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Ep 53 – Memoir of a Tired Carer, Sunshine Super Girl

We’re back baby! We went to a Fringe show, Memoir of a Tired Carer, and no one got Covid. Team Aisle also travelled to wilds of North Geelong Arena to see the Evonne Goolagong biographical play (feel good hit) Sunshine Super Girl. In Intermission we chat Fringe highlights, Bangarra Dance Theatre and experimental new opera The Lighthouse. In Coming Soon we recommend Bodies of WaterBeth Gibbeson – A Thread of LightLele and Richard Mosse – Broken Spectre (at NGV). Please join us with your favourite bevvie.

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Credits

  • Produced and recorded by Carla Donnelly and Philip Thiel
  • Theme composition Mark Barrage
  • Sound editing by Shackwest
transcript under the cut

Ep 52 – Shadow, Give Me Pity!

Across the Aisle attends MIFF! Phil reporting deep from the trenches of all the pleasures of MIFF (queues, choc tops, darting from one venue to the other) and Carla from her loungeroom on the Surf Coast annihilated on edibles. Films covered are Back to Back Theatre’s award winning Shadow – a luscious celluloid imagining of their stage plays that “wonders whether an AI-led near-future society will further disenfranchise the disabled community” and the gloriously deranged Give Me Pity! starring Sophie von Haselberg as Sissy St. Clair in her first Saturday Night Special – ingenue, entertainer, demonically possessed.  We also chat cinema going (how do you do it?) and what is Coming Soon. Enjoy!

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If you love our show please consider donating to our server costs.

Credits

  • Produced and recorded by Carla Donnelly and Philip Thiel
  • Theme composition Mark Barrage
  • Sound editing by Shackwest
transcript under the cut

Ep 51 – Light (ACMI), Looking for Alibrandi

In this month’s episode Carla and Phil discuss the smaller blockbuster Melbourne Winter Masterpieces on at ACMI from the Tate Modern – Light. And then we head off and the crack of dawn for sauce day at The Malthouse theatre for the stage adaptation of much-loved teen novel Looking for Alibrandi. In intermission the gang chat favourite winter drinks, Virginia Woolf’s diaries and Hannah Kent’s delightfully queer ghost story, Devotion. And perhaps a little too late in Coming Soon our picks for Melbourne Writers festival and MIFF. Bon appetite and tell your friends!    

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If you love our show please consider donating to our server costs.

Credits

  • Produced and recorded by Carla Donnelly and Philip Thiel
  • Theme composition Mark Barrage
  • Sound editing by Shackwest
Transcript under the CUT

Ep 50 – QUEER (NGV), Titicut Follies (ACMI)

It’s official! Across the Aisle is back for a 5th season after we can’t quite believe it 3 years hiatus. In June 2022 we cover the monumental QUEER exhibition at the NGV and Titicut Follies as part of the Frederick Wiseman retrospective at ACMI. We hope you enjoy having us back in your ears, and please tell your friends.

Titicut Follies (along with many other Frederick Wiseman films) is available for viewing on the Kanopy platform. You can get access to this free resource through your school or local library. Tracey Moffatt’s male gaze obliterating Heaven is available to rent on Vimeo (do it, it’s SO WORTH IT).

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Credits

transcript under the cut

Ep 49 – Handa Opera La Traviata, The Power of the Dog

Hello and welcome BACK to Across the Aisle. It is episode 49! And as with all things everything has changed, and we are no longer performing arts monogamous. We are arts with a capital A polyamorous. So, please watch Handa Opera’s 2012 production of La Traviata on the Opera Australia website and The Power of the Dog on Netflix (or in the cinema if at all possible). During Intermission we talk pandemic specific changes to our arts consumption and in Coming Soon we pick a few highlights to think about for potential future episodes.

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Credits

transcript under the cut

Sometimes Melbourne – What Melbourne Loved 2019

Carla here. I did Sometimes Melbourne’s annual “What Melbourne Loved” list. You can see the rest by clicking the link.

Favourite moments in 2019.

2019 has been a year of incredible art for me. Music, film and my beloved theatre. There have been so many amazing performances that my memories become nested into moments that had my jaw unhinge with tears of disbelief that life could be so beautiful. A lot of the works that stayed with me explored post-humanism, native peoples self-determination or the post apocalypse; further cementing that theatre is dangerous, vital, conversational and provocative. No wonder funding is drying up, like the creek beds of our planet.

Sarah Ward’s alien/rock/monkey space rock opera The Legend of Queen Kong: opera singing MOTHER FUCKER to a baroque harpsichord psychedelic freak out.

Ursula Yovich’s defiant, heartbreaking and vulnerable rock musical Barbara and the Camp Dogs: too many moments to list that had me in tears.

Mr Burns, a post-electric play (Lightning Jar Theatre Inc.) was an absolute miracle of production, the amount of moving pieces to get right would have been back breaking. Its message of the way humans make meaning and connect, how memory works, and our utter compulsion to tell ourselves and each other through story completely blew me away. The pop medley was the prestige in an already inconceivably incredible independent theatre production.

