Performance Review

Join us today at the @thewhitneyreview x @no_more_poetry booth at Melbourne Art Book Fair, where we’ll be debating pressing issues like: Does #sabrinacarpenter exist? @ngvmelbourne #melbourneartbookfair

Issue 006 of @thewhitneyreview has landed just in time for Melbourne Art Book Fair. Catch @_______________searcher__ today at @ngvmelbourne ! EDITORS NOTE This issue is about illness, style, contact, and shade. FEATURED INTERVIEWS Judith Thurman, John Keene, and Francesca Lia Block. BOOKS REVIEWED Perverts, Minor Black Figures, Lonely Crowds, The Director, Grand Rapids, It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me, The Four Spent the Day Together, Lost Lambs, Foreclosure Gothic, Our Air, Dysphoria Mundi, Muscle Man, Will There Ever Be Another You, The Passenger Seat, Butch Manual, Flat Earth, Last Week in End Times Cinema, Another World Isn’t Possible, Happiness and Love, Practicing Dying, Magnificent Product, Casanova 2.0, Give Me Danger, Henrytown, Nymph, Repetition, Baby Bruise, Herculine, One or Two, Black Brane, Season of the Rat, Little Lazarus, Fear and Money, Television, Be Dead, Dominion, Pan, Tip of the Spear, Shade, Nova Scotia House, Name, Nula, Holy Smoke, The Royal We, Against Morality, The Gadfly, Information Age, Perfect Victims, Amateurs!, A Queer Theory of the State, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, and many more. CONTRIBUTORS Collier Schorr, Macy Rodman, Canal Street Research Association, Ryanaustin Dennis, Adina Glickstein, Mara McKevitt, Ryan Petersen, Frank Nesbitt, A. S. Hamrah, Gerlan Marcel, Claire Donato, Cesar Padilla, Jo Shane, Alex Auder, Travis Jeppesen, C. Frances Fisher, Fabiola Ching, Harry Tafoya, abdu mongo ali, James Nulick, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Nate Lippens, Alissa Bennett, Candystore, Negashi Armada, and many more.

@gertrudecontemporary ’s Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005-2025 launches 3pm Sunday 17 May at the Melbourne Art Book Fair. Flicking through this labour of love by editor @sharongflynn got me all kinds of emotional. I spent 8 years working in many different capacities at Gertrude between 2017 and 2025. I began as @markfeary ’s curatorial assistant on the last exhibition at 200 Gertrude Street; worked in Communications and Development (twice); and participated in the Emerging Writers’ Program with @lisrad , where I penned the precursor to my honours thesis. So when I say I was part of the furniture, I’m not joking. I have a lot to thank Gertrude for, but it is their nurturing of me as a curator and their support of @performance_review that I am most grateful for. At a time when in Australia we were seeing performance-focused roles being dissolved within major visual art institutions, Gertrude took up that mantle here in Naarm Melbourne. Between 2022 and 2025, Gertrude and Performance Review staged 4 Contact High, summer performance programs—2 at Gertrude Glasshouse; 1 at Gertrude, Preston and 1 in New York at @pageantpageantpageant . Contact High was a reaction to the extremity of the pandemic lockdowns here in Naarm and the glut of digital performance that was commissioned in this period. A platform for emerging voices in local performance, Contact High sought to reemphasise the core tenants of Auslandian ‘liveness’—spatial-temporal co-presence—and became a mainstay of the Naarm arts calendar. Last year we extrapolated this presentation model to take pillars of our performance community to New York to build relationships with the local scene and grow audiences there (documentation coming soon, I promise). I am deeply proud of this project and am honoured to have contributed to this organisation in this way. Thank you to the artists who trusted me with showing their work within this frame, Mark and @tracymegs for their mentorship, and the broader Gertrude team (looking at you @brigie.moriarty @ianbunyi__ and @tim.riley.walsh ) for their friendship. Gerty 5eva! Swipe to catch me when I started at Gerty (with a literal baby face) and me when I finished.

