... LEGENDARY SHOWGIRLS, LEGENDARY ACTS...

OPENS JUNE 25 2009

The legendary, indefinable, genre busting, burlesque-eats-its-young salon that has critics raving and festival audiences around the world in raptures returns with LEGENDS. From every facet of the eye-popping, show-stopping spectrum, the Burlesque Hour brings you an international line up of LEGENDS to set your thrillometer to ten.

Every fortnight a new LEGEND. Don’t you miss out.

From London cult cabaret legend Ursula Martinez, star of the Olivier Award winning La Clique, purveyor of the infamous hanky strip; to three time Helpmann and Green Room winner, Australia’s darkest singing angel, Paul Capsis, “in possession of a voice that sounds like an act of God” (Scotsman); to Miss Toni Lamond The Legend of Australian Variety, Order of Australia, Keys to the City of Melbourne, and declared by the Sydney Morning Herald as “The Ultimate Showgirl”, The Burlesque Hour mixes it up with the very very best stars of the stratosphere.

Add to that internationally acclaimed Mistress of Grand Guignol Moira Finucane, Japanese electric shock butoh dancer Yumi Umiumare; the elegant iconoclast Maude Davey; smouldering circus siren Azaria Universe; the growing kitten-exploitation legend of wild dancers Kitten K.O and you have BURLESQUE HOUR … LEGENDS

From Japan to Edinburgh, Slovenia to New Zealand, Italy to Croatia, audiences have snatched up every last ticket. Next stop Shanghai! Dress Up. Book Now.

‘Outrageous and unforgettable’ The Times, UK

'Fantastico' Il Piccolo, Italy

‘Jaw dropping, feisty, seductive, dynamic…Unmissable. Edinburgh Guide, UK

‘Fantastically indecent’ WD Mag, Japan

EACH LEGENDARY GUEST PLAYS 2 WEEKS ONLY … HURRY!


Guest Performance Dates:

Ursula Martinez: 24 June – 5 July
Paul Capsis: 9 July – 19 July
Toni Lamond: 23 July – 2 Aug


Please note: The Burlesque Hour contains nudity and occasional strong language.


Burlesque Hour LEGENDS would not be possible without the generous support of Sofitel Melbourne On Collins - Hotel for the Arts, and fortyfivedownstairs.

"Travelling in Ethiopia gives one the Orlando-like illusion of living through different centuries".
(Delva Murphy, Ethiopia with a Mule, 1968)

The extraordinary landscapes of the Simien Mountains evoke feelings of temporal dislocation, of being transported to another time. Is it 2008i, or 2001 or 1588? In these photographs Handfield captures the
feeling that he experienced in Ethiopia, and most strongly in the Simien Mountains. The beauty of the landscape and the unique quality of the light gave the artist an uncanny sense of recognition, like being in a sublime 19th Century landscape painting.

Handfield’s work is purely photographic, but it has strong affinity for the way that painters use colour. Digital photography has freed photography from the constraints of film and chemistry enabling the photographer to define the way that the camera ‘sees’ colour and how that is subsequently translated into the print. In this exhibition Handfield embraces this new painterly quality of digital photography to explore connections with the sublime landscape tradition.

Tim Handfield is a Melbourne based photographic artist. His work is held in several National collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Otherwise, by Claire Henly, is a collection of window boxes filled with possessions and poetry. A shotgun loader and a pair of shears. White gloves and a thimble. Measuring tape encircles a memory box of children’s toys. Train tracks rest on sheet music. Past due notices, written in ox blood, surround a rhythmical pattern of watch cogs.
 
In each piece, the objects come together to trace the outline of a personality, an emotion, a sense of place. All freeze, for a moment, the ephemeral.
 
The familiarity of the objects and the sentiments they inspire invite the viewer to enter another world. Each piece is at once disconnected from yet intimately linked with our reality.  

As an exhibition, they evoke feelings of inevitability, frustration even entrapment. Yet, these impressions are only half formed, the stories only partially constructed by the objects and the words. Viewers become part of the narrative.

Two artists, 30 years of pushing the brush around, grappling to engage with form, light, colour and meaning in the Australian landscape.
Smiley Williams and Ian Bracegirdle are friends and colleagues who have worked and painted together frequently over the years. Though full of contrast, their points of contact are demonstrated in this exhibition. The paintings and drawings in this current showing largely originated from field trips to the You Yangs and the Murray made in the last year.

