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Article:  Robin Usher, A New York play, a London company, an Australian cast; What are the odds?, The Age, 1 April 2008, 22
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Article:  Robin Usher, A New York play, a Lpondon company, an Australian cast; What are the odds?, The Age, 1 April 2008, 22
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Article:  Robin Usher, A tight squeeze, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 16 October 2008, 26
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Article:  Robin Usher, A turn-up for the books, The Age, 6 May 2008, 13
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A new event celebrates Melbourne's reputation as a dance capital, writes Robin Usher.
MELBOURNE is Australia's capital of contemporary dance and our dance companies tour internationally more than other art forms, but until now there has been nothing to celebrate this vibrancy.
Dance Massive is designed to bring companies and dancers together under one banner.
Performances over the 12 days from March 3 will include groups from around the country, as well as Melbourne-based Chunky Move with Gideon Obarzanek's latest international hit, Mortal Engine.
"It has been touring constantly since it premiered at the Sydney Festival last year and went on to the Edinburgh Festival," says Steven Richardson, artistic director of Melbourne's Arts House and the driving force behind Dance Massive.
"Melbourne's contemporary dance infrastructure is the envy of almost every other city in Australia but there is nothing to celebrate it except the annual programming of the Melbourne (International Arts) Festival," he says. "The time is propitious to try to create a platform to showcase the art form nationally."
His plan is to make the event biennial and develop the program further in 2011 and 2013.
"We made a national call for expressions of interest this year and were inundated with responses," he says at his Arts House headquarters in the old North Melbourne town hall.
The organisation also hosts events at the Meat Market in North Melbourne and both venues will be part of Dance Massive.
Other groups - Malthouse Theatre, Ausdance and Dancehouse - joined in to make the event possible. Richardson is especially pleased to see contemporary dance being regularly programmed at the Malthouse, which will host Chunky Move and Brisbane's Splintergroup.
The Queensland company is little known in Melbourne but its two works in the program have both toured internationally. Lawn, which will be seen at the Malthouse's Merlyn Theatre, was conceived in Berlin and developed at Brisbane Powerhouse before going to Singapore and Germany. Roadkill was included in London's Dance Umbrella at the Barbican Centre in 2007 and will be performed at the Meat Market.
Choreographer Lucy Guerin will also appear at the Meat Market with a new work, Untrained, which pairs two specialised dancers with two untrained ones.
"It's terrific to have Lucy and Gideon (Obarzanek) in the program because it lifts the profile to have their work appearing," Richardson says. He has a background in dance and was on the Australia Council's dance board for more than five years, as well as working with Circus Oz. He says Dance Massive will be the first opportunity for companies to present full-length works together since Melbourne's Greenmill Dance Project, which ran for six years until 1998.
Six overseas presenters will be here for Dance Massive thanks to $30,000 from the Australia Council. "It's not about setting up a retail model but rather establishing relationships with local artists and international agents," Richardson says.
Arts Victoria is also providing $50,000 to the project. Richardson believes the potential audience for contemporary dance is huge, and expects the Meat Market's 180 Seconds in (Disco) Heaven or Hell on Sunday March 8 to attract an enthusiastic audience.
It will combine local choreographers working with groups specialising in ballroom, breaking and different sorts of ethnic dances.
"There will be a party atmosphere and many varieties of dance," Richardson says. "I think that leads to a more meaningful experience than passively sitting in a seat in the theatre."
Dance Massive runs from March 3 to 15 at the Malthouse Theatre, Arts House and Dancehouse. Go
to dancemassive.com.au or book on 9685 5111.
Article:  Robin Usher, About time dance took centre stage, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 17 February 2009, 18
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Article:  Robin Usher, Another Epic Session at the Pub, The Age, 4 May 2007, 15
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Article:  Robin Usher, Art & Culture, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 28 November 2007
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Article:  Robin Usher, Arts projects get $850,000 grants, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 9 July 2010, online
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Opera is regarded as the most lavish and expensive art form, as shown by the top price of $1500 for tickets to see the four works in Adelaide's $15million production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. But opera-goers in Melbourne have the chance to see a production that relies on a small cast and orchestra, rather than a budget-busting set, to establish direct, emotional contact with the audience.
"It's a very pared-back form," says Patrick Nolan, director of Opera Australia's last show in its spring season, Baroque Masterworks.
The two works in the double bill, by Monteverdi and Purcell, come from soon after the birth of opera at the dawn of the 17th century.
"The baroque style is minimal and direct compared to what came later," he says. "The 21st century couldn't be more different, where we are used to layers of meaning piled on top of each other."
The production is part of a boom in baroque music-making in Melbourne, including critically acclaimed performances by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Italy's Il Giardino Armonico.
Nolan, known for his elegant and concise direction, says his challenge is to allow the directness of the emotional approach to come through.
