a taboo.

The large paintings in this series are created using a unique integration of traditional Vietnamese lacquer with oil paint.

Giang Nguyen is a leading member of the cutting-edge artist collective, Hanoi Link. Since graduating with a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts from Hanoi University in 2003 she has exhibited her paintings and installations in Vietnam, France (Paris) and Australia (Melbourne).

This exhibition is presented by Deborah Salter Fine Art. The exhibition will be opened by Dr Anette Van den Bosch.

An exhibition of photographs highlighting the extraordinary beauty and value of the Tasmania environment, and to open minds to the fact that these places are so valuable that peaceful protest is a legitimate tactic employed in the face of their imminent destruction.

In December 2004, 17 individuals and 3 groups were sued by Gunns Ltd, Australia’s largest wood chipper, for $6.4 million. A day later Gunns’ applied for approval to build a pulp mill in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley. Almost 5 years on, the case continues with 6 defendants remaining. The cases against the other defendants have been settled or unilaterally dropped by Gunns.

The opening date of the exhibition, 2 February 2010, coincides with the first day of the
Gunns20 trial.

This exhibition features photographs by: Senator Bob Brown; Olegas Truchanas; Peter Dombrovskis; Rob Blakers; and Wolfgang Glowacki.

Gagged: The Gunns 20 and other law suits details the inside story of the long running “Gunns 20” lawsuit and raises the need for law reform to protect public participation.

Gagged, written by The Wilderness Society’s former Legal Coordinator, Greg Ogle, puts the case in the context of a number of other similar cases which threaten free speech and the right to political protest.

The book launch is timed to coincide with the scheduled trial of the 4 remaining defendants in the Gunns 20 case, 5 years after the writs were issued and nearly 7 years after the protests which form the basis of the case.

All are welcome to this book launch, entry is free of charge.

MADE IN CHINA is a special musical event to mark Chinese New Year and the Federal Government’s Year of Australia in China. This is an opportunity to hear the sounds of the brave new world of contemporary Chinese culture.

MADE IN CHINA features the Australian premiere of the Melbourne City Council commission ’Visages peint dans les Opéra Békin III’ a theatrical work for Western opera singer and Peking Opera singer, featuring Australian soprano Xenia Hanusiak .

Composed by China’s leading contemporary composer Zhang Xiao fu especially conceived for Xenia, it was premiered at the Beijing Music Festival 2009. The work embraces east and west tonalities, bedded on Chinese traditional instruments sonorities all within the context of here and now contemporary creativity. It certainly has its virtuosic demands but the end result is that it brings a smile to the audience.

Artists: Xenia Hanusiak, Yi Zhang, Wang Zheng-Ting and Jim Atkins

Made in China is presented with support from the City of Melbourne

A series of colourful portraits which evoke Kandinsky, and art furniture that is pure Bauhaus.

Clark’s paintings are highly colored and deceptively naïve. Although in the modernist tradition following Cézanne, they are deliberately quirky, some grotesque.

His limited palette of intense pure colors both unifies and further enlivens his images.

There is a tribal existential depth to these sketch-like portraits. Some subjects seem perky and assertive, others withdrawn and fragile. Some are inwardly composed and others disturbingly anxious and troubled. The portraits reveal the individuality, varying moods and states of mind of these young people.

A series of new photographs by Imogen Barraga Hall

’as we shape landscape so it shapes us and all we do within it.

events of light and timing constantly illuminate the past which lives on within us psychologically and unconsciously.

the photographs in nature as history are seen moments resonating with what has passed in a given landscape, quiet refutations of time. fragments bringing the world a little closer to us, to completeness.’

Creator of cult hit cabaret Vaudeville X Michael Dalley joins forces with TV sketch comedy star Paul McCarthy to create this exquisitely cruel “anti-cabaret” with an acidic line-up of satirical numbers. Intimate Apparel takes a knife to the Australian cultural industry and the poor desperate souls who try to get intimate with the paying public!

