One of the paradoxes of art is the uneasy legacy of success. As soon as a work is labelled a "classic", it becomes curiously invisible: it transforms into a monument, cobwebbed by all the extraneous things its success now symbolises, and the energies that made it a success in the first place are polished away by the pieties that must now attend it. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a good exampleAlison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com23

Bangarra Dance Theatre's Belong demonstrates, once again, why Bangarra is one of our leading dance companies (and why it has such a huge international reputation). It consists of two dances: About, by Torres Strait Islander Elma Kris, and ID by artistic director Stephen Page. Both of them add up to "stunning".The opening work enacts myths about the wind from Kris's Islander culture, opening out Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com1

Was that 2011? I'm thinking of the Venerable Bede's story, in which one of King Edwin's thanes compares the life of a man (with the Anglo-Saxons it was always a man) to the swift flight of a sparrow through a banqueting hall on a dark winter's day. The past year has seemed the mere flip of a wing. Yet somehow I reviewed around 86 shows this year - quite a lot more than last year, when I reviewed Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com7

It's tempting to consider what Mary MacLane's life might have been, had she been born male. For one thing, I might have had a better chance of having heard of her: the work of interesting women is all too apt to disappear after their deaths. Perhaps MacLane might have been known as an early 20th century Thomas Chatterton or Arthur Rimbaud, a wayward brilliance that ignited rebellion into a Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com21

The great holiday guillotine has now slammed down across Ms TN's diary, and so last week I saw my last shows for the year. And then, in the way of the these things, I promptly came down with a cold. I blame Melbourne's increasingly absurd weather for this, as much as the exigencies of the end of the year: this city has always, admittedly, been proverbial for its changeability ("if you don't like Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com26

Ms TN seems unable to get her sentences together today, so let me briefly flag a couple of theatrical events that opened this week, both from Melbourne's thriving independent scene. Get thee hence to A is for Atlas's wholly charming Cherry Cherry (details here), which takes place in a private home in Thornbury and includes a delicious dinner, and MKA's wicked take on political delusion, The Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0

Ms TN seems unable to get her sentences together today, so let me briefly flag a couple of theatrical events that opened this week, both from Melbourne's thriving independent scene. Get thee hence to A is for Atlas's wholly charming Cherry Cherry (details here), which takes place in a private home in Thornbury and includes a delicious dinner, and MKA's wicked take on political delusion, The Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0

George Hunka at Superfluities Redux (whom I'm sure you all read religiously) blogs on the recurrent death of criticism, and in particular on the argument that its death sentence is signed by the new democratisation of the web. This is (sigh) an old and whiskery argument, but as George points out,"the real danger is in formalizing (the) informal process of inclusion and exclusion". It's an Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com1

It's proverbial that there is a Hamlet for every century. As Jan Kott says, it's a play that absorbs its times. The Romantic era gave us a pale, introspective youth; the 20th century an animal trapped in the pitiless mechanisms of power. In the 21st century, the Prince of Denmark has become the random particle in a corrupted, dysfunctional and claustrophobic nuclear family.Stripping the play of Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com5

I see that Dr Peter West, retired university lecturer and social commentator, is in today's Age fulminating on the bad manners of Young People at the Opera and the Consequent Decline and Fall of Civilisation. Apparently nobody obeys Rules any more. It's all the fault of entitled young people with their newfangled phones, according to Dr West. Or possibly people on drugs. Anyway, I was inspired, Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com56

*Spoiler warnings*The end of the year is rushing up like a charging rhino. Melbourne theatre has its traditional means of signalling this milestone - widespread admissions of astonishment that Christmas is only 34 sleeps away, the issuing of phalanxes of party invitations, and, of course, the Christmas shows, crowd-pleasers that fill the houses with cheer and, hopefully, audiences. The Malthouse Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com12

I walked out of the opening night of Lally Katz's new play Return To Earth with my stomach in a knot. Readers, I have seldom seen a production which was so utterly wrong. It's wrong from the ground up, wrong from the first moment, and goes on being wrong all the way through to the end. Every flicker of life in this play is wrestled to the ground and throttled to death.Any text, if it's at all Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com27

Recently quite a few theatre bloggers have been tracking their creative processes: George Hunka, for instance, is logging some of his thinking material as he writes a new play in his Elf King notebooks on Superfluities Redux. I don't especially want to do this myself - if I wanted to talk about my writing process, I would start a different blog - but I thought some readers might be interested in Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0

Ms TN been making sad little meep noises all year about the increasing necessity to pull back on the blog and focus on my own work. Now, as the late, great Midnight Oil once had it, the time has come: for the next fortnight, circumstance will forcibly remove me from my desk. Next week I'll be in Sydney workshopping Night Songs, a music theatre piece co-written with Daniel Keene, with music by Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0

During the recent Australian Theatre Forum, one of the Open Space groups worked on a response to the National Cultural Policy discussion paper. This diverse group consisted of people from all areas of Australian theatre, including funding bodies, major organisations, independent companies and independent artists. They decided that a preamble to the policy would be a good idea, and to model this Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com2

Curating an international arts festival, says Adelaide Festival artistic director Paul Grabowsky, isn't simply a matter of assembling a shopping list. And it's complicated. "With something like the Adelaide Festival, there are so many areas to cover," he says. "The performing arts, literature, visual art, film, public outdoor events... they're all things which people rightly expect..." And all Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0

When Brett Sheehy, Melbourne Festival artistic director, launched his program earlier this year at a lavishly corporate event, he announced that the themes of this year's festival were "rebellion and revolution". This immediately set up a jangling dissonance: anything less revolutionary than the event which announced it is hard to imagine. This, you might justifiably conclude, is a comfortable Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com13

Some of the dance at this year's Melbourne Festival has been full-on sensory overload. Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother hit like a sledgehammer, an avalanche of sound and imagery that struck me as an almost unmediated response to the violence of our times. BalletLab's Aviary had a similar physical effect, with very different means and imagery. Immersive theatre? The choreographers do it by Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com2

Watching Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler - the first of his works I've seen - was unexpectedly fascinating. Through directors such as Benedict Andrews, a stablemate of Ostermeier's at Berlin's Schaubühne, the aesthetic of Ostermeier and his peers has had a profound influence on contemporary Australian theatre. So much of the design language here - architectural spaces defined by Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com6

Byron Perry's new dance work Double Think opens in complete darkness in the vast space of the North Melbourne Town Hall. To the rhythms of Luke Smiles's electronic score, blindingly bright geometries of white light flash out and vanish. The movements are precise, created as two dancers lift small boxes concealing the light source, and there's not enough time for the light to bleed out and Alison Croggonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.com0