Emma Hall’s World Problems. A simple conceit – a woman builds a trampoline on stage, with a monologue projected at/to the audience. Emma tells us the story of how ‘you’ let the world die. The mental gymnastics I went through to avoid complicity took me to at least half way through the show before my heart sank and I started to cry realising that it *was* us. We did let the world die.

The Honouring (during Yirramboi Festival) was a work of such tenderness and pain; I am crying now thinking about it. Jack Sheppard’s physical rendering of Indigenous suicide through text, movement and puppetry was staggering. A work that didn’t get enough attention. Nor the festival really; Yirramboi is extraordinary.

Joel Bray’s Daddy (also at Yirramboi) a was another incredible work featuring dance, text and tableaus presented to the audience by following Bray around the room. Joel Bray is filled with rage and hope and love and desire and this was beautifully rendered. It was electrifying.

The Susie Dee and Patricia Cornelius (Dee and Cornelius) power combo continued to slay with Love: stories, faces and bodies I never see on Melbourne stages. Working class people. Drug dependent people. The traumatised. The vulgar. The aberrant. All lovingly and respectfully brought into focus. I walk away from their shows thinking why do I never see these kinds of stories? Who has the keys?

Them (La Mama – Samah Sabawi) was one of the most profound plays of the year. Mystical in its realisation the perfection of casting, time, place and script. It is truly gifted to make a drama about war deeply funny in places. It had me laughing and sobbing and believing the best in humanity that plays like this can find a stage.

I flew to Sydney to see Adena Jacobs’s Titus Andronicus and it did not disappoint Jane Montgomery Griffiths was clearly having the time of her life in this role. My moment of the year was Catherine Văn-Davies ‘comic relief’ clown smearing shit all up the back of her legs whilst doing a sexy dance. Just when you think things can’t get worse, that happens to you and you wonder how life can get any better?

My last three are the most creative and original of the year. Yay for Canetoads! at Melbourne Fringe was one of those word-of-mouths gems that I would never have known about. So skillfully wrought with colonialism succinctly expressed through the “white death” of the sugar cane industry. Ordinarily this pun could have been one note or on the nose, but Kendra Keller’s tremendous skill and commitment makes our complicity and embeddedness in this horror felt.

Subliminal Massage (Marcus mckenzie: Acter for Hire) at Melbourne Fringe was truly one of the most left field and surreal works I’ve ever experienced. A post (post?) human exploration/celebration/exhibition of the trash bag of western “culture”. Puns, portmanteaus, wellness, white cubes, black screens… This AI hasn’t been updated in a century and his database has festered. Glitched out, hilarious, touching, terrifying… just absolutely fucking mind blowing.

And finally Unwoman by @therabbletheatre. From the fecund idealisation of the function of femininity to Yumi Umiumare’s butoh – 50 minutes of screaming and giving birth to rocks in a concrete prison reality. This work truly communicated the female experience. Funny, paternalistic, objectifying, non-agentic, tedious, primal – you name it it was in there. The design was also exceptional.

A deep gratitude to all these artists (and the 60+ other performances I saw this year). The diversity of skill and talent in this country is staggering, and your work, minds, hearts and bodies make my life worth living.

Ep 48 – Finale – Daddy, Blood Quantum

Welcome to the LAST EPISODE of Across the Aisle. That’s right, after 4 years and 48 episodes we are ending. This episode is our Yirramboi special, covering Joel Bray’s Daddy and Ngioka Bunda-Heath and Tracey Bunda’s Blood Quantum. Join us for a greatest hits look at our back catalogue during intermission – where we both award our top 3 of the past 4 years and a wooden spoon!

Thank you to all our listeners for your support over the years. If you’d like to help us keep the lights on for our back catalogue please contribute to our server costs here.

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Ep 47 – The Aspie Hour, Single Asian Female

Welcome to our still relevant AWARD WINNING PODCAST. That’s right, Across the Aisle has won “Best Audiogram” at the 2019 Australian Podcast Awards.

This episode was recorded before the ceremony, so please enjoy our trip down Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The gang saw Aspergers musical cabaret The Aspie Hour and Michelle Law’s debut play Single Asian Female.

During “Intermission” we talked the rest of the fest, primarily Maria Bamford, DeAnne Smith and Sweaty Pitts Pity Party. And in “Coming Soon” we chat our attendance at the Green Room Awards and the upcoming Australian Podcast Awards.

Thanks for listening and please support us. We only have 1 episode left of this season before are forced to close due to lack of funds.

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Ep 46 – Mr. Burns – A post-electric play, Biladurang

Hello! It’s been too long since our last chat. In this episode the gang envision story telling beyond the apocalypse with Mr. Burns, a post-electric play by Lightning Jar Theatre; and we return to the lofty heights of the Sofitel to experience Joel Bray’s immersive and intimate dance piece, Biladurang. During intermission we discuss radical television and colonially problematic, but beautiful nonetheless, gardens.

Thanks for listening and please financially subscribe. We only have 2 episodes left of this season before are forced to close due to lack of funds.

Connect with us on twitter, facebook, instagram and our website. 

Donate to our server costs.

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