Events & Festivals

Hundreds of people brave the chilly waters of Hobart's River Derwent for the city's annual nude swim to mark the winter solstice.

It's hard to avoid being framed by the media as a wild and unpredictable character if your claim to fame is founding the 'Japanoise' rock band Boredoms. But this has made experimental musician EYE Yamantaka wary of the media, and as a result he is very careful that his words are not misused.

Hobart's Winter Feast attracts thousands of tourists and businesses to the city as Dark Mofo organisers hope to rival the hugely popular summer event, the Taste of Tasmania.

Hobart's Dark Mofo festival has taken over the port city with tens of thousands coming out for the celebrations.

Dark Mofo, Tasmania's premiere winter arts festival, returns for its third year with a program that includes fire breathing organs, earth shaking sounds and disorientating late night events all designed to push audiences outside their comfort zones, writes Tim Stone.

Dark Mofo festival is changing the way Australia's southernmost capital is being seen and enjoyed, by locals and tourists alike.

Now in its third year, Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art's winter festival Dark Mofo explores and celebrates the darkest part of the year with large scale public art, theatre, music, cinema and feasting.

The Dark Mofo winter festival gets off to a suitably dark and creepy start with the world premiere of the television series The Kettering Incident.

Organisers are looking for volunteers to carry massive ogoh-ogoh monsters through the streets of Hobart for Dark Mofo's Winter Feast.

The first public event to be staged at Macquarie Point sees the site refurbished to mix the old with the new for Dark Mofo events next week.

While vivid and balletic, Kiss and Cry ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of using humble elements to create something extraordinary, writes Courtney Collins.

On Saturday Exxopolis is deflated, MONA market is postponed and the Australian Art Orchestra's collaboration with Arnhem Land's Young Wagilak Group is blown off MONA lawn and into the museum's subterranean bar. Kate Hennessy reports on what happens next.

From the maelstrom mustered by rock band Swans to the serenity spread by Adam Wojcinski's tea art, MONA FOMA excelled when foraying the fringes of quietness and noise and the space between spectacle and sound. Kate Hennessy brings us the music, sound and silence of MOFO 2015.

How To Dress Well, aka Chicago's Tom Krell, is a true innovator when it comes to both recording and performing, even if his music is characterised by profound sadness. Barnaby Smith looks ahead to his Australian shows, including a performance at Sydney Festival.

Music and songwriting is a way to reflect on the small triumphs and failures of everyday living, for Hollie Fullbrook of Tiny Ruins. Ahead of the band's appearance at Sydney Festival, she speaks to Barnaby Smith about the confessions and fragilities that make up her deeply thoughtful second album Brightly Painted One, as well as collaborations with some very important people.

American singer Alela Diane suffered for her art when making latest album About Farewell. As she prepares for her first ever trip to Australia to play at Sydney Festival, the ghosts from her past still play a crucial role in her present as she looks toward a fruitful, renewed musical future, writes Barnaby Smith.

Sydney Festival's interactive public art program is pulling crowds into the Festival Hub, giving them the perfect selfie moment to mark the start of the 2015 Festival.

Like Charlie Chaplin with his film The Great Dictator, grandson James Thierr is using art to champion freedom of expression over terror, but as the cries of "Je Suis Charlie" recede on the Tabac Rouge stage Courtney Collins considers whether activism and artistry always make good bedfellows.

When UK-based artist Mira Calix shared the concept for her Sydney Festival artwork with the writer who inspired the piece she delighted in the shared connection the two had with paper, or rather the decay of paper.

Have I No Mouth, by Dublin-based company Brokentalker, is a fascinating production that reveals the messy complexity of human lives, writes Alison Croggon. While in contrast, German playwright Falk Richter's highly anticipated collaboration with Chunky Move and the Melbourne Theatre Company lacks sophistication and subtlety, never quite shaking the spectre of Eurocentric tourism.

With Hello, Goodbye, Happy Birthday, former Malthouse Theatre director-in-residence Roslyn Oades has created one of the most charming shows of the year, writes Alison Croggon. While the riveting double bill at Dancehouse continues the Festival's preoccupation with ritual.

An exhilarating, fantastic Quebecois circus troupe and Dewey Dell's shamanistic enactment about the unease of contemporary times captures Alison Croggon's attention at Melbourne Festival.