Concrete Playground

art play think Pecha Kucha for Haiti

Saturday, 20th February - 7PM
@ MCA Harbour Terrace

If you haven’t been to a famed Pecha Kucha Night yet — title from the Japanese for ‘chitchat’ — Saturday night is your night. Saturday we are Pecha Kucha-ing not just for the symbiotic development of ideas and love-in of aesthetic wonderment, but also for Haiti.You’ve heard it said time...

art free think Art Month Sydney 2010

Monday, 1st March - Wednesday, 31st March
@ Various Sydney venues

If your normal intake of art plateaus out at a monthly round of the AGNSW and a field trip during the Biennale, March is here to turn things up a notch. The instigators of Art Month Sydney want you to see the smallest of private galleries scattered through our city...

play Fashion Weekend

Thursday, 13th May - Sunday, 16th May
@ Royal Hall of Industries

I am forever trying to convince some cynic there is art in fashion: that a runway show is a walking exhibition; that designers make endless, self-reflexive statements on the meaning of the body; that street fashion is innate expression. But I concede there is no art in Fashion Weekend —...

free music performing play I, Robot

Wednesday, 9th June - 8PM
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

If you thought the full possibilities of the sci-fi genre had been plumbed by that episode of Doctor Who the other week where the human space colony of the 29th century have to vote every five years to 'protest' or 'forget' the secret exploitation at the heart of their thriving...

film The Special Relationship

Thursday, 5th August - Wednesday, 15th September
@ Various cinemas

Longed to see the grandeur and mythmaking of American drama combined with the British penchant to satirise? This co-production between America's HBO and Britain's BBC Films brings the two worlds together with surprising ease.

art play think Creating the Look: Benini and Fashion Photography

Tuesday, 3rd August - Monday, 18th April
@ Powerhouse Museum

Italian-born Bruno was a photographer with a wonderful sense of narrative, painterly composition, drama and light. Hazel - a Kiwi, artist and shop window stylist - could put together a Sportsgirl display that would draw crowds of office girls when it was unveiled on a Thursday afternoon.

performing Gwen in Purgatory

Wednesday, 11th August - Sunday, 19th September
@ Belvoir St Theatre

Playwright Tommy Murphy's much-anticipated follow-up to [i]Holding the Man[/i] and [i]Saturn's Return[/i], [i]Gwen in Purgatory[/i] was directed and guided to fruition by Neil Armfield at Company B. The result is an immaculate production of a finely tuned script. At its centre is 90-year-old Gwen Houlihan, lifelong resident of Queanbeyan, cloistered in her new digs and caught in a web of technologies that have kept moving faster as she has slowed down to a shuffle. Literally. Her phones are ringing and she just can't reach them in time. And the arrival of her children and grandchildren isn't the balm you'd hope.

film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Tuesday, 17th August - Wednesday, 29th September
@ Various cinemas

Years of hipster geekdom have led to this, a film directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Spaced), starring Michael Cera (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Juno, Arrested Development) and adapted from a comic book based on the conventions of video games and romance. Cera is Scott...

performing Tusk Tusk

Wednesday, 25th August - Saturday, 4th September
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

There's something refreshing about these particular angsty youths. They show so little sign of that neologism-spinning, tech-tuned, so-sharp-you'll-cut-yourself dialect contrived for young characters and expected of young authors, they're practically real people. Their references are less Facebook, more Sendak. They don't talk like they're texting, but their lives are tied...

film Tomorrow, When the War Began

Thursday, 2nd September - Thursday, 21st October
@ Various cinemas

If anything is going to get us over our cultural cringe, it must be this serious, big-budget-ish adaptation of the [i] Tomorrow[/i] series. It's a whole lot bloodier than [i] Twilight[/i], and the explosions: well they're great. Save your cynicism - this is one to get excited about.

