Liz Seymour and the words

Arts Hub Australia, 19th May 2008

Prior to speaking with Frankie Airey, I had been advised that what she doesn’t know about fundraising is not worth knowing. Whilst I’m hardly equipped to play quizmaster in this area, it would be some task to formulate a question she could not navigate smoothly in her residual motherland lilt. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 15th May 2008

Jeff Lang, Half Seas Over album and Tour, The Toff In Town, Melbourne, Saturday 10 May 2008

In addition to a stellar turn as poster boy for the new millennium resurgence of lush facial hair, Australian singer-songwriter Jeff Lang also does a fine line in blues and folk. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 12th May 2008

 The nine-month wait endured by most expectant parents is enough to tip them into hyper-reactive neurosis by week three. So for a man who has waited almost two years to find out whether his baby will be the anatomically correct festival of which every Artistic Director dreams, Next Wave’s Jeff Khan sounds impressively mellow, if a little weary. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 23rd April 2008

It is a mildly disarming moment when Daniel Keene’s otherwise measured conviction in discussing his work abruptly segues into palms-up bewilderment. This moment comes as it must have done so many times before, when faced with the question of his almost disproportionate success in Europe – in particular chez those dramaphiles, the French – when compared with a somewhat diminutive if plaudit-festooned public profile in his home country. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 18th April 2008

Earlier this month, three young artsworkers were honoured for their outstanding contributions to community arts and culture. Two Young Leaders awards were given to Frances Bunji Elcoate, a multimedia artist and artsworker based in the Northern Territory, and Alison Richardson, a Sydney-based theatre director and producer whose work centres on arts facilitation for youth and people with a disability. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 9th April 2008

Ten years ago, the internet was still a novelty and mobile phones had dimensions similar to those of the few people who owned them. In 2008, mobile phones contain the internet and slide into your wallet where the photos of your kids used to be. Fortunately these are now also on your phone.

We are urged by mainstream news networks to record unfolding catastrophes on whatever digital device comes to hand and leaving the house sans camera results in the sin of having nothing to show of your day at its end. In the midst of such a frenzy of self-documentation and citizen journalism, former U.S. Vice President and reigning Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt noticed a considerable gap in the market. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 2nd April 2008

Through all accounts of the life and times of Mstislav Rostropovich runs a common thread which, when viewed at a distance, would seem to be stitched into the word “enormous”, or something very like it. His talent, passion, warmth, sympathy and humanity were prodigious, and as long-time friend and interpreter Anthony Steel explains, “Once you were a friend of Slava’s you were a friend for life”.

A cellist of unparalleled dynamism, a masterful conductor and pianist and an indefatigable activist and friend, Rostropovich’s art and life merged in such a fluid circle as to render one barely distinguishable from the other. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 26th March 2008

By the opening of the London Olympics in 2012, fifty years will have passed since Newsweek cited Charles de Gaulle’s wry enquiry as to how anyone could be expected to “govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?”. Half a century and around 240 kilometres away across the Channel, Keith Khan’s challenge as Head of Culture for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad seems rather more daunting and his subjects more expectant than your average Roquefort.

So just how do you coordinate a celebration of culture in a nation whose capital alone hears over 300 languages spoken every day?

“Well I certainly don’t think that one size fits all,” Khan affirms with the faintest of dry laughs. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 26th March 2008

Now I’ve enjoyed a spot of Creedence Clearwater Revival as much as anyone with a fondness for rhythm and twang, but after patiently riding the light-rail car that is John Fogerty’s personal Revival across dead flat mid-west country plains and straight through towns like Sting, The Eagles and Epic Rock, it occurred to me that a similar and yet more apt title might have been Reanimation, if only the challenge thrown down by either had ever stood a dueller’s chance of being met. (more…)

Arts Hub Australia, 19th March 2008 

An instrumental ABC Classics album bearing a Bon Jovi title track had me quaking in my sceptical stilettos, but by the opening bars of Bed of Roses’ third track I had kicked them right through the walls of my glass house and sunk down to be immersed in this unfathomably successful classical-pop fusion. (more…)