Reviews

International Avant-garde musician Margaret Leng Tan is playfully dubbed ‘Queen of the toy piano’. Her new show Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, co-produced by Chamber Made and Culture Link Singapore, is a masterful experimental collage of music, spoken word, performance and visuals for the triennial Asia TOPA at the Arts Centre.

In a work featuring twelve short musical scores by Erik Griswold, director Tamara Saulwick and Tan have collaborated to devise a uniquely structured, visually stunning choreographic, sound-based performance.

Bell Shakespeare betters a run of disappointing shows with this conventional, touchingly domesticated telling of Hamlet. 

Screens of imposing snowclad forests surrounds the stage, interlaced in part with family videos of happier, nostalgic times for young Hamlet and his kin.

What’s the difference between actual and virtual realities? Not much, according to Laura McDonald’s play on being both trapped and liberated by technology.

Madeleine Osborne is Darcy, a young woman who spends much of her time living in a virtual reality headset, the game setting her challenges that distract her from the real world. Rhiannon Watson is, like, her ‘cool sister’, who has a job and a string of ex-boyfriends, reluctantly drawn into the game after her breakdown about her break-up.

Dimanche, presented by Cie Chaliwate & Cie Focus from Belgium is an extraordinary piece of ‘family theatre’, and is a welcomed addition to this year’s Adelaide Festival. We journey through inter-related sketches involving a small group of people facing apocalyptic change. Whilst never directly stated, this apocalypse is the result of severe climate change. Subsequently, whilst relatively harrowing and tragic, it is also extremely topical and relevant at this time.