The Menstruum 22: A Guide to Common Plant Care

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE 30.03.2011]

There are few topics on which I feel more qualified to speak on than that of failure. I have begun and irreparably failed careers as an engineer, a teacher, musician, fishmonger, salted snack manufacturer, and postman. I have written (a number terrifyingly and certainly over a dozen) novels and then proceeded to fail audaciously in getting a single one of them published. As a student, I once failed for an entire summer holiday at concocting a recipe for a palatable, and thus saleable, carbonated milk drink. Just this morning I was attempting to swat a wasp with a rolled up copy of the Vintage Cellars Wine Club Gazette, missed, and sent a jam jar’s worth of thumbtacks and five cent pieces tumbling down a previously unknown and barely accessible crevice between my writing desk and the wall.     

And yet, and yet on the subject of the failure of humanity; I am a blissful dope. I can only conclude that I am not yet old enough nor well-read to have abandoned the idea that there is hope for us lot.    

Albert Tucker
Image of Modern Evil: Spring in Fitzroy 1943
oil on canvas on plywood
58.7 x 69 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist 1982
© Barbara Tucker

In 1943, Albert Tucker made Spring in Fitzroy (now on display at Heide: part of Tucker’s Images of Modern Evil series exhibition – really, truly, go there), and it is difficult to not read the painting as a woman staring down at a world gone terminally sick. It is the vision of faith on the brink of failing.

Australia and the world was at war, and Tucker’s objections to fighting were ones both political and personal. The whole blasted affair disgusted and terrified him. He saw his city of Melbourne as one decaying into moral and actual ruin – it was the end of the world, with violence and sex being exchanged on the streets like drinks at one last party. Tucker saw a civilisation that might not deserve to be saved.

The central figure of Spring in Fitzroy is a wasted woman, laughing and throwing her arms up in hysterical defeat. In the background is a city ready to burn and to her side is a withered plant, an aspidistra, a symbol borrowed from George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. In George’s book, the plant is an emblem for everything wrong with a contemporary life, it is the “money-god” we worship. Orwell’s male lead spends the novel haunted by a potted aspidistra in his room, eventually dousing it with chemicals, desperate, but it stays standing high and refuses to die.        

Whereby, despite his scene of utter despair, Tucker has triumphed in injuring his aspidistra. The bugger has slain it. The thing is gloriously limp and lies next to our hero like a drunk and her hungry dog.

I cannot surely know what Tucker meant by this; if it was a cheeky wink to camera, but in his vision of hell, I am choosing to take this sign of death as a tiny sign of hope. I see a chance, but of course, I am young and have read not nearly enough.    

The Menstruum 21: The String Bag

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 23.03.2011]

I only remember my past in summers. 

Photograph by Edward Lukins, 1987.

It could have a lot to do with having spent most of my years in Queensland – the relaxed and future-loving child, the quiet but know-it-all teenager, the twenty-something and his terrible haircuts and dumb explosions of terror and contentment. Now, days away from turning 33 and a 1/3, I’m drinking tea and looking for the years that have gone and I’m only seeing summers. 

Photograph by Edward Lukins, 1987.

Photograph by Pamela Lukins, 1988.

1988 looms so large. All I can think of is Expo ’88 and exactly how that place smelled. The air was all humidity and frangipanis, and into this came the wafts of just-cooked loukoumades from the stall outside of the Greek pavilion. I would beg for these every time and can feel the honey and powdered sugar still stuck to my grin; the world is painted by Ken Done, so all is fluorescent. It’s summer and the soundtrack is always John Farnham, always ‘Two Strong Hearts’.    

World Expo '88. Photograph by Edward Lukins, 1988.

   

Dragon Ride, Big Top. Photograph by Pamela Lukins, 1988.

Ken Done, Australia, 1988. Photograph by Edward Lukins, 1988.

1995 and high school is about to end, and we’ve moved into a place that has a communal pool. It would be night but still hot, so I’m alone in the water and floating on my back, thinking of how wide and endless my future must be, and waiting for the motion-sensor lights to switch off so I can see the stars. I realise I’m humming Nirvana, and I’m looking up and waiting for a falling satellite to wish on.   