"It is very spacious music and it has been a remarkable process working with the singers to peel back the layers," he says.
The production opens with Monteverdi's 30-minute masterpiece, IlCombattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, followed by Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which is the first opera to have been sung in English. This ordering allows the evening to conclude with Dido's lament, which Nolan describes as one of opera's most well known songs.
"The chorus follows with a lament that is some of the most sublime music ever written," he says, quoting: "With drooping wings, Cupids come and scatter roses on the tomb".
Nolan says Purcell is speaking through time, reminding people that the pain of love "has always been and will always be".
The opera is adapted from the chapter in The Aenead in which Aeneas (Angus Wood), the mythical founder of Rome, is washed up on the shores of Carthage where he falls in love with Dido (Deborah Humble).
But Nolan says the opera makes Dido the main character. This allows her to sing her own death after her lover departs, contrasting with the starkness of the original, in which Aeneas looks back from his departing ship and sees the smoke of Dido's funeral pyre following her suicide.
The opera was written in 1689, during the flowering of the arts in England in the era following the rule of Cromwell's puritans. Nolan says Purcell was aware of Monteverdi's works from earlier in the century because a copy he made of a score by the Italian has survived.
Monteverdi's Orfeo, written in 1601, is regarded as the first opera. When he came to write Il Combattimento 23 years later, he developed a revolutionary style of music-making that mirrored the drama of the story.
The story is taken from Tasso's long poem on the Crusades and tells of a Christian warrior, Tancredi (Han Lim) who falls in love with a Muslim warrior maiden (Ali McGregor) before later killing her in a duel.
"She knew who he was, but because she wore an armoured visor, he didn't know who he was fighting," Nolan says.
But, he says, because the action is described by a narrator (Wood), he wanted to find a way to dramatise the fight on stage. "Because the battle to the death is so intense, I wanted to see bodies going for it," he says. So he asked Lucy Guerin to choreograph the combat. The opera is over in less than 30 minutes, but Nolan says the two dancers are called on to work hard, and he also employs them in the Purcell work after interval.
He says the beauty of the Monteverdi work is that the key issues are hidden: armour masks beauty, war conceals love and human strife is only the foreground to eternal peace.
But stage direction is just one of Nolan's interests. Having directed the Paul Grabowsky/Joanna Murray-Smith 2002 opera, Love in the Age of Therapy, he is planning to film a documentary on the lives of Aboriginal singers Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. This follows his direction of the 2004 Melbourne Festival show, Kura Tungar, with the two singers and Grabowsky's Australian Art Orchestra.
A short film that Nolan wrote and directed in 1998, 389, was a finalist in Tropfest and screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival. 389 is about a bus route and a frustrated poet who hijacks a vehicle in order to find an audience for his poems.
Because of his deep regard for him, he gained permission from the former dissident Czech poet, Miroslav Holub, to use one of his works.
Article:  Robin Usher, Baroque Revels in pain of love, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 29 November 2004
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Article:  Robin Usher, Big year for blockbusters as Helpmann winners take their bows at Sydney Opera House, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 27 July 2009
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Article:  Robin Usher, Cash for small arts groups, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 26 October 2010
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Article:  Robin Usher, Double bill's headline act dances to breaking news, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 17 July 2010
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CHINA'S economic development and growing middle class make it easy to assume the nation's art forms are able to reflect the country's latest concerns in new shows for their audiences.
But there are few independent theatre companies in China, which makes the contemporary show, Fight the Landlord, which opens at the Arts Centre on Thursday, an unusual experiment.
It is the result of a collaboration between the Beijing Square Moon company and the Irish director, Gavin Quinn, who was in Melbourne last year with the Hamlet adaptation, The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, produced by his company, Pan Pan Theatre.
He commissioned the writer Sun Yue to write the play after he worked with her on Pan Pan's Beijing production of the Irish classic, Playboy of the Western World, six years ago.
''She is incredibly smart and able to communicate her views about contemporary life,'' he says in a phone call from Dublin. ''She translated Playboy, which was produced with an all-Chinese cast that later toured to Ireland.''
Yue is one of three actors in Fighting the Landlord, named after a popular card game that grew out of the class struggles during the Cultural Revolution.
It premiered at the Irish Pavilion at Shanghai's World Expo in 2010 and later was produced in Beijing and Sichuan's capital, Chengdu.
''The play is telling contemporary stories about such things as the pressures caused by the inflationary property market,'' Quinn says. ''There are not many independent theatre companies in China, although there are very well established acting academies for traditional theatres and musicals.''
He says the play's success demonstrates people are keen for shows reflecting contemporary concerns. This has already been demonstrated by another contemporary show, Rhinoceros in Love, which also travelled to last year's Melbourne Festival.
''China is hurtling forward into extreme capitalism and there is a need for a new language that deals with concerns of today,'' he says. ''We had to send the text to the Ministry of Culture but it did not cause any censorship problems because it is about cultural rather than political issues.''
