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Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 80 | April 2022

 

Table of Contents

1. Issue 080 (Full Issue PDF)

2. Contents

3. Editorial Yoni Prior

4. Looking Forwards to the 1950s: Utilising the Concept of Hauntology to Investigate Australian Theatre History Julian Meyrick 

Invariably (and naturally) the 1950s are a decade we look back on. This article treats them as years that have yet to happen, returning to the 1930s and 1940s to look forward to an as-yet undisclosed future in Australian theatre. The means proposed to explore the historical record in this way utilize the concept of “hauntology”, in both Jacques Derrida’s original definition as “the spectral traces of the past found in the present”, and of Mark Fisher’s notion of “lost futures”, where longing is felt for possibility states that remain unrealised, “a relation to what is no longer or not yet”. The second half of the article demonstrates a number of practical, hauntologically-inflected methods for examining Australian theatre, asking what impact the activities of the 1930s and 1940s might have had on those in the 1950s as we receive this framing today. Hauntologically-inflected methods not only provide fresh insight into the contingency of Australian theatre’s development, they also de-reify the present moment.

5.Before Neo-Burlesque, There Was Queer Cabaret: Revisiting Queer Performances from Melbourne in the 1990s Maude Davey

In Melbourne in the 1990s, a burgeoning ‘queer cabaret’ scene and Dockland parties produced by the ALSO Foundation provided regular performances for LGBTQI+ audiences. Queer club nights incorporated performances including dance, spoken word, music and drag performance. These performances articulated developing ideas about lesbian and queer identities, feminist and female subjectivities, and the ‘body’ – the status and state of corporeality in the increasingly mediated and corporatized environment. This article takes an autoethnographic approach, drawing upon primary sources including performance texts, journal entries (autoethnographic record) and interviews with performers and event producers. In examining specific performances, their context and reception, I tease out the ways in which queer women in Melbourne were reworking lesbian and feminist identity positions as ‘desiring subjects’, specifically enabled through the development of a sophisticated queer audience with an appetite for performance which did more than trot out unifying slogans for them to applaud. This queer audience released the performers from the heteronormative gaze, and thereby from the transformation of female subjects to fetishized objects

KEY WORDS: Queer, Cabaret, Melbourne, Feminism

6.Shadows of the Australian Performing Arts Ecology Görkem Acaroğlu

This article provides a perspective from the margins of the Australian performing arts, investigating intersecting power relations, as Patricia Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) define intersectionality. Extending on that work, Museum UNDONE, a 2021 production by Metanoia Theatre’s Artistic Director Görkem Acaroğlu, is put forward as an example offering possibilities to audiences and artists with experiences and perspectives diverse from the mainstream. Museum UNDONE is an immersive, site-specific work, that playfully interrogates the region’s colonial history and its gaps by engaging with the museum’s collection, which focuses on colonial life in regional Victoria in the 1800s. Museum UNDONE focuses on de-centring and decolonising narratives of Australian identity, undertaking research through practice, critiquing normative conceptions of Anglo-Australian identity by facilitating the voices of non-Anglo artists from various creative disciplines. The article then moves to draw on Acaroğlu’s experience working as a diversity mentor and trainer with multiple arts organisations, to explore racism in the Australian Theatre sector broadly.

7.‘Time’s Up, Motherf*%ker’: Emasculation and Restaging Justice for Women in Aotearoa New Zealand Nicola Hyland

Responding to the call for unity amongst female-identifying theatre-makers by the global ‘Time’s Up’ movement, the counter-discursive theatre production Te Puna Hipi (2019) confronted stories of sexual violence from Aotearoa New Zealand. Working with student collaborators from Victoria University of Wellington, Te Puna Hipi retold Lope De Vega’s Fuenteovejuna as a Feminist “Pacific Western”, altering the original play’s narrative to play on, and speak to, the misogyny of so many canonical texts. This discussion explores the representation of literal emasculation in this production as a specific and localised form of justice, utu, as a means to restore balance. The project sought not only to liberate women’s characters in the play, but to empower the actors tasked with reimagining them for an emancipatory, #timesup, world.

8.The Use of Irony in Pākehā Performance Adriann Smith

Ironical performance can be a powerful expression of cultural identity. Using performance analysis, this article considers how the everyday irony of Andrew London’s songs, Gary Henderson’s play Home Land, and the dramatic irony of Stuart Hoar and Chris Blake’s opera Bitter Calm represents Pākehā cultural identity on the stage. Considering its Greek origins of ‘simulated ignorance’, the discussion of irony draws on the work of Joana Garmendia (2019), and Deirdre Wilson (2013). The discussion of irony in Pākehā performance, draws on the premise that their short history and residual sense of ‘belonging’ somewhere else, means Pākehā have to devise cultural strategies to deal with a sense of strangeness in Aotearoa. An ironic approach provides for an examination of personal and cultural identity, and enables an audience to consider how Pakeha are navigating their relationship with Aotearoa.