1997 and the summer of falling in love with Brisbane – of the Go-Betweens and bad student theatre and the backyard filling up with fallen and rotting mangoes. Then it’s new year’s eve and we’re tripping into 2000, and we’re on the beach at Bribie Island when the brawl breaks out during the ten-second countdown. It’s summer and I have no violence in me. Paul and his girlfriend end up in hospital, I just get a decent thump to the back of the head. 

The next decade, it only happened between Decembers and Februarys. Pink Floyd, table tennis, working at the rubbish tip. Those boys that I love, the Burnside boys. Floods, gin. Sleeping in the library, the uni bar, running my fingers through what was left of Grant McLennan’s hair. That one great surf trip down the coast.

Brisbane has gone. Now it’s 2011 and it is Melbourne with its black coats and tiny wheelie bins, and the summer just gone had been crazed and beautiful and non-existent. March, Autumn, I’m living in time that has no weight. There’s a freedom in it. I know that my future self will only remember the season before this one; he is a forgetful and basic creature, and likes to boil things down. I will remember stumbling down a street in Abbotsford, singing Edith Piaf very loud and badly. I will remember going potty for Keats. I will remember Emily Ferretti’s Sky Line. 

Emily Ferretti, Sky Line, 2011.

This summer gone will become a handful of images and scented sounds, and I will add it to the simple slide show of a life.        

THE WOUND-DRESSER: Albert Tucker's Images of Modern Evil series at Heide

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 23.03.2011]
 
ALBERT TUCKER’S SERIES OF PAINTINGS, IMAGES OF MODERN EVIL, HAVE COME TO BE RECOGNISED AS ICONIC ILLUSTRATIONS OF A CITY AND WORLD AT WAR. ROBERT LUKINS SPEAKS WITH HEIDE GALLERY CURATOR LESLEY HARDING AND DISCOVERS THAT TUCKER WAS REPORTING ON A BATTLE BOTH EXTERNAL AND PRIVATE.   

Albert Tucker
Image of Modern Evil: Paris Night 1948
oil on canvas on composition board
38.5 x 46.5 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist 1985
© Courtesy of Barbara Tucker

For the first time in almost 30 years, the Heide Museum of Modern Art is on the eve of displaying all known, locatable works of Tucker’s most heralded series, Images of Modern Evil (1943-48). Its 39 constituent works represent a body of expression that, though roundly critically unloved at the time of their making, is now revered as a complex and astute depiction of a place and time in flux.

A key member of the gaggle of mid-century artists that revolved around and occupied the artistic haven that was John and Sunday Reed’s Heide property, Tucker began work on the series a full three years before his Modernist comrade, Sidney Nolan, had daubed the first stroke of his esteemed Ned Kelly collections. Images of Modern Evil is a tunnelled and stricken insight into Melbourne at a time when the threat of international military collapse seemed both real and nearby. As Harding notes, “we know how the Second World War turned out – they didn’t”.

Albert Tucker

Image of Modern Evil: Woman and Clown 1943

oil on canvas on composition board

51.8 x 72.5 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Gift of the artist 1983

© Barbara Tucker

As such, Tucker’s paintings show a city heavy with a sinister anxiety. Alleys, buildings and their people are reduced to raw and hostile fundamental elements, and at these works’ focal point: a female centrepiece. These foregrounded figures are distillations of an unbalancing social structure, Tucker’s personal complicated relationship with women, and the Australian Modernist’s connection with the utter history of art. We see the emergence of the series’ most discussable symbol, the “red crescent”; the turned and smiling lips that stand in for the full female form – we see Tucker’s self-understanding of females as both alluring and fear-inducing; we see the vagina dentate, the toothed vagina.  

Tucker was himself a barbed creature, taking as his mission at this time in his working life, the depiction and probing of the shrouded and dark sides of what he saw as a collapsing civilisation. Taking cues from Picasso, T.S. Eliot, and the blooming band of Modernists in his social circle, he pursued his base fascinations to, and beyond, their natural and necessarily morbid conclusions. Tucker well understood this to be a path unlikely to end in popular or commercial acclaim.

