Welcome to the 12th guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! This month is a bit special: the lady who inspired this campaign, Kali Reid, is culture-selecting for us. Every Tuesday of March, Kali will be telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to her.
This week my cultural outings have been very varied. I saw Chimerica at STC and watched my first ever live match of professional football. I heard a great presentation on the history of Australian cultural policy and had all kinds of lively discussions with friends about it afterwards.
But what I was most looking forward to sharing was a visit to 107 (in Redfern) to see Contemporary Contemporary Contemporary. Curated by the performance group POST (Mish Grigor, Nat Rose and Zoë Coombs Marr), it featured works from some great local artists, including Bron Batten, Nat Randall, Emma Saunders, Matt Prest and James Brown. Spread over two nights on Friday and Saturday, the program was a spin off of an idea POST had back in 2003, to try to present “the most contemporary works EVA”.
Full disclosure: I was one of the co-founders of 107. Although I’m no longer involved, I always get just a little bit peaky proud when I see cool stuff is happening there. The space is going from strength to strength at the moment. If you haven’t been, I strongly recommend it. For example: try The New Plot, on this week and next, which is presenting 6 new plays over 2 weeks, in competition for a $10K cash prize.
Alas though, I didn’t make it to 107 this week. I was way too worn out (and quite frankly, hung over) after I’d been at the wedding of two dear friends on Friday night. It was a lovely time, thanks for asking. Even better, it was the first gay wedding I’ve been to – so we were all in rebellious spirits. The rain held off but there were plenty of tears cried through beautiful speeches. And then much to my delight, after the wedding was over we went out, took over the DJ decks at Tatler, and danced all night.
Dancing is possibly my favourite thing in the whole world. Sometimes I get worried that Sydney will never let me dance again. But it happened on Friday, and it will happen again. No matter how many times we get locked in, locked out, shuffled through queues, told to stop eating here, stop drinking there, to not make any noise anywhere.... dancing is too important, so I’m just going to keep on doing it anyway.
Read more about our 52 Weeks of #SydCulture challenge, and let us know what you're seeing/loving on Instagram via the hashtag #SydCulture.