MYTH and cultural and gender relationships are played out in a mix of theatre and dance as the Blue Room opens its 2016 season with Selkie, an ancient Celtic legend presented with fresh eyes. Written by Finn O’Branagain it’s based on the myth of seals shedding their skins to become women: as the creatures played…

WITH a massive mural to complete in record time for Elizabeth Quay’s water playground Fremantle’s J-Shed artists Jenny Dawson and Sandra Hill put the word out to their ceramic artist mates for help. “Eight different artists were working on it,” Dawson says. Nyoongar elder and ceramicist Hill has written the story of the lakes that…

WHEN Elvis Presley appeared on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, his hip gyrations were so shocking to American parents that ‘The Pelvis’ was filmed from the waist up. “When people come to see my show I’ll show them what happens from the waist down,” Elvis impersonator Max Pellicano says from his home…

YOU’D do anything for your kids, right? Video artist Pasquale Giorgi proved that point, convincing her dad to do karaoke for her final year art project. Adding insult to injury he was singing a Latin translation of Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face. “I translated from software, I’m not sure how faithful they were, a lot…

SHAKESPEARE was not only England’s greatest playwright and poet, he conveniently died on the day he was born, April 22. Which is also the eve of St George’s day, and the death of the dragon and the birth and death of the bard, will be commemorated at St George’s Cathedral. “It’s a one-off event to…

PIRACY and cultural cringe is killing Australian cinema, film buff Matt Eeles says. “We would rather pay $25 to see Transformers Part 9 [watching] the same thing over and over, instead of supporting our own culture.” Australian films are gathering attention at international festivals, but back home are on limited release, usually in art house…

THE conversation kept drifting back to Iceland, despite photographer Tom Grasso’s protestations he didn’t have a favourite amongst the many wild and beautiful countries he’d visited recently. A photograph of an Icelandic glacial lagoon drew elegant words from the normally taciturn 27-year-old, telling the Voice it was the top location on his list and a…

THE dark underworld of black market selling and “entrepreneurial” trading had audiences trawling Subiaco streets at night as part of Blackmarket, an edgy street performance, for the Perth International Arts Festival. Based on the collapse of capitalism, in a world where money has no value, audience members traded possessions for survival skills and services, including…

THEIR dark and savagely humorous claymation films brought Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg to the world’s attention. But for Swedish animator Djurberg it’s a side of her work she is inured to, and with a certain Germanic toughness (she and Berg live in Berlin) she dismisses others’ squeamishness. “People go to see art to experience…

A EUREKA Stockade-style flag made from old high-vis shirts, street signs overprinted and finely etched impressionist views of Perth from the air. They’re all part of Built, at Linton and Kay Gallery in Perth, an artistic response to WA’s social, cultural, economic, political, ethnic and geographical environment post the recent mining boom. It’s by emerging…