Albert Tucker

Image of Modern Evil: Demon Dreamer 1942

oil on canvas on composition board

40.8 x 50.8 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Gift of the artist 1982

© Courtesy of Barbara Tucker

Art historian Janine Burke has described the series as illustrating wartime Melbourne “as it had never been seen before: a living hell of licentious, red-lipped, uncontrollable monsters who prowl the streets, intent on orgiastic pleasures.” It is for these reasons, Harding explains, that the celebration of Tucker’s contribution is one reliant on the judiciousness of hindsight. “They were not critically appreciated at the time,” she says. “It was a time when there was a conservatism within art criticism ... these works were too difficult.”

Tucker was more than aware of the casino of a world in which he’d set course: “When I get to the end of my life and find I’ve won more than I’ve lost, then this is the occasion to say I’ve lead a fulfilled and happy life. The word happiness is meaningless.”

Tucker rolled the dice.

WHAT: Images of Modern Evil

WHERE & WHEN: Heide Museum of Modern Art. Saturday 19 March to Sunday 26 June. 

Emily Ferretti at Gertrudes Contemporary

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 23.03.2011]

 

THERE CAN BE A CHAOS, A PANDEMONIUM, AN INCH BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE MOST SERENE SURFACE. DISCUSSING HER NEW SHOW, POT PLANTS AND LANDSCAPES, MELBOURNE ARTIST EMILY FERRETTI TELLS ROBERT LUKINS OF THE VEILED BUSTLE BENEATH HER NEW PAINTINGS. 

Emily Ferretti, Coil Pot, 2011. Images courtesy the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

“It’s funny that people often pick up on the stillness, the reflective nature of the work,” she says. “I laugh every time because in real life my personality is totally opposite to the pictures. I do things way too quickly and am quite rough with things. I do have a real respect for my materials and the things I choose to paint, so I think this is what ends up coming through the work and giving them that quality.”

In this elegant and restrained series, Ferretti was interested in the notion of the pot plant being manmade, and as such, contained, in contrast to the common understanding of the landscape as a thing that is born of nature and so vast and sublime. She elaborates: “I wanted to play with the scale of these subjects so the audience sees close-up pictures of the pot plants paired with images of more distant landscapes such as the tips of a distant tree line.”     

Emily Ferretti, Sky Line, 2011. Images courtesy the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

In doing so, she has made a body of work which appeals to those thoughtful impulses of its audience. It is this contemplative aspect to her style which could be read as a sadness, however Ferretti describes a process of art-making which is very much at odds with this.

“My work stems from a positive place and I make my best work when I feel happiest. I choose to paint objects that filter into my daily life ... they form a visual importance to me that I would like to honor and give new relevance too. To me there is a sense of nostalgia to my pictures, but not a sadness or loneliness ...  if this comes through it’s not really my intention.” 

The materials and subjects of her pictures are handled in a deft and definite manner, so it is a surprise to learn the role “happy accidents” have had on Ferretti’s latest collection. “In this body of work the first painting done was Split Fig, which is a piece made up of two canvas panels joined together. This came about when the original single canvas dropped and ripped. I thought the only way to save it was to stretch the pieces separately and place them together … I was surprised by the result and this made me decide to continue joining canvas panels for other works in the show. It’s opened me up to all sort of new ways of thinking about picture making.”

Emily Ferretti, Split Fig, 2011. Images courtesy the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

With an exhibition featuring simple pot plants as a primary concern, Ferretti answers the perhaps obvious question of whether she finds a beauty in the common place. “Absolutely! I find the most ordinary subjects most compelling and interesting. In my pictures I aim to exaggerate and exploit the characteristics of familiar things ... so they become suspended between tangible and dreamlike states. It is important to me that the audience feels they are looking at something very familiar in a completely new way.”

WHAT: Pot Plants and Landscapes

WHERE & WHEN: Gertrude Contemporary, 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. Saturday 19 March to Sunday 16 April. 