Bracegirdle spends time on location collecting visual samples and fragments in the form of pencil and gouache sketches. Once back in the studio he recycles the material, rearranging textures, terrain and patterns in a deliberate decision to experiment with form and meaning in context. The works are often not representations of a specific location, but reconstructed and emotional responses to it.

Most of Williams’ paintings are done on site, with occasional adjustments made back in the studio. While based on the ‘observable’, the paintings are less concerned with literal representation than response to the subject. Colour and form may be manipulated or heightened in order to express the artist’s feeling of the unique qualities of each site. Williams exults in colour and in the application and plasticity of paint itself.

Together they have created a considerable body of work that presents a diverse and insightful
response to the landscape in which, though we may often feel separate from it, we are immersed.

This mysterious garden on canvas is a selection of plants including; weeds, vegetables, cultivated flowers and more.

Transplant is an exhibition of transprints combining dye and plants; their natural juice and heat.

In the spirit of a cottage garden the works will be scattered throughout the space in small groups.
Collectively Transplant conveys the notion that even the most annoying weed can be a source of marvel.

A play written by Susie Anderson
Directed by Ariette Taylor


Daedelus said to his son Icarus.
Beware!
Don't fly to close to the sunday
But Icarus soared higher and higher until finally all that remained were feathers floating on the waiting sea below.

'Wings' is a play inspired by the real and imagined lives of Amelia Earhart, Nancy Bird Walton and Gaby Kennard.

A play that explores the concept of courage, fear and escape.

Why some of us take risks so we may fly.

A tribute to Australia's Military forces in Timor in WW2 and the debt owed to the Timorese people who courageously supported them.


A photographic exhibition commemorating the activities of the Australian military services in what was Portuguese Timor during WW2 opens at the fortyfivedownstairs Gallery, Tuesday, July 28, on display for one week only.

Debt of Honour highlights the close co-operation and bonds of friendship between the Australians and Timorese during the Japanese invasion and occupation of Portuguese Timor incursion towards Australia.

These WW2 photos from the Australian War Memorial Museum archives; from private collections of some of the few remaining Australian soldiers and The Fairfax and News Ltd groups, who kindly donated the reunion images, tells the story of the close camaraderie between our countries.

"Your friends do not forget you”

Included in the display is the propaganda leaflet in Portuguese which was dropped in 1944 on Portuguese Timor by the Far East Liaison Office. It was meant to support and assure the Timorese that the Australians were their friends and that Allied forces were coming to re-take the country from the Japanese

With this year marking the 10th anniversary of East Timor's "vote for" independence, the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival opens on July 24th with the BALIBO Film - the political thriller about the events surrounding the execution of five journalists during Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975.

Debt of Honour a concept of Bruce Butler, Member of Friends of Same Group. Curated by Bruce Butler and Jacqueline Taylor OAM, Director, OzLink Entertainment and is mounted and touring through OzLink Entertainment.

Lost Dogs is a photographic exhibition that demands attention. The exhibition depicts the plight of the dogs at The Lost Dogs’ Home in North Melbourne, the largest animal shelter in Australia. The goal of showing these emotionally evocative images is to raise the public’s awareness of the harsh existence faced by unwanted and discarded animals in an urban environment, while educating people about what it means to be a responsible pet owner. This is a unique look into Australia’s busiest animal shelter that begun it s life in 1913. There has never been a photographic documentary of this scale completed on The Lost Dogs Home.

Selective focus and prominent textures have been used in the photographs to emphasize reality in this emotional series. The images give you a sense of being present and being able to reach out and feel the textures of a dog’s coat, the softness of a pile of blankets or the hardness of the concrete floor. This exhibition will leave viewers with an insight into the running of Australia’s largest animal shelter and give them a renewed desire to make a difference.

This exhibition is a not-for-profit project.

These works on paper, using oil pastel and oil stick, are the second installment in a series of pictures set around Sydney Harbour 1788-92, inspired by the early encounters between the British and the indigenous Australians who lived there.

Zero & Not refers to the title of Joseph Kosuth’s 1985 –87 silk-screened pages that figuratively erased the words of writers and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud with a single black continuous line. Kosuth’s Zero & Not, which simultaneously unmade one work while making another in a Janus-faced act of destruction and creation, is used as the conceptual point of departure for this exhibition that explores absence, negation and erasure in contemporary art.


