Counting and Cracking

Recommended by: Cassie Tongue

One of Sydney festival’s most exciting qualities is transformation. Its temporary nature can render the city mutable, changing the way we approach an everyday city space, or changing the space for a short, golden summer window. That’s why I’m eager for Counting and Cracking, Belvoir’s ambitious production that is building a Sri Lankan town hall into our own landmark Town Hall building. A city’s heart transplanted into the heart of Sydney.

Plus the play is set to be sprawling, new and epic. Written by S. Shakthidharan and directed by Belvoir’s artistic director, Eamon Flack, 16 actors will play four generations of a family that has come from Sri Lanka’s Colombo to suburban Sydney, although whether they can ever leave their past behind is another matter entirely.

Together we will reckon with what refuge and reconciliation – both personal and political – really means, how families change and yet remain familiar. And what better place to do that than in a well-known building that has been transformed?

• Counting and Cracking runs at Sydney Town Hall until 2 February; it is also part of the 2019 Adelaide festival in March

Since Ali Died

Recommended by: Brigid Delaney

This one-man show contains multitudes. Under the skilful direction of Anthea Williams, author, MC and poet Omar Musa returns to the Griffin theatre for a one-hour meditation on masculinity, love, religion, race and family.

Taking Muhammad Ali’s death as an organising principle, Musa charts how his life fell apart after the boxer’s death. Using poetry, song and prose, he evokes a boyhood in Queanbeyan with a strict, religious father, racist taunts at school, and wild teenage years, before bringing us up to speed: he’s deep in love, and he’s riding fast in cars with his best mate, Danny. But then his hero dies.

The material is personal, but it’s when Musa is talking about race in Australia and the culture wars that he’s at his most powerful. But there’s is humour in the darkness too.

• Since Ali Died runs at SBW Stables theatre, Darlinghurst, until 19 January, and at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, from January 22-25

Beware of Pity

Recommended by: Steph Harmon

When Simon McBurney first read Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel Beware of Pity, he says it disturbed something in him. “[I was] unable to put it down, not even sure I liked it,” he wrote in the Guardian. “I found myself gripped and troubled.”

It feels fitting that he would then collaborate on an adaptation with German theatre company Schaubühne; I had a similar reaction to Schaubühne’s hyper-masculine, bombastic take on Richard III when it came to Adelaide festival in 2017. It was puerile and vicious and underserved the women even more than the original text does – but it grabbed and rattled me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling for a week.

Schaubühne is known globally for its twisted take on classic texts, but this is the first time it has collaborated with the British theatre-maker and auteur McBurney, whose company Complicite – according to this publication – irrevocably changed the face of British theatre.

Set in Europe on the brink of war, the story is of a man whose pity-driven social gaffe – and subsequent poor choices – sets a terrible train of events in motion from which he cannot escape.

“With dazzling virtuosity, McBurney and his team evoke a vanished world,” wrote Michael Billington of this “astonishing” production when it ran at the Barbican in February 2017. McBurney’s last show to tour Australia was his “aural masterpiece”, the Encounter, which used 3D audio to transport audiences deep into the Amazon rainforest. I’m eager to see what this collaboration brings.

• Beware of Pity runs at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, from 23-27 January

Masters of Modern Sound

Recommended by: Kate Hennessy

I love a good gallery mash-up of sound, art and ideas. This three-night series is set amid the Art Gallery of NSW’s Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage, which is being marketed as a “blockbuster exhibition” with works by Kandinsky, Picasso and Matisse.

Yet it will not be “blockbuster” artists performing because that’s not how these things roll. Instead we’ll have cultish iconoclasts such as the pianist Chris Abrahams (The Necks), the ambient maestro William Basinski (The Disintegration Loops), Lawrence English (Room40), Dean Hurley (Twin Peaks: The Return) and the Italian minimalist Caterina Barbieri.

Will English ask us to lie down to sponge up the sound? Everyone was nude at the last gallery dance show I saw, so what transgressions might Force Majeure’s Danielle Micich be plotting? Australian sound artists and musicians Del Lumanta, Corin Ileto, Becky Sui Zhen (No Zu) and Casey Hartnett are presenting newly commissioned work, a netherworld that festival ticket-holders often neglect to properly explore although it often yields the most gold with artists still striving and pushing outwards. How will these women respond to iconic works from dead male artists?

• Masters of Modern Sound takes place at the Art Gallery of NSW from 10-12 January

Man with the Iron Neck

Recommended by: Emily Nicol

After premiering last year at Brisbane festival, the beloved Aboriginal actor and playwright Ursula Yovich’s Man with the Iron Neck has been praised as a moving, poetic and visually stunning work of physical theatre which addresses the youth suicide crisis faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Directors Josh Bond and Gavin Robens mix aerial theatre with video design to explore universal themes of loss, trauma and survival through the experience of three Aboriginal teens in small-town Australia.

We enter the search for meaning and hope with Ash, who – after losing his best friend, Bear, to suicide – becomes obsessed with 1930s death-defying stuntman The Great Peters who in his act jumped from bridges with a rope around his neck.

