Cuttings is a dynamic new play that grew out COVID and the beating red desert heart of Mparntwe/Alice Springs. It’s about to have its South Australian premiere at the 2023 Adelaide Fringe Festival. In 2020, long-time Alice resident, novelist Jo Dutton (From Alice With Love), received a Creative Fellowship from Arts NT. She had a lot going on that year. Diagnosed with degenerative neurological condition Parkinson’s eight years earlier, she’d recently had brain surgery, travelling to and from Adelaide for treatment and recovery. Keen to discover new opportunities for her writing in lived, collaborative settings, Jo turned her hand from prose to play writing, and books to theatre. A mother of daughters, Jo had watched the rise of the #MeToo movement with…
Stories from inside life’s big top.
Posts from the “interview” Category
A powerful new voice arrives to set the Australian music scene on fire. Tanzanian rapper, musician, singer and hip hop artist Katanga Junior has called Mparntwe (Alice Springs) home for only a year. Yet already he’s one of the hardest working musicians in town, igniting the stages of festivals and music venues alike. Ferociously talented, his unique blend of rap, reggae and ragga sets dance floors ablaze. His first EP Moto (“fire” in Swahili) is due for national release on September 4, 2021. “I called it Moto because there’s burning and fire in the lyrics,” reveals Katanga when I interview him from home, “with fire in the music and the cover art. Yeah, fire is definitely the vibe”. Fifteen months…
Categories: interview
Tagged: Alice Springs, desert music, hip hop, interview, katanga junior, moto, Mparntwe, music, new music, tanzania
Not long ago, a ‘call to action’ floated across my social feeds. “Gondola. Need one. Anyone selling theirs? Or could help hook a sista up?” It was from Melbourne artist Laila Marie Costa, an old friend of a friend whose art I’ve seriously admired for many years. Given her line of work it wasn’t unusual. She wasn’t kidding either. Reaching deep into her Italian heritage and harking the call of refused, obsolete, junk objects – the addiction fever-grip to which she’s been answering her entire artistic life – I intuited she was in the throes of (another) new upcycling project… While the self-described “creator of art stuff… curator of collections, riffage musician and champion weeder” later told me she “wasn’t…
Earlier this year, after travelling many miles and relocating for the umpteenth time in my life, I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a lovely act of kindness. It happened when I met Australian collage artist Karen Lynch in person for the first time. I’d recently moved to the “southern creep” of Adelaide, Karen’s home city. On a sunny day in May we arranged to catch up in one of the sleepy seaside villages between our respective suburbs that only ‘the locals’ know about. We’d been ‘virtual’ blogging buddies for 4 years, encouraging each other and interacting as co-members of the very first intake of Pip Lincolne‘s ‘Blog With Pip’ (an online “how to” course for bloggers),…
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision… is the most abject treachery; and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.” – Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room Of One’s Own’. I’ve long been an admirer of Alice Orchard. We met a decade ago in Darwin when I was living there, working in radio. I’d up-stumped from Sydney, and, in search of like-minded souls who lived and breathed music, found my way to Happy Yess, a tiny…
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In February 2018 Auspicious Plastic was selected as a finalist in the Frankie “Good Stuff” Awards in the ‘Writing + Podcasts’ category.
I submitted an excerpt from “Episode 10“, featuring a conversation with dedicated diarist and digital publisher, Carrie King. It went into the running for the ‘Writing + Podcast’ category, and the People’s Choice Award.
Bobbing around out there on that roiling sea of podcasts, sometimes it can feel as if you’re in the boat alone, rendered invisible by thick fog and heavy swells. So it’s very nice to receive some acknowledgement. And an oar back to shore…
I was chuffed (and genuinely surprised!) to be selected as one of six finalists in the category. And grateful to everyone I’ve interviewed for the series so far, Cooperblack for the theme music and Studio Ink for the lovely logo design. And to my late Mum Margaret who inspired it all.
Thank you to everyone who has listened to the series, been touched it, and who voted for it in the ‘People’s Choice Award’.
POST UPDATED: ‘Auspicious Plastic’ didn’t win the category, but it was great to be selected along with five other auspicious finalists. Read more – and about the winner (congrats Taku Mbudzi!) – on the Frankie website.
TAKING A LITTLE BREAK: ‘Auspicious Plastic’ will return in 2019. In the meantime there are 14 episodes to catch up on or to re-listen to – on Soundcloud, and/or listen+subscribe on iTunes.
“Jazz has endured because it doesn’t have a beginning or an ending. It’s a moment.” – Robert Altman. Some of my favorite films are ‘mosaics’. A fistful of the best include Nashville (1975), MASH (1970), The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). Made by American movie pioneer, Robert Altman (1925 – 2006), they’re shining examples of supremely satisfying, subversive cinematic storytelling, as intricately constructed as a Mesopotamian temple. And so it goes: the paths of a multitude of seemingly discreet characters intersect and intertwine, eventually moving together as one towards a powerful denouement. Sounds like jazz to me. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic, sprawling tragedy Magnolia (1999) is another tapestry with a baker’s dozen worth of characters…
It’s amazing who you meet in Berlin… Artists are drawn to the city as if it were a kind of mythic, spiritual ‘big top’, seeking artistic inspiration, like-minded community and creative challenge. Something I’ve written about time and time again here at Circus Folk! Mark Ogge is one such ‘pilgrim’. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia – and the brother of one of my dearest friends – Mark’s an “internationally renowned” mid-career artist with a passion for making images inspired by “the rich history of fairground and theatrical art”, the circus, vaudeville and Commedia dell’Arte. Having studied all of the above, in 2001 he painted the Famous Spiegeltent Facade under which thousands have sat during Melbourne festivals (and elsewhere around the world). Also…
Tagged: art, artist, circus automata, commedia dell'arte, famous speigeltent, mark ogge, painting
Massimo Maio moved to Berlin “for love”. Migrating from a “small and cosy” village in southwest Germany, he says that “friends, radio and art” also had a lot to do with him pulling up stumps for the German capital. Like me, Massimo has BIG LOVE for radio. It’s a fundamental part of his life and has been since he was a child. He’s also been working in the medium for many years, both as a producer and presenter, starting in the days of analogue, later embracing digital with its creative freedoms and disruptive potential. Snap! We’re also died-in-the-wool public broadcasters. Massimo and I first met in 2015 just after I moved to Berlin from Australia. I was co-teaching a two-day…
Tagged: audiowalks, audioworker, berlin, deutschlandfunkkultur, massimo maio, podcasting, radio, refugees, republica, wdr
Recently I got lucky. My husband Oliver and I were coming to the end of our time in Berlin. About to move back to Australia, we managed to find someone who wanted to buy all our furniture and take on the new lease of our apartment. The only hitch being we’d need to leave a month early and find another place to live temporarily. Not easy in a city with a rental crisis. A good friend helped us out, renting us his extra room. Not only did we have a sweet-as apartment to stay in (and a laid-back, lovely-as wine-and-cheese-fan of a housemate), we were about to relocate to one of the most exciting and talked about neighbourhoods of Berlin: Neukölln. And…
Tagged: berlin, hom, hom cafe berlin, neukölln, wildenbruchplatz