PROGRAM GUIDE : Fresh Performance

Expect clothes off, skates on and plastic pistols cocked. Bach and Miley Cyrus. Big dance numbers and slights-of-hand. A visit from the spirit of Vaslav Nijinsky and a deep yearning for lithium. Argentine choreographer Marina Otero un-tames the stage and smears lines between art and life, in her latest piece of vivacious bodily research.

In this adaptation from Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza, a neurodiverse cast give “to be or not to be?” a new, life-affirming perspective. It’s a dazzling mash-up that melds film with live performance and turns the age-old question of Hamlet’s madness back in on itself. Presented with UMAC.

Dance as raw autobiography. Visionary British choreographer Botis Seva opens his life up for a kind of hip-hop exorcism—a storm of limbs, precise and unruly solos. An Olivier-Award-winning production hat asks—how can we fight through vice to find peace?

A live docu-drama from re: group that crackles with wit and energy. Enter the mind’s eye of Bub, an 11-year-old girl who’s obsessed with documentary filmmaking. In the aftermath of a family breakdown, she turns to dramatised re-enactment to try to figure out what happened. Each night two new unrehearsed actors play the parents, while Bub directs the action. Presented with Arts Centre Melbourne.

Karin McCracken is someone you want by your side on that walk down lonely street to the Heartbreak Hotel. The Wellington-based company EBKM’s newest work is a look at what heartbreak does to our bodies and minds. It’s a room with a view, that lets us in with pitch-perfect sketches, vulnerable slices of memoir and plenty of philosophical wit. Presented with Arts Centre Melbourne.

Two emerging playwrights—Joe Paradise Lui and Merlynn Tong—take us on a bogus adventure through the golden arches and into Chinese hell. A heart-filled buddy comedy that bends reality and serves extra pickles. A Performing Lines production, presented with Melbourne Theatre Company.

Amrita Hepi is one of Naarm/Melbourne’s pre-eminent voices in contemporary dance. Tilly Lawless is a writer and sex worker who shares sharp and heartfelt insights into queer romance and the stigma faced by sex workers. This collaboration with co-writer and director Mish Grigor tests the transactional limits of art and erotic power.

In Complete Works, six performers condense all of Shakespeare’s plays — retelling a new one each night around the kitchen table using everyday objects. A vase for the prince. A jar for Juliet. A bottle of Dettol for the nurse. Salt and pepper for the king and queen. It’s the immortal storytelling of The Bard, stripped and seasoned to perfection. Presented with UMAC.

Five fierce Brown women present themselves as an obstacle and as resistance. They are a monolith. An enormous ancient rock formation, coming together and apart. Moving yet unmovable—colonised bodies as powerful sites of silent protest. This is the premiere of Joel Bray’s latest major dance work. Presented with Arts House.

It’s percussionist vs pigeon. Human vs machine. Three robotic trap machines take centre stage. In unrelenting, symphonic, patterns, they hurl hundreds of fluorescent clay targets at a wall of suspended, resonant percussive objects. A maverick idea, hatched by Speak Percussion’s Co-Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti with a flock of risk-taking collaborators. Presented with Melbourne Recital Centre.

For 50,000 years, soldiers, missionaries and kings and queens have tried to conquer a remote Indian valley, and for 50,000 years Nirmala’s ancestors have kept them out. But what if ‘out’ is exactly where her daughter Isha wants to be? Visionary playwright S. Shakthidharan returns with another story of hope, betrayal, tradition and self-discovery.