Carving in Snow

We don’t just sit and watch TV anymore. There’s hardly a TV program that doesn’t ask us to comment or get involved – whether it’s SMS voting on talent shows, or by giving twitter commentary on morning television, or the ABC’s Q & A, which centres the audience – there, we are constantly reminded, we ask the questions and tweet a witty commentary from home. We are our own producers. We don’t just read the news as it’s given to us anymore. If you read a news story online, you can very often comment about it and provide one of 25 or 68 or hundreds of comments that will sometimes give you a much better picture of what’s really going on than the story itself. And we have a huge range of news sources available to us. We are our own editors. We don’t just read facts from scholar-authored and vetted encyclopedias anymore. At the very heart of Wikipedia is a democratisation of the definition of knowledge. We – any of us, from anywhere – help determine how knowledge is defined and under

I stumbled across a recording of Laurence Oliver as King Lear on YouTube recently and was shocked by it. I have some memories of when Olivier recorded this King Lear . It was in 1983, and made especially for television. He was 75 or 76. His final Shakespeare role on film. It was well known that he had suffered decades of serious illness, including prostrate cancer. In 1975, he had nearly died of dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder, but struggled on for another decade or so, during which time he filmed this performance. It was clearly out of the question to perform the role on stage - his final performance on stage in a full role had been in 1974. Olivier was to die five years after this Lear . I had admired Olivier when I was a teenager. I was a bit of a Shakespeare nut. In high school, I directed a 90 minute version of Hamlet in which I made the costumes, choreographed the fights, compiled the music and played the central role. Scenes not involving Hamlet were

I've been thinking more, lately, of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who passed away on 18 May, just shy of his 87th birthday. He was a giant among classical baritones and simply the best singer of lieder, especially Schubert, ever. The statistics are hard to nail, but he may be the most recorded artist in classical music history - around twice as many recordings as Placido Domingo, to give you an idea. He is the sound of many private moments in my life, a source of solace and of inspiration. During some periods of his career he was criticised for being 'mannered'. But this was because he sang like an actor. Sometimes he would inflect individual syllables in the most surprising, but revelatory, way. He could change both the shape of the syllable and the texture of the musical note so that there was a unity of meaning mostly unknown until then. This was not the lieder singing of a Richard Tauber, and some didn't like it. This was singing full of sharp insight and endles

On 24 April, the Women in Theatre report was released. It is a report commissioned in July 2011 by the Australia Council for the Arts ‘to bring the research on the issue of women in creative leadership in Australia up to the present day, and provide a basis for the sector to discuss these issues and to reach agreement on some strategies to address the situation.’ This fresh wave of interest in this most complex matter was stimulated by the announcement of Neil Armfield’s final season at the then Company B in September 2009. The sight of a stage full of bright young men, and just one woman, got people thinking and talking . One response was to have the annual Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture, usually delivered by one person, given over to a panel discussion, Where are the Women? Is there a lack of women in key creative roles in theatre? On Sunday 6 December, the panellists lined up: Rachel Healy, Alison Croggon, Shannon Murphy, Marion Potts and Gil Appleton, moderated by Monic

Jill Shearer , who passed away on 6 May, was an important Australian playwright, living in Brisbane.  Jill's plays were produced all over the world, and on Broadway ( Shimada , 1992, directed by Simon Phillips and starring Ben Gazzara, Estelle Parsons, Ellen Burstyn and Mako). She was, I think, the first Australian woman to have a play on Broadway.   She had a long relationship with La Boite Theatre Company - over the years the company has produced, I think, four or five of her plays. La Boite hosted a fond memorial tribute to Jill last Sunday.  There was no one like Jill Shearer. I didn’t know her well, but I do know how important she was to the community of artists in Brisbane, and well beyond. She was a genuine inspiration. I first met her when I was working for Queensland Theatre Company in the early 1990s. The company had just produced Shimada , and we were then developing her new play The Family. She was already something of a legend by then, of course. I was a youn

George Hunka reminds us that in some parts of the world theatre provides a genuine political threat. Two nights ago, Israeli armed forces raided the home of Nabil Al Raee, the artistic director of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, arresting h im and terrifying his three year old daughter Mina. The Freedom Theatre is a theatre and cultural centre in the Jenin Refugee Camp, 60km from Ramallah and home to 10,000 people (40% of whom are under 15), that "offers space in which children and youth can act, create and express themselves freely, imagining new realities and challenging existing social and cultural barriers." Its productions have toured internationally, giving these young people a voice. Drama is often used as therapy for trauma, as this short video shows. I'm told by those who have visited the theatre that this is a place in which Palestinian, international and even Israeli artists and activists come together despite (or maybe because of) differences in nat