Culture

  • Palestinian theatre performs stories from Egypt's revolution

    A crew of Palestinian actors and musicians from the Jenin-based Freedom Theatre toured Egypt in April. The aim of the tour was to conduct a series of “playback theatre” workshops and performances in Cairo and Alexandria. Playback theatre is an interactive theatre approach used as a tool for community building, public dialogue, cultural activism and trauma recovery. In a playback event, audience members share thoughts, feelings, memories and autobiographical accounts, and watch as a team of actors and musicians instantly transform these experiences into improvised theatre pieces.

  • Ignored Aboriginal voices return in sequel

    NT Consultations Report 2011: By Quotations Published by Concerned Australians 72 pages, hard cover, $15 www.concernedaustralians.com.au NT Consultations Report 2011: By Quotations, published in February 2012, is an important sequel to the highly regarded This Is What We Said (February 2010) and Walk With Us (August 2011).

  • Political fundraising gigs ― experiences from Brisbane

    The Brisbane branch of the socialist youth group Resistance has linked up with Occupy Brisbane and Stop CSG Brisbane to pull off two successful fundraising gigs. Dominic Hale and Alice Jenkins, from Resistance's cultural committee, spoke to Green Left Weekly's Hannah Reardon-Smith about political gigs. * * * What was the idea behind your approach to these Resistance gigs?

  • Never mind Putin, here's Pussy Riot

    Pussy Riot is an anonymous Russian feminist punk band. Its anonymous members, whose identities are concealed by their costumes, formed in October last year as a feminist music collective that performs public “flash mob” gigs to protest the rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

  • Poem: Why Are We in Afghanistan?

    “Belief in Winter’s iron music turns the lands of home to Spring.” Kenneth Patchen, “Nocturne for the Heirs of Light” Even your blood seems cold slush so we come, bearing scientific warmth and clean blades Of faith and all such crude early things we moderns strive to sharpen, your mystic heart alone beats most desperate beneath our lazer aim: true tempered love at gunship point thrusts in you bleeding you clear in sha'Allah by dread hand of surgeon- drone, bootkick- blessing, your shabby portal opens upon us we ash-cross your brow:

  • Debt to East Timor remembered by soldiers, betrayed by governments

    Debt of Honour: Australia’s first commandos and East Timor Exhibition at the Western Australian Museum Until May 20. When the Japanese entered World War II after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbour, they swept through south-east Asia and the Pacific.

  • Filastine battles political philistines

    Genre-bending musician Filastine says he has taken so much flak for being political in his music that these days he tries to be a little more innovative in getting his message across.

  • Hip hop tracks for Trayvon

    In a recent interview with Hip-Hop DX, a hoodie-clad Nas exhibited an understandable amount of despair at the case of African American youth Trayvon Martin, the shot dead by George Zimmerman while walking home from the shops in Florida in February. The US hip hop artist said: “You never want to hear that kind of news. When it happens, you remember how many Trayvon incidents happen everyday all over the world... “It doesn’t seem like the race problem will ever get solved. I like to be optimistic, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever get solved.”

  • The Lorax: An eco-parable for our times

    The Lorax Starring Danny Devito, Zac Efron, Taylor Swift & Ed Helms, directed by Chris Melandandri and Kyle Balda Now showing in cinemas. Adapted from the 1971 Dr Seuss book of the same name, The Lorax is a great analogy for the destructive nature of capitalism. The story is set in “Thneedville”, a walled city in which everything is made of plastic, metal and synthetic material. It is controlled by the mayor and owner of a bottled oxygen company, Aloysious O’Hare, who sells the residents their bottled water.

  • The Labor Party and the working class — flawed left histories

    Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers & the Politics of Class By Tom Bramble & Rick Kuhn Cambridge University Press, 2011, 226 pp., $39.95 Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide By Tom Bramble Cambridge University Press, 2008 293 pp., $49.95 Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn, through Bramble’s Trade Unionism in Australia and their jointly-authored Labor’s Conflict, offer substantial histories of two very important elements of the workers’ movement in Australia.