9.Director/Mother/Outlaw Katy Maudlin

Director/Mother/Outlaw extends on mothering scholarship and the term “mother outlaw”, which was first coined by Adrienne Rich in 1976. Through interviews with two contemporary Australian directors, Kate Davis and Sarah Giles, this paper highlights how acts of empowered mothering — acts that push against the ideological institution of motherhood — are disrupting predominantly male-centric and neoliberal theatre environments. By analysing mothering counter-narratives and how they intersect with the participants’ professional trajectories and craft, this paper examines how the directors have facilitated change in their industries, including creating environments of “maternal allyship”: a concept developed in this research. This field is uncharted, making the research distinct in both its contribution to motherhood studies and directing. The women in this study are mother outlaws. They have done this by pursuing careers in creative leadership roles while concurrently living embodied experiences of childbearing and rearing. By investigating how pregnancy and mothering interact with the theatre artist’s creativity and leadership through qualitative data, these findings can be utilised by policymakers and arts organisations.

10.Traversing the Proscenium: Audience Enworlding in Musical Theatre Stuart Grant, Narelle Yeo and Melissa Fenton

Everyday musical theatre cultures consist in conversation, singing, dance, acting, revoicing and re-narrating beyond the proscenium, eclipsing other forms in reach and impact. This regeneration of performative materials through various platforms, leads to emergent communities, identities, worlds, and belongings, pouring out from the theatre onto the street, and onto social media. In this article we illuminate the workings of this phenomenon through Victor Turner's concepts of communitas, the liminal and the liminoid, and the phenomenological concept of enworlding. We use these terms to examine the intensifying feedback loops between musical theatre productions and their fans, and the worlds they create in spaces beyond the theatre. Through three case studies, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen and Love Never Dies, we demonstrate how unique fan cultures enworld in particular ways to re-engage and re-voice the shows from which they originate. The study specifically analyses the role of changing social media platforms in the unique import of fan culture back into the productions themselves.

11.‘What Do You Mean We Aren’t Performing Shakespeare?’: A Contemporary, Devised Performance Curriculum at a Regional Australian University Gillian Arrighi, Clare Irvine, Brian Joyce and Carine

Challandes Written by four teaching academics at the University of Newcastle, this article critically appraises both the pedagogy and creative outcomes of four undergraduate courses focussed on making performance from the vectors of site, place, and historical research. In each course it was research concerning the history/ies, social uses, and architecture of one chosen building in Newcastle City that anchored the site-specific projects of first-year students (in 2011 and in 2012) and third year students (in 2019 and in 2020). The teaching practice and practical outcomes examined in this article span ten years and illustrate a contemporary devised performance curriculum that has been the focus of the Creative and Performing Arts Major at the University of Newcastle for over a decade. This longitudinal study of teaching strategies for making performance events that respond to place and site in the city underpins the authors’ assessment of the potential value of this pedagogy for students in the contemporary HE environment.

12.Between Freedom and Control: A Chorus-Centred Bakkhai for Community Ensemble Vahri McKenzie

In addition to capturing the heart of the mythological story, the tension between freedom and control explored so vividly in Euripides’ ‘Bakkhai’ can resonate in the creative process. This article focuses on the creative development of Bakkhai (2018) to illustrate the value of employing a process that fosters collaboration and improvisational freedom in a community theatre context. Without eliminating the text of Euripides’ play, as director I employed a creative methodology in which an original translation was deliberately introduced late in the creative development process. Rather, the work sought to communicate the power and experience of ancient tragedy through extensive use of choral song and dance. Building on the work of Dunbar and Harrop (2018), I argue that reducing the influence of the text in creative development restrains individualist and psychologising approaches to Greek tragedy, and that such restraint creates the opportunity for greater embodied and affective performer engagement.

KEY WORDS: Euripides’ Bakkhai; choral strategies; community ensemble; Greek theatre in Australian context

13.Driving “Transformational change”: using ecodramaturgy to develop a more sustainable theatre ecosystem Dr Saffron Benner

Ecodramaturgy expands dramaturgical practice to include all aspects of ecology – biological and ideological. Ecodramaturgy believes that theatre has the unique capacity to rethink and reframe our understanding of and approaches to climate change and climate action. However, ecodramaturgy has been largely applied to issues of performance practice and theory and is underutilised in examining the theatre as a production ecosystem. Conversely, theatre companies have been slow to adopt comprehensive policies, strategies and actions to address climate change, despite having been directly impacted. This essay uses ecodramaturgy as a critical lens to investigate how theatre can become a more sustainable ecosystem, using examples from Queensland theatre, as well as wider Australian, contexts.

