The practice of creatingI and professionally presenting performance works for and with very young children, and their adults, is known as Theatre for Early Years (TEY). Noting that TEY is still considered emergent in Australia because of the extremely small field of Australia-based practitioners, this article builds out of two recent Australian works devised by artist-scholars Sarah Austin and Sally Chance, linking their scholarship and practice in an exploration of what might constitute risk and ambition in TEY, with artistic implications for the dramaturgical frameworks of the works.
Keywords
Theatre for Early Years, young children, participatory theatre, co-creation, participatory dramaturgy
The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) explicitly aimed to improve the lives of African Americans, both culturally and materially, by producing work about Black experiences, for Black audiences, and by Black theatre practitioners. However, in apparent contradiction to these aims, the NEC’s co-founder and Artistic Director, Douglas Turner Ward, programmed Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in its inaugural season in 1968. In a move that would surprise Australian readers, Ward relocated the play from Melbourne to New Orleans and cast it entirely with Black actors. What had been seen as a quintessentially (white) Australian play now spoke about Black lives and Black experiences. It was a politically contentious choice, and Ward and the NEC faced criticism over the lack of African American playwrights in their first season.
Keywords
Seventeenth Doll, Negro Ensemble Company
Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie has arguably been the most successful contemporary Australian play of the last decade. Its trajectory since its inaugural 2019 Griffin Theatre Company production in Sydney has been unprecedented: performed in at least fifteen countries, adapted into a novel, and a feature length film underway. Framed through Sara Ahmed’s cultural feminist theory on affective modes of feeling, Prima Facie acts as a powerful impetus for politicising sexual violence on stage. The play’s success hinges on its ability to tap into the power of affective feelings, like anger, pain and hope, intertwined with the embodied experience of sexual violence, as a potential method for politicising the contemporary subject into collectivised action. Consequently, Prima Facie enacts a seemingly impossible twofold task: positioning the complex emotions of sexual violence to political and social efficacy, and, in turn, potentially mobilising audiences to collectively be at the helm of demanding this change.
Keywords
Rape, emotion, affect, embodiment, feminism
While the work of Ranters has undergone a clear evolution since our inception as a company in 1994, our practice and methodology have always been grounded in a consistent exploration of liveness in terms of theory, and its practical application. The work of Ranters is designed to highlight what is essential and unrepeatable, a manifesting of the real, in the live exchange between audience and performers. For Ranters, the audient and the performer have always been considered active constituents, inseparable from what is defined as theatre. Over time there has been an increased focus
on the everyday and a theoretical exploration of everydayness to make visible the minutiae of actions within the live physical encounter. There has been a progressive shift in the emphasis to greater liveness, more immediacy and unpredictability.
Keywords
Liveness, everyday, postdramatic, dramaturgy, Ranters
This article interrogates the ways in which we understand performance – as a process, as an outcome, and as a philosophical approach. Drawing on the innovative audiovisual exhibition Near Sighted (2023) as a case study, the article examines the ways in which notions of performance can be disrupted and reimagined. The authors employ three primary channels of analysis, drawing on relevant scholarship for each: critical reflection on the creation of work that employs expanded scenography and sonic dramaturgy; analysis of audience role in performance works; and critical engagement with how posthumanism informs performance-making. The article proposes that small shifts in artistic practice can have profound implications for an individual artist and also for the field of performance-making as artists contend with a swiftly changing and unsettled world.
Keywords
Expanded scenography, sonic dramaturgy, posthuman performance-making, participatory performance
This article suggests that city space and the Anthropocene can collide innovatively and productively on stage (as they collide outside it) in contemporary theatre. It proposes that writing for performance that embraces the absurdity of the Anthropocene – and that seeks to uncover and interrupt current dominant processes in city space which are driven by late capitalism – is found in Pomona (2014) by Alistair McDowall and The Turquoise Elephant (2016) by Stephen Carleton. These strange and disquieting works satirise late capitalism through heightened form, and use formal innovation to express the urban malaise/ climate anxiety bearing down on the content of the plays. The horror-adjacent, city-focused neoliberal critique of Pomona and the climate change satire of The Turquoise Elephant usefully offer formally connected but tonally disparate examples of this appropriately challenging turn in writing cities and the Anthropocene.
