Michael Shirrefs – home

Darwin Harbour Storm Wall for background

Recent

Front Foot | Back Beat

By Michael Shirrefs 20 Sep 2023

Front Foot | Back Beat is a public dance collaboration that brought together a diverse range of people to work together over some months, to create a new dance work. The project is the third in a trilogy of dance initiatives, under the guidance of dancer and community artist Samara…

Dance Hall

By Michael Shirrefs 26 Mar 2023

Dance Hall is a dance lab experiment, drawing together five professionally trained dancers from South Gippsland in Victoria, each with different backgrounds and histories, to create a new work—a dance sketch—all in the space of six weeks.

Action Station

By Michael Shirrefs 22 May 2022

Action Station is the second in a series of community dance projects, which matched a group of professional artists with a diverse range of community members, of all ages and skill levels, to collectively create an original and distinctive dance work.

History In The Making:
How Long-form Journalism Frames Contemporary Histories, Building Mosaics Out of Ruins, Fragments and Ephemera

By Michael Shirrefs 25 Oct 2021

This is a PhD reflecting on narrative theories influencing my long-form radio journalism on recent instabilities and disunity in Europe. It also examines how and why long-form journalism equates with the telling of contemporary history.

Fill The Void

By Michael Shirrefs 22 Aug 2021

On a cool August night 2021, in the midst of rolling COVID-19 lockdowns, a magical thing happened. A small group of performers managed to stage a performance in a small, rural hall. Against a backdrop of pandemic fear and isolation, this was a strange and wonderful thing to occur.

Walter Benjamin | proto-multimedia journo?

By Michael Shirrefs 17 Feb 2019

One of the most important intellectual figures of the last century, Benjamin’s writings have given us a critical window onto the psyche of Europe in the early 20th Century. But was he, in fact, our first multi-media journalist?

The fate of the Common Good

By Michael Shirrefs 06 May 2018

Do we still believe in the idea of the common good, a concept that seemed ubiquitous through the 20th Century? Renowned philosopher Prof. Hans Sluga, seeks to explain why respect for the role of the Common Good, within Europe and the European Union, is in decline.

Germany: Globally-minded from birth? The pianoforte example

By Michael Shirrefs 13 Jan 2018

Why is Berlin sometimes colloquially referred to as an outer suburb of Melbourne? And is there a link between Germany's amazing success selling of pianos at the Melbourne Exhibitions of 1880/1888, and the present-day openness of Germany to Australian musicians and cultural conversation?

An end to discord

By Michael Shirrefs 31 Oct 2017

Music is music, right? But through the middle of the 20th Century, our evolving appetite for innovation took us on some pretty weird detours, especially in the world of classical music. So, in the midst of all this, what happened to the familiar tradition of tonal composition?

Flying Small Planes

By Michael Shirrefs 20 Jun 2017

At some point in 2017, in a strange fit of madness, I was convinced of the need to learn to fly planes.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30