WHEN you’re still dissecting your own family at the end of a slow, rainy trip home to Freo, it’s a good indication that Black Swan’s latest production of Tennessee Williams’ classic The Glass Menagerie has hit the mark. Director Clare Watson has taken Williams’ production notes to heart (“atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play…

GRAB your wooden stake, silver bullets and holy water – a new horror film festival is opening in Perth. Curated by local horror fans for horror fans, the Perth Horror Film Festival will have a strong emphasis on WA talent, screening shorts from locals filmmakers as well as classic full-length scaries like The Exorcist and…

SNOO’s debut single might be the most un-rock and roll song ever – it’s about rescue cats. As singer Lizzy Harskamp explains, they are pretty much a band of animal lovers, reflected in the film clip for their single After Dark, where they poorly audition for the musical Cats and get into all kinds of…

• Aussie stand-up Sam Kissajukian SOME of the most famous comics have suffered from brutal depression and mental illness. Robin Williams, Peter Cook and Jim Carey to name a few. During lockdown, Aussie stand-up Sam Kissajukian became obsessed with painting, creating 300 artworks in five months. Visualising what he couldn’t express with words, he painted…

A NOSTALGIC peek at life during the school holidays in the Bassendean burbs is one of the highlights of this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival. Captured on 16mm film, Bassendream whisks us back to the massive backyards and endless summers of our youth, capturing the last day of the school holidays in Perth in…

I WONDER if Goldman Sachs employees felt like the insect protagonist in Cicada when they were recently ordered to return to the office full-time after working from home during the pandemic. Cicada, a picture book by Perth oscar-winner Shaun Tan, follows a depressed insect who works in a grey cubicle in a grey soulless corporate…

THESE days, watching obscure music is as simple as typing “Peruvian death metal” into YouTube, but pre-internet you had to make the effort to ferret things out. In the early 1980s, one of the few ways to see authentic world music in Perth was at the Ethnic Music Centre, which held concerts showcasing local immigrant…

WHEN Dana Kazhimova went to watch a couple of friends perform the traditional music and dance of her native Kazakhstan, she had no idea of the impact it would have. “I was not a Kazakh dancing type of person,” she said. While she’d done the compulsory national dancing in primary school and her father had…

It only seems fitting that WA’s sexually-ambiguous burlesque scene has officially entered the post-gender age. This year’s burlesque state finals in Perth will do away with its Miss and Mr categories, replacing them with the all-encompassing ‘Mx’. “This competition is now open to all expression of gender identity,” says Mx Burlesque WA producer Melanie Piantoni…

A SURREAL comedy featuring a man dressed as a horse is just one of the wacky highlights of this year’s Over the Fence Comedy Festival. Featuring 13 hand-picked comedy shorts from Australia and around the globe, the festival specialises in dark, strange laughs with a good dose of irony. This year’s festival has the most WA…