Musically intoxicating, visually compelling and powerfully fused performance piece.

The resolution of ideas bristling through Finsterer’s score and Wright’s libretto via Savanna Wegman’s suggestive set and costumes, Niklas Pajanti’s dramatic lighting and Aron Murray’s encompassing video designs – drawing on Cardano’s broad scientific studies including astrology and astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology – is faultless.

Ideas relating to an inextricable link between science and religion, the intellectual and visceral, working and personal life and strengths and weaknesses seemingly orbit through the stage rings as Cardano’s complexities are revealed. In doing so, the work effortlessly conveys the omnipresent contradictions rooted in self and the universe.

- Paul Selar, Australian Arts Review

The production cleverly uses light, projections and mirrors.

- Bridget Davies, The Age

Visually, Biographica is restrained but consistently interesting, as the designers draw on the art and science of Cardano’s world. Lit from the side with Caravaggio-esque chiaroscuro drama by Niklas Pajanti, Savanna Wegman’s set includes a table laden with objects, like a still-life painting. The stage area is dominated by three large, interlocking elliptical hoops that recall the old celestial spheres, as well as the gimbal, an ancient device Cardano described in detail. 

- Patricia Maunder, LIMELIGHT 
 

MUSIC by Mary Finsterer 
LIBRETTO by Tom Wright 

DIRECTOR: Heather Fairbairn 
CONDUCTOR: Patrick Burns 
SET AND COSTUME DESIGNER: Savanna Wegman
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Niklas Pajanti 
VIDEO DESIGNER: Aron Murray 
STAGE MANAGER: Brittany Coombs
ASSOCIATE DESIGNER: Maya Anderson 
ASSOCIATE ARTIST: Nathan Burmeister

with Dion Mills, Belinda Dalton, Rachael Joyce, Juel Riggall, Douglas Kelly, Bailey Montgomerie, Raphael Wong

Photos: Jodie Hutchinson