Vivaldi and Hendrix collide in a concert that was something of a religious experience

Abel Selaocoe ★★★★
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Melbourne Recital Centre, April 12

Attending a concert by South African cellist Abel Selaocoe is something of a religious experience. Not only a cellist but a singer and composer, he encourages fervent audience participation reminiscent both of ritual and rock concerts. Blended with magnetic stage presence, some spellbinding virtuosity and moments of rapt lyricism, the result is highly charismatic.

Abel Selaocoe performs with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.Credit: Nic Walker

Improvising with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and his longtime collaborator, percussionist Sidiki Dembele, Selaocoe introduced his extraordinary voice: a wind instrument capable of an appealing tenor and didgeridoo-like guttural sounds, as well as a multifaceted percussive device.

Using a wide range of techniques from the classical cello, Selaocoe wove together an imaginative tapestry, mirroring approaches used in his four songs on the program. Often, these had the orchestra and audience singing as they led to an exultant climax before dying away.

Benedetto Platti’s Cello Concerto in D Major showcased Selaocoe’s elegant classical credentials. An African touch came with some percussion in the outer movements and an improvised introduction to the central adagio.

Commissioned for this 50th anniversary season of the ACO, Nigel Westlake’s Ascension for string orchestra memorialised his mother (a former ACO violinist). Inspired by Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, it inhabits a similar harmonic world to the earlier classic but the myriad textural and rhythmic details draw the listener into this finely crafted score. Leader Helena Rathbone’s atmospheric playing crowned this first Melbourne performance.

Selaocoe partnered with principal cello Timo-Veikko Valve in presenting five of the six movements of the double cello concerto When We Were Trees by contemporary Italian composer Giovanni Sollima. This was a wild ride for the two soloists, who tossed aside the considerable technical challenges, creating an astounding synergy while evoking both Antonio Vivaldi and Jimi Hendrix.

A standing ovation confirmed that this sort of church has many ardent devotees.
Reviewed by Tony Way

MUSIC
Sex Pistols ★★★
Festival Hall, April 5

Many people have told me the Sex Pistols aren’t good. They’re wrong. When I was 15, in the deep Millennial-era Australian suburbs, their single album, Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), represented the promise of punk: social anarchy, relative lack of skill, and branding genius. It’s potent even today, five decades after their flash-in-the-pan heyday.

The Sex Pistols perform on stage at Festival Hall on April 5, 2025. Credit: Martin Philbey

For this tour, the band is back together for the first time in two decades, this time without former lead singer John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten. He no longer gets on with his bandmates. He’s a vocal Trump supporter now, and he’s described this tour as “puppetry” and “karaoke”.

The Sex Pistols without John Lydon is a difficult prospect. To me, his unpredictable screech is what defined the band. It’s INXS without Michael Hutchence, or Queen without Freddie Mercury. He’d hate both comparisons, but he’s not here to protest.

Tonight, the position is filled by Frank Carter, erstwhile singer from Gallows and the Rattlesnakes. In front of an image of two huge speakers marked “NOWHERE” and “BOREDOM”, the band members, aged in their late 60s – apart from Carter, 40 – lead us into a rousing Holidays in the Sun, followed by Seventeen. “I’m so lazy,” Carter sings, not lazily. His voice is more Billie Joe Armstrong than Johnny Rotten, tight-wound and cover-band-accurate to the source material. But is accuracy what we want from a band who promised to rip up rock and roll and rebuild it?

By Pretty Vacant, it’s clear he’s here to compere the old guard and foster a singalong. “The old boys deserve it,” he says. “They f---in’ invented this shit.” They can’t declare themselves “the greatest punk band in history”, but he can. “I’m not an animal,” they shout in Bodies, confined to their stage mics, while Carter is in the audience, crowd-surfing.

The Sex Pistols have reunited for the first time in two decades.Credit: Martin Philbey

The rest of the set, comprised mostly of tracks from their one album, passes without error, and I won’t lie: I sing along, at times screaming. It’s infectious, cathartic. In the encore, Carter leads us in a rendition of My Way, in tribute to the other absent Pistol, Sid Vicious, who allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, before dying of an overdose on bail. The band’s manager sold T-shirts marking her death. They’ve always been a branding exercise.

After the show, most fans I ask are thrilled with the results. The pub around the corner from Festival Hall, the Angry Dog, is full of Sex Pistols fans, and the absence of Lydon is a win. Gail, from Glasgow, Scotland via Perth, WA, describes Lydon as “a right-wing English prick.” I overhear someone else describing Carter as a “wanker”. Better a wanker than a prick.
Reviewed by Will Cox

DANCE
Shadow Text ★★★
Dancehouse, Carlton, until April 12

Back from Brussels, where she is now based, choreographer Chloe Chignell returns with an enigmatic, bookish new contemporary dance work – co-created with Amina Szecsödy – steeped in continental culture and sophistication.