Keywords
Anthropocene, city space, ecological, playwriting
Hélène Cixous’ call for women to write themselves – ‘Woman must write woman’ – has been a guiding principle in my feminist adaptations of classical myths. Inspired by Cixous concept of écriture féminine, a fluid and poetic writing style rooted in the female body, the theatre performance Monstrous Woman (2022) was developed through a methodology grounded in corporeal writing, symbolic imagery, dreamlike fragmentation, emotional excess and polyvocality - embracing its open-ended nature as a feminist practice. This approach acknowledges and critiques traditional structures that have marginalised women in theatre. The labyrinth becomes both a metaphor and a method – an affective, non-linear path requiring emotional awareness, resilience and critical reflection. By rewriting myth, this work aimed to reveal the embedded inequities of the past and reimagine them for contemporary feminist theatre. This work contributes to a global feminist map, offering tools and waypoints for others navigating similar creative and political terrain.
Keywords
Feminist theatre, feminist theory, theatre directing and adaptation, devising, Cixous
This article investigates the relationships among yoga, playwriting and Romani culture in the creation of a dramatic work for theatre. The work’s development was grounded in the author’s experience as a playwright and yoga practitioner of Romani origin. Historically, yoga has adapted to changing societal circumstances and cultural traditions. However, the traditional eightfold path of yoga has not previously been implemented as a developmental structure for playwriting. This autoethnographic, practice-led research project investigates the relationship between yoga and the writing of a play exploring aspects of Romani culture derived from the author’s personal and anecdotal experiences. Yoga principles and practices from the eightfold path were applied to stimulate a state of flow, which fed directly into the playwriting process. Journal writing was concurrently undertaken as a means of reflecting on and guiding the playwriting process and the emerging content. The outcomes suggest the benefits of this approach to dramaturgical development.
Keywords
Yoga, playwriting, autoethnography, flow, Romani
At its 2010 season launch, marking long-time Artistic Director Neil Armfield’s final season, Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre invited the directors of the season’s productions to take to the stage. Only one woman was present in this group of ten. This moment became a lightning rod for examining women’s career paths to the Australian mainstage at this company and beyond. This article follows performance data to reveal
how Belvoir responded to this outcry. Using improved AusStage records and data visualisations, the authors map women’s representation in positions of creative leadership on the mainstage over time, following Belvoir’s history from 1984 to 2024 as a case study. The AusStage database’s rich holdings also allow us to further contextualise these contemporary trends in the representation of female-identifying and non-binary directors and playwrights on the mainstage within the wider sweep of modern Australian theatre history from the 1950s to the 2010s.
Keywords
Australian theatre, data, feminism, Belvoir, AusStage
This article examines a critical period of transformation in Australian industrial relations. Between 1983 and 1996, trade union membership declined from 60 per cent to 32 per cent, profoundly reshaping the Australian working class. Established in 1987, the Melbourne Workers Theatre produced plays that captured the lived experiences of workers during this transformative era. Close readings of five key plays situate these works within the broader context of neoliberal economic policy and industrial relations. Using an interdisciplinary framework combining theatre and labour history, the article argues that the company’s early plays offer a unique insight into the human impact of trade union decline. By centring the voices of workers, these plays provide a crucial cultural record of this era, challenging abstract economic narratives. This study highlights the value of integrating theatre and labour history to illuminate the lasting legacy of neoliberal policies on Australian working life and the cultural implications of trade union decline.
