A NOTE FROM MICHAEL KANTOR

SEASON TWO ‘08

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
Charlie Parker

Assembling this extraordinary program of theatre making and performances has been as exhilarating for us, as we hope the experience will be for you. We will present new works commissioned and developed specifically for this season, as well as the most astonishing works, in so many theatrical styles, from stages far and wide.

We will warm you during the Winter months with a spectacular collaboration with Sydney Opera House featuring the award winning Meow Meow, and take over the Beckett Theatre with two madly entertaining works by the most original and ingenious performers from Australia and the UK. Our treasured creative partnership with the Melbourne International Arts Festival continues with a major new commission, and to accompany the Spring winds we present a premiere collaboration with Company B Belvoir by a Melbourne based writer whose family journey beats at the heart of this land’s past and present.

From Sydney Theatre Company we bring you a production of true magnificence, an ancient but shockingly prescient tragedy about war’s unending horrors featuring one of our stage legends in one of theatre’s legendary roles.

In the Tower Theatre, mayhem and havoc will reign during the Black Lung collective’s residency – an experiment for us with potentially unimaginable consequences! And to balance this anarchy, we will restage one of independent theatre’s most stunningly poised and restrained productions of recent years by the Melbourne company, Ranters.

Music has been our muse, shaping the ideas behind the work - and the performances which offer them up - as well as shaping the season as a whole. Theatre and music are inextricable. The rhythm of all theatre, and not least drama, is essentially musical, and there is very real purpose to its pitch and rhythm. Whether driven by sound or the crafted rhythms of the written and uttered word, or the engrossing rhythms of visual transformations and physical gesture, it can deliver a direct hit to our emotions and our memory even when we cannot say in so many words what the meaning of that hit is.

Thank you, as always, for allowing us to astonish you.

Michael Kantor, Artistic Director

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