This month, mous magazine’s panel discussion is all about sex work and creativity. The panellists will be people who have previously, or are currently, working in the sex industry and are also engaged in some form of professional creative practice be it graphic design, writing or film making.

This panel will take and in-depth look at the good, the bad and the ugly of both sex work and creative practice and how those two industries can become intertwined for practitioners. Through this honest conversation, mous magazine aims to get to the core of the relationship between sex work and creative practice by focusing on real experiences.

Joining the panel will be author Leigh Hopkinson, film maker Jane Ayre and graphic designer and artist Harley Barnes-Roos. You can read more about the panellists and their practice here.

Image: Exotic Cancer

Are you an artist, creative, entrepreneur or small business owner? Do you need to build your own website or edit and update content for websites?

This one-day course teaches you the essential foundation skills you need. With our primary focus on HTML and CSS development, you’ll learn more than you ever thought possible in a day.

These workshops are aimed at people who have zero experience with coding. In one day, you will hand code your first multi-page, mobile friendly, SEO compliant website!

At Speakeasy, no subject is off the menu. Defy decorum and delve into delicious ideas, discussions and debates. Join us for dinner and drinks, with an entree of keynote speakers followed by an (actual) main course provided by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, and roundtable discussions between dinner guests and artists.

Come get curious about class and currency with Esther Anatolitis, Farah Farouque and Helen Razer. How do we reconcile personal and political principles with the glib practicalities of modern life? We’ll ponder alternative economies, class and elitism in the arts, and the market price of artistic integrity and truth-telling.

Have your say at all three Speakeasy events with a Speakeasy Pass for only $100. Book your pass today.

Presented in partnership with The Wheeler Centre and Brunswick Mechanics Institute.

A deep dive into writing for performance, featuring panel conversations between industry leaders. Whether you’re coming across from another storytelling discipline, or brushing up on your basics, this day is a great place to meet other creatives and get your work ready for the stage.

Expressions of interest are now open for The Bake-Off, a FREE two-day rapid playwriting challenge following on from Writing Live. More information here.

10am New Words

What drives you to write plays? Once you’re doing it, how do you get them out into the world? Two writers with a marathon of experience in conversation with two writers bursting out of the emerging blocks.

With Emilie Collyer, Jane Harrison, Adena Jacobs, Natesha Somasundaram and Jean Tong

11am New Dramaturgy

Who are the people that help writers shape new work and what structures are they working with? A rapid fire cross-section of various dramaturgical approaches and frameworks including feminist and de-colonising theories.

With Candy Bowers, Didem Caia, Jenni Medway and Rachel Perks

1pm New Visions

Writing for performance is writing for bodies in space. It’s a three dimensional, multi-faceted act. This panel gets the low down from a design perspective and the key collaborative relationships between playwrights, designers and directors.

With Bridget Balodis, Amelia Lever-Davidson, Eugyeene Teh and Louris van de Geer

2pm New Ways

Writing from lived and own experience is a powerful starting point for playwriting and performance making. In this discussion we tease out different ways to approach this process and the balance of own voice with collaboration.

With Jacob Boehme, Tania Cañas, Jess Knight, Michele Lee and Rajith Savanadasa

3pm New Versions

Adapting text from one version to another, one form to another brings its own challenges and rewards. This short discussion will be followed by a workshop where participants get to flex their writing muscles.

With Raimondo Cortese, Dan Giovannoni, Kim Ho and Mark Wilson

Presented in partnership with New Working Group and Brunswick Mechanics Instititute
Supported by Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Trust

At Speakeasy, no subject is off the menu. Defy decorum and delve into delicious ideas, discussions and debates. Join us for dinner and drinks, with an entree of keynote speakers followed by an (actual) main course provided by Moroccan Soup Bar, and roundtable discussions between dinner guests and artists.

Writers since time immemorial have connected food and sex – after all, the brain is the biggest sex organ. Whet your appetites with Dani Weber, Angela Serrano and Dion Kagan as they talk erotic writing, gender, fluidity and desire. It’s going to be saucy, consensual and conversational – just the way we like it.

Have your say at all three Speakeasy events with a Speakeasy Pass for only $100. Book your pass today.

Presented in partnership with The Wheeler Centre and Brunswick Mechanics Institute

At Speakeasy, no subject is off the menu. Defy decorum and delve into delicious ideas, discussions and debates. Join us for dinner and drinks, with an entree of keynote speakers followed by an (actual) main course provided by Tiba’s, and roundtable discussions between dinner guests and artists.

A defining mystery of living, a necessary finality; death is often daunting. Joined at the table by Pia Interlandi, Hayley West and Elizabeth Flux, we’ll chew over the nature of death – and our ways of living with it. Whose deaths matter? Do we lack death literacy? Who is commemorated or erased in death? How do we ritualise grieving, healing, and celebration after death… and why?

Have your say at all three Speakeasy events with a Speakeasy Pass for only $100. Book your pass today.

Presented in partnership with The Wheeler Centre and Brunswick Mechanics Institute

Kick up your heels, and bring out your feels – we’ve had an incredible eleven days of discussion, development and damn fine art and it’s time to celebrate Y-O-U. The brilliant folks from Still Nomads have collectively curated and created a night to close the festival with a bang.

Still Nomads is an African arts collective made up of multidisciplinary artists, filmmakers, visual artists, writers and performers, and is grounded in the establishment of community and collective creativity.

Presented in partnership with Still Nomads and Brunswick Mechanics Institute.

What’s your deepest, darkest secret? Tragic, comic and everything in between – six writers bare all, from their worst work to confessing their writerly sins and shameful secrets, all under the anonymous cover of darkness.

