Arts Centre Melbourne

Humans 2.0 is a tight 70-minute circus show comprising ten highly skilled performers and presented by Circa at Arts Centre Melbourne. Directed by Yaron Lifschitz, the performance takes place on a bare stage marked only by a white circle with banks of lighting around the outer periphery.  Choosing to see this work on a Saturday matinee away from the hullabaloo of opening night – surrounded by families and children – it's clear that Circa has created a real crowd-pleaser. Yes, the physicality is impressive and the stunts are jaw-dropping, but whether or not it reaches the lofty heights of “examining the human condition” remains in question. Part of this problem lies in the fact that as audiences, we are bearing witness to performers who are nothing short of superhuman. These ten bodies create towering structures and tableaux, each successive passage of movement like waves of varying intensities coming along to wipe the slate clean. As a genre circus is often a tricky wheel to re-invent. It’s bound by the parameters of different acts and tricks, such as acrobatics and aerial, and further complicating any attempts to do so are the time and training it takes to undertake such feats.  Humans 2.0 is at its best when leaning further into its choreographic language, which is a signature of this company. In these briefest of moments we come closest as an audience to an examination of the human condition. Without these passages all that remains is a very lean show consisting solely...

We on the affirmative team contend that taking a high school debating tournament, making feminism the topic of discussion and turning it all into a play is a recipe for a fascinating night of theatre.  This will be the fourth year in a row that Trophy Boys has played to local audiences, following sold-out seasons at La Mama in 2022, fortyfivedownstairs in 2023 and Arts Centre Melbourne in 2024. This time around, the dark drag extravaganza is playing once again at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio from August 12-24. Tickets range from $30-60 and you can get yours here. Read on for Time Out Sydney's five-star take on the 2024 Sydney run of Trophy Boys. *** If you had asked me what I thought the next canonical Australian text would be before I watched Trophy Boys, I certainly wouldn’t have pegged a play that features a sign boldly emblazoned with the words “Feminism has failed women” set against a backdrop of portraits of “powerful women leaders”. (Jacinda Ardern, Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Youzafi and Grace Tame are accounted for, to name a few.) And yet, with this hilariously profound production, Trophy Boys proves that a provocative and unexpected approach can pay off handsomely.  We are introduced to a gang of four private school boys from the fictional Saint Imperium College as they strut into a classroom with the kind of boisterous raucousness that can only come from teenage boys. However, these aren’t your average young men – this queer black comedy...