Reviews

Chamber music is intimate and vulnerable and in the Primrose Potter Salon the players’ interactions with the music and collaboration with each other are on full display. The Alma Moodie Quartet features violinists Kristian Winther and Anna da Silva Chen, violist James Wannan, and cellist Miles Mullin-Chivers.

There is a wonderful connection underlying this piece. Circus performers are always testing the limits of human endurance and capability and so too were the first astronauts, especially the first woman.

The quite extraordinary Social Beast – a physical theatre/dance phenomenon – plays differently each night.  On stage there are five physically very varied, highly individual dancers: Liv Bell, Michelle McCowage, Michelle Mayumi Chinen, Jet Min and Sophia Derkenne.  Each wear quite different dance rehearsal clothing. Each of them is the epitome of contained focused energy as they move to Moses Carr’s dynamic live score.

In this utterly entertaining musical, the remarkable Vidya Makan’s thirteen original songs – with orchestration by Heidi Maguire - range in reference across the work of iconic Australian artists from Kylie Minogue to Jimmy Barnes and Paul Kelly.  But here, every song is a show tune, a musical number with precise, energetic and often very funny choreography by Amy Zhang.