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The play begins with Simon Burke’s bare arse, facing the audience and bouncing side to side in time with David Bowie’s The Jean Genie. In this new production of a queer Australian classic, the actor is playing 56-year-old elocution teacher Robert O’Brien in stockings and suspenders, rouge on his face, caressing himself before a poster of Mick Jagger.
While teaching, O’Brien wears a fusty green vest and brown suit and tie that blend with his living room furnishings; in private, cigarette in hand, he resembles Norma Desmond in cloth cap and dressing gown.
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Afro-Asian Creole artist Thania Petersen makes evocative sound, smell, textile, photographic and video works with cross-cultural joy and empathy at their heart. For the past five years, she has been working with musicians from the city of Makassar in the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi.
Last September, during her second visit to Makassar, a group of Yolngu Elders and artists from Arnhem Land also flew there to help Petersen make new recordings for her project, in the process strengthening their cultural ties forged by trading with the Makassans long before European colonisation.
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Nestled on a cliff face at Sydney’s Coogee, the last remaining women’s-only seawater pool in Australia proudly continues its tradition of a century and a half of female bathing. To this sanctuary known as McIver’s Ladies Baths, Australian-born Tongan performance artist Latai Taumoepeau will this summer add a spectrum of ancestral ceremony.
As part of Sydney Festival, which this year emphasises communal rituals, more than 100 women and children (girls all ages, boys under 13) will join for an evening’s bathing here known as Wansolmoana Lunar Assembly on 18 January (with the event repeated at Malabar Ocean Pool the following evening).
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