With Ana Maria Gomides, Aimee Knight, Jamie Marina Lau, Bastian Fox Phelan, Mira Schlosberg and Nevena Spirovska.

A verbatim episode of The Bachelor live on stage.

An actual episode of The Bachelor (as seen on television) performed for you and your companions verbatim by a posse of living breathing human beings. Live! Real! Really real. Realer than reality television. Bear witness as we (armed with nothing but a transcript of a reality television show and our imperfections) prove that love is not just for the young, white, thin and hetero.

Morgan Rose is a biting new name in the Melbourne playwriting community – 5 stars – Time Out Melbourne, on Virgins and Cowboys

Company: the B.O.T.S.
Director/Creator: Katrina Cornwell
Writer/Creator: Morgan Rose
Lighting Design: Georgie Wolfe
Performers: Natesha Somasundaram, John Marc Desengano, Precious Cargo, George Lingard, Rebecca Catalano, Sarah Conroy, Maggie Brown, Polly Sara, Joana Pires and more surprise guests.
Photo by Jack Zapsalis
Graphic Design by Steven Mitchell Wright

Allison and Heidi meet for the first time in ten years at a hospital where their daughter Nadia is recovering from a suicide attempt.

Allison wants to blame Heidi and Heidi wants to blame Scott and Scott wants to blame Allison. Two ex’s are forced back together in one room and gradually realise that if they want to help their daughter they will need to resolve issues from their relationship first.

A modern family drama about mental illness set to the good old Grease soundtrack.

Written by Allee Richards
Directed by Marissa Bennett
Performed by Wendy Bos, Lainie Hart, John Marc Desengano and Tatiana Kotsimbos
Dramaturgy by Morgan Rose
Sound design by Thomas Crawford
Lighting design by Georgie Wolfe
Image by Tessa Mansfield-Hung

La Mama Musica Presents:

THE SMALL CARS
Michael Havir laptop, field recordings, sound effects, recorded text, live keys
Ania Reynolds synthesizers

TWO
Deb Kayser voice
Nick Tsiavos contrabass ​

We’re back! CULT Cinema & Bar and the Brunswick Mechanics Institute are excited to announce a one-off Brooklyn inspired film & cocktail event, as part of Melbourne’s city wide MEL&NYC festival.

Delve into Spike Lee’s super seductive anti-love story SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, enjoy a pre-film live set of NYC inspired 90’s jams from beatmaster DJ Colette and sip on a ‘Sex on the Brooklyn Bridge’ cocktail, specifically designed for this event.

Film – She’s Gotta Have It | 1986

Spike Lee’s breakthrough independent feature, shot in fifteen days on a budget of $175,000 ushered in the American independent film movement of the 1980s. It was a groundbreaking film for African-American filmmakers and a welcome change in the representation of blacks in American cinema, depicting men and women of color not as pimps and whores, but as intelligent, upscale urbanites.

Cocktail – Sex on the Brooklyn Bridge: Archie Rose Distilling Co. Original Vodka, strawberries, lemon juice, agave syrup, soda.

Music – Colette is a DJ with intrinsic musical taste, derived from her Cape Town ancestry and a lifetime of involvement in the thriving hotbed that is the Melbourne scene, her selections traverse Funk, R&B, Dance, Hip Hop and Jazz.

Sound artist Nat Grant is developing a work for solo drummer and feedback. Simply titled Feed, this work interrogates unsolicited feedback around gender roles in and outside of the arts. Feedback loops enhance or amplify change. The more we hear what we can (or can’t) do, the harder it becomes to challenge these ideas. Audio feedback, where a loop exists between an audio input (eg a microphone) and an output (ie a speaker), works similarly. Constant re-amplification of the same sound makes it bigger, louder, and harder to ignore. Feedback can sound loud, soft, strong vulnerable. There is no one way people of different genders perform or perceive sound. But our experiences of music continue to be distorted by stereotypes. Nat’s work will delve into the distorted views we have of ourselves and our peers: how different people ‘should’ act and what kind of art they ‘should’ make.

Image
Edwina Stevens

T’was 149 nights before Christmas…

This July, Brunswick Mechanics Institute brings New York City to Melbourne with a film marathon of three classic Christmas films to warm the cockles of cold winter hearts. Gather with your loved ones at the bar in your ugliest woolly jumper before heading in to the cinema for one, two, or all three of the films. Put it in your advent calendar, we will see you there.

Film marathon tix are limited – get in quick to be one of the lucky few!

New York City policeman John McClane is visiting his estranged wife and two daughters on Christmas Eve. He joins her at a holiday party in the headquarters of the Japanese-owned business she works for. But the festivities are interrupted by a group of terrorists who take over the exclusive high-rise, and everyone in it. This is definitely a Christmas movie.

EXERCISE ONE:

Close your eyes.
Visualise the election of Donald Trump.
Scream for 10 seconds.*

Next Wave presents Export Happenings, an evening of reperformance from the stages and streets of 1960s and 70s New York, by artists Emile Zile, Angela Goh and The Band Presents. Three performances will mine and reinterpret an era that upturned our understanding of what performance art is, where it can be shown and who can perform it.

In the spirit of do-it-yourself, artists and audiences are invited to intervene into the documents, archives and memories of pioneering art movements through Fluxus magazines, concerts and manifestos; video art; performance scores and instruction kits. Turn your minds on for an evening of ready-made performance; a tribute to the ghosts of a radical, rebellious and amusing era of performance history.

*with regards to Yoko Ono via Laurie Anderson.