Michael Dalley proves his mettle once again as one of this country’s mordant wits and music theatre luminaries” Lilly Bragge – The Saturday Age

Inventive, intelligent and entertaining… a little gem… Kate Herbert – Herald Sun

Don’t overlook this show…. Helen Razer …. The Age

Reading of a new work by Sandra Fiona Long
with Director/Performer Jodee Mundy, and Music by Mal Webb

A rock and roll memoir to the heart of a family tragedy. A coming of age story steeped in wicked humor, self obsession and poetry under sufferance.

Waiting for Isabella
(30mins)

Hold onto your hats, Miss Furr (Ellie Nielsen) is back in town with a monologue in the first act of the long-awaited sequel to Miss Furr and Miss Skeene (2006) by avant-garde playwright, novelist and painter Antoni Jach

Break (15mins)

Black Bag
(60mins)

Wes Snelling and Benn Bennett perform together with only a keyboard, a black bag, a handful of dreadful songs from the 1980s, and some bad German accents…..

BLACK BAG – There’s something in there for you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

….unique, absurd and downright infectious…. The Age

Tom Davies presents a new work in development.

Urged on by dread and an unruly imagination, a man keeps running…

an ir/regular gathering and  an evening of Subversion, creation, performance, ingestion, desire, adulation, laughter and especially “imbibing”…

with performers:

Kate Hunter: list n.  (1) a series of names, words, or other items written, printed, or imagined. (2) an arena for jousting tournaments or other contests. A place of combat. An area of controversy.

Jeff Stein: Agesilaus Santander – He looks him steadily in the eye, for a long time, and then retreats- in a series of spasms, but inexorably.

Ben Rogan: Crocodopolis – The grail legend meets midlife crisis. One hell of a tale about nothing really that exciting.

Sally Smith: The Dawning- A Retrospective – Sally Smith pays tribute to the grand dance divas of old.

Penny Baron: Fault Line – Banished- unseen but somewhere…waiting. Distorting movement, text and the hidden agenda.

David Wells: The Corridor: David Wells tells stories using his body and his mouth. His mouth runs in close association with his mind but his body never lies.

Carolyn Connors:  Nocturne: A solo vocal work created and performed by Carolyn Connors with sound by Dave Brown.

ACAPTA director, Gail Kelly, hosts an ‘in conversation’ with Independent physical performance artists.

Ira Seidenstein’s Qantam performance ‘A Whole Bunch of Clowns’

Benn Bennett and Chas Forrest’s House Music
(60mins)

Join Melbourne based duo Benn Bennett and Chas Forrest for an evening of Dark Cabaret, Folk and Electro music. Special guests for the evening include Forty Forty Home and a Dutch side show act by performance artist Mzzz Erin Tasmania.

Break (15mins)

We’re Doing Well
(20mins)

New young all women performance company, Forty Forty Home: Two prime time anchor women find themselves washed up and, horrifyingly, alone.

Meant to be Spoken: A champagne celebration of Australian Playwriting

As part of Searchlight Festival this year some of Melbourne’s most exciting new playwrights come together with some of our best loved established playwrights to present their own work in a Sunday afternoon celebration of new Australian play writing.

Meant to be Spoken presents selected works written and read by Adam Cass, Patricia Cornelius, David Mence, Declan Green, Tee O’Neill, Hannie Rayson and Amelia Roper and is hosted by Robert Reid.

Come join us at Searchlight Festival for a Sunday afternoon champagne soirée with some of Australia’s most exciting Playwriting Talent and celebrate the spoken word.

A duet for live body and film that maps a modern Cordelia and her “Lear-like father” onto the bones of Shakespeare’s Lear and his silent daughter.

Concept, film, co-creator, performer Deborah Leiser-Moore, director, co-creator Meredith Rogers, choreographer Sally Smith;

…deeply textured, multilayered and savagely poetical work,,,,, Real Time 94

Here is theatre – visceral, elemental, brutal – that will heave your heart into your mouth. Rob Conkie (Shakespeare Project)

….a multi-stranded narrative that literally pulsates, like an exposed heart, with  deep feeling and mystery. Ari Roth (Theater J, Washington DC)

The Memory Progressive is a new contemporary dance and multi-media work by young and emerging dance company Phantom Limbs.

Central to the work are themes of memory loss, the role of technology in mental reconstruction, and the phenomenon of telepathy.

The Memory Progressive is a collaboration between the founders of Phantom Limbs, Amy Macpherson and James Welsby, and Sydney based composer and animator James P Brown.

