Welcome to another survey of happenings from around our creative sphere with a bit of a focus on international theatre and dance this week. We hope you discover something new!

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The Wild Duck

A new production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck premiered this month at Festival d’Avignon, directed by Thomas Ostermeier – one of the giants of German speaking theatre. The Wild Duck is one of Ibsen’s most tense plays; it centres on a childhood friend who returns to his hometown and encourages a family to be honest with each other about their lies from the past, with disruptive consequences. Ostermeier’s Shakespeare productions are always wild and eccentric (e.g. Richard III for Adelaide Festival 2017) but his approach to Ibsen is often a commitment to realism. That said, in The Wild Duck when the characters are debating the merits of being honest with each other, one of the actors asks for the house lights to come up and requests the audience discuss with their lover, family member, or friend, a lie they have told them. An unexpected breaking of the 4th wall that helps to connect the audience more deeply with the question of the play.

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Lemi Pontifasio

Lemi had a new work open recently. If you don’t know Lemi, he is a Samoan artist who creates large scale visual and movement-based works. He’s quite the auteur but we don’t often get the opportunity to see his creations in Australia. His latest work was a collaboration with the Yi people in China where he is developing a series of new works exploring the rituals, songs, and traditions of Yi culture. Always transporting, the way Lemi constructs stunning visual and aural imagery is unique.

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Dear Son

The next offering from our very own State Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre. Renowned First Nations theatre makers, Isaac Drandic and John Harvey adapt the work of Thomas Mayo (co-author of The Voice to Parliament Handbook and our guest at this year’s Writers’ Week) into a powerful and healing cross-generational exploration of First Nations manhood. This World Premiere theatre work features the likes of Jimi Bani and Aaron Pedersen and opens this weekend – Sat 26 July.

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Bérénice

A remarkable monologue performance by Isabelle Huppert, one of the greatest actors of her generation. Huppert voices this 17th century text about the sacrifice and tragedy of Queen Bérénice, but in this production a troupe of performers build the visual language around her. Here she is working with director Romeo Castellucci and the image-making (as you would expect from Castellucci) is extraordinary. Watch the clip below; included is an image of Isabelle standing in front of flowers as they start to fall (and in the production, they slowly fall and rot over five minutes). This is not a projection! They are real objects being manipulated. It’s a remarkable theatrical meeting of two European stage icons.

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Joshua Serafin

We’ve recently been introduced to the work of the extraordinary Filipino performance maker, Joshua Serafin, who approaches ideas of colonialism and identity through a very distinct and queer lens. Born in the Philippines, Serafin is currently based in Brussels and is a house artist of Viernulvier (Ghent) for their 23-27 season. We’ll let this short video speak to their work. Mesmerising!

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Art Radar is a short periodical selection of anything and everything that has been moving us, inspiring us and piquing our curiosity from right across the creative world. Adelaide Festival celebrates bold new performances, radical creativity and boundary-pushing talent. Every day we get to engage with a wonderful range of incredible works and creatives that are shaping the cultural conversation so here’s a peek behind the curtain at some of the happenings that have caught our attention this week! Hopefully a few may even be appearing on a stage or street near you before long.