Container Festival 2014

Overview

Monash Uni swings open its theatrical doors for this two-and-a-half week festival. With shipping containers scattered around campus, a pop-up bar and lounge and bucketloads of affordable entertainment from Melbourne's brightest up-and-coming performers, it's worth the trip to Clayton. There's cabaret, clowning, 10-minute dance parties, visual art, theatre and much more in this 35-page program.

Particularly intriguing is award-winning performance troupe The Dig Collective Does Cabaret, described as "Monty Python and Rocky Horror's illegitimate child". Their mash of cabaret/physical theatre/clowning/poetry/comedy/drama is as visceral as it is funny. There's also Danception, a combination of dance, fashion, professional lip-syncing (who knew) and visual art that explores ideas of pop culture, social media and trends. How can we find our own voice in a world forcing expectations on us? At the very least, surely this is worth it for the lip-syncing.

And where else but uni can you spend a few hours contemplating a question that has plagued Shakespeare students for years: Is It Okay to Tame a Shrew Today? Can The Taming of the Shrew be performed in a way that extracts the push for patriarchy? Or is it just a sexist play about women submitting to their husbands? Go on a journey to potentially find an answer.