performing Quack

Tuesday, 5th October - Saturday, 9th October
@ Riverside Theatres

"I saw discharge. It's on the table." These seven words, spoken by one Dr Waterman, go a long way toward summing up this [i]Deadwood[/i]-with-zombies styled play. It's a gross-out fest of the sort that is rarely seen in these days of restrained living-room dramedy.

art free The Big Bang

Thursday, 16th September - Monday, 31st January
@ The White Rabbit

This popular converted warehouse space makes the most of its four storeys, whether through the whirlwind of plastic refuse that reaches to the third landing or the musky, ethereal parchment man that, stretched out, snakes through the roof.

think Festival of Dangerous Ideas

Saturday, 2nd October - 10AM - Sunday, 3rd October - 10AM
@ Sydney Opera House

This provocative weekend festival should really be called the 'Festival of Ideas Slightly More Radical Than One Would Normally Bring Up in Polite Society, Addressed By the Minds and Working Belief Systems of People Known to be Really Quite Smart'. Presented by the St James Ethics Centre in conjunction with the Sydney Opera House, the festival is looking to build on its successful debut last year with a host of new, compelling speakers on the program. With talks entitled 'What we can learn from terrorists', 'Art doesn't make us better people' and 'Are children worth it', you can expect to be challenged, provoked and maybe just a little enlightened after during this two-day talk-fest. So go along and live dangerously this long weekend.

performing The Pigeons

Tuesday, 12th October - Saturday, 30th October
@ SBW Stables Theatre

You won't be left wanting for what's lost in translation here. [i]The Pigeons[/i] is great fun and, in that way only the foreign can be, entirely unexpected.

art film music performing The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

Tuesday, 26th October - Saturday, 6th November
@ The Studio, Sydney Opera House

There's something we just know to be magical about interacting with animation right there on stage, and these quirky innovators do it particularly well.

art free think Reportage 2010

Friday, 5th November - Sunday, 21st November
@ Australian Centre for Photography

It can be hard to connect with a story happening a world away - until you see a photograph that makes it feel like it's taking place next door. This annual photo festival celebrates this moment of insight, showcasing works from photographers around the world.

film The Loved Ones

Thursday, 4th November - Wednesday, 15th December
@ Various cinemas

Want to see what glitter and blood look like combined? Inventive Aussie horror The Loved Ones has recently scooped a handful of film festival prizes, so it's being released to some hype. The points of difference to the average slasher are its investment in character (so you care when someone...

performing True West

Tuesday, 9th November - Saturday, 18th December
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

With Philip Seymour Hoffman directing, Wayne Blair and Brendan Cowell play two brothers who explore their latent undersides, admit mutual admiration, co-write a Western, drink and trash the joint.

performing Uncle Vanya

Tuesday, 16th November - Saturday, 1st January
@ Sydney Theatre

It's a classic text heaving under the weight of its all-star cast, so you'll have to fight to secure a ticket.

performing Angela's Kitchen

Wednesday, 17th November - Saturday, 18th December
@ SBW Stables Theatre

A fascinating play on the practice of biography, a microhistory of the migrant experience, a touching ode to a deeply loved woman and a reflection on his own lifetime of pretending and identity-seeking.

free Made in Dagenham

Thursday, 28th October - Wednesday, 22nd December
@ Various cinemas

Anything set in the 1960s will draw the inevitable comparison with Mad Men, so let's get it done with in the first sentence: Made in Dagenham shares none of the glamour of that particular zeitgeist-definer, although it does have a charm all of its own. The movie charts the days...

performing Bigger Than Jesus

Tuesday, 18th January - Saturday, 29th January
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

Do not rush to judge this blasphemous heathen, good believers; the last person to lie claim to being bigger than Jesus was John Lennon, and, well, he had a point.Bigger Than Jesus is a self-labelled 'multimedia mass' that uses one man and a high-tech toolbox to explore the role religion...

performing Soap

Tuesday, 18th January - Sunday, 30th January
@ Drama Theatre, Opera House

A company of acrobats, dancers, jugglers and contortionists transform the generally private and uninspiring bathroom domain into one of wonder, daring, cheekiness and sublimity.