KEY WORDS: Ecodramaturgy, sustainability, ecosystems, Queensland theatre

14.Oppression and allyship in Australia’s Deaf Arts. Racheal Missingham and Bree Hadley

In this article, we investigate the history of Deaf theatre in Australia, through the lens of oppression and allyship. Through a review of the to date limited academic, industry, and media literature, in conjunction with survey and interview research with Deaf theatre practitioners, this research sheds light on Deaf theatre makers’ perceptions of the ways in which ally support can operate to create both social benefits and barriers, and how this has impacted on the non-linear development and recent decline in Deaf theatre companies in Australia. It finds that, in developing a framework to scaffold stronger allyship relationships with d/Deaf and hard of hearing artists, it is critical to consider the accessibility and cultural requirements not just in relation to theatre methodologies, but in relation to arts management practices, which support continuing company production, too. Challenges in creating strong, successful, respectful, and sustainable relationships between Deaf and non-Deaf artists are arising, this research finds, from lack of understanding of the dynamics of audism in play in theatre training, theatre making, theatre management, and the industry at large for d/Deaf artists.

KEY WORDS: D/deaf arts, d/Deaf theatre, d/Deaf theatre in Australia, oppression, allyship, audism

15.Reviews

16. Contributors
 

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 79 | December 2021

 

Table of Contents

1. Issue 079 (Full Issue PDF)

2. Contents

3. Editorial Pia Johnson and Miles O’Neil



4. A Conversation Between Performance Photographers Brett Boardman and Jeff Busby, with Notes by Heidrun Lohr Pia Johnson

Photography and theatre have strong connections. The two artforms speak to authenticity, fiction, and craft, and in coming together create an engaging dialogue of visual references. The premise of this conversation was to question and explore the dynamic role performance photography has within the world of theatre and live performance. This conversation between professional practitioners aims to open further inquiry into the field and speak to the intersection of performance photography and theatre within Australia’s contemporary performance landscape from the photographers’ point of view.

5. The Intimate and the Epic in Plunge: A Writer-Director’s Approach to Heterarchical Composition Kate Shearer

The recent rise in sonic-led dramaturgical analysis has contested previously perceived hierarchies of sound and vision in the theatre. This paper seeks to move away from a binary approach and offers a heterarchical approach to directing the relationship between sound and vision. Carole Crumley defines heterarchy as “the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked,” so that the power is “counterpoised” (1995, p.3), and this paper applies this concept to the process of creating a multi-sensory, site-specific interdisciplinary work, Plunge (2017). 

Drawing on the spectacle of elite sport, Plungeexperimented modes of viewing: up close, through glass, up a 10m dive-tower, through illuminated water and at vast distances from an open-air stadium, as audiences promenaded across the aquatic centre viewing small and large-scale videos projected onto the body, buildings and pools. heterarchical approach to composition facilitated the ambiguity of ownership between verbatim techniques and fiction to deliberately blur the ‘truth’ claims of the form and broaden public perceptions of elite athletes. Through a de-hierarchical approach to artforms and interplay between sound and vision, Plungesought to create a highly sensate, large-scale spectacle that still felt deeply intimate, personal and political.

6. A Performative Investigation of the Agency of Sound: Mapping the Sound/ Soundscape Portrait Angela Viora

 In this article, I discuss Mapping the Sound/Soundscape Portrait (206, 2018), an audience-participatory, synaesthetic sound/drawing live performance. I perform my synaesthesia: sitting on a large piece of paper, I draw the sounds that I hear as I “see” them with the eyes of my mind, and I move accordingly— if sound is a place (soundscape), what does it look like? Conceiving sound as a performative element with agency, Mapping invites those involved to pay attention to the liveness of the soundscape in which they are immersed and their relationship with it. This work questions the sight-hegemonic and purpose-oriented human experience of place by centralising the presence and presentness of sound as the key-element of narrative-making and knowledge production. The agency of the audience and of sound in the performance de-centralises the artist, who ceases to be the protagonist of the work and becomes a vehicle for its process to unfold. The performance offers a new sensorial perspective on the surrounding environment to those involved, contributing to the scholarship studying the role of live art and embodied practices as tools in investigating the world.