Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009)

Just after Isidore moves to France to study filmmaking, his best friend dies back in the US. Through documentary, performance, and animation, a ghostly portrait emerges, prompting Isidore to question his relationships with his parents and his boyfriend in Paris.

"Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" sang the rapper known to his estranged mother as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, but better known to the rest of us as Eminem. That the Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte was attracted to the early-noughties icon is perhaps unsurprising, given Da Corte’s long-held interest in artifice and pop culture, masking and makeup. After a friend noted a passing resemblance, Da Corte started to ‘embody’ the persona of the musician, not least bleaching his hair, in the hope that by taking on these outward signifiers, he might better understand a figure whose politics Da Corte profoundly disagreed with.

The world is an enduring war theatre. Perhaps because it’s a men’s world? When cast in such a set women try to play out all their means, even performing a sad joy division or bowing down like a poor little thing. This in spite of being a fierce partisan or a tactical guerrilla expert. The world is either a repeating making up of the same actions, as in the movements necessary for the make-up moment, every single day. Persisting like a waterproof mascara – but will it alike prove itself bulletproof too? I guess no, a mascara can only be more or less dramatic. Like in a recrudescing war against more natural habits, occurring at large in the world theatre.

US stage director Robert Wilson has teamed up with pop star Rufus Wainwright to bring Shakespeare’s sonnets to the stage in Berlin. Debuting on Easter Sunday, this highly stylized cross-dressing version of the archetypal love poems went down a storm with the audience.

A documentary detailing a small section of the Avant Garde music scene in Perth, Western Australia.