With an ultimately hopeful narrative, it’s a timely and potent offering which will hopefully open up more discussion about a subject that should be on the national agenda.

• Man with the Iron Neck runs at the Sydney Opera House from 23-26 January; it is also part of the 2019 Adelaide festival in March

Home

Recommended by: Alexandra Spring

At last count I figured I’ve lived in about 25 homes during my life. Only one was newly built, one was freshly renovated, and the rest were existing homes that I tried to put my stamp on. Mostly I didn’t spend too much time wondering about those who’d walked on those floors before me, who’d stared up at the same ceilings during sleepless nights or washed themselves in those showers. But maybe I should have.

These are some of the questions that the US theatre-maker Geoff Sobelle – last in Australia for 2016’s The Object Lesson – explores in his acclaimed show Home. The theatre/music/dance/magic show asks “Where is home? If it is not a place, what is home?” On stage a house is constructed in real time, then all the residents move in to live out their lives, often on top of each other and all at the same time. It’s a commentary on overcrowded living, gentrification, migration and our ever-disposable society.

And yet according to the critics, these important questions are handled in a light and deft way. The Boston Globe critic Don Aucoin writes, “Indeed, the show turns into an all-out party at the end … to which the audience is invited.” That sounds like a show I want to see.

• Home runs at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, until 18 January

Shànghǎi Mimi

Recommended by: Van Badham

Local cabaret favourites like La Clique and Velvet have whetted a popular appetite for high-end variety shows. What renders them exquisite is not merely the uniqueness of their acts, be they acrobats, magicians, dancers or songbirds. It’s their immersive theatrical aesthetics that honour the imagined glories of the past: the burlesque bars, circuses, travelling carnivals, speakeasies, music halls and other smoke-and-mirrors spaces in whose shadows common humanity could experience the exotic and thrillingly taboo.

In this tradition, Shànghǎi Mimi promises to “part the curtains on an enchanted world”. Billing itself as a “sumptuous cabaret of delights”, its aesthetic homage is to 1930s Shanghai, “a city famous for its flamboyant clubs and heady nights”.

The Australian company Finucane and Smith is an international master of the genre, and the involvement of the brilliant Moira Finucane is reason enough to see a show. She directs this production, which engages – through cabaret – the cultural conversation between east and west, and features an international lineup of acts including the Qinghai Acrobatic Troupe and a live band playing “long-lost vintage Chinese jazz and blues unearthed in a condemned Mumbai warehouse”.

Also, guests are invited to “dress to the nines and immerse yourself”. Who wouldn’t want to go to this? You’ll see me in my diamantés.

• Shànghǎi Mimi runs at the Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, from 10-20 January

Biladurang

Recommended by: Steve Dow

Joel Bray, a fair-skinned, queer, Wiradjuri dancer, stands in a dressing gown on a bed in a Sydney hotel room performing a preview of his show Biladurang. He tells his boutique audience of about 20, who have also changed into robes, about entering a newsagent at age 15 wearing his school uniform and selecting a magazine with a hot dude on the cover. “My cock jumped,” he grins, then carefully enunciates each word: “A real … gay … porno.”

Coming of age in rural Orange, New South Wales, in a white Pentecostal household, and spending summers with his Indigenous father, a land rights activist, Bray embraced his difference. This show’s title, which means platypus, is apposite, as Sydney festival’s director, Wesley Enoch, explains, being a monotreme and a duck-billed, amphibious mammal. “Who knows what a platypus is? This notion of a mix of everything, and what’s your identity in this world?”

Moreover, what I’m looking forward to in Bray’s coming show, already seen at Melbourne Fringe and Brisbane festival and soon at the Dance Massive festival in Melbourne, is the sense of shared humanity. Bray waits in the foyer afterward: “I’ve had people hug me, I’ve had people crying, I’ve had people share their stories of discovering their Aboriginality late in life.”

• Biladurang runs at the QT Hotel from 11-20 January

Nakhane

Recommended by: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

The South African-born and London-based Nakhane is perhaps most well-known for his starring role in the 2017 movie The Wound. The film took a long hard look at the hyper-masculine Xhosa circumcision ritual, ulwaluko and, controversially, featured three main gay characters (its homosexual scenes prompted protests across South Africa).

He is also a musician whose songs – mixing electronics, vocals, folk and acoustic guitar – often draw on the heritage of his Christian roots. Openly gay since his 20s, Nakhane’s latest album, You Will Not Die, documents the collision between his sexuality and the religion he has now rejected. The Guardian’s Kate Hutchison pegged him as One to Watch last year, comparing his sound with the “emphatic pop” of Perfume Genius and describing the record as “fearless … delivered with heart-stopping fragility”. He is also a stellar performer. Do not miss this concert.

• Nakhane plays at the Spiegeltent in Hyde Park on 18 January, before playing at Mona Foma, in Launceston, at the Tivoli, in Brisbane and at Melbourne Museum during Midsumma