performing Speaking in Tongues

Tuesday, 8th February - Saturday, 19th March
@ SBW Stables Theatre

The play that became the film Lantana is being revived for the next-gen audience and comes complete with all the theatrey touches that were excised on the screen.

performing In the Next Room, or the vibrator play

Wednesday, 9th February - Sunday, 27th March
@ Drama Theatre, Opera House

Making its debut with the Sydney Theatre Company, In The Next Room casts light on the sordid past of the 'hysterical paroxysms' which cure all lady ailments.

art free play think Art Month Sydney 2011

Tuesday, 1st March - Thursday, 31st March
@ Various Sydney venues

Art Month Sydney is back to unite over 80 galleries and artist-run initiatives in four weeks of celebration, collaboration and bigger-than-oneself thinking.

performing ZEBRA!

Monday, 14th March - Saturday, 30th April
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

Two men walk into a bar. One, Larry (Colin Friels), waiting to meet his daughter's fiance, is a Bostonian self-made man whose suave banker get-up is interrupted by a broken arm and accessorised with a reckless ownership over all that he touches. The other, Jimmy (Bryan Brown), is an Australian...

performing Missing the Bus to David Jones

Tuesday, 29th March - Saturday, 2nd April
@ Seymour Centre

It's worth facing ageing and death when visiting the surreal nursing home of Theatre Kantanka.

film Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires)

Thursday, 31st March - Wednesday, 27th April
@ Dendy Newtown

With his distinctive visual style, Xavier Dolan's may be next year's Pedro Almodovar or Michel Gondry, and you'll want to say you saw him first.

performing Me Pregnant!

Monday, 11th April - Saturday, 23rd April
@ Old Fitzroy Theatre

Let Nick Coyle tell you a tale of a wretched village, a fallen hero and an angsty beast waiting for revenge.

performing Silent Disco

Monday, 2nd May - Saturday, 4th June
@ SBW Stables Theatre

Young love can make a whole lot of life's rotten, unfair burdens bearable, but for teenagers Tamara and Squid, it may not be enough. Lachlan Philpott's script, in its first performance after winning the 2009 Griffin Award that sent it into production, is bold, poetic, insightful, truly affecting and wonderfully, literally close to home. It's extraordinary the levels to which he's been able to penetrate and embody the teenage mind - Facebook-checking and headphones-dependency unpatronisingly explained - as well as the minutiae of the school world most of us have happily repressed (Philpott couldn't; he's a teacher). Still, it's a hard one to pull off, so it's fortunate this show is so well cast and directed (by Lee Lewis, fresh off the Sydney Theatre Company's ZEBRA!).

performing I Only Came to Use the Phone

Tuesday, 10th May - Sunday, 29th May
@ Darlinghurst Theatre

Discover a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short fiction as this ensemble tells the tale of a woman who, after her car breaks down, winds up in a dark and unexpected place.

performing Baal

Monday, 16th May - Saturday, 11th June
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

The new Baal looks like an evil Angus Stone, prostrates over his guitar and systematically, callously pushes against everything that wanders into his path.

performing The Kiss

Tuesday, 17th May - Sunday, 12th June
@ Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs

With its sweet, flirtatious and emotionally charged connotations, the kiss is a subject that can pull a theatre audience close for hours.

performing Terminus

Tuesday, 7th June - Saturday, 9th July
@ Drama Theatre, Opera House

Three isolated characters kill, die, brawl, save lives, steal a truck and soar through the air in the arms of a demon composed of worms.

performing The White Guard

Tuesday, 14th June - Friday, 10th June
@ Sydney Theatre

One imagines Stalin licking his lips in delight at the sad fate awaiting these loving, erring, human characters.

performing Who's the Best

Thursday, 23rd June - Saturday, 2nd July
@ Wharf 2, Wharf Theatre

Looks, personality, intelligence, health and fitness, talent, luck, money, life experience, life skills and special skills. Post know what it takes to win.

