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his award, from the Goethe-Institut in Melbourne, is for a 4 week language intensive in Germany. I will be taking the scholarship in Berlin from late November 2013.
During this time, I will also be able to gather material for future projects—both sound and text.
Many thanks to the Goethe-Institut for the award and for their ongoing support.
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In 1888 Federici, the singer in Gounod’s Faust playing the part of Mephistopheles died on stage while descending into hell. And his ghost has haunted Melbourne’s Princess Theatre ever since.
So, is it foolhardy to make a bargain with the devil, or should Faust go to heaven in the end? Would that relieve the ghost of its anxious haunting?
This is story about the golden age of Australian opera, and a lost soul from the 16th century whom Goethe made famous. Continue Reading
C.J Dennis is best known for his 1915 verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. It sold 66,000 copies樂威壯
within eighteen months of its first publication, extraordinary even by today’s standards. It made Dennis famous, and made him one of the few poets in Australia to earn a living from his craft.
But whatever your preference The Bloke, or the sequel The Moods of Ginger Mick, or the satire The Glugs of Gosh, reading the verse of C.J Dennis is an opportunity to relish the sound and rhythm of Australian spoken language, and to take delight in the inventiveness of its rhymes.
This week’s Hindsight approaches this most larrikin of Australian poets through the eyes of his wife, a tough minded woman whose name was Olive Herron, although Dennis called her Biddy and she wrote under the pen name Margaret.
The setting is The Singing Garden, the Toolangi property where Den and Biddy lived from 1915 until Den’s death in 1938. It was called “Arden” back then, but the current owners Jan and Vic Williams now call it The Singing Gardens after C.J Dennis’s last book of poetry which was inspired by the garden Biddy cultivated there. Jan and Vic have also opened the site up as a tea room, and they host a C.J Dennis festival each year, because it gives the public the chance to share the same environment that C.J Dennis knew and loved and which was the source of much of his inspiration.
John Cage, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and influential of all composers, is best known for his silent piece 4’33, the full orchestral version of which is now downloadable on YouTube. The purpose of that silent piece was to make listeners aware of sound around them, and come to the realisation that there is actually no such thing as silence.
This week in honour of the centenary of his birth Lyn Gallacher pays personal tribute to the composer who blew the future of music wide open by changing the way we listen.
Another one of Cage’s typically radical ideas was a score called Musicircus. It was designed to be a large-scale simultaneous performance event involving musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets and occasionally even a pony. The very first Musicircus was held in 1967 at the University of Illinois. The idea behind it then was to bring together too many musicians, to perform all at once, playing anything they like, in any way they like. Cage’s instruction was for ‘as much music as practical under the circumstances’.
Since 1967 many Musicircuses have been held all around the world, including a mega-Melbourne-Musicircus in 2007. This Australian performance involved over 500 artists and went all night. Cage described this work as a practise zone for living, and as such it reveals many of his seminal ideas about life, art and the world.
This week it’s all about beginnings and endings and the idea that in the beginning nothing and nobody has experienced the end. Creation is only possible because of destruction — and death is a natural part of that eternal cycle. But we can never actually know death … we can only ima威而鋼
gine. This is the thought experiment contained in Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Learning to be Dead’. The central character is Mr Palomar and it is he who leads ABC producer Lyn Gallacher into the philosophical realms of what being dead can teach us.
What was the world like before the first person died? Is Cain to be held responsible for murdering his brother Abel when he doesn’t know what death is? In a sense Abel is the first dead body in history and the first one to be buried. So who will be the last? Is our end in our beginning? Perhaps there is something to be learned from imagining what it would be like to be dead. Do you think the world can do without you for a little while? If so, join us in Learning to be dead.
That morning Henry Harold Evans sat in his favourite office chair, in front of his favourite coffee mug and took out his coloured crayons. He laid them out carefully alongside the Blueprint for Reform of the Australian Government’s Administration of Justice. It was a big document. It would take a lot of colouring in, but that’s just what he wanted, a challenge. His secretary would take care of whatever else it was he was supposed to be doing, she always did. Anyhow, he was the Attorney General. He could colour in whenever he liked.
Under Milk Wood, that much loved classic by Dylan Thomas, is about to have a new season at the Sydney Theatre Company. But what you may not know about this play is just how close it came to never being written.
The play is set in the imaginary Welsh town of Llareggub, which actually is ‘bugger all’ spelt backwards. In it we meet the townsfolk and enter their houses, bedrooms and dreams.
We meet Mr Pugh who fantasises about poisoning his poisonous wife; Captain Cat who hears the voice of his dead love whenever he shuts his eyes; Willy Nilly the nosy local postman, Mr Dai Bread and his two wives, the lovely school teacher, Miss Gossamer, who longingly watches Sinbad the Sailor; and Mr Beyon, a butcher who mercilessly teases his wife about the origins of his choice cuts.
So, today on Creative Instinct we present a play about a play. It’s a dramatisation, by Lyn Gallacher, of a book by BBC producer Douglas Cleverdon called The Growth of Milk Wood.
It is the tale of a masterpiece that almost wasn’t.
One of the most treasured objects in the State Library of Victoria is the Whitman Cabinet, a special box, purpose built by the Australian man of letters Bernard O’Dowd to house his personal correspondence with Walt Whitman. Today we take a peek inside that cabinet.
Walt Whitman is widely known as the author of Leaves of Grass, an epic poem that has provided inspiration for generations of Americans. On the other side of the globe Bernard O’Dowd is best known for Poetry Militant – his idea that the true power of poetry lies in the revolutionary functions of democracy … because aren’t we all treading on the same leaves of grass?
Bernard O’Dowd’s first fan letter to Whitman not only sparked a friendship, it also gave birth to a whole community of Australian Walt enthusiasts, most of them being Bernard’s close personal friends. In this program you’ll get to know Fred, Ada, Tom Touchstone, Ted, Eve, Jim and lastly little Eric Whitman O’Dowd. You’ll also hear how the lives of these two poets unfold alongside each other. Both men are trying to find a new voice for a new nation, but one is at the end of his creative endeavour, and the other is young, still straining to make his mark. It is a remarkable and influential friendship.
