Arts Tuesday 23rd December

Go to the Arts Tuesday page on our program guide and choose ‘Replay’ to hear the show.

A special edition of Arts Tuesday for Christmas week, looking at some wonderfully flamboyant creative expression in local subculture performance, with a side order of Steampunk.

My first guest was contact juggler and burlesque performer Christopher Hawkins. Listen to the show to get a full list of burlesque cabaret performances in and around Sydney throughout January/February.

Christopher Hawkins

Then on to the topic of Steampunk. I hope we all have some place to go where we feel like one of the crowd. We all feel better for having a place of belonging, but what that place is will vary depending on those quirks that make us the individuals we are. One person’s badlands is another persons home. Subcultures are created when individuals who share a particular passion find their way to each other. They create a space where something that might be unknown or strange to others is the norm. Members of a subculture will have their own rules and rituals, and ways of communicating. It brings them together and it sets them apart.

Antonio in The Tempest

Christopher Hawkins as Ariel

There is one subculture that is unusual, perhaps even unique, in that its participants have been brought together through love, not of an activity, but of an aesthetic. This is Steampunk. Steampunk looks back at how people in the Nineteenth Century looked forward to advances in science and technology. In short: Victoriana futurism.

I spoke to graphic designer and theatre director John Galea about the Steampunk production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that he created at Sidetrack Theatre in 2012, and also to Irish novelist Oisín McGann about his trilogy The Wildenstern Saga.