Renowned HIV+ theatre maker and queer arts producer Jeremy Goldstein surveys Sydney WorldPride Arts for The Queer Review, and finds a radically inclusive multi-artform festival of gender, identity, and sexuality. Beyond the Mardi Gras and the usual circuit parties, WorldPride Arts reinvents the harbour city as one of the world’s greatest LGBTQIA+ cultural destinations. I... Continue Reading →
Comfort, Spin, Travel is a story of trans frustration. Our narrator is spending a late night in a branch of Officeworks—a big box office supply chain—thinking about his past and his family, and trying to come to some kind of peace with the world around him. Is he a good person? Written by Lu Bradshaw... Continue Reading →
There is magic here. Choreographer Shaun Parker’s collaboration with composer and vocalist Ivo Dimchev has produced something truly luscious to behold in King, newly relaunched work at Sydney’s Seymour Centre. The group dynamics of men, sexuality and masculinity are illustrated and deconstructed in Parker’s kinetic and humorous piece. With a company made up of a... Continue Reading →
Opera Up Late takes opera's biggest hits and sprinkles them with some late night fairy dust. Stars of the Sydney Opera House's Dame Joan Sutherland theatre are dragging up, getting down and belting the high notes for an evening of delights that’s making an early claim to be the real highlight of Sydney WorldPride’s cultural... Continue Reading →
CAMP, a new play by Elias Jamieson Brown, chronicles the rise of the Australian Pride movement through the women who fought through their pain and losses to win us the freedoms we enjoy today. It’s a decades spanning tale, elevating Australia’s own Gay Liberation story, just in time for Sydney WorldPride 2023. Sydney, in the... Continue Reading →
There’s a simple pleasure to be had in sitting back and watching everything on stage being done well. Belvoir’s new queer family dramedy, Blessed Union, is seamlessly terrific. Funny, emotive, and probing. Flawless. No notes. I could end the review here, but obviously I won't... Ruth (Danielle Cormack) and Judith (Maude Davey) have always upheld... Continue Reading →
Sydney’s glamour bug, Etcetera Etcetera, is expanding her field of drag with a new one-woman show that gets down to the humanity behind the mask in Big Screen, Small Queen (Everything I Didn’t Learn at Film School), presented during Sydney WorldPride. The night starts like an old school Sydney drag show, lip-syncing to classic film... Continue Reading →
The fine line between straight boys “being boys” and homoeroticism is on display in Marco Berger’s latest feature, Horseplay (Los agitadores), that leans into the liminal spaces of male sexuality and “manhood”. A group of twenty-something young Argentinian men are vacationing together in a luxury villa. Freed from the constraints of parents and family, the... Continue Reading →
The Gateways Club, or the Gates as it was known, was the centre of lesbian London for decades. A watering hole in the heart of Chelsea, it one of the only exclusively lesbian venues in London, frequented by a mix of women of all classes, including the likes of author Patricia Highsmith. Running from the... Continue Reading →
An experimental blend of film, poetry, song and more, Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day? (Bashtaalak sa'at) is an art piece that defies linear narrative or easy interpretation. We may start with a play on Shakespeare, but where we’ll end up…well, that's anyone’s guess. Egyptian filmmaker Mohammad Shawky Hassan has given us a... Continue Reading →