The artworks exhibited in Zero & Not have been contributed by a selection of emerging and mid-career artists, and each engage — in highly divergent manners — in the representation of absence via presence. This concept is explored through atypical modes of portraiture, such as associative representation, constructed or artificial identities, such as avatars, and through a technical process of removal or disengagement, as is the case with Kosuth. Censorship is also a method of erasure, as is appropriation or copying, in the Baudrillardian sense of creation through copying (which is, in a sense, an act of destruction).


These types of absent gestures in art’s history have included Joseph Beuys’s tallow eulogies that literally punctuated the landscape of postwar Germany, or Bruce Nauman’s bodily- and Rachel Whiteread’s object-based impressions. Similarly, the notion of creation through destruction has been explored thoroughly (some might say devastatingly) by Jake and Dinos Chapman, who purchased a complete set of Francisco de Goya’s 80 etchings constituting the Disasters of War series, and then set about decorating the prints with their own images of puppy and clown heads. The artworks exhibited in Zero & Not reflect upon the legacy of the absent gesture in art, whilst considering its future in a series of conceptual and visual explorations into the poetic act of erasure.

Rehearsed readings of winning scripts from The R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards

Big Noise, by Aidan Fennessy
Wednesday 26 August, 7.30pm

A woman lies bleeding on a darkened city street after a near-fatal attack. Big Noise traces the diffuse intersections over the course of a day that lead to a horrific crime. Strangers collide, streets intersect, and lives are changed forever. One night. One city. Six stories. Big Noise drills down into the everyday dislocation of life at the crossroads in a big city.



Topsy, by Kit Lazaroo
Thursday 27 August, 7.30pm

It’s 1906 and three Australians arrive on Coney Island, New York, to witness the execution by electrocution of a rogue elephant called Topsy. Bruna is a journalist documenting the event for a small newsletter, and she befriends an illiterate adventuress, Clothilde. They encounter Grenitch, a would-be revolutionary, at the Hotel Scheherezade. The three deprive each other of sleep with their fears, secrets and suspicions, while the elephant-keeper, Vasco, tries to extract money from them. The characters gradually move from posturing to revelation in this story of cruelty and incarceration in the carnival world of peepshows and alleyways.
DIRECTOR: JANE WOOLLARD.
CAST: GEORGINA CAPPER, COLIN JAMES,
CAROLE PATULLO, ALEX PINDER



Whiteley’s Incredible Blue, by Barry Dickins
Friday 28 August, 7.30pm

‘Voluptuous French ultramarine light arrives upon a tiny Japanese meditation garden. Some gentle but insistent breeze worries at the incredibly beautiful bamboo plants... It seems a storm is to come. Mental; mortal; whatever.’ Set
either before, during or after Brett Whitleley’s untimely death (or all three), this one-person play, originally commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is a wild, transgressive journey into the great painter’s life and imagination by Melbourne’s most poetic playwright. A verbal extravaganza of the first order, the play expresses in words, rhythm and physical movement what Whiteley’s paintings express in vivid colours, outrageous forms and disturbing images – bold expressions of Australia’s collective unconscious.
ACTOR: NEIL PIGOT. DIRECTOR: JULIAN MEYRICK. DESIGNER: MEREDITH
ROGERS. LIGHTING DESIGNER: KERRY SAXBY. MUSICIANS: ROBERT
GEORGE, ROBERT CALVERT, PIETRO FINE (THE HOWLEY CALVERT JAZZ TRIO)

European Nights Series 2009.
Two Cellists. One Pianist. Two Programmes.

In this the second programme, the powerful and inspiring Germanic composers are presented, featuring Brahm's Cello Sonata op 2 no 99.

Felix Mendelssohn Cello Sonata no 2 op 58
Kurt Weill Cello Sonata op 4
Johannes Brahms Cello Sonata no 2 op 99

In 2008, The Yarra Trio established itself as one of Australia's most sought after chamber groups. In 2009, each concert will include a world premiere, a piano masterpeice and a lesser-known gem. Before each recital, join us fro a wine tasting hosted by the award-winning Sanguine Estate and a pre-concert talk with ABC Classic FM presenter Emma Ayres. Book early to avoid disappointment!

Programme 2: Monday 30 November
Beethoven Trio in B flat major, op 97 "Archduke"
TBA Winner, The Yarra Trio National Composition Award 2009
Rachmaninoff Trio Eligiaque no 2 in D minor, op 9