Kate Holden

Back to Back artistic director Bruce Gladwin found the brilliance of the ordinary in Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of the battle between striking British miners and the police.

For The Australian Ballet’s Dimity Azoury, the power of Simon Stone’s 2013 production of Hamlet opened up the possibilities of performance.

Watching Jane Campion’s work showed Robert Lukins that writing can be as collaborative as filmmaking.

Maguy Marin’s Beckettian dance work May B has fascinated and moved dancer and choreographer Alice Cummins since she first saw it in 1992.

For Angela Tiatia, the performance art of Latai Taumoepeau was revelatory.

The Australian Ballet’s artistic director, David Hallberg, says French choreographer Jérôme Bel opened his eyes – and broke his heart.

The deepest influence on ARIA-nominated Emma Donovan is the music of her grandparents, Micko and Aileen Donovan.

Multidisciplinary artist Amrita Hepi pays homage to Adrian Piper’s groundbreaking short video Funk Lessons.

Acclaimed war photographer Stephen Dupont traces his vocation back to the shock of first seeing Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

For choreographer Jo Lloyd, the discomfort of Leos Carax’s film Holy Motors is part of its uneasy brilliance.

Author Charlotte Wood explains how the still-life paintings of Jude Rae help her write.

Filmmaker Robynne Murphy is inspired by the collective genesis of a painting by sisters Lorraine Brown and Narelle Thomas.

Melbourne artist Lisa Radford, a friend and colleague of Damiano Bertoli’s, remembers his major work Le Désir, a series of performances of a little-known play by Picasso.

The whole-work aesthetic of Japanese doom-metal band Corrupted has been a major inspiration for the noise art of Marco Fusinato.

A 2007 retrospective of Tom Kreisler’s art has had a lifelong impact on Mitch Cairns’ work.

Broadcaster and composer Andrew Ford discusses how Luciano Berio’s O King showed him how to start with the simple.

Miles Franklin award-winner Amanda Lohrey on how the Hindu god Shiva danced creation into being.

Opera and film director Constantine Costi discusses how Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ has influenced his approach to staging.

Artist and puppet-maker Bryony Anderson talks about the influence of Fiona Hall’s Paradisus Terrestris (1989-90) on her work and outlook.

Alexander Briger AO, an Australian and international star of classical music, discusses the influence of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony on his career.

Award-winning documentary and digital installation artist Lynette Wallworth describes a work that influenced her.

Last year, author Toni Jordan decided to write fiction full-time, in order to pursue her goal of subverting capitalism by making people feel less miserable. She is editing her sixth book and has started writing the next one.

A filmmaker, cinematographer and visual artist, Ling Ang has been documenting her dreams for three years with 3D graphics, installations and now a book.

One of the pioneers of Indigenous presence on screen, Rhoda Roberts has spent her life breaking barriers for First Nations artists. But with her new job, she may finally find some time for her own art.

Musician Ben Salter is ensconced in a studio at MONA, making music in front of the museum’s patrons as a kind of performance art.

The children’s author Ursula Dubosarsky says books can be like cats, sitting at the back of your mind demanding your attention.

Games composer, teacher, broadcaster and critic Dan Golding balances his different worlds in a chaos of creativity.

For Yuwaalaraay singer and writer Nardi Simpson, author of Song of the Crocodile, a sense of place is fundamental to all her work.

Composer Liza Lim is old-school – she still handwrites her scores, as the tactile act of notation flows into her music-making.

Garth Nix, one of Australia’s most internationally successful authors, says lying on the couch with his eyes shut is a crucial part of his working life.

Playwright and performer Kate Mulvany is working on her next play in an unusual space – under quarantine in a Brisbane hotel room.

On his company’s 10th anniversary, Shaun Parker – one of the stalwarts of Australian contemporary dance – looks over his shapeshifting career. “It’s weird, I didn’t like it. I loved it. You’d think I’d be more terrified, but I think, beginning to sing or dance or act, you’re becoming another role. I love that feeling of becoming someone else.”