THE MENSTRUUM 20: Party of One

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 16.03.2011]


I’m waiting for the elevator with an awful woman who seems convinced that charisma is measured in decibels. She won’t stop and after nearly ten minutes I’m almost sure the lift isn’t coming, and going to the stairs I can still hear her, screeching and cackling at a poor and silent arts student – ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, dear. I am crazy, I am. Don’t worry about me, I’m crazy.” – who must be regretting her timetabling of this moment to visit the Nicholas building. Taking the deep stone steps by two, I’m now happy for the inconvenience, at my transport’s sudden lack of mechanisation.

It is a tower worth being lost in; twisting clockwise up and around and over and again, and everywhere are lockers and doors on the walls at your chest, positioned above a height that could be useful, and signs glued on tiles and glass doors that suggest an invitation but which are in fact strict in their excluding.

 

Photograph by Tiago Brissos.

Being in this place is being at a party that you heard of through a friend, is like the parties you dreamed of having when you were thirteen, is attended entirely by people who don’t know you but know each other too well, and which started a long, long time ago.  

 



Photograph by Robert Lukins.





All the way, up and up, clockwise and round, there are windows which crack open to a view of the central and hollow core of the building. Where you might imagine a steel spine, the Nicholas has a bare concrete square and a shaft of unreplenished air and the odd birds of blown scraps and rubbish.

Photograph by Robert Lukins.

I would mention urban labyrinths and physicalised bureaucracies and Kafka, but I would then feel duty bound to hire fifteen first-semester philosophy students to suspend me by my ankles and repeatedly pound my goolies with my valueless but tastefully-framed arts degree.

Photograph by Robert Lukins.

   

Now, the seventh floor, I turn and turn and am at the optimistically large donation box that stands guard to the entrance to Blindside gallery. Peopleless, doorless – inside, contraptions are banging. The room is Paul Yore’s and styled with blinding dyes and these set-off clatter machines, and there, a rainbow; a My Little Pony is glued to a revolving record player, a wire tied to her back which lets a bead thump over and over into a circle of drums. Over there, a pineapple strums musical strings. A dildo spins, blue water is spurting into bowls – the room is a horror carnival in miniature.



Paul Yore, Fountain of Sanity, 2011.



I’m through this, thrilled but escaping this, the second room is a halcyon with its wings outstretched. Sophie Knezic’s Fiat Lux is only a sun-white room and a window of digital colour: it is a moment of real peace. In a firetrap gallery, on a maze floor, in a hip and outmoded belfry on the corner of a screaming world; I am for a second in a beautiful truth. In rare silence, I am my own friend, and so, am a god.       



STRIPING SMIKE: The Butterworth Brothers at Bridget McDonnell Galery

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 16.03.2011]

IN A DEBASED ERA, WHEN A SIMPLE LINE CANNOT BE DRAWN BETWEEN ONE POINT IN TIME AND THE LAST, WHAT DEPTH OF RELATIONSHIP CAN AN ARTIST HAVE WITH THOSE THAT CAME BEFORE? ROBERT LUKINS SEEKS ADVICE FROM BROTHERS, DANIEL AND MATTHEW BUTTERWORTH.  

Jean Baudrillard talked of a rupture; of this irretrievable point at which the central organising principle of our world shifted from that of production to that of simulation. The moment at which this occurred is necessarily impossible to isolate, but more importantly, it is a moment from which there can be no return.

Big Bad Baud: The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative discourse.

Daniel & Matthew Butterworth, Smike.

Popping Jean briefly on ice – the brothers Butterworth’s forthcoming show aims to “humanise and demystify the astist”, asking, “if highly regarded artists of the past were around today, what would they be painting?” In answering this, through painted works dipping between irreverence and confrontation, the boys put hands to the neck of post- Derridean thinking. Their shared exhibition on the eve of opening, the brothers Butterworth make answers as one – distinction between them unwanted or impractical.   

Their paintings interacting with celebrated practitioners of old, they are clear on whether they feel divorced from the history of art. “No we don't. If anything the artists we reference  would celebrate our work ... obviously we are always looking for inspiration, whether that be from living or dead.”

Daniel & Matthew Butterworth, A Brief History of Art.

The pair have developed a working relationship that pivots between individual articulation and collaboration. When constructing joint pieces, Daniel will often start the procedure, slapping paint, moving the work to the point when he will pass the canvas and stewardship to Matthew. In a work such as Smike, in which they have tattooed and taken the clothes from Tom Roberts’ portrayal of Arthur Streeton, they simultaneously add and remove layers of complexity. We are left to think of “the male, relationships, sexuality and masculinity.”

