EIGHT years after becoming an artist, James Cross is preparing to display his works to the public for the first time. “I started doing art when I was up in Darwin in palliative care,” he says. Years before when he was building houses for poor communities overseas, he never imagined he’d be an artist. But…

IT will be jazz hands galore when Adam Hall and the Soul Playboys play a two-hour fundraiser in Perth later this month. All proceeds from Jazz for a Cause go to the Solaris Cancer Fund, and with the Playboys’ set including songs by Stevie Wonder, Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars, it’s set to be a…

FOUR years after the tragic death of pioneering engineer CY O’Connor, his daughter Kathleen immigrated to bohemian Paris in 1906. The artist spent most of her life there, occasionally returning home, but her Parisian manners and dress sense didn’t go down well in conservative Perth. The painter’s life and art are featured in the exhibition…

IF your kids are driving you nuts during the school holidays, fear not, because the Awesome International Arts Festival for Bright Young Things is back. The annual Perth festival has a heap of shows from Australia and overseas for kids aged 12 or under. It opens on a musical high with Simon Tedeschi’s Pianist and…

TRASH is treasure for artist Susan Flavell. Her Hamilton Hill studio is crammed with broken crockery and a mind boggling assortment of bric-a-brac, including the bust of an oriental woman she discovered on a vacant lot in China. Op-shops are another rich vein of inspiration and Flavell is more than happy to accept other people’s…

ONE of the world’s most successful instrumental rock guitarists, Joe Satriani, will play the Astor Theatre in November. “Satch” is a technical virtuoso who can pretty much play anything on an axe, but throughout his long career he’s never lost sight of melody, and his music appeals to both guitar nerds and the mainstream. Readers…

A CROSS between a cage fight and The Office, Cockfight explores masculinity through the medium of dance. The show’s theme – an older male being challenged by a younger buck in the corporate world – is an old one, but the aggressive dance routines give Cockfight an original twist, with bodies slamming into office furniture…

MONKEY magic, Aboriginal spirituality and a space station crashing near Esperance form a bewildering whole in Skylab. The play is the first co-production between Indigenous theatre company Yirra Yaakin and Black Swan, and the first play written by WAAPA graduate Melodie Reynolds-Diarra. Skylab follows Aboriginal couple Nev (Alan Little) and Jem (Laila Rind), who live…

A DAVID BOWIE ukelele tribute band may sound like a piss-take, but the Thin White Ukes take their music very seriously. The band’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Bowie’s mid-70s persona The Thin White Duke, and like the glam rocker’s shadowy character their music is deep and layered. “Our music is complex,” says frontman Michael…

WHAT is the truth and how can politics and the media distort it? That is the central theme of Threshold, a play set in a Sydney newsroom in 2016. The play was inspired by journalist Chris Kenny’s first visit to Nauru in late-2015, but there’s also an “opaque reference to what’s happening in the US…