Melbourne Theatre Company

The Melbourne Theatre Company (popularly known as MTC) is a theatre company based in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1953 as the Union Theatre Repertory Company, it is the oldest professional theatre company in Australia, and has its own theatre, Southbank Theatre – which houses the 500-seat Sumner and the 150-seat Lawler – located in Melbourne's Arts Precinct in Southbank. Despite being recognised as Victoria's State theatre company, it comes under the auspices of the University of Melbourne. Currently, it offers a Mainstage Season of ten to twelve plays each year, a season of new and emerging works (Neon Festival of Independent Theatre), and an Education Season along with affiliate writers programs. It has a current subscriber base of 19,816 people and plays to a quarter of a million people annually.

History

The Melbourne Theatre Company was founded in 1953 by John Sumner as the Union Theatre Repertory Company, based at the Union Theatre of the University of Melbourne's Student Union building. Sumner's original idea was to present a season of plays over those months when the Union Theatre was not being used by student drama societies. It was Australia's first professional repertory theatre, presenting a new play every two weeks during the season. Later, that became three weekly repertory. The first play, Jean Anouilh's Colombe, opened on 31 August 1953, starring Zoe Caldwell (who was later to have considerable success on Broadway), George Fairfax and Alex Scott.

Theatre

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from ancient Greek drama, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing, and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts, literature, and the arts in general.

Melbourne

Melbourne (/ˈmɛlbərn/, AU ⁱ/ˈmɛlbən/) is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia and Oceania. The name "Melbourne" refers to the area of urban agglomeration (as well as a census statistical division) spanning 9,900 km² (3,800 sq mi) which comprises the broader metropolitan area, as well as being the common name for its city centre. The metropolis is located on the large natural bay of Port Phillip and expands into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon mountain ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley. Melbourne consists of 31 municipalities. It has a population of 4,347,955 as of 2013, and its inhabitants are called Melburnians.

Founded by free settlers from the British Crown colony of Van Diemen's Land on 30 August 1835, in what was then the colony of New South Wales, it was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837. It was named "Melbourne" by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, in honour of the British Prime Minister of the day, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. It was officially declared a city by Queen Victoria in 1847, after which it became the capital of the newly founded colony of Victoria in 1851. During the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, it was transformed into one of the world's largest and wealthiest cities. After the federation of Australia in 1901, it served as the nation's interim seat of government until 1927.

.au

.au is the internet country code for Australia.

History

The domain name was originally allocated by Jon Postel, operator of IANA to Kevin Robert Elz of Melbourne University in 1986. After an approximately five-year process in the 1990s, the Internet industry created a self-regulatory body called .au Domain Administration to operate the domain. It obtained assent from ICANN in 2001, and commenced operating a new competitive regime for domain registration on 1 July 2002. Since this new regime, any registration has to be ordered via a registrar.

Operation

Oversight of .au is by .au Domain Administration (auDA). It is a not-for-profit organisation whose membership is derived from Internet organisations, industry members and interested individuals. The organisation operates under the consent of the Australian government which has legislative power to decide the operators of electronic addressing in the country.

Policy for .au is devised by policy development panels. These panels are convened by auDA and combine public input with industry representation to derive policy.

Melbourne (album)

Melbourne is a compilation album by the Models, recorded in the early 1980s and released in 2001. The album was distributed by Shock Records.

The album was compiled by dedicated Models fan, Mark Burchett (a band booking agent for Premier Artists), who compiled sixteen cuts of the Models' material before they signed with Mushroom Records, consisting of demos, studio cuts and live tracks with the assistance of Melbourne public radio station 3RRRFM. The liner notes for the album are written by Australian Rock historian Ian McFarlane.

Track listing