“The Guaia is three-and-a-half feet tall, with arms as long as she is high. The pads of her fingers are as dark and shiny as wet wood, and splayed like a tree frog’s. Her face is forever young yet strafed, all hollow and crag, sexless. She sleeps behind …”

As the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal violin, Satu Vänskä teases astonishing music from her centuries-old instrument. But away from the stage, Vänskä’s musical tastes march to a very different beat. “You know what’s really sad? You can go through your whole life without ever hearing ’90s grunge. Not to mention Bach or Mozart. Or 1970s popular music. If we want to keep our art form alive … we try to bring back music in everyday conversation, so you can encounter something and awake that curiosity.”

As Sydney-born, Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti prepares to show her three-channel video work Assembly in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, she talks about emotional responses, music as a salve and the vital need for connection. “Dissonance is a word that was really important to this work. Basically, the work is using music as a metaphor. It travels through dissonance, through harmony, through polyphony, through cacophony.”

Archibald Prize-winning artist Yvette Coppersmith’s principal subject is herself, in works created with little concession to how they might be perceived by others. “To make a work without an awareness of an audience is virtually impossible, even though I began doing portraits or drawings of faces to hang in my childhood room, and that’s probably what I still want to do. It’s a very private process. It’s really private, actually. It’s only the fact that you’re an artist and part of your role is to share your work.”

A conversation about movement and personal history, with dancer Diane Busuttil.

After a decade of critical acclaim as Pikelet, musician Evelyn Ida Morris is releasing the first music under their own name – a grand suite of piano songs, both sung and speechless, about the experience of being non-binary. “Non-binary is very strange, because it’s about preserving that internal space, and feeling proud of it, and finding ways to communicate it.”

Inside the studio with conceptual artist Stuart Ringholt.

Yorgos Lanthimos teams mundane musings and deadpan delivery to create humour and horror. The Greek filmmaker talks about what inspires his twisted metaphors, and who they are for. “We would never make a film to give a solution or preach something or teach something. It’s just human beings, you know, being in this world and trying to make sense of it and exploring various sides of it and going, ‘Huh, what do you think about that?’ ”

As a pioneer of conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth’s reflections on the world’s great thinkers glow with deeper meaning. “It’s not about how, it’s about why,” he says. “So I think – not to be vainglorious about it – I instituted, for very selfish reasons, a view of art as something quite different from the inherited tradition.”

A chat with urban planner, author and artistic director of the theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex Darren O’Donnell.

Daycare operator Eliza and her life committed to children.

The Book of Exodus director Adena Jacobs on the ethereal connection between the stage and the audience.

A pioneering Melbourne designer discovers a family link to the birth of the Indian film industry.

Philippine pole-dancer performance artist Eisa Jocson.

In the workroom with punk veteran and abstract artist John Nixon.

Back to Back Theatre disorients and mesmerises audiences with large themes developed from very personal workshopping.

John Neumeier rehearses Nijinsky with the Australian Ballet.

Studio Voltaire director Joe Scotland on how art can help us think about and understand the world.

Father John Misty delivers bruising piss-taking, knowing manipulation of celebrity, and surprisingly sincere love songs.

A seat side stage with theatre production pair Carolyn Burns and Simon Phillips.

A chat in the back shed with futurist and artist Daniel Crooks.

Mary Coustas on comedy, her quest for motherhood, and not losing her ‘floral bits’.

Richard Mosse turns the war-torn landscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo shockingly pink.

Acclaimed NYC-based multimedia artist TV Moore brings his immersive work home to Australia.

Chapel Street's Benevolent ALIen.

Glyn Johns knows what it's like to be in a dark room with Keith Richards.

All the world’s a stage for Melbourne Symphony Orchestra maestro Andrew Davis.

“Few have noticed the highwire upon which Turnbull has been perched ever more precariously since the election. Only now is the wobble beginning to show. ”

The Victorian Labor leader stands taller ahead of the election.

In the world of Australian film and television, few people have spent more time on our screens than Angus Sampson.

How a Footscray fitter and turner became the king of Crown Casino's male burlesque hit, Princes of the Night.

For two albums, singer-songwriter Dan Sultan was ‘a collaborator’. Now he is himself.

Quiet please, there's a lady on stage. Lights go up on renowned artistic director Robyn Archer.

Dealing with tragedy, raw grief, blood and gore is just part of the job for a paramedic. Thank God they can do what they do every day.

“"I didn’t want to be the boy who cried sober."”