We’ll be at the Melbourne Art Book Fair next week, selling a limited number of issues 2-6 of @thewhitneyreview . Get em while they’re hot 🔥🔥🔥 10am-5pm, 15-17 May @ngvmelbourne The Whitney Review of New Writing is an independent journal of literary criticism based in New York City. Each issue features interviews, essays, poetry, and more than seventy short-format reviews—a laboratory for sharp, pithy writing that experiments with new modes of criticism. At once a place of discovery, guiding readers toward their next book, it also stands as a record of the zeitgeist, connecting a culture of reading to interdisciplinary perspectives in art, design, performance, music, nightlife, and fashion. The criticism engages writing in radically different formats, from major houses and micro presses to advertising copy and spoken-word performance, offering both support and context for the literary ecosystem. Previous contributors include Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Claudia Rankine, Alissa Bennett, Honey Dijon, K8 Hardy, Rhea Dillon, Diamond Stingily, Hedi El Kholti, Natasha Stagg, Rayne Fisher-Quann, Samuel R. Delany, E. Jane, Maya Martinez, Grace Byron, Tao Lin, and many others. #thewhitneyreview #melbourneartbookfair

As the official™️ Australian retailer of literary magazine @thewhitneyreview we’re bringing ‘hot literati gate’ to the Melbourne Art Book Fair. 15-17 May @ngvmelbourne More info to come—see you there. Images: @jeremy_liebman for @i_d

Buckle up! 🐎🐎🐎 Performance Review is back in the year of the Fire Horse with the second instalment of ‘Scene Report,’ a new series of reviews engaging with performance presented in A̶u̶s̶t̶r̶a̶l̶i̶a̶ by members of the local scene and touring international artists. 🔗🔗🔗 in bio ‘Scene Report’ #2 focuses on Jacob Coppedge’s Blue. Strap, Sit. (2025) for Performance Space Sydney’s Queer Development Program and VILLA PECULIAR (2025) by Rosa and Pearl Spring Voss. Both pieces, written by Joshua Edward of @no_more_poetry , take an expanded approach to the review format and play with bias as a structural device. There’s even a Wuthering Heights moment, timely we know. Images: 1. Jacob Coppedge, ‘Blue. Strap. Sit.,’ 2025, Performance Space Queer Development Program, PACT, Eora Sydney. Photo: Joseph Mayers. 2.Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, ‘VILLA PECULIAR,’ 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent. @collingwood__house @pact_sydney @performancespace

Two Performance Reviews in one week? It must be a summer (Christmas if you celebrate) miracle! We’re back in your feed today with the first in a two part series on the London Open Live at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In this edition, Nithya Iyer responds to the daily performances of Offerings by Devika Bilimoria which inaugurated this program on 5, 6 and 7 June 2025. 🔗🔗🔗 in bio Established in 1932, the Whitechapel Gallery’s London Open program was founded to platform artists in London’s East End and overtime developed into an annual public showcase of diverse London-based practices. This year, London Open responded to COVID-19’s impact on live artists by staging free daily performances across a period of three months. The featured artists were Devika Bilimoria, Season Butler, Shaun Caton, Helen Davison, Tim Etchells, Plastique Fantastique, Helena Goldwater, i.as.in.we, William Mackrell, Nando Messias, Will Pegna, Roshana Rubin Mayhew, Mahsa Salali, Aaron Williamson and Joshua Woolford. Part two of this series to follow in 2026. Images: Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2025, performance documentation, The London Open Live, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photos: 1. Fenia Kotsopoulou 2. and 3. Amias Hanley. @devika_bilimoria @nvmiyer @whitechapelgallery

Coming out of hiatus to share with you the final instalment of Performance Review’s 2025 writer’s program in partnership with Dancehouse. In this edition, I review the double bill of Brigid by Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin and Natural Basic by Rebecca Jensen. In this piece, I relish in the opportunity to reflect on the similarities and points of departure between these two works for three dancers, choreographed by contemporaries. In doing so, I also chart the networks of influence that have nurtured these emerging choreographic practices and wade through the porosity of dance. Read now via the bio 🔗🔗🔗 This piece has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing our mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support choreographic practice. Images 1 and 2: Rebecca Jensen, Natural Basic, Promotional Images. Photos: @ameliajdowd Images 3 and 4: Alice Heyward and Oisín Ó Manacháin, Brigid, Promotional Images. Photos: @agustinfar @performance_review @dancehouse.melb @bec_jenny @lanspr @anikaderuyter @allesheyward @oisinmonaghan @oon_z

