Short+Sweet: The Biggest Little Play Festival In The World

If you have the attention span of a kitten in a room full of cardboard boxes and laser pointers, then Short+Sweet is the festival for you.

Operating from the hypothesis that less is more, Short+Sweet delivers a rapid fire cavalcade of comedy, theatre, dance and cabaret. Performers are given precisely ten-minutes to charm, thrill, baffle or amaze you with a prerequisite for exciting and contemporary works that challenge and entertain. With all that talent concentrated into just ten-minutes and change as the only constant, even the most focally-challenged will be enthralled.

But it’s not just those with the attention span of a dying fruit-fly who’ll appreciate Short+Sweet. Festival director, Nathan Sibthorpe explains: “the Festival has so much to offer audiences in fantastic short, sharp bursts. At just ten-minutes a pop, Short+Sweet is perfect entertainment. Each night offers a real mixed bag of shows, and it’s very much a lucky dip. There’s really nothing else like it.”

In each show, you’ll see five to ten different performances and will be joined by a panel of expert judges. While entertaining you is their primary goal, each artist has their eyes on the Festival awards which include Best Overall Production, Best Actor, Best Cabaret Artist and Audience Choice.

Here’s a sneaky glimpse at what’s coming up this year:

Comedy Cabaret

If you heard someone talking about ‘Orgasma And The Intergalactic Sky Cock’ you might imagine an obscure German porno or perhaps a David Bowie album you somehow missed. But you’d be wrong (about Bowie anyway, rule 34 of the internet tells us the porno probably exists). This ‘Sky Cock’ business is actually a comically-camp, sci-fi cabaret, created by Regan Lynch which developed quite the cult following and came close to taking out the top prize at last year’s event. This year, Regan returns – with co-stars James Halloran and Reuben Witsenhuysenin – in ‘The Retrofuturists’, a cabaret about futuristic time travellers with a lust for '80s pop music.



Last year’s overall winners, ‘Dirty Sexy Politics’ – who are about to have their premier season in the Queensland Cabaret Festival – have this year separated into their composite parts to create individual pieces for Short+Sweet. One half of the duo, Thomas Albert, will be featuring in ‘Dancing With Dinosaurs': a comedy cabaret show that is quite literal with its title. There will be dinosaurs and they will be dancing. The show, which claims to be a bigger, sexier, scalier version of ‘Dancing With The Stars’ has already had a smashing season at La Mama in Melbourne with its unique take on life, death and extinction.

'Dancing With Dinosaurs'

Solo Shows and Online Woes

The other half of ‘Dirty Sexy Politics’, Samuel Valentine, will be exploring the underbelly of the internet with his solo piece about online trolls. Matthew Filkins will also be presenting a one-man show with ‘Indefatigable’, a gritty and physically demanding expedition into violence and masculinity.

Continuing the exploration of the seedy side of the web, Lewis Treston and Danielle Carney will be teaming up to present ‘Fat/Snob’, a play that cuts through the facade of Tinder (which oddly claims to be “like real life but better”) and the culture it has created.

Clever Students

‘Rumination’ is the first devised work to be performed publically by the new and growing Audax Industria Ensemble. Formed by a crew of QUT students with a diverse range of talents, the ensemble’s mission is to fight stagnation in the performing arts by supporting emerging talent and cultivating fresh, exciting ideas.

Meanwhile, UQ theatre company, Underground Productions, have created four separate projects for Short+Sweet, all co-ordinated by Siobhan Batt. These include a mix of plays and cabaret acts, each with a separate team of artists.

The Gold Coast Steps Back In Time

The '80s and '90s have a lot to answer for. Stonewash jeans, boy bands, the infectious spread of the word ‘like’ lettering people’s sentences. Thankfully these things died along with the decades that spawned them. But with them, they took some of the brilliant things too, like choose-your-own-adventure books. Gold Coast audiences will get to dive back into these childhood classics with ‘The Customer Is Always Right’, an interactive play which relies on the attending crowd to make decisions for the characters.

Short+Sweet is not just about laughs and thrills. There are a number of performances in the Gold Coast line-up that explore darker material, adding to the depth and variety on offer. Based on a true story, Jay Bloodsworth’s ‘The Sunflower Puzzle’ blends magic and realism with all original musical to explore the rolling and shadowy yet fascinating depths of depression.

Short+Sweet Festival

Mon 6 - Sun 19 July – Brisbane
Tues 28 July - Sun 9 Aug – Gold Coast
Mon 3 Aug - Sat 15 Aug – Canberra