La Mama’s HOPE PUNK Climate Festival is charging into its second week with another dense mix of theatre, music, playreadings, performance and climate-focused work across Carlton.
Running from 1 to 20 September, the festival is built around staggered performance times so audiences can move between multiple events in a single day or evening, with tickets ranging from $5 to $35 alongside a number of free events.
It is an unusually broad program, but the through-line is clear: climate anxiety, environmental collapse, resilience and hope are being tackled with humour, absurdity, music and live performance rather than another lecture about the end of the world.
PULSE – a love song to a bleeding ocean
Running 8–12 September at 6pm, PULSE brings together vocalist, percussionist, playable costume and sound art in a work inspired by love for — and concern about — the sea.
Created by Susan Bamford Caleo and Elissa Goodrich, the performance sits somewhere between concert, installation and environmental meditation.
Tickets are $15–35, with performances already selling fast.
How to Eat Rabbit
If the title sounds ominous, the premise is even better.
Temperatures, sea levels, and fascists are rising. Retreat to a burrow to train for survival.
Written by Jamila Main and produced by Pillow Fight Theatre, How to Eat Rabbit takes aim at the myth of individualism while imagining survival in a world where everything appears to be getting worse at once.
The production features a majority-disabled creative team and includes accessibility across the season, with an Auslan-interpreted performance on 10 September, audio description on 11 September, and captions at every show.
Abject Rodeo
Playreading Abject Rodeo lands on 12 September at 2pm, written and performed by Ellen Marning.
La Mama’s description manages to tell you almost everything and absolutely nothing:
Power. Fiskensuppe. A coffin. Canapes. Babies. Sex. The horror of the future. The absurdity of now.
Tickets are $10.
Build a synthesiser out of a cardboard box
In perhaps the most gloriously La Mama item of the week, Cris Edwards presents Make a Cardboard Box Synthsiser on 12 September at 3.30pm.
Participants turn cardboard, foil and pipe cleaners into a customisable synthesiser.
The workshop itself is booked out, but people can still come along and watch the process.
For the Love of Long Grass
Running 12–13 September at 4pm, For the Love of Long Grass offers “love songs to the natural world from a nylon guitar-centred perspective”.
The work combines the compositions and sound design of Meredith Connie, vocals from Christelise de Graaf, and performances by the Melbourne Suzuki Guitar Ensemble.
Who decides when the apocalypse has happened?
That is the central question behind The Village, a playreading by writer Sam Pringle.
It takes place at 11am on 13 September, with tickets priced at $10.
Cobble Creek Rangers
Nick and Jesi will teach you how to save the planet. Sort of.
That is the pitch behind Cobble Creek Rangers, written by Kyle McCallion and Ann Maree and running on 13 and 19 September at 2pm and 6pm.
The show promises environmental instruction filtered through performance, humour and the sort of theatrical chaos La Mama has made its own.
Hopetica Garden Party
On 14 September at 5.30pm, La Mama Poetica and Cabaretica head outdoors for the Hopetica Garden Party at the University of Melbourne’s System Garden.
The event is free, although bookings are required, with audiences meeting first at La Mama before heading to the garden.
See the full HOPE PUNK program
And then the puppets arrive
Once HOPE PUNK winds down, La Mama barely has time to catch its breath.
The Melbourne Festival of Puppetry runs from Tuesday 22 to Sunday 27 September, timed for the school holidays and featuring separate programs for children, families and adult audiences.
Family performances at La Mama HQ, 205 Faraday Street, Carlton include The Wobbly Wallaby Show, an adventure celebrating friendship, empathy and kindness for children aged three to eight; Snow on a Summer’s Day; and The Boy Who Lost His Light, described as an enchanting puppetry journey into a magical illuminated world.
The adult program moves to The Motley Wherehaus at 430 Queen Street, Melbourne, and includes Please Remain, Those Who Pass the Gateway and the wonderfully titled The Very, Very, Very Late Puppet Show.
Melbourne Fringe follows close behind
La Mama is also preparing for Melbourne Fringe, with Trash Wizard running 29 September to 4 October.
It is described as a “camp, absurdist, post-humanist dark comedy” that gradually turns into tragedy — with puppets thrown in for good measure.
Meanwhile Exhibit, running 30 September to 4 October, is billed as a shape-shifting theatre event involving humans on display, absurdity and plenty of strangeness.
La Mama continues doing what La Mama does
There is an appealing refusal to separate the serious from the ridiculous in this program.
The climate crisis can sit alongside cardboard synthesisers. Apocalypse beside guitar ensembles. Environmental politics beside cabaret, disabled-led theatre, puppetry and a couple of comedy rangers who may — or may not — know how to save the planet.
That has always been part of La Mama’s particular place in Melbourne theatre: give artists a room, give them permission to experiment, and see what emerges.
Venues
La Mama HQ
205 Faraday Street
Carlton VIC
La Mama Courthouse
349 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC
Images supplied by La Mama. HOPE PUNK festival images are by Darren Gill except where otherwise indicated.
