So you think you can be the biggest reviewer who wants a wife with an x-factor from just around the block?

In Australia’s latest reality show, we pit reviewers against each other in many different rounds where they have to rap reviews, recite them in pig-latin or only write reviews in palindromes. Your judges are… Mark Fennel, Margaret Pomeranz and Dicko!

What? Wrong post? Oh sorry.

Comrades, hecklers and brother/sisters-in-arms, heckler is growing. We have a larger team than ever and are covering more festivals than some of our ‘rival’ outlets. But we need more reviewers, specifically in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin. So if you’re interested, please read the information below and get in touch with us.

• First things first, we don’t publish any author names with reviews, articles, interviews, etc. All work is published under the nom de plume of ‘heckler’.
  Why? We can go on about this particular decision for hours, but the simplest and most important reason is that we want people to read the website based on its content rather than who wrote it. In a small industry like the arts, people quite often form prejudices and biases with certain writers. It’s one of the biggest problems we’ve identified on similar websites and we’d rather that doesn’t happen on heckler.

• Can I re-publish the reviews on my website?
  Yes! It is your work and you can publish your own version on your website. On heckler, we’ll be editing the work before it goes up, but on your own website/Facebook/etc, you can publish it how you like. We request that you perhaps mention a link to heckler at the end of your article, but we won’t hold any grudges if you don’t.

• What about my portfolio?
  Every page on the website has meta-data (only accessible from the back-end) that identifies the author. If you ever want to show your work to a potential employer (or impress a special someone),  just let us know and we will compile a list of ALL your work and attest that it was indeed penned (or keyed) by you.

• What’s in it for me?
  Since there is no monetary compensation (at this stage, but you know, we can dream), you should only join us as a reviewer/writer if you’re madly in love with the arts. In which case, we’ll try to get you to as many shows as we can and you’ll get to write about them for us. Win-win. Heckler is currently pretty much non-for-profit (in fact, we run a loss on it).  But “it’s not about the money, it’s (literally) about the art”.

• Do you have a style guide?
  We’re glad you asked, because no, we don’t have a ‘style guide’ per se. But we do encourage you to write in a certain manner, which you can peruse below.

“Style Guide”:

Our style guide requires you to heavily rely on common sense. But here’s a few dot points none the less:

• Reviews must be 200-300 words. If you want to write longer review (highly discouraged) then you must be able to justify why it must be a long review.
• Write about how the show made you feel. Did you feel like it was fun? Was it boring? Was it coma-inducing?
• Don’t get technical, unless it’s something the audience really wants to know. There are many review websites that make this mistake. Audiences don’t generally care about the ins and outs of theatre, we do. But we’re not writing for us, we’re writing for Joe, who goes to watch theatre for entertainment. (No, that doesn’t just mean comedies, entertainment comes in all forms, even in tragedies).
• If you hated the show, tell us why, but also tells something that might have been good in the show.
• Be funny. We may not always be funny, but we hope that you can be.
• Try and make your review as grammatically correct as you can. And please, for Kim Kardashian’s sake, use a spell checker.

That’s it really. Like we said, we’re not very strict. We love individuality.

Last but not the least, please only put your name down for shows if you can definitely make it. Cancelling on a show with short notice is a no-no. Artists miss out on selling their tickets and publicists have a very long-term memory. So please don’t cancel on shows at the last-minute. We ask for a minimum notice of 48 hours.

And if you’re interested, we’d love to see a sample of your work. It can come in the form of a review/opinion piece/photo essay. So please email us at whatever -[at]- heckler.com.au and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.