MUSIC
Grace Cummings ★★★★
Athenaeum Theatre, December 5
Grace Cummings casually walks on stage barefoot, taking a seat at the piano. She says dryly: “I wrote this song the other day. I played it the other day in Sydney, but I’ll play it now. It’s self-explanatory, I suppose.” The audience laughs.
After touring the UK, US and Europe, Melbourne-based Cummings returned to Australia for a national tour, and her Athenaeum Theatre show was her last of 2024. She played songs from her third album, Ramona, its title a nod to Bob Dylan’s 1964 track To Ramona.
Grace Cummings performs at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre.Credit: Richard Clifford
The singer-songwriter exudes just as much power performing solo on stage, playing the piano or guitar, as when she is accompanied by her band. The floor vibrates when the guitars, drums and backing vocals come into full effect, creating an electrifying ambience in the theatre. A theremin brings a piercing, haunting sharpness that complements Cummings’ gravelly vocals and the Irish folk and blues nodes in her performance.
There’s an earthy vulnerability to her onstage demeanour. Cummings takes a swig of her glass bottle between songs while carrying on a dialogue with the crowd about the inspiration behind her music. She describes Work Today (and Tomorrow) as a “song about gambling”, and doesn’t hold back in explaining how Everybody’s Somebody is about a person who has done her wrong. Cummings also performed Something Going ’Round with the band and Help Is On Its Way solo on the piano, staying faithful to its Ramona version.
Peering wide-eyed into the darkened room, Cummings tries to draw a connection with her fans by meeting their gaze, and retorts, “I’ll claim that” to an audience member who calls her sexy.
The warmth and appreciation Cummings has for her band is obvious, as she often looks over her shoulder and smiles at them while playing piano. This extends to her opening act, Gareth Liddiard. She performs a duet with Liddiard, and describes him as a “a big inspiration to me, and I’m extremely happy he’s here”.
Grace Cummings is as captivating whether she is performing solo, or with her band.Credit: Richard Clifford
It’s clear she believes in the deeply profound impact music can have, saying “it’s for future generations. Music is a way we pass on our stories, pass on our feelings, pass on the history of the world.”
After her final song, Cummings stands before the crowd. They rise, whistling and cheering, for a standing ovation.
Reviewed by Vyshnavee Wijekumar
CIRCUS
Muse ★★★
National Institute of Circus Arts, until December 7
Playing with precarity is part of what makes circus such an appealing and popular form, but you need security to put your body on the line for art. Muse, this year’s graduate showcase at the National Institute of Circus Arts, proves once again that the institution is a reliable incubator for nurturing uncanny skill and imagination.
Third-year student Taylor Vogt performs in Muse. Credit: Cameron Grant
Many in the arts community were shocked when NICA “paused” its 2024 intake for the only dedicated tertiary degree in circus in the southern hemisphere. Our best and brightest aspiring circus artists suddenly had the tightwire pulled from under them; Australia’s global reputation as a leader in contemporary circus looked set for a fall.
Events have swung back, trapeze-like, since. A partnership with CollArts restored the 2025 intake in July, and if this showcase is representative, the competitive course will continue to attract the cream of our circus talent.
Muse channels inspiration through freestyle individual acts. Each performer has chosen an apparatus and built a routine that explores possibilities for physical expression and theatrical spectacle. Each creates a unique mood and is delivered in sometimes quite idiosyncratic style.
There’s some ultra-casual hoop diving (Jesse Holden) – themed around building a modular frame from an instructional manual – that would make for a fun impromptu performance at any IKEA store.
Other ground-based routines include: the scintillations of Gemma Jackson’s golden Hula Hoop; charismatic diablo from Ty Wallant with mesmeric use of light and shadow; some flexible contortion handstands from Jasmine Poniris; and Merlene Hutt’s momentous and strange sci-fi encounter with the Cyr wheel.
Merlene Hutt on the cyr wheel.Credit: Cameron Grant
Aerialists take flight into fancies all their own. Three very distinctive approaches to straps (Anais Stewart, Rose Symons and Luca Trimboli) show how versatile and characterful the apparatus can be while launching an ugly duckling, creating midair gremlin mischief, or falling to earth with the grace of a flower petal spinning in the wind.
Gabriel Walker sets sail for a nautical adventure on Chinese pole; Taylor Vogt takes an elegant and aesthetically spare approach to aerial rope.
