Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
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…)
Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
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…)
Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
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…)
Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
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…)
Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
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…)
