Dog Park - Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

It has been proven that dogs can reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, ease loneliness and encourage exercise and playfulness. They truly are a human's best friend. Walk past a dog park and you're bound to see dogs sniffing each other, running for tennis balls and marking their territory while their owners gather around catching up on local news and talking about their fur-baby like parents waiting to pick up their children from school. But what happens when that pocket of sanctuary is threatened by an unspeakable act? Presented by Lab Kelpie, Dog Park is a satirical and biting look at how one dog park community is impacted when a private school boy on exchange from Sri Lanka, is found dead in the leafy suburbs of a Melbourne dog park covered in bites.

In some ways, Dog Park is a work almost 30 years in the making when director Lyall Brooks, who also serves as Artistic Director of the now regional-based not-for-profit theatre company, first met the show's playwright Sally Faraday. "Sally and I used to act in shows and musicals together back in the *cough* late 90s *cough* when she was studying at Monash University and I was basically just hanging around there pretending to be a student because they had an incredible Performing Arts program," he recalls.

Dog Show - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

You know that saying 'it doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game"? Yeah, forget that, because in this competition, it's all about the win. Presented as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Dog Show is a physical theatre performance scrutinising our obsession with winning, and while it might revolve around a dog show, it's the humans who are ultimately the ones being judged.

It's a dog eat dog world in this competition with Simone French, Alex Roe and Adam Ibrahim each taking on the role of a dog and its owner. The canines compete in various challenges and tests to determine which one will ultimately be hailed as the best in show. This includes being aggressively examined from head to toe for ideal leg length, desired weight, and flawless face and teeth by the judges. At other times, they are paraded around the audience, putting their best paw forward to the live score by drummer Cassandra Kumaschow that brings out the tension of the show while also leading the humour. Director Cassandra Fumi does a great job of creating much activity and chaos in such a confined space but never losing the purpose of this show.

Canine Choreography review | Next Wave Festival | Testing Grounds

Since 2009, Dances with Dogs has been approved by the Australian National Kennel Council as an official sport in Australia. That's right; dog owners perform fully themed, costumed and choreographed dance numbers to music with their canine counterparts. Presented as part of Next Wave, Canine Choreography takes a number of dog owners and their pets and has them recreating award winning Dances with Dogs routines while highlighting the relationships and bonds we share with dogs.

Creator Danielle Reynolds interviews a number of dog owners, including some from the Dances with Dogs community. There is a slight Best In Show mockumentary feel throughout as people gush over their pets and the seriousness in which competitive dog dancing is discussed. These moments prove to be the most entertaining and unfortunately this is where the problem with Canine Choreography lies.

Queen Bitch - Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Geraldine Quinn has had an extremely rough time of late. A series of unfortunate events have forced her from living in her south eastern suburbs unit back to the not-so idyllic surroundings of Noble Park (North), just 5km from where her parents live. Queen Bitch, her new cabaret comedy show, recalls these events in horrific and hysterical detail, which begin from when she was a 10 year old girl in love with Xanadu but petrified of roller skating.

Quinn is a masterful storyteller in bringing all the pieces of her life together to create a flowing single narrative that engages the audiences for its entirety. Her performance is highly impressive with her tone and facial expressions used effectively to convey her emotions. When describing the moment her unit flooded, the whole room can feel the frantic disbelief that she would have experienced in that situation.

Queen Bitch - Melbourne International Comedy Festival preview

Geraldine Quinn returns to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with her brand new cabaret show, Queen Bitch. Quinn will truly be making lemons out of lemonade as she takes a look at her life over the last two years and comes to some realisations on how to cope when the going gets tough and that perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel but not in the way most people might realise.

"2016-17 for me was a pretty magnificent string of bad things happening. I ended up in hospital after a ridiculously small accident, my rental property flooded in minutes during a freak storm, I moved back out to the South-East suburbs which I'd been trying to escape for decades, gosh, SO much more happened - and then I got my dog, which weirdly wouldn't have happened without all the other nonsense," Quinn explains. "Queen Bitch is basically a show about trying not to be scared so much, because people are there for you more than you think, even when you feel very alone. As I developed the show, I realised the 'light' is everywhere, in weird corners, and some sort of light is always somewhere, you just have to turn around in the cave and squint a bit. Writing Queen Bitch made me realise how scared I have been to just live my life, and also how many people will help when you really need it."