Cry Baby review | Melbourne Fringe Festival | Trades Hall

Isabella Perversi has written three plays, each one dealing with heavy emotions. With Cry Baby she explains that she wants to branch out and create a piece of work that is different. Something that is light, and happy but she also lists a number of other requisites about what she wants and doesn't want to do.

However, no matter what she tries, she seems to fall back into the pit of sadness that she's building an artistic reputation for. Perversi has set up a good structure to explore these worries and she starts off with a burst of colour and movement as she removes her black oversized coat and trousers to reveal (and revel in) a bright orange leotard. She energetically gets into an aerobic routine, brimming with forced positivity that eventually begins to wear her down and she succumbs to the sads. But that's OK, she'll simply move on and try something else to help guide her writing process.

Hamish Annan is having an outpouring of emotions with Access (Melbourne Fringe Festival)

A person has about 400 emotional experiences per day stemming from 27 basic emotions. In Access, performance artist Hamish Annan invites his audience to be faced with six of these as they sit across from him in a room and are asked to select one of the designated emotions: aggression, happiness, lust, fear, grief, or disgust. Once they've announced it, Annan takes on that feeling for as long as the attendee remains seated. Annan has performed Access across New Zealand and won the New Zealand Fringe Touring Award, and for the first time, he is bringing his show to Australia as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. It's quite a journey for a show that began amidst the pandemic lockdowns.



Happy at Times review (Melbourne International Comedy Festival)

Musical comedian Sarah Gaul is on a mission to improve her happiness levels. But what does it take to actually be happy? With Happy at Times, Gaul performs a number of delightful songs and shares her unique perspectives with her audience on how we can all increase our happiness ratio.

Gaul radiates warmth on stage and her personality shines through as she makes sure she greets everyone as we enter and take our seats. She is personable and friendly and when she recreates her passport and drivers license photo IDs she becomes someone we could sit there and listen to all night and still be entertained.

The Resilience Project: Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness

My smile hides a lot. It hides my fear, my sadness, my loneliness and my anxiety. It hides the fact that I still feel like my life has had little accomplishment and always wondering when my break will come. When will I feel accepted? When will I feel loved? When will I be happy?

A year ago, I wrote about my (self-diagnosis of) depression after having watched Bryony Kimmings's "Fake It Till You Make It", and it was about then I started seeing a psychologist. While Dr C determined I did not have depression, he did diagnose me with severe general anxiety disorder. Great I thought, I've been diagnosed now I can get fixed. I saw Dr C fortnightly - sometimes weekly - for a year, and we would discuss different techniques and exercises I could do to manage my anxiety and while I always walked out of the session determined to do them, I never did.