Bangarra’s next generation arrives in style, plus reviews of other big shows this week

Joan Sutherland Theatre, Opera House June 3, until June 13.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Sheltering is a beautifully curated triple bill with something for everyone: a live piece by Glory Tuohy-Daniell, a short film by Daniel Mateo with Cass Mortimer Eipper, and a re-staging of Frances Rings’ 2015 Sheoak.

First off the ranks is Tuohy-Daniell’s Keeping Grounded, where dancers move through a giant net spread across the stage, their feet seeming to tread air. Tuohy-Daniell’s choreography bursts with freshness: the dancers spin across the stage in unexpected paths, their bodies moving with youthful lightness into swift, startling angles.

There’s a playfulness and touches of street dance, buoyed by Karen Norris’s molten lighting, which turns the net into a gold-hued celestial staircase. Combined with Brendon Boney’s pulsing soundscape, Keeping Grounded has a bracing, uplifting energy, much like a surprising breeze or a cold drink on a hot day.

The Neilson, ACO on the Pier, June 3.

Keats once remarked that the point of diving into a lake is not to swim to the shore but to be in the lake (my italics), and to luxuriate in the sensation of water. He was making an analogy with poetry, but a similar point could be made about the music of Australian composer Kate Moore, now based in the Netherlands.

It coaxes the listener to experience textures and small changes in ideas repeated like mantras that guide an inward journey. Her prize-winning work The Dam moves from imperceptible ripples to coruscating floods. This program featured two recent works by Moore that demonstrated an extrovert turn but still used the familiar techniques of minimalism – repetition, cross rhythm and shifting phases – to explore sensations in a similar way.

Rose of Roses, for flute, clarinet, percussion and violin, took short dancing melodies inspired by the 13th century song collection Cantigas de Santa Maria. The sections of the work were clearly demarcated by change of melodic instrument, mode and instrumental colour, and changes from one section to the next were unceremonious, like switching tracks on a music streaming device.

Old Fitz Theatre May 31
Until June 14

What do you want from your life, and what will you sacrifice to get it? These are questions we all must ask ourselves, and for women, these questions have thorns: can you dream as widely and freely as men can and have that ambition rewarded?

In W, a new play by Madelaine Nunn making its debut at the Old Fitz Theatre, our characters are wrestling with these questions from inside a pressure cooker: a make-or-break season of elite women’s AFL.

Team captain Rosie (Shannon Ryan) has been playing her heart out since well before women were paid to do it professionally, and is now at the height of her career. Her wife Alex (Grace Smibert) is also on the team, and when complications arise in their IVF process, Rosie’s relationship to the game, and her personal life, comes under new strain.

Enmore Theatre, May 30

Heroes to Zeros, the title of the third album from Scottish group The Beta Band, acts as a succinct summary of the group’s career.

After being feted by the music press in the late ’90s for a series of visionary, genre-mashing EPs, they went on to release three albums to mostly critical praise but middling success, breaking up shortly after Zeros′ 2004 release and £1.2 million ($2.2 million) in debt to their label.

For their first ever Australian show after reuniting in 2025, the group’s original members – Steve Mason (vocals, guitar), Robin Jones (drums), John Maclean (keyboard, samples, turntables) and Richard Greentree (bass) – finally get to enjoy a hero’s welcome once more.