Ellen M. Scott (she/her) is a Narrm-based writer, researcher and critic, and founding editor of Melbourne Stage Review. She approaches criticism as situated practice, attentive to perspective, context and the limits of the critic’s own gaze.
Reviews
The lights are blinding, the sound unnerving, the dancers absorbed in some peculiar business. Their movements are fierce, precise and wonderfully strange. I was transfixed, though I'm still not entirely sure what I witnessed. Extraordinary stuff.
Reviews
Not a Jam gives the pleasures and dilemmas of contact improvisation an exquisitely judged theatrical shape. Speech, stillness, sound and shifting weight draw us into the intimacy of a shared practice, revealing how feeling at home in a body might become a way of belonging among others.
Reviews
I found something deeply replenishing in The Village Square: the warmth of its storytelling, the musicians’ sensitivity, and the delight taken in small things. Amid Melbourne Fringe’s many competing energies, its unhurried rhythm held me happily in its care.
Reviews
There are things Ben Grant never knew about his parents, including the tenderness they struggled to express. Discovered after their deaths, their letters form the basis of this disarmingly funny exploration of family, grief and the peculiar intimacy of reading words never intended for you.
Reviews
Age is no excuse for behaving yourself. With ridiculous costumes, unruly dancing and a few uncomfortable truths about growing older, Prime Time takes a playful swipe at the generation gap. Beneath the silliness, there's a surprisingly tender provocation: what if we stop counting?
Reviews
There are giant eyeballs, a singing mop and enough Kate Bush to satisfy the Fish People. But Sarah-Louise Young’s cleverest trick is making a roomful of strangers feel, for an evening, like they belong to one another.
Reviews
God, death, shame, desire and the appalling inconvenience of other people. Hitherto turns the existential crisis into a gloriously funny theatrical playground, where meaning is always just within reach — until someone starts meowing.
Reviews
Irene Holub’s Manifesto of Silences is an exhilarating reimagining of opera, where signing bodies, shifting images and vibrations beneath the seats create a work of extraordinary beauty, anguish and tenderness.
Reviews
Emma Fawcett’s Toto’s Song is a glorious, irreverent and deeply moving portrait of a woman determined to live and die on her own terms. With magnificent performances and exceptional direction from Kate Fryer, this La Mama production is among the finest theatre of the year.
Reviews
Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s Estuary is a beautiful, unsettling exploration of bodies, belonging, water and Country. Through recurring movement, the deep thrum of its soundscape and a landscape contracting around its dancers, the work gathers a disquieting force, while its images linger.
Reviews
He likes things just so. She has other ideas. The Portrait finds glorious, somewhat cathartic physical comedy in the oh-so-recognisable rules, rituals and petty irritations of working life.
Reviews
For all its fury about governments, institutions and wealthy benefactors, Fuck Your Funding keeps turning its attention back onto the artists themselves. Hamilton allows each person inside the argument enough humanity to become inconvenient. The result is messy, funny, fiercely intelligent theatre.