WE’VE had more versions of Storm Boy than we’ve had popes: it’s had a book, a film and a half-dozen stage plays. But Tom Holloway’s stage adaption for Barking Gecko and Sydney Theatre Company is the top-shelf gold standard of Colin Thiele’s tale about a boy who makes friends with a pelican called Mr Percival…

NORTH PERTH artist duo Snapcat has been chosen for the prestigious Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts Salon 2015. Comprising Anna Dunnill (26) and Renae Coles (28), over the past few weeks the pair has been amusing and baffling Perth with their “Tiny Parades,” micro marches about little issues like celebrating obsolete technology or mourning all…

IN a comedy theatre production honouring late UK fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, Bayswater actor Jim Chantry plays a liar. His character in Maskerade is world-famous tenor Enrico Basilica, who pretends to be a foreigner at an opera house set in Pratchett’s Discworld fantasyland Ankh-Morpork. Basilica even has a manager to translate the local language he…

FRENCH people have been celebrating the June solstice with music since 1982. “In every city, in bars, inside or outside, people are having drinks and enjoying the sun and the first day of summer,” says Valeriane Mathieu from Alliance Francaise de Perth. “There are amateur and professional musicians in the streets playing all styles of…

ADVERTISEMENT: Fremantle Chamber Orchestra Concert Notes for  June 6-7, 2015 Concert Notes by Peter Conole As the founder and helmsman of the FCO, Hans Hug makes a point of giving concert goers an unusual gift or two every year. He and his strong support team schedule works seldom performed in this country, notably from the great…

A VISIT to a Saigon bar some years ago was the inspiration for The Song Was Wrong, Perth Theatre Company’s latest offering at the State Theatre. Backdropped by piano music in the atmospheric bar in Vietnam’s French quarter, artistic director Melissa Cantwell was told of a piano player, “who fell in love with a French…

BATHROOM “selfies” snapped in privacy while getting ready for a night out are quite common, says artist and photographer Emily Hornum. By day the Edith Cowan University student works in a photo lab and she’s intrigued by the changes the digital era has wrought on photography: the way images are shared, concepts of private and…

AN artist from NSW has beat out local competition to win the $35,000 Harold Schenberg art prize at PICA’s Hatched national graduate show. Andrew Styan’s piece The Bell Buoy featured a rotating hunk of coal filmed live and projected into the gallery resembled “a hyper-realistic asteroid looming ever closer,” a comment on humanity’s impact on…

HE’S been dubbed “the African Sting”, but is Richard Bona really “one of the planet’s five revelations of the past decade”, as claimed in an international music magazine? “I’d agreed with that, he is a sensational musician, one of a few in a generation who will make his mark,” Perth International Jazz Festival artistic director…

KYLE BARTLETT is bringing indigenous hip-hop to Mt Lawley. The 27-year-old, who occasionally does some rapping on Bartlett Brothers tracks, is branching out on his own with his band Tribal Legacy. But don’t expect cliche-ridden lyrics about gangstas, bitches and “shizzle ma nizzle”. Instead, Bartlett wants to promote indigenous empowerment and education. “Growing up I…