A grapevine lifts Jasmin Tait to intoxicating heights on swinging trapeze, and Zaelea Nolte dangles enigmatically on the static version (following an opening tightwire act suspended over pebbles thrown onstage by the audience).
Zaelea Nolte dangles enigmatically in Muse.Credit: Cameron Grant
Spliced throughout are short grabs from interviews with the artists talking about their creative processes – some fascinating, some boilerplate, some amusingly inarticulate, with a few that sound as if they’re unpaid advertising for NICA. The last is annoying because it is unnecessary: the acrobatic and circus talent on display does a far better job on that score.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
DANCE
Project B ★★★★
Kensington Town Hall, until December 6
Kensington Town Hall has one outstanding feature as a performing arts venue: west-facing clerestory windows. On the opening night of Project B, the airy hall was filled with soft evening sunlight. No other lighting was needed.
And it’s typical of the enterprising M.Collective, led by the Italian-born Arianna Marchiori, to find this out-of-the-way venue. The company works with a host of talented collaborators but operates outside the usual networks for independent dance.
The core ensemble comprises Marchiori, Chimene Steele-Prior and former Australian Ballet dancers Stephanie Petersen and Jessica Thompson. It’s a quartet with an impressive range of professional experience.
The Darling by Tim Harbour as part of Project B.Credit: Dominic Steele
The company’s latest double bill opens with The Darling by former Australian Ballet resident choreographer Tim Harbour, a free-flowing piece building from quiet beginnings into something fierce and focused, culminating in vigorous unison.
In its middle parts, the work contrasts bumbling, almost mime-like material – dancers in socks nudging and knocking into one another – with more intricate partnering: arabesques and complex, almost courtly arm work.
The dancers spend a lot of time gazing about with affected looks of wide-eyed wonderment. This thematic realisation of what Harbour calls a search for the inner child feels too literal, but the piece nonetheless has an appealing spontaneity.
The second work, Tanz der Sehnsucht by Lucas Jervies, is inspired by the expressive physical theatre of the great Pina Bausch. Oliver Northam provides a rollicking piano accompaniment, full of surging improvisations and crushing dissonances.
Tanz der Sehnsucht by Lucas Jervies.Credit: Dominic Steele
Sehnsucht, that untranslatable German word for something like longing, informs the piece’s overwrought mood. While it flirts with parody – anguished women in white slips, escapees from Bausch’s Café Müller – it’s hard not to be carried along the storm and strife.
Like Harbour’s piece, Tanz der Sehnsucht, though a little rough and ready, has the charm of immediacy – swift and undistracted.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann
MUSIC
Joshua Bell in Recital ★★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, December 4
American violinist Joshua Bell may no longer be a boy wonder, but as a master at the height of his powers, wonder is a quality his playing so often imparts.
Joshua Bell imparts wonder through his music. Credit: Sebastian Madej
In an adroitly programmed recital, Bell, superbly partnered by pianist Peter Dugan, produced a chameleonic range of expression that testified not only to a prodigious technique but to a consummate musicality.
In Mozart’s two-movement Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 21, K. 304, the audience had its first taste of the admirable synergy between the two players, who wove the exchange of melodic material into a seamless whole.
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From its tremulous beginnings, Schubert’s wide-ranging Fantasy in C major for Violin and Piano, D. 934 was an excellent vehicle for the well-projected tone of Bell’s 1713 Stradivarius. Its golden tone invested the third movement theme and variations with superb lyricism.
In the dying days of the Fauré centenary year, it was a special pleasure to encounter his rarely heard Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 13. Brimming over with explosive passion and tender reverie, Bell gave a thoroughly immersive account, highlighting the composer’s beguiling melodic and harmonic turns of phrase. Bell dispatched the technically demanding whiplash scherzo with appropriate nonchalance, before plunging into the dramatic finale, ably supported by Dugan’s empathetic handling of the monumental piano part.
Following these three advertised works, Bell further intensified the mood by delivering a scorching reading of the Sonata for Solo Violin No. 3, Ballade by 19th-century virtuoso Eugene Ysaye. After witnessing this utterly assured account of this fiendishly difficult work, it is easy to understand why previous generations thought of virtuosos as being possessed.
After such extraordinary intensity, Bell’s arrangement of Chopin’s beloved Nocturne in E-flat major and Wieniawski’s popular Scherzo Tarantelle provided a lighter, but no less wondrous, conclusion to this profoundly memorable evening.
Reviewed by Tony Way
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