We are also tossed into a confusion of lineality, and again, into Baudrillard’s darkly funny and one-sided conversation: ... and at the same time, the end simultaneously of the exchange value/use value dialectic which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production possible. The end of linear dimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of the commodity. The end of the classical era of the sign. The end of the era of production.

Daniel and Matthew Butterworth have made a smooth dance of sharing an idea; “The process is made easy because our style and approach complements each other. We like the challenge of bringing our two styles together to create a cohesive image.”

In acting together, they make a twin with their subject, or if not a twin, then at the least a temporary spouse, and the upshot of this is something to be considered – there is the idea of the cool smile, of a gesture which ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity. Humour can be a slippery fish, it can turn and it can bite.

WHAT: Daniel and Matthew Butterworth exhibition.

WHERE & WHEN: Opening Saturday 12 March, 3 – 5pm. Exhibition continues until Saturday 2 April. Bridget McDonnell Gallery: Hampton. 392 Hampton Street, Hampton.

THE MENSTRUUM 19: Moral Fibre

FROM SUCH SMOKE: Phoenix at Surface POP Up Exhibition

OVID WROTE OF THE MYTH: MOST BEINGS SPRING FROM OTHER INDIVIDUALS; BUT THERE IS A CERTAIN KIND WHICH REPRODUCES ITSELF. SEVEN YEARS AFTER A FIRE WHICH DESTROYED HIS STUDIO, STREET ARTIST PHOENIX IS SET TO PRESENT SALVAGED BURNT WORKS, AND NEW AND STREET PIECES. ROBERT LUKINS IS SHOWN THROUGH THE ASHES. 

Phoenix's destroyed studio, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2004, flames made short work of a creative space and the burn-happy works it housed. It is the kind of event which could stop a type of life in its tracks. Phoenix describes the “ravenous, five metre tall monster”: “[the fire] started in a faulty power board above my central collating desk ... it was very traumatic ... and took four fire engines to be extinguished. At one point I was fighting the fire alongside the first fireman – working to save the house from also catching. I know that any slight whiff of such smoke – burning buildings have a particular smell – and my nervous system definitely kicks in to this day.”

Five years passed before he could step back into art-making. To face this was to again face that day. “I was fortunate that a number of works and folders from my source library survived the flames and fire hoses; though scorched and melted. Some of these works were strangely enhanced by going through the fire and being partly burnt. The fire ... created a few works of its own – melting and fusing together bits and pieces. Works like my Artburn piece, are collages of unaltered pieces found in the ashes.



Phoenix, Artburn, 2009.



The presentation of street art in a gallery environment and commercial structure is a challenge which is yet to be fully met. It can be considered an affront to the art form’s roots. It can be the legitimisation of a manner of representation commonly reviled. Phoenix is well aware of the dispute. “It is about bringing the art from the street into the gallery space,” he states, boiling considerations down. “Street art is a very different animal to much of the art that is typically put up on gallery walls. By having copies – and where possible exact replicas – of works which are currently ... or have in the past been installed on walls around Melbourne alongside photos and stories about the works on the street, I think this exhibition will go some way to integrating these two very different art forms.”

More than the simple comma it could have been in his development, the destruction central to fiery event necessitated rebuilding. Broken bones can grow back heavy. “I think the fire eventually made me a better artist,” he can now see. “It made me passionate about gathering together and creating a good storage system for my source materials ... also, as often happens for a person who has been through a trauma, I came through stronger: clearer about my artistic methods and intentions.”

Phoenix, Force and Its Effects.

“I should say here that when they say truth is stranger than fiction, they are speaking the truth. You cannot make this stuff up. I could also say that God has a sick sense of humour. Fortunately mine is similarly black.”

WHAT: In Here Out There.

WHERE & WHEN: Surface POP Up Exhibition Shop, 11-13 Carlisle Street, St Kilda. Opening Night, Thursday 10 March 6-8pm. Exhibition runs Friday 11 March to Monday 21 March.

