Overview
Arts House in North Melbourne Town Hall is a venue mostly associated with the hectic weeks in spring when it becomes the Fringe Festival hub, but it's worth a visit at other times of the year too. If you had any questions on that score, take a look over the freshly released program for the second season for 2013.
There'll be dance, from the fury of Whelping Box, in which theatricalised aggression takes place in a boxed off arena, to the elegant intricacy of A Small Prometheus, a work from Chunky Move regulars Stephanie Lake and Robin Fox, in which dancers perform alongside fire-driven kinetic sculptures. There'll be song, too, with a musical dedicated to murderess Jean Lee, the last woman hanged in Australia, featuring a former member of the Bad Seeds (who better for a murder ballad?) and '90s indie pop star Max Sharam as Lee.
The limits of theatrical form will be challenged. The Confidence Man invites audiences to take part in the performance, wearing masks and receiving directions by headset, while in PROMPTER, a semi science fictional take on the world of online journalism, onstage actors interact with performers online, beaming in from Argentina, Britain, France and the USA.
Closer to reality, indeed as close to reality as theatre gets, two compelling documentary theatre pieces from Belvoir's 2012 season will be having their Melbourne debuts. Beautiful One Day tackles the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody through interviews with members of the Palm Island community, performed verbatim by actors. The verbatim theatre approach is also used to delve into the hidden side of competitive boxing in the exhaustively researched I'm Your Man.
So don't wait til Fringe time to get down to Arts House. The cutting-edge theatre is already there.