He says the booming property price has caused suicides among the younger generation locked out of the market by rises of as much as 15 per cent a year. But he describes the play as gentle and humorous, being staged in China with audiences sitting in circles surrounding the performers.
The Fairfax Studio also offers audience members the option of sitting on stage as part of the action, or in the auditorium.
''China is still a mystery to many people and this offers people a chance to get an insight into the country,'' Quinn says. ''Sitting on stage with the performers provides an interesting dynamic that is different and intimate.''
He found it easy to direct the production after the more traumatic experience developing the earlier Playboy production, which took a long time to develop.
''That was a big initial investment but it resulted in several friendships and was a great way to get to know China,'' he says.
He worked with an interpreter in directing Landlord but because he already knew the actors - Yue, Bai Shuo and Wang Jinglei - from the earlier show he quickly forgot the mediator was there.
''We are all from the theatre and we know what's good and what isn't,'' he says. ''We were all concentrating on the common project.''
He is encouraged the show is in Australia, opening at the Darwin Festival before Melbourne. ''It is an interesting experiment because it is not an expensive show but it does provide real insights into the country.''
Fight the Landlord opens at the Fairfax Studio at 7.30pm on Thursday until Saturday.
Article:  Robin Usher, Experiment's unique view of China, The Age, 28 August 2012
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Article:  Robin Usher, Guerin tops State Grants, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 16 August 2002, 4
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Article:  Robin Usher, Hamlet the Prequel Cuts the Babble, The Age, 24 October 2007, 21
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Article:  Robin Usher, Handel done Justin's way, The Age, 1 December 2007, 0
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Article:  Robin Usher, Have a Real Ball in the City Streets, The Age, 23 October 2007, 16
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Article:  Robin Usher, Healer in a foreign land, The Age, News Extra, 7 October 2000, 5
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Article:  Robin Usher, Joe Cinque's alteration: remaking a tragic story, The Age, 8 August 2007, 17
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Article:  Robin Usher, Love in hostile times, Metro, 26 November 2007
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Article:  Robin Usher, Lucy Guerin's festival, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 29 September 2003, 11
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Article:  Robin Usher, Melbourne's Gift: the space to create, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 28 November 2007
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Article:  Robin Usher, Metro, 24 June 2005, 6
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Article:  Robin Usher, Myer prizemoney a buffer and a leg up, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 1 March 2001, T5
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Article:  Robin Usher, NY Invite for Guerin, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 30 October 1998, 10
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Article:  Robin Usher, Projecting messages with meaning, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 15 March 2005, 4
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Article:  Robin Usher, Questions about a scandalous grilling, The Age, 14 April 2008, 15
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Article:  Robin Usher, Sacrifice in war and the quest to find the light, The Age, 6 August 2007, 13
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Article:  Robin Usher, Scoundrel steps in from Russia's wildside, The Age, 7 May 2008, 19
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Article:  Robin Usher, Sex, violence? It must be opera, The Age, 27 July 2007, 13
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Article:  Robin Usher, Southbank to Scotland, The Age, 28 May 2009, 20
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Article:  Robin Usher, Splitting into bite size chunks, The Age, Theatre and Dance Platform, 11 October 2008
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Article:  Robin Usher, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 October 2005, 12
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Article:  Robin Usher, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 2003, 16
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Article:  Robin Usher, Tale leaves no Stone unturned, Arts and Culture, 11 September 2006, 15
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 10 November 2007, 23
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 12 November 2003, 0
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 14 October 2005, 17
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 19 June 2007, 13
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 20 February 2007, 15
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 23 November 2006, 0
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 28 July 2007, 9
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 4 December 2006, 13
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Age, 7 August 2007, 13
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 12 June 1997
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Article:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 9 April 1997, 48
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Article:  Robin Usher, Tribute challenge daunted choreographer, The Age, 27 August 2007, 13
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Article:  Robin Usher, Walking Wounded, The Age, 2 August 2010
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Article:  Robin Usher, Yanagai! Yanagai!, The Age, 10 September 2003, 14
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Review:  Robin Usher, A3, 1 December 2003, 8
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Review:  Robin Usher, Melbourne Times, 24 November 1993
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Review:  Robin Usher, Metro, 15 April 2005, 3
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Review:  Robin Usher, Right Place, Wright Time for Marriage, 21 September 2007
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Review:  Robin Usher, Sylvia, The Herald Sun, 8 January 1997
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Age, 26 May 1995
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Age, 6 January 1998
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 16 May 1996
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 18 April 1996
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 2 November 1995
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 2 September 1996
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 23 March 1996
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 6 January 1997
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Herald Sun, 8 January 1997
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Review:  Robin Usher, The Sunday Age, 13 May 2001, 10
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