performing Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness

Tuesday, 28th June - Saturday, 23rd July
@ Wharf 1, Wharf Theatre

Dressed by Romance War Born, Edward Gant's ensemble tell stories sweetly tragic and slightly grotesque.

performing And No More Shall We Part

Monday, 8th August - Saturday, 3rd September
@ SBW Stables Theatre

Discover love, death, what it takes to close the curtain on the days ahead you've dreamed of and what it means to let someone go.

performing Smashed

Sunday, 11th September - Saturday, 1st October
@ SBW Stables Theatre

Explore the unique intensity of teenage girl best-friendom in this warm, funny, metaphysical play by Lally Katz.

film Fright Night

Thursday, 15th September - Wednesday, 12th October
@ Various cinemas

Bask in the nostalgia and watch Colin Farrell get creepy in this fun vampire flick.

performing Loot - Sydney Theatre Company

Friday, 16th September - Sunday, 23rd October
@ Drama Theatre, Opera House

Madcap hijinks with dead bodies. It's all so very English.

film The Eye of the Storm

Thursday, 15th September - Wednesday, 2nd November
@ Various cinemas

Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis play a brother and sister who have all the hallmarks of success but struggle to flip a steak or feel real love.

performing Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Wednesday, 28th September - Sunday, 13th November
@ Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs

Sex, relationships, growing up, blindness to change, and the fantasies we sustain to make our lives liveable: the themes of this Australian classic seem strikingly contemporary.

film Tabloid

Thursday, 6th October - Wednesday, 16th November
@ Various cinemas

You'll never meet more interesting tabloid fodder than Joyce McKinney, 1978's Mormon-kidnapping, sexually predatory Southern beauty queen.

art Try This at Home

Saturday, 8th October - Sunday, 8th January
@ Object Gallery

This exhibition on sustainable living combines the community of old with the technology of the new to signal a future we'd be happy to live in.

film Take Shelter

Thursday, 13th October - Wednesday, 16th November
@ Various cinemas

Prophesy or mental illness? This thoughtful slow-burner will make you question what you think you know.

performing This Year's Ashes

Thursday, 13th October - Saturday, 19th November
@ SBW Stables Theatre

Try as you might, you can't find closure in sauvignon blanc, the beds of strangers or cricket matches.

performing Sprout

Wednesday, 26th October - Saturday, 19th November
@ Old Fitzroy Theatre

This production beautifully and subtly charts how relationships are impacted by a climate-changed world.

performing Julius Caesar

Thursday, 27th October - Saturday, 26th November
@ Playhouse, Sydney Opera House

Bell Shakespeare's slick and effective take on Julius Caesar speaks to modern executive government generally and the Kevin-to-Julia Labor leadership switch specifically.

performing The Dark Room

Thursday, 3rd November - Sunday, 27th November
@ Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs

If these walls could talk, they'd tell you to leave this godforsaken place while you still can.

performing NovemberISM

Wednesday, 2nd November - Sunday, 27th November
@ Old 505 Theatre

Of all the things you're encouraged to do in the month of November, getting out and experiencing some new playwriting is by far the least painful.

film The Tall Man

Thursday, 17th November - Wednesday, 14th December
@ Various cinemas

Cameron Doomadgee was arrested on Palm Island while merrily singing 'Who Let the Dogs Out' and found unresponsive in a police cell 40 minutes later.

film The Ides of March

Thursday, 24th November - Wednesday, 4th January
@ Various cinemas

Over a few crucial days, an ambitious idealist becomes a pragmatic manipulator, and it's an entirely believable journey.

performing Buried City - Belvoir and Urban Theatre Projects

Friday, 6th January - Sunday, 5th February
@ Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs

Explore who owns the future of our city with Urban Theatre Projects.

performing I'm Your Man - Belvoir

Thursday, 12th January - Sunday, 5th February
@ Belvoir St Theatre Downstairs

A mixture of verbatim and physical performance will interest even placid non-athletes in the world of boxing.

