Alison Croggon

Dance Massive began in 2009 as a biennial festival designed to showcase Australia's diverse dance culture. A collaboration between three Melbourne venues - North Melbourne Arts House, Dancehouse and the Malthouse Theatre - it's proved to be a keeper, drawing our best choreographers and enthusiastic audiences.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet is a relatively young company, but in Adelaide they presented a program that was brilliant, overwhelming, but intensely rewarding, writes Alison Croggon.

In a culture conditioned by Disney's happy endings, fairy tales are much more perilous than children are generally permitted to know. Remnants of ancient stories, they reach into the realm of the uncanny, where nightmares and marvels live in the seams of the everyday. Often in their original forms they are very cruel. The grandmother isn't rescued from the belly of the wolf. The evil queen is forced into iron boots that are heated up until her feet burn off and she dies.

There's a lot of Samuel Beckett around at the moment. He might currently be Australia's most performed playwright: three short plays were performed by Lisa Dwan at last month's Perth Festival, and the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies are each doing their own version of Endgame. And in Adelaide, as its contribution to the Adelaide Festival, the State Theatre Company of South Australia is presenting another three short plays, as a Beckett Triptych.

Silvia Gallerano's performance in La Merda, at the Adelaide Festival, is more than a parade of female grotesquerie, writes Alison Croggon.

There's no getting around the fact that climate change is the issue of our time. It's a problem that encompasses every facet of our lives, from our domestic habits to global politics. One of the reasons why it's difficult to process, quite apart from the difficulty of extending our individual senses of mortality to imagining our extinction as a species, is its complexity.

Relationships, like people, are complex. Are text messages, facebook posts, snapchats, or tweets less valuable than face-to-face conversation? Alison Croggon reviews Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe's Perth Festival interactive performance I Wish I Was Lonely.

Puppets and their peculiar magic have been a recurring theme in this year's Perth Festival, but in Ubu and The Truth Commission puppetry becomes a vehicle to explore the human suffering many endured under Apartheid, writes Alison Croggon.

Puccini's Madama Butterfly is a damning narrative of western colonialism, but it's a challenge for any director tackling this material in 2015 to keep the production from descending into Orientalist kitsch, writes Alison Croggon.

In a rare Australian showing, acclaimed choreographer Mark Morris has pitted his New York-based dancers against the wild talent of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and produced a performance that is complex, pleasurable and darkly seductive, writes Alison Croggon.

Alison Croggon considers the very ordinary realities exposed by Samuel Beckett in his rarely performed shorter works, Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby.

The big news of the first weekend of the Perth Festival is The Giants, the Royal de Luxe's supersized puppets. I've never seen an art event like it, writes Alison Croggon.

Every two years, a representative sample of around 300 Australian theatre makers from all over Australia - regional and urban, major companies and independents - gathers in a building and talks. And boy, do they talk, writes Alison Croggon.

Critical discourse is crucial to a healthy culture, argues Alison Croggon. So why is Opera Australia blacklisting critics?

The 2014 Melbourne Festival has been, from my slice of it, three weeks of brilliant cultural stimulation, harking back to the best of Kristy Edmunds's festivals in the mid-2000s. Josephine Ridge's programming has been quietly subversive, combining a genuine populism with an exploration of subliminal currents, from personal transformation to social revolution.

Alison Croggon considers Heiner Goebbels' breathtaking work When The Mountain Changed Its Clothing, a piece of theatre that refuses to cast young women as shallow, narcissistic, morally shonky human beings.

For this year's Melbourne Festival, both Big hArt and Kage offer shows created by working with specific communities - in Big hArt's case, the Aboriginal community of the Pilbara town of Roebourne, and in Kage's, Sudanese refugees and young Aboriginals, writes Alison Croggon.

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.

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.

Australia's major theatre companies are approaching diversity on our stages is an urgent concern, writes Alison Croggon. Perhaps a new energy is gathering in our culture.

How did a production that was intended by Malthouse and Griffin Theatre to question the stigma against sex workers lead to accusations the creators had used their lives to create "pity porn", asks Alison Croggon.

The Abbott Government has signalled a new international role for the arts by endorsing the Australia Council's new strategy and funding system.

Gender is so hot right now. If gender is, as is often claimed, a performance, then theatre is the place, nonpareil, to explore it. And theatre is exploring it, for good or ill: in the past few months, I've seen at least half a dozen productions which feature cross-gendered casting or some kind of gendered critique.

Barrie Kosky is one of Melbourne's most illustrious exports. As the current Intendant and Chef Regisseur of the Komische Oper Berlin (as Kosky translates it, "boss") he has reached a career peak. Since his incumbency, which began in 2012, the Komische Oper was voted Opera House of the Year by 50 international journalists, and Kosky was named Best Director in this year's International Opera Awards.