Our stage is also a place for shows that you feel in a bodily, visceral way—experiences that are hard to put into words.
This is when dance plays a vital role on our stage, expanding the scope of what theatre can evoke. The adrenaline you feel from being in the presence of a performer experiencing an extremity, results in a shared adrenaline. It creates a spell.
Tense Dave cast this spell on an endlessly revolving stage, in a collaboration by Gideon Obarzanek, Lucy Guerin and Michael Kantor. Honour Bound brought the extremes of David Hicks’ story to life in choreography by Garry Stewart.
Dance Massive become a regular feature as of 2009—a biannual dance festival in collaboration with Arts House and Dancehouse. The Malthouse is a place where theatre and dance come together.
More than any other stage in the country, The Malthouse is also a place for bold design.
Design uncovers new layers to the words of a play and visually brings them to the surface.
Many designs at The Malthouse tell their own story alongside the words, opening up new dimensions, inviting us to look at a familiar tale anew—revealing added layers, meanings and points of view.
Michael Gow’s Away has been staged twice at The Malthouse—in 1990 and 2017. An Australian classic, where each production used the exact same words, but the design created a completely different emotional experience of these Australian families on the run.
The set design of The Tell-Tale Heart distilled the gothic emotion of Edgar Allan Poe’s story into a single image—an endless staircase ascending into the darkness.
The designs for Blood Wedding and The Good Person of Szechuan took classic plays and created new visual worlds full of ritual and culture and history.
The Malthouse is a stage not only for writers, but also for dancers and designers, who create experiences beyond and without words.