performing Thyestes - Belvoir and The Hayloft Project

Sunday, 15th January - Sunday, 19th February
@ CarriageWorks

'After Seneca'. A long way after.

performing A History of Everything - Sydney Theatre Company and Ontroerend Goed

Tuesday, 17th January - Sunday, 5th February
@ Wharf 2, Wharf Theatre

Sydney's Belgian friends, Ontroerend Goed, come back with an idiosyncratic twist on everything that's happened ever.

film Young Adult

Thursday, 19th January - Wednesday, 15th February
@ Various cinemas

The team behind Juno take you on a journey with Mavis Gary, a YA fiction writer who's all-out detestable.

film Weekend

Thursday, 26th January - Wednesday, 22nd February
@ Various cinemas

The gender of the couple is not the whole story in this sweet, intimate indie romance.

film The Artist

Thursday, 2nd February - Wednesday, 14th March
@ Various cinemas

There's no such thing as a perfect movie, but there may be one you wouldn't wish to be any different.

performing Babyteeth - Belvoir

Wednesday, 15th February - Sunday, 18th March
@ Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs

Cancer is dug out of the 'not funny' basket in a new Australian play.

music performing The Marriage of Figaro - Opera Australia

Friday, 24th February - 7PM - Saturday, 24th March - 7PM
@ Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House

Opera gets hip, experimental and fun with the help of Benedict Andrews.

music performing La Traviata - Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour

Saturday, 24th March - Sunday, 15th April
@ Mrs. Macquaries Point

Probably the best outdoor event to ever be staged in Australia, this stunning spectacle floats in the harbour, while you sip champagne from Fleet Steps.

film A Separation

Thursday, 1st March - Wednesday, 28th March
@ Various cinemas

One thing the Oscars got right: picking Best Foreign Film.

film Coriolanus

Thursday, 8th March - Wednesday, 4th April
@ Various cinemas

Ralph Fiennes' bold Shakespeare/action movie hybrid is set 'in a place calling itself Rome' but looking like the Balkans.

film Fantastic Planet Film Festival + A Night of Horror 2012

Thursday, 22nd March - Sunday, 1st April
@ Dendy Newtown

The most interesting new fantasy, sci-fi, horror, Asian and cult films crammed into 11 days at the Dendy.

film free Seen and Heard 2012

Thursday, 15th March - Thursday, 29th March
@ Red Rattler

Short and feature films that have a woman's (not necessarily gentle) touch.

art film free music Message Sticks 2012

Tuesday, 27th March - Sunday, 1st April
@ Sydney Opera House

See great Indigenous films for free, alongside a fiery array of music, talks, dance and art.

performing Every Breath - Belvoir

Saturday, 24th March - Sunday, 29th April
@ Belvoir St Theatre Upstairs

Can imaginative top-gun director Benedict Andrews also write? We're still not sure.

performing Macbeth - Bell Shakespeare

Friday, 30th March - Saturday, 12th May
@ Drama Theatre, Opera House

The witches, the ghosts, the murders, the coups, that wonderful, powerful, punished, sleepwalking Lady — this play is thrilling every time.

film John Carter

Thursday, 8th March - Wednesday, 11th April
@ Various cinemas

Film studios have been trying to make this legendary sci-fi epic for decades - and that might be the problem.

music performing Die Tote Stadt - Opera Australia

Saturday, 30th June - Wednesday, 18th July
@ Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House

Holograms and other groundbreaking tech will make this a truly 21st-century opera.

art film Christian Marclay: The Clock

Thursday, 29th March - Sunday, 3rd June
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

We visit the MCA at 2am for an extraordinary spot of clock-watching.

art performing Local Positioning Systems

Thursday, 29th March - Sunday, 3rd June
@ Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

From naked art tours to philosophical doctors, the MCA and Performance Space present seven surprising performance, participatory and site-specific artworks.