Keywords
Trade unions; community theatre; Melbourne Workers Theatre; neoliberalism; Art and Working Life
This article introduces the idea of Disaster Theatre as a form of applied theatre that engages directly with emergency readiness, and response. The production of Disaster at Vogelmorn: The Dress Rehearsal is a case study to draw attention to the generative tension between command-and-control and relational practices within and between emergencies. Enabling convivial commoning, knowledge sharing, and problem solving within a liminal space, may support communities to build capacity. However, there is still a call for a more intentional approach to readiness training and planning between disasters. Finding a balance between structure and improvisation, calmness and ‘intra-festum’ in training approaches could help to realise policy aspirations for emergency management agencies in Aotearoa New Zealand. It could support community-led responses and strengthen community resilience – goals sometimes put into the ‘too hard’ basket – and also offer a new seam of creative opportunity to applied theatre practitioners.
Keywords
Applied theatre, emergency planning, spatial commoning, intra-festum, Disaster Theatre
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This article is a short reflective piece which explores a personal approach to using a Māori ritual called karakia. This reflection explores the importance of karakia as a culturally responsive theatre praxis and an act of decolonising and embodied love within the context of the rehearsal process in Aotearoa New Zealand. Told using a personal story of grief and loss, this reflection introduces the reader to: the whakapapa of karakia, and how karakia is used in Marae Theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand. It also provides examples of karakia used in theatre praxis and concludes with a challenge to the reader to explore their own biases before including karakia authentically into their own theatre praxis.
Keywords
Decolonisation, karakia, Māori theatre, rehearsal, praxis
This article describes The Waka of Love, a Theatre Marae-informed stage production situated within a Kaupapa Māori research project examining impacts of racism on mokopuna Māori in Aotearoa. Underpinned by ethical co-designing – an approach aligned with Indigenous rights that emphasises power-sharing, accountability and positive transformation – and through wānanga-based creative participatory inquiry grounded in Te Ao Māori, mokopuna Māori collaborated to address racism and its impacts on hauora. The Waka of Love serves to illustrate decolonial anti-racist praxis that challenges colonial knowledge systems through empowerment of mātauranga Māori and whakamoemoeā for mokopuna Māori. Central to The Waka of Love is that of aro ki te hā – the sacred reverence for the breath – fostering deep interconnectedness, compassion, empathy, and respect for oneself, one another, Papatūānuku, and the universe. The Waka of Love underscores decolonial anti-racist
efforts toward liberation, enabling the flourishing of mātauranga and hauora for mokopuna Māori, their whānau and communities.
Keywords
Love, Indigenous, Māori, decolonial, racism
This article discusses the unintended harm that Applied Theatre practitioners can inflict on their participants due to their unconscious biases and assumptions. The author argues that this is the result of ‘fake love’, wherein practitioners only centre the vulnerabilities and experiences of their participants while neglecting how they participate in broader systemic issues. The article proposes a shift from ‘fake love’ to ‘Critical Love’, which requires practitioners to engage in a critical and deep self-reflection on their own biases, privileges, and the power dynamics they bring to the room. The author provides examples of her own critical self-reflection and how these may affect participants, and she encourages practitioners to do the same. Through Critical Love, the article argues, practitioners can foster more authentic and empowering relationships with participants, which has the potential to drive real social change and justice within Applied Theatre practice and beyond.
Keywords
Critical Love, Applied Theatre, facilitation
In 2023, eight learning disabled performers from Different Light Theatre collaborated with eighteen drama school students from NASDA (National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art) in Christchurch on a production of Faust.Us based on Marlowe’s
text. The framing principles of the process were intended to be whanaungatanga (kinship and belonging), kotahitanga (unity) and, particularly, manaakitanga (hospitality) in which the non-disabled staff and students would afford support for the learning disabled performers. However, the emotional and theatrical outcome of this process was a profound reversal of this ‘economy of affection’ in the collaboration and the performance. It was in fact the support of the learning disabled actors for their non-disabled colleagues that proved invaluable and unshakeable. While in inclusive theatre we might assume that the performance of compassion would be for the benefit of the learning disabled actors, this flipping of the script had real power to hit everyone in the guts.
