SUICIDE, domestic violence and SAS snipers are linked in a play about masculinity at the Blue Room Theatre. Amour is a raw look at what makes men tick, and what’s really below the facade of the “strong, silent type”. Local playwright Tom Jeffcote says it’s “based…on the inability of men to speak of their feelings”.…

THE Blue Room Theatre kicked off its 2015 season with the introduction of Auslan interpreters for selected shows. Eastern states theatre have use deaf interpreters for some time and Victorian-based, Auslan Stage Left, says Perth’s deaf community wants the same. “It’s giving deaf people the opportunity to see different types of theatre,” co-director Susan Emerson…

DELIBERATELY barren, witch and bitch were just some of the many arrows fired at Julia Gillard. The vicious treatment of Australia’s first female prime minister in the national parliament and across the media exposed deep-seated gender discrimination in politics and the wider community, says composer Cat Hope. Now she and seven female composers have set…

A NAKED life-sized Freud slumped in a chair, tiny sculptures and huge tapestries are just some of the artworks at PICA’s An Internal Difficulty, Australian Artists at the Freud Museum. Back home, WA artists Thea Costantino, Pilar Mata Dupont, Susan Flavell, Tarryn Gill, Travis Kelleher and Andrew Nicholls took two years to create their works for…

TRACEY MOFFATT’S work can be found in in the Tate Modern Gallery in London, the Australian National Gallery, MONA in Tasmania, every state gallery, and private and public collections just about everywhere in between. Her work has also featured in the prestigious Venice Biennales, and the Sao Palo and Singapore Biennale. Which makes her arguably…

NED: Ideas You’ll Never Have is a parody of the popular TED talks. TED is a US-based non-profit organisation devoted to the lofty notion of Ideas Worth Spreading. People like Bill Clinton win TED awards for their 15-minute oratical flourishes on subjects as diverse as health for Rwanda to graphic design for newspapers. The clothes…

One of the most valuable things an arts experience can give to a young audience is curiosity – if they leave a gallery or theatre with more questions than answers, then the art has done its job. Our hope is that the challenge of those questions will one day become ideas to be shared with the world. Our…

DID I really see a man in a pin-striped suit doing a single-handed handstand on the head of a man reading The Times of London? Or one of the same men extend his body rigidly from a lamp post and proceed to “climb” an imaginary set of stairs, in time to Singing in the Rain?…

BONDAGE, pain, domination and sexual power collide in Black Swan Theatre’s Venus in Fur at the State Theatre’s Underground. David Ives work is a play-within-a-play, based on the 1870 novel Venus in Furs, written by the man masochism was named for, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. A simple set, just two actors and great chunks of dialogue…

HOORAY for Ben Target! That rhymes, by the way, if you speak its French pronunciation, “tar-jay” (like the department store). Target is having the last laugh after years of correcting people—and copping jokes, especially during his UK school days—by touring the world with a show that pokes fun at his name. “I’m fond of it…