Shadow Text is a response to Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel-length prose poem Les GuérillèresCredit: Rudy Carlier

This is a welcome return, even if the show – a response to Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel-length prose poem Les Guérillères – is a little left field, a little opaque in its construction.

Wittig’s book, a cult classic, describes a radically feminist state at war with men. It has a splintered, incantatory style that gives it a dreamlike, almost mythic power. Chignell has an ongoing fascination with the relationship between writing and dancing, and here she responds as much to the book’s eerie moonlit atmosphere as its story of epic conflict.

The two dancers – Chignell and Szecsödy – begin with a simple, springy stepdance, which soon transforms into a slow, concentrated crawl as they circle the space, creating images of deliquesce and deformation. Some of this vocabulary echoes scenes from Wittig’s novel – women riding into battle, swinging deadly bolos – but mostly it tries to body forth the book’s queer, cloistered erotic intensity.

Wittig was a novelist but also a theorist, aligned with the mid-century French intellectual tradition that privileged text over speech, language over the body – where revolution begins with words. One aim of this project is to revisit and challenge these ideas, treating them – perhaps deliberately – as if they still hold more currency than they do. Hence the prominence of projected and spoken text in this show.

Some of this is original and some of it is a revision of Les Guérillères. The juxtapositions, however, between text and movement don’t always create a strong impression, as if the shadow of the work’s title is what lies between them.

It’s an intriguing performance, but I wish there was more contextual framing, because Shadow Text feels like a fragment of a larger and more urgent conversation unfolding elsewhere, just beyond our hearing.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

DANCE
SpringCity 43214 ★★★
Dancehouse, Carlton, until April 12

Interactive dance – where the audience helps steer what’s performed – is an old idea that rarely gets a run outside the improv and comedy circuit. The last example I saw was Joel Bray’s comic lecture staged in a suburban pub years ago. So, producer-performer MaggZ really is breaking new ground with this attempt at combining audience participation with higher-than-normal production values.

Producer-performer MaggZ really is breaking new ground with SpringCity 43214.Credit: Simon L. Wong

This is a serious attempt to integrate the audience without compromising on spectacle. Created by and for – as the show’s website notes – the Asian diasporic community, the production borrows its aesthetic from arcade culture, transporting us to SpringCity 43214: a virtual, neon-noir, pan-Asian fantasia, with a backdrop of colourful animated patterns and a soundtrack ranging from ambient electronica to kitschy techno.

Despite its game-like trimmings – character selection, a computerised voice-over – this isn’t really a game. There’s no contest, no quest, no real goal. The interactivity is more old-school. In the first round, for example, a performer with a microphone approaches audience members and offers them a selection of cards. They choose one, and a new style or task is announced. The dancers adjust accordingly.

The central character is played by MaggZ herself, with supporting roles performed by hitahhchi and Aqua. Early sections are deliberately slow, built around stylised group poses. It’s not until the third sequence – which spills partly into the audience – that momentum builds, showcasing sharper street dance stylings. MaggZ, in particular, impresses with precision, speed and snap.

The production is technically ambitious, syncing live interactions with shifting sound and light. But with only two performances, there’s little time to bed things in. On opening night, the sound was a little too loud, and the lighting a little too dark, which meant the participatory elements felt confused. This is a show you’d learn a lot from over time, but not, I think, in just two performances.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC
Cyndi Lauper: The Farewell Tour ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, April 2

Cyndi Lauper walks on stage to an explosion of rainbow confetti and dives straight into She Bop, an ode to masturbation. She’s 71 years old, 160 centimetres tall, and exuberant as hell in blue-green hair, blasting through a recorder solo before chucking the instrument offstage.

Cyndi Lauper performs at Rod Laver Arena, April 2, 2025.Credit: Martin Philbey

The crowd are in tulle skirts, glitter and colourful wigs, which are on sale in the foyer – the money goes to her charity, Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights.

Tonight is supposedly part of Lauper’s farewell tour, and she’s going out on top. She still has a voice like a box of crayons, bright, messy, and expressive. She uses everything, with soaring vibrato, sometimes audibly out of breath, imprecise and alive. The set is ’80s-heavy, leaning most on her ’83 debut She’s So Unusual, with some middle-of-the-road ’90s stuff and, to my delight, the song she did for The Goonies thrown in.

Tonight is supposedly part of Lauper’s farewell tour, and she’s going out on top.Credit: Martin Philbey

It’s a talky night. “It’s not just a bang-bang show,” she says unapologetically in her irresistible Brooklyn drawl (“It’s a paww-deee!”). She tells us about family, the cousin who had a pigeon coop on her roof, the women who raised her and the way they’d cut up old clothes and make something brand new with them.

She does the same with her art, of course. Many of her songs are written by others but she makes them utterly her own. She tells us she recorded I Drove All Night, written for Roy Orbison, because there were no songs on the radio about women driving. “When you get in the car and you can drive anywhere you freakin’ want, that’s a power song.”