Keywords
Learning disability, inclusion, radical compassion, manaakitanga
This talanoa (conversation) between final year PhD candidate Sepelini Mua’au (Levī-Saleīmoa & Matāutu Falelātai) and Nicola Hyland (Te Ati-Haunui-a-Pāpārangi/Ngāti Hauiti) explores the ‘why’ of Sepe’s project that centres around decolonising frameworks and Theatre in Aotearoa. Exploring the whakapapa of this research, Sepe speaks to his upbringing as a second-generation, New Zealand-born Samoan and delves into key moments in his creative journey as an actor, writer, director and theatre-maker. The talanoa questions historical institutions with colonial foundations to encourage conversations around decolonised ways of working as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour) creative in Aotearoa. What does approaching rehearsal spaces with alofa/aroha mean for BIPOC creatives? This talanoa acknowledges Sepe’s experiences within the Samoan concept of the vā, which centres around the formation and maintenance of meaningful relationships with people, and. in this instance, Sepe’s creative practice.
Keywords
Decolonial, BIPOC, actor training, Pasifika
The proliferation of the discourse of recognition in state politics is, as many anti-colonial scholars have argued, a form of governmentality in settler colonial nations. How does love among the colonised disrupt colonial recognition? What learnings do we gain when we theorise acts of decentering colonial recognition in terms of love? This article explores these questions through Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s performance Vigil, and Métis playwright Marie Clements’ play The Unnatural and Accidental Women from northern Turtle Island (Canada). The article theorises love as an insurgence against what Dylan Robinson calls ‘perceptual logics of settler colonialism’.
Keywords
Recognition, Canada, love, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), performance
The article explores how Aragalaya embodies Judith Butler’s concept of plural performativity as a call for justice and rejection of precarity. This unique Sri Lankan socio-political movement, often called ‘Adaraye Aragalaya’ (struggle for love), reflects its non-violent ethos and practice of inclusivity. In April 2022, groups of young people occupied the Galle Face promenade beside the Presidential Secretariat building in Colombo to demand that the Sri Lankan President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, resign. Butler suggests that when masses occupy public spaces to protest, exercising their ‘plural and performative right to appear’, the gatherings embody ‘plural performativity’, and the bodies enact ‘political meanings’. The article features an
analysis of three artists’ performances: a trans woman, a man who carried a large wooden cross, demanding justice for the victims of the 2019 Easter bombings, and a performer who painted his body red to commemorate the 1983 Black July massacre victims.
Keywords
Sri Lanka, Aragalaya, plural performativity, Judith Butler, non-violent protest
The Healthy Conservatoires (UK), covering drama, music and dance training institutions, has included the spiritual (defined as ‘exploring beliefs, values and ethics and creating a sense of purpose and meaning in life’) as one of eight key dimensions in its online wellbeing framework. Yet few drama schools have formally incorporated considerations of moral and spiritual development as part of their curriculum. In 2020, interviews with nine professional actors documented the impacts of playing a villain or other amorally inclined characters. The study found that three factors can impact actors’ personal and relational wellbeing in enacting such characters: 1. the requirements of empathy in the creation and performance of character; 2. the potentiality of moral distress and injury in the creation and performance of character; and 3. the shaping of intrinsic and extrinsic values during professional identity formation. Love and compassion for human woundedness needs to be honoured in drama schools.
Keywords
Actor training, moral injury, spirituality, intrinsic values, wellbeing
Hine’s Monologue is a poroporoaki to her late husband Talite, as she comes to terms with his passing after the unfortunate collapse of their marriage. Despite enduring love, the obstacles they faced together in the form of personal challenges exacerbated by societal inequities and mandates from church authorities undermined their ability to live in love. Hine’s monologue is a call to whānau and community to better support young, brown couples and their families, and a reminder that the kupu aroha is both tūingoa (noun) and tūmahi (verb); in equal parts a nameable thing, a destination, an action, state, and condition. Hine’s monologue, performed by Erina Daniels and Emma Katene, was one of six monologues woven together under the title ONO and presented at both Tahi Festival 2023, Wellington and Koanga Festival 2023, Auckland.
Keywords
Aroha, Māui, Whānau, Church, Poroporoaki
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