A year and a day... or two...

It was the 31st December 2006 - a year ago that I decided to plunge into the world of blogging. For so long I had felt that there wasn't enough opportunity for people on the fringes of the Sydney theatre world to express their opinions and have a forum for debate.

The grumblings, particularly aimed at the establishment, were often stated in hushed tones in the back of foyers. Reviews would come out in the major papers and reflected very little of what many in the industry truly thought. There was a distinct air of silence.

In some ways, this blog has been hopefully successful in pulling back the curtain over that silence, encouraging some good debate and I am delighted that it has grown and grown over the last 12 months.

And it has been an extremely interesting year in the arts world in Sydney, making blogging intriguing and insightful. And it has been made all the more fun with many of you making comments and getting your hands dirty in the weekly topics.

The year started off where we are about to lift off again - with the new and improved Sydney Festival under the direction of Fergus Linehan. There was some enthralling theatre and performance in the 2007 festival. Seemanslieder, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, Uncle Vanya and Eh Joe to name a few of my favourites.

This was followed by an array of exciting and not so exciting theatre throughout the professional and independent scenes.

The top five personal highlights within the independent sector would be Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mercury Fur, Jesus Hoped the A Train, Brilliant Monkey and Bone.

This list doesn't include some notable other productions within the sector including Love's Triumph, Norm and Ahmed and An Unfortunate Woman.

As the year has progressed I have been re-introducing myself to the performance art sector which has produced some of the most exciting and challenging productions of the year. At the very top is the production of Corvus which is my pick as the overall theatre production of the year.

It was also a year where version 1.0 produced yet another stunning piece of political theatre by tackling the Australian Wheat Board Inquiry and Urban Theatre Projects developed the beautiful The Unfolding Wife.

The youth theatre sector has been producing some of the best works of the year that are refreshing and adventurous, most notably the work of PACT with their production of Constellations and the Shopfront production of RAW Shaken and Stirred.

The professional sector has also taken audiences on beautiful journey's. The pick of the bunch was Lorelei - A Meditation on Loss which was both rivetting and gut-wrenching. This was closely followed by the brilliant King Lear from the Studio Company, Peter Brook's Sizwe Banze is Dead and Miriam Margolyes portrayal of Charles Dickens' works in Dickens' Women.

The biggest disappointments have been from a cross section of the sector and include Bell Shakespeare's A Government Inspector, the B Sharp production of The Small Things, the latest production from the Stables Tiger Country as well as the 'cultural showcase' brought to foreign leaders during the APEC meet earlier this year.

It has also been a fascinating on many other fronts. The debate around the new Kookaburra Musical Theatre Company has generated some intense discussion here, here and here.

The essay by Lee Lewis on cross-racial casting on Sydney stages was nothing less than fascinating. (A summary I have written about the blog comments throughout the Lewis debate will be published in this quarter's Platform Papers from Currency House).

It has also been a sad year in the demise of underground performance spaces, but hopefully with the tenacity of our industrious arts creators, that live in every corner of our beautiful city, this will be rectified before you know it. And fingers crossed that our Lord Mayor Clover Moore will also see to putting her weight behind some important zoning issues that need urgent attention.

We also had a lot of debate around the Sydney Theatre Company. It infamously started with a certain situation here, but then developed into some encouraging debate here. There was, of course, that under-whelming doco that the STC got involved with. Thankfully it was redeemed by the Canadian doco which I recently review.

Which makes you think that the year has been one of Ying and Yang. The bad outweighed by the good, the scandalous over taken by the the sincere.

This year, we will keep our eyes on it all, once again - unless something drastic changes...

We have a new government but I am less than convinced. It all has to come from within and that is the only way change occurs.

May you all have a wonderful 2008 and thanks for reading, commenting and clicking around. It's been a pleasure.