Positive mental health and wellbeing in the arts

This evening I’ve had the pleasure of being in a wellbeing workshop with Dr Jane Miskovic-Wheatley and my fellow actors in Once the musical. Due to present covid-19 restrictions in…

State Theatre Company South Australia to deliver a plague of plays

In Italy, during the middle of the fourteenth century, five years after the black death had ravaged the nation, author Giovanni Boccaccio published The Decameron; a collection of novellas featuring…

Arts with heart: connecting people with a disability to support workers that share their passions

In 2017, a UK study entitled ‘Creative Health: The Arts For Health and Wellbeing’ found, according to The Guardian, that the arts “can help keep us well, aid recovery, and…

Black is the New White review

In Nakkiah Lui’s gut splittingly hilarious Indigenous Black is the New White, Ray Gibson (Tony Briggs), a Noel Pearson-esque former politician pleads to his successful lawyer and media commentator daughter…

Aunty Social’s Dark Carnivale

Ever since her early childhood, the only place Toronto’s Daniela Gitto aka Aunty Social felt comfortable was in her room; social anxiety robbed her of many experiences, most notably a…

After 20 years of frozen silence, Jaguar Jonze’s Deena Lynch fights back

For most of her life, Jaguar Jonze’s Deena Lynch closely guarded the gates to her inner world of unspeakable pain; a place where the wounds from a childhood marked by…

Charmaine Jones faces her best self through music

As the director of the thriving musical services and education agency, Gospo Enterprises, and leader of the Gospo Collective, who have performed at almost all our peak artistic festivals and…

Riding out the storm of depression with Amelia Ryan

At the end of this year’s summer arts festival season, acclaimed cabaret performer and mother of one, Amelia Ryan, reached out on social media for help. Touring three shows across…

Entertainment Assist champions for wellbeing

Mental illness and artistic creativity are often seen as being inextricably intertwined; opposite sides of the same coin. While, as a society, we like to mythologise the lives of tortured…

An Honest talk about men’s mental health

By distilling the essence of a drunken public servant named Dave in his Adelaide Fringe performances of DC Moore’s one-man play Honest, British actor and activist Matt Hyde tapped into…

Burlesque that bares soul

Velvet Chase Productions, with their two neo-burlesque shows in the Adelaide Fringe, #nofilter and Gorelesque, aim to normalise the mental illness debate while healing audience members and performers in the…

Josh Belperio’s wall of existential despair

Josh Belperio’s sophomore Fringe show, 30,000 Notes, is an exploration of how tightly humanity clings to its strongest attachments: the bonds we form with the people that we love, and…