SHAKESPEARE’S St Crispin’s Day speech (Henry V) has been a rallying cry for battle down the ages, and was even used recently by rugby coach Walley Lewis to gee up his “troops” pre-game. More than 400 years after it was penned it resonates with the turbulent brutality of conflict around the modern world, showing little…

THE ROOM is the worst movie ever made, a melodrama about a love triangle that is so bafflingly bad it’s gained a cult following and now draws big crowds to screenings across the globe 10 years after its release. Greg Sestero, one of its “stars”, is coming to Perth to answer questions about the film…

DREAMS OF COUNTRY is the latest exhibition by artists and cousins Daisy and Hannah Courtauld showing at the YMCA HQ Gallery in Leederville until July 11. Deriving its name from indigenous Australian concepts of Dreaming and “going country” the showcase is based upon themes of identity and place. Entry is free to view the 16…

A PHONE interview with artist Helen Ansell was a tense and anxious affair on my behalf. The gregarious Geraldton local was anything but difficult, but she was expecting a baby “any minute now”. “I’m nine days overdue,” she cheerfully told the Voice. Baby number two and an exhibition at the same time weren’t some weird avant…

WINDY Perth is a city at the mercy of the changing winds of the mining industry, so a play about a red dust storm completely blanketing the metropolitan area has resonance. The inspiration for Dust was the 2009 dust storm that closed Sydney, but the content is pure Western Australia—and its mining culture. Living in…

FROM roadkill to life—albeit still—isn’t a quantum leap for artist Marian Drew. For years the Brisbane-based artist has used dead native animals in her works, to highlight the loss of species from urbanisation. “It helps people know what’s actually there living with us,” Drew tells the Voice. But the allure of death, however beautifully posed…

WARNING FOR THE FAINT-OF-HEART This review has a rude word in it. The children, think of the children! A  PLAY with a name that’s stronger than the brew it derides—be warned, we spell it out in full in the next paragraph—is showing now at the Mary Street Bakery on Beaufort Street, Mt Lawley. Fuck Decaf…

“IF women have so many choices today, why do they all come in pink?” asks photographer and academic Deedee Noon. Her exhibition Pinkification: Rethinking Pink grew out of an entry a couple of years ago in FotoFreo. The series of portraits looks at the impact, and conflicting messages, of “pink is for girls”. The portrait…

THE Sextet Dukes is putting the cool back into the ukelele, an instrument invented by Portuguese labourers slaving on the plantations of Hawaii in the 1880s. Relegated for years to child’s toy status they’ve been enjoying a resurgence of credibility thanks in part to Paul McCartney playing one at a George Harrison memorial concert. The…

EVERYONE loves jazz—they just don’t know it, says singer Kristin Beradi, who’ll soon be in town for the Perth International Jazz Festival. The booming base notes of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World prove her point. And who doesn’t know Glen Miller’s In the Mood or that the Boogie Woogie bugle boy was in Company…