The MENTRUUM 18: Guy, Leech.

[First published in Inpress Magazine, 02.03.2011]

I don’t think we’re going to die, but we’re going to get rashes, the voms or the shits for sure. Trouble is in the post. 

Lorne, Victoria.

The day before, we found coffees, marshalled tired bodies into the car and pointed ourselves towards the coast and Lorne. Miranda had seen a video of some Westies throwing themselves down some rapids, just bare bodies on a flowing and mossy rock formation, and we wanted that to be us.   

And it had been fab – a rough bush walk and then this expanse of crazy and wet rock. Someone suggested rubbish bags were a good idea, to strap them on like a nappy to help with speed and to keep the slime out. Downriver, green strips of the torn plastic hung from low branches like the stone’s trophies. The water was cold and the falls hard: no-one died, everyone was bashed up, everyone was laughing – then we noticed the leeches. Tiny, writhing, hundreds of leeches, Christ. 

We rushed out of the bush picking their black bodies from each other, quick across the roads and into the blessed sea. Salt water, we promised ourselves, would kill them.  

Morning after, I’m in Lamington Drive, Collingwood: Jeremy Dower’s show of digital paintings, and I swear I can still feel the slimy pricks down my slacks. There’s a creeping too, a burrowing, to these images of dogs. Canis Lupus Familiaris – made of dejected pixels, they are cartoons in the way that a mind is a collection of grey, damp cells.   

Jeremy Dower. Lumpy Poodle 2, 2011.

Dower fires the powers of his technique like a smirking, knowingly hapless hubby, dishing out the romance when he’s good and ready, and it’s almost a shame how great it is when it comes – there is a true childishness under the dark machinery, a silly freedom.

The naive and grinning dogs are drowning here, and as I walk and rub my hands across the surface of the opposing arm, I wonder what purpose these can have. They are severe and dazzling, beautiful and made with care – and what then? You know what to do with a blackened banana, or with a cretinoid arse-hat: you pop it in the bin, or you elect it Lord Mayor of Melbourne.

What do we do with a wonderful thing?

Now I’ve got my hand under my shirt and I’m thinking about the leeches and whether they were actually leeches and not something worse, and how every twitch of movement in my gut is the early explosive rumbling of some creek-born bowel malady. My coccyx is a sad and bruised mess. The larvae of some river beasty is in my blood. 

Then, now remembering that you can make cake from blackened bananas too, I watch two adults and a small girl enter into the room. The woman is grimacing and looking at the walls like they’re riding up her crack. The father is talking on his phone, ignoring the young girl’s tugs on his cargo shorts.

“Mummy,” the girl says, hopefully, “Mummy, I love the puppies. Look, mummy, I love the puppies.”

MADAME BUTTERFLY: The Australian Ballet, The Arts Centre, 25.02.2011

[First published in Inpress Magazine, 02.03.2011]

A ballet audience is something special, and never more so than on opening night. They are a wondrous mixture: tuxedos and pearls stand beside too-blue jeans and just tucked polos. And they are a good-looking crowd, and tall; you can spot the dancers among them, present and past. Civvies can’t disguise those straightened backs, the opened chests, those precise and weightless strides – even if those steps are just to join the queue in the dunnies or to grab that last pre-curtain gin.    

Hans Vonk.

    

Inside: lights cut, the conductor applauded and with his hand poised above the orchestra’s pit, ready to lead that first beat, a magic something descends on the room. The pomp and trappings of ballet are so often considered its whole, and so, derided; but the dancing – the centre, the heart of this – is a thing so genuine, so inclusive and powerful.       

Miwako Kubota. Photograph by Paul Empson.

The Australian Ballet’s production of Madame Butterfly is well considered a contemporary classic, and now, sixteen years after its premiere, a newness and brash energy runs down its spine. The wordless story, of love and its capacity for fragility and brutality, makes a stage for the humour and pricks of astounding beauty, agony, of Stanton Welch’s choreography. It is remarkably Australian; of the pain and potential of old worlds meeting new.

To many, ballet is an island where others live – a place just seen in glimpses. In a reasonable universe, this production would be one to destroy that idea.