Arts Centre Melbourne's 2013 Winter Season Announced

Arts Centre Melbourne's new Winter season offers an electrifying range of experiences to charge the senses in the middle of the year. From 26 July to 18 August, art, science and technology are celebrated in a spectacular fashion with several Art Centre Melbourne Australian exclusives.

Inspired by the popularity of the Hamer Hall Opening Season in winter 2012, for three weeks this year the warming footlights of Arts Centre Melbourne will beckon, enticing audiences with everything from sublime opera and illuminating dance to unseen labyrinths and a battery of other stimulating things to see and do.

"Our new Winter season is a fully-curated event 100% presented by Arts Centre Melbourne," said Chief Executive Judith Isherwood. "Our 2013 Winter season, the first of a series of curated and thematically linked seasons, is Arts Centre Melbourne's contribution to what we hope will be an ongoing and reinvigorated relationship between the arts and sciences. It is a series of events that can each be taken at face value as first-class entertainment or, for the curiously-minded, a challenging exploration that will take you as far as you would like to go.

"Arts, science and technology was chosen as our 2013 theme because we live in a time when we look to science and technology to progress and improve our lives. We are confronted with and challenged by the effects of our discoveries on our environment and the impact of new technologies on our daily lives. Science is literally at our fingertips. So too are the arts woven into our lives - we have photos, music, pictures and videos, including performances from around the globe, also at our fingertips. Today's artists continue to cross boundaries as they re-present our world to us. Many are exploring scientific issues and using their creative minds to put both traditional and new technologies to work in new ways," said Ms Isherwood.

Featuring more than a dozen events in a three-week period, it is designed to light up winter with extraordinary entertainment from near and far, to add the performing arts to what is on offer alongside the exhibitions of the Melbourne Winter Masterpiece series, and to enable Victorians and visitors pull on their coats and light up their nights with some live performance experiences.

Winter's must-see is one of the masterpieces of the 20th century, a new production of the epic Einstein on the Beach, which will be staged at Arts Centre Melbourne for an exclusive Australian season in the State Theatre from Wednesday 31-Saturday 3 August. Melbourne joins a select group of cities around the world celebrating a work that was first created four decades ago and remains devastatingly contemporary. Rarely performed due to its epic scale, Einstein on the Beach launched its director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass to international success when it was first produced in Avignon in 1976 and then took on the world.

The hugely popular American contemporary dance company MOMIX returns to Melbourne for an exclusive Australian season of their stunningly beautiful Botanica in the State Theatre from Wednesday 7 August - Sunday 11 August. Following the rhythms of the four seasons, this gorgeously colourful spectacle conjures up a world of surrealistic floral images using props, light, shadow, humour and the human body unlike anything seen before.

Winter also features home-grown favourite Australian Dance Theatre, which returns to Melbourne after a 14-year absence. Australian Dance Theatre will bring their critically acclaimed Proximity, an experimental fusion of dance and live videography, to The Playhouse from Thursday 15-Saturday 18 August.

Another Arts Centre Melbourne exclusive, The Extraordinary Shapes of Geoffrey Rush reflects on the actor's many achievements to date and explores his ability to inhabit characters through a remarkable physical and verbal dexterity. Featuring costumes, photographs, moving image and personal items, the free exhibition in Gallery 1 from 6 July-29 September highlights roles created by Geoffrey Rush in plays including Exit the King, The Diary of a Madman and The Importance of Being Earnest, and in films such as Shine, Quills, Pirates of the Caribbean and The King's Speech.

Acclaimed puppeteer Ronnie Burkett returns to Arts Centre Melbourne from Thursday 8-Sunday 18 August with his new creation Penny Plain. Marking the 25th anniversary of Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, Penny Plain shows the horribly funny consequences of Mother Earth reclaiming her ground and follows the success of Tinka's New Dress, Provenance and Billy Twinkle which have previously delighted adult Melbourne audiences.

A fusion of social documentary, art, biological science and music, Dead Symphony by Melbourne award-winning artist Saskia Moore is a performance like no other, a sound world inspired by documented accounts of music heard during near-death experiences. Presented as 40-minute performance with live music and lighting installation, Dead Symphony highlights the startling and spooky similarities between the pitches and patterns of sounds heard by diverse individuals having near-death experiences.

Hidden Spaces, Ready Stages is a digital installation that combines performance, video, sound and light, by Melbourne-based artists and identical twins Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, which centres on the physical perception, functional dynamics and theatricality of Arts Centre Melbourne's unseen chambers.

Right Place Right Time is a series of site-specific installations and happenings which take place in surprising and usual spaces at Arts Centre Melbourne - in foyers, the car park, and outdoors from 31 July to 17 August. Featuring four individual projects, each created by artists leading their artform, the series features public artworks in the forms of interactive sculpture, poetry, live art, and sound installation.

Kids and their families will also experience a breadth of first-class entertainment in Winter, with a range of performances and accompanying workshops. This mini-season gets under way with the remarkable Dutch retelling of Hansel and Gretel, .h.g., in which its audience, armed with only a set of headphones and a torch, walks into the very heart of the story, guided through a series of rooms and passageways suspended between reality and dream from Friday 9 - Sunday 11 August.

From The Netherlands' youth and music theatre company, Het Filiaal, is Miss Ophelia, a lovely tale about a lost shadow based on the picture book Ophelia's Shadow Theatre by Michael Ende on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 August, and in a highly imaginative fusion of animation, mime, puppetry, projections and music, master storyteller Tim Watts tells The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer in an immersive production by Perth Theatre Company and Weeping Spoon Productions on Saturday 17 August.

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