She cycles through about half-a-dozen costume changes, each with a different hair colour: sparkly, shoulder-padded jackets, asymmetrical suits, underwear on the outside, a floor-length Norma Desmond number, a red jacket with a bright yellow wig. “I tried to dress up faw ya,” she says. As this outfit’s designer Christian Siriano told her: “The gays want glamour.”

For the evergreen Time After Time, Melbourne’s Tones and I joins for a duet that’s like every wedding dance floor you’ve ever been on: messy and beautiful. And she delivers True Colours flawlessly, standing on a small satellite stage in the middle of the arena with a long rainbow scarf metres in the air.

For the finale, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, she’s joined by The Veronicas, who sink into the background in a stage designed in polka-dot tribute to artist Yayoi Kusama.

Even this, her signature tune, is a cover of a late-’70s pop-punk number, sung by a man, but I defy you to listen to that original and think of it as anything less than a sketch for Lauper to colour in and make something wonderful, defiant and punch-the-air fun.
Reviewed by Will Cox

JAZZ
Matthew Ottignon’s Volant ★★★★
The Jazzlab, April 4

Matthew Ottignon’s latest album was conceived during a period of unusual calm for the composer-saxophonist. Back in Sydney after years of touring and performing in other people’s bands, Ottignon finally found time to let his own creativity take flight. That idea of flight – and the freedom it embodies – resonates throughout the album, aptly titled Volant.

Composer and saxophonist Matthew Ottignon.Credit: Greg Sheehan

His current quartet has now adopted Volant as a band name, and it’s the perfect moniker for an outfit that can glide and soar as naturally as a flock of birds. One of the tunes they played at Jazzlab on Friday night (Murmuring) was inspired by the flight of starlings, moving through the sky like an undulating cloud and capable of sudden, instinctive changes of direction. Swift, beating pulsations from Lauren Tsamouras’ piano, Hannah James’ bass and Hayley Chan’s drums created a sense of propulsion and uplift as Ottignon’s sax hovered, then ascended over a fast-moving landscape.

Rolling and Circling exuded a similar energy, though with a more open, expansive feel. Ottignon’s full-bodied tenor swept in circles over the rhythm section’s turbulent sea, surging with soulful intensity before the waves unexpectedly settled and the sea grew calm.

Other tunes demonstrated the group’s ability to evoke atmosphere through subtlety and nuance. Circular Breathing opened with a whisper of brushes on cymbals, arco bass and ghostly overtones from Ottignon’s sax; Naturis conjured an air of mystery via brooding chord changes and an unhurried, rolling sway.

But this is a band that also knows how to groove – even over odd meters and fitful rhythms. Rocky Lux saw the ensemble strutting breezily in a Latin-tinged 7/4; Bilpin set up an exuberant canter that bubbled with vitality; and on the final tune (Jetsetters), the quartet hopscotched nimbly across a stop-start pulse with playful precision, their visible delight radiating outwards and becoming an invisible current on which we, too, could take flight.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

DANCE
Poesis and The Bastard ★★★
Dancehouse, Carlton, until April 5

The latest Dancehouse double bill features two works that differ wildly in their commitments to technique and virtuosity, but which together make for an invigorating and provoking evening of dance theatre.

Gabriella Imrichova’s cheekily titled The Bastard aims to challenge expectations with a surprising blend of theatre, performance art and only little dance. It’s a bit punk and a bit mongrel, but consistently funny.

This is a performance in two halves. First, we get a dry parody of non-dance, a somewhat dated form of experimental dance in which movement is withheld: it’s slow and repetitious and very low effort.

Either side of this performance, Imrichova addresses the audience, simulating apprehension about its reception: about whether it fits the context and whether it works as dance. It’s mischievous but not without charm.

Then follows a wild rant about art and novelty. There were a few walkouts on opening night, but that’s surely a victory for an artist who declares that trolling is a creative practice.

Prue Lang’s Poesis sits more securely within the conventions of contemporary dance. It’s a duet in which the two dancers generate striking compositions from subtle contrasts in form, line and intention.

Both performers are extraordinary. Benjamin Hancock, with his strange elongations, projects a kind of alien grace. And Tara Jade Samaya – returning to Melbourne after a long absence – is all strength and control.

Poesis moves through various phases, the dancers arranging themselves in ways that are unexpected but visually satisfying, mixing traditions and vocabularies, folding themselves together and even improvising with a game of follow the leader.

The costumes exaggerate the effects of counterpoint in interesting ways. Samaya appears in boxing gear while Hancock is in pointe shoes: there are luridly patterned unitards, absurd heels, lots of activewear and some deluxe furry boots.

It’s a little cerebral but nonetheless attractive. Imrichova has the freshness of a new voice, but Lang brings the more serious engagement with contemporary dance and its possibilities.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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