In today’s edition of Performance Review, Annabel Brown responds to Tony Yap’s The Wound, Georgia Banks writes on Deanne Butterworth’s WHEN IT IS FINISHED and Lilly Skipper engages with Geoffrey Watson’s The Story of the Hare.  🔗🔗🔗 in bio In 2025, Performance Review and Temperance Hall are partnering to bring you written responses to Temperance Hall’s Front Studio Residency. This program offers six choreographic artists two-month studio residencies across the year and includes a stipend, public showing and photographic documentation. To complement this, Performance Review is publishing a series of written responses on the public outcomes of this program, penned by emerging arts writers and grounded in conversations with these artists. The aim of this collaboration is to mutually develop critical reflection on the practices of local choreographic artists and build performance literacy in arts writing. The 2025 Temperance Hall Front Studio Residents are Tony Yap, Chung Nguyen, Geoffrey Watson, Deanne Butterworth, Gabriella Imrichova and Fleur Conlon. The writers in this program have been mentored by Performance Review’s Director, Anador Walsh. @temperance.hall @performance_review @geoffreygeoffreygeoffrey @lilly__skipper @deannebutterworth @georgiaraebanks @tony.yap.88 @annabelbrown__ @declangalagher @iht_lionspaw @robbie.divine Images: 1. Geoffrey Watson, The Story of the Hare, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Jeff Busby. 2. Deanne Butterworth, WHEN IT IS FINISHED, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti. 3. Tony Yap, The Wound, 2025, performance documentation, Temperance Hall, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Jeff Busby.

This week, Performance Review brings you the second instalment of our annual writer’s program in partnership with Dancehouse, this time responding to Dancehouse’s second season of 2025. In this edition, Arabella Frahn-Starkie reviews Jo Lloyd’s Agitato and Rhiannon Newton’s Long Sentences, interrogating art’s capacity to grant us access to perspectives and experiences other than our own, and Coral Guan engages with Priya Srinivasan’s Copy of the Copy, charting the interconnected histories of Indian classical dance and Western contemporary dance and the negation of the former’s influence on the later. Read now via the bio 🔗🔗🔗 This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing our mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support choreographic practice. The writers in this program have been chosen by Performance Review to nurture new voices in performance criticism. @tjentiste @srinivasan2728 @jolloyd4448 @rhiannonlnewt @performance_review @dancehouse.melb bellaramallama

Tonight marks the first of three performances by Kori Miles at Performance Space’s 2025 Liveworks Festival in Eora Sydney. On this occasion, Performance Review and Performance Space have co-commissioned an interview between Kori and Anador Walsh. Between Thursday 23 October and Sunday 26 October, Kori will present three iterations of WHO CARES? a work originally commissioned by Performance Review in 2024 and which we are honoured to have supported ever since. In these ceremonial performances, Kori uses breath, sound and movement to summon the energies of protest, resistance and transformation. In this interview, Kori speaks to this work in their own words. 🔗🔗🔗 in bio @kori_milehighclub @anadorwalsh @performance_review @performancespace @melonandwater Image: Kori Miles, Who Cares? [Iteration no. 3], 2024, performance documentation, Performance Review presents Performing Care, 2025. Photos: Machiko Abe. Courtesy of the artist and Performance Review.

Performance Review is SO back! We’ve had a huge year and we have a big backlog of pieces to share with you over the next few months—buckle up. The first cab off the rank is also the first instalment of ‘Scene Report,’ a new series of reviews engaging with performances presented in A̶u̶s̶t̶r̶a̶l̶i̶a̶ by members of the local performance scene and touring international artists. Read via the bio 🔗🔗🔗 ‘Scene Report’ #1 features an art historical framing of Young Boy Dancing Group by Sam Beard; a mediation on liveness by Parker Lev Dupain, in response to Rosa Spring Voss and Andrea Illés’ Autopilot; a poetic response to Tina Stefanou’s Exhausted Vocalities—the performance component of her exhibition You Can’t See Speed—by Shannon May Powell; and an interview between Eleanor Laver and Kirby Casilli, centring on Casilli’s multimodal practice. We love performance and we hope you’ll love this snapshot of what’s happening in the scene.