The Orchestra and The Big Bang: ACO’s Timeline

Over the past several years, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has played an annual multimedia concert in collaboration with a number of renowned creatives, including photographers Bill Henson (Luminous) and Jon Frank (The Crowd and The Reef). This year, as part of Sydney’s annual Vivid winter festival of lights, music and ideas, the ACO performed Timeline in collaboration with The Presets and, as the concert’s tagline proclaims, life flashed before your very ears. A flick through the concert’s program proves just how mind-bendingly vast and crazy an undertaking it was.

Keep calm and Carry On: STC's Noises Off

Playing farce is a dangerous business. Not only is the timing and hitting of marks crucial, but physicality is also a key element in the success of a piece. In a way, farce largely depends upon an audience’s knowing of things that the characters do not. “We know the vicar is behind the door, but the ingénue does not. We know why she’s in her underwear and the husband’s trousers have fallen down but his affronted wife does not,” writes Jonathan Biggins in the play’s program. Enter then, Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s seminal farce – nay, play – about a “third-rate production of a creaky bedroom farce” called ‘Nothing On’ as played by a less than fourth-rate troupe of actors. I say play because the plotting and precision of the writing is pure Stoppard, the collision of art-imitating-life is Pirandello’s, the characters’ awareness of a curtain that will never fall is Beckett’s. Yet for all its double entendres and mishaps, there lies at its heart the very real dilemma of not knowing your next line, your next entrance, your next move, and in that way it is very much like life – we never really know what (or, perhaps, who) is coming through the door next.

Staged in three acts, Act One depicts the final rehearsal before opening night (the first time they have ever run the show through head to tail in one go). Act Two is the production seen from backstage, four weeks into a national (regional?) tour (and played mostly in actions, “looks and gestures”), while Act Three is the production on its final night in Stockton-on-Tees, the last leg of the tour, and indeed on its last legs. It’s all a bit Groundhog Day in a way, the way we see the same one-act’s action played over and again, but with increasing variation and divergence from the prompt-book.

Sarah Blasko - I Awake

Sometimes you think you know a song. You hear it one day, and wonder if you really knew the song in the first place, you find something new in it to fall in love with. Sarah Blasko’s music is a bit like this, in a way: you think you know her songs from her albums – the melodies, the instrumentations, the little adornments and quirks, the rhythms, the timing between tracks – but then you hear them performed live and they’re completely new all over again.

Back in 2010, my sister and I went to Blasko’s As Day Follows Night concert at the Enmore Theatre. I’m pretty sure it was the first ‘gig’ that I could remember going to. There was something about the album, the songs – Blasko herself, even – that seemed irresistible, enchanting, hypnotic, unfathomable, and seeing and hearing her songs refashioned on tour made me appreciate the album on a deeper, more intangible, more inexpressible way.