Amy Macpherson, James Welsby, and new Phantom Limbs members Lily Paskas, and Rennie McDougall will perform the work.

The Memory Progressive is being developed under the support of Arts ACT and supported in Victoria by the City of Melbourne. Theatre Works, QL2 Centre for Youth Dance, and design studio The Illogical Study are also supporting the project.

Mary Edquist lives in Melbourne and is an emerging artist who resumed her painting career in 2004

’Because it took me so long to get back into painting it is both a relief and an exhilarating release.  Impelled by these emotions I try to grasp that moment before it vanishes, to find structure and clarity in the maelstrom of suburban existence.
 
As an Australian (and more particularly a Melburnian) I am fortunate in my influences, aware but not over burdened by European artistic traditions.  I have also absorbed something of a sparseness and spatial proportions of indigenous art.  These contrasting styles of representing the human condition form a fruitful dynamic and my paintings which deal with natural forms, with water, rocks and trees are a synthesis of these contrasting forces.’

Being men in the modern world is no laughing matter…


One room. Three men. This is the last time. They are so close to the end. They just need to keep it together for one more hour. Will they make it? Drug-addled Guy (Samuel Johnson) is ‘celebrating’ his birthday. He is in a dark, needy headspace and desperate to connect to life and participate in it. Jules (Jay Bowen) is the suave charmer, a leopard in an expensive shirt. He’s got the girl and is living life to the max. But Jules wants more. Enter Bob (Justin Rosnaik). With a hysterically unique brand of wisdom, Bob surveys life and contemplates relationships through the lens of a sex-maniac.

Sarah Hallam, a renowned casting agent has gathered four of Australia’s finest actors, including Samuel Johnson, Justin Rosniak, Jay Bowen and Georgia Bolton. A stalwart of the entertainment industry, Sarah Hallam’s directorial poses a tantalising question ... What happens to MEN when directed by a vibrant, contemporary woman?

The 2010 season of MEN at fortyfivedownstairs is presented by Peregrine Corporate Ltd in association with Lucy Freeman and is proudly supported by Open Channel, Ed Hardy, Poverty Hill Wines, Final Sound, Jason Coleman’s Ministry of Dance and EPR.

In Vestiges, photographer Jo Daniell presents photographs of the Outback that explore its timelessness, looking at the landscape in a Pre-European way. His fascination with the marks that nature makes on the surface of the land, the memories of actions, form abstractions that give him a path toward comprehending and elucidating the fundamental characteristics of this unique environment

These works present an awareness of nature, of art, and the essence of landscape. They have a masterful consciousness of the visual abstraction, the motifs – the vestiges – that nature forms.

‘Is this what you believe?‘, is an examination and a critique of the ontological landscape of a contemporary city. It questions the acts of Ritual and the idea of the Sacred, especially as it is placed within the dominant culture - a culture that is nothing, if not secular, materialist and wedded to hedonism and entertainment. Nick Tsiavos brings together four remarkable musicians to join him in this work, all their histories indicate a willingness and an ability to search for transcendent beauty within the grit and dissonance of modern art music.

Featuring: Nick Tsiavos, Adam Simmons, Eugene Ughetti, Peter Neville and Deborah Kayser.

This performance is supported by City of Melbourne.

Love and Loss; Storm and Stress; Classical Symmetry and the emergence of Romantic Spirit.

This is the story of Haydn’s little heard Opus 20 quartets and his later regal Opus 77 quartets, with the beautiful textures and warm sounds of gut stringed instruments. Visit an age of eighteenth century elegance and intrigue with twenty-first century time-travellers Ironwood, as we take you on a dramatic musical journey with Haydn The Bold, Haydn The Beautiful.

Australia\'s renowned historically informed ensemble will perform early and late Haydn string quartets, a beautiful miniature by Boccherini, and a world premiere by Australian composer Damian Barbeler, Silk Panels for gut stringed instruments of the classical age.

Ironwood are: Rachael Beesley and Julia Fredersdorff, violins; Nicole Forsyth, viola and Daniel Yeadon, cello.

“...fantastic. This ensemble is quite something!” Canberra Times, March 2009