IF a picture is worth a thousand words, surely a piece of classical music is worth a million. Orchestral works can move people to tears and it’s no surprise  they feature heavily in iconic films. Who can forget the soaring theme in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the dramatic fanfare in Rocky or the moving refrain in…

A DISABLED girl group that wear their heart on their sleeve are making their WA debut at the Perth International Cabaret Festival this month. The five members of The Sisters of Invention have a range of learning difficulties including blindness, cerebral palsy, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, Williams Syndrome and an intellectual disability. But this doesn’t…

FANCY walking inside a giant eyeball and then down a serpentine tunnel that leads to someone’s brain?  Synapse is just one of the weird arty installations at this year’s Strange Festival, which features more than 20 outré artworks in empty shopfronts and neglected spaces across the city. More than 30 artists have been given carte…

WHEN playwright Henrik Ibsen had his female lead walk out on her family in A Doll’s House, it was considered radical for its late-19th century audience.   Whether it would still be considered radical today is at the heart of a sequel making its WA premiere at the Blue Room Theatre from June 13.  …

MOST artists trample the corn around their existential crisis, but Perth painter Robert Gear met his head on. It all came bubbling up after he read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a set of poems tackling the weighty themes of time, mortality, religion and spirituality. With metaphysical clocks spinning around his head and the grim reaper…

THE Ellington 15 is a deeply personal exhibition. It features some of the best photographs taken at the Perth jazz club since it opened in 2009, and was curated by photographer Angelyne Wolfe. She was the partner of jazz pianist Graham Wood when he setup the Ellington, and Wolfe took photos at the club during…

AN inflatable God with green hair and skinny arms, an Australian barista who makes men from magic coffee beans, and a group therapy session where all the participants are dead. These are just some of the wacky characters and plots in the 2024 Over the Fence film festival, which is dedicated to off-beat and subversive…

IT WAS so weird and dark it polarised audiences and critics on its initial release. Most of us are familiar with the iconic Twin Peaks TV show from the early 1990s, but shortly after it finished, director David Lynch made Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a movie prequel to the series. Charting the last…

THERE’S a searing honesty to Angela Stewart’s art. The North Fremantle-based artist likes to peel back the layers to expose the doubt that occurs during the early stages of creating a painting. She then uses that to fashion something unique and a bit meta. One of her techniques involves painting a face, photographing it, then…

INSPIRED by their theatrical hit Black Brass from the 2021 Perth Festival, African-born musicians Mahamudo Selimane and Mararo Wangai have put together a purely musical venture which launches at Clancy’s in Fremantle on April 28. The pair now live in Perth and will release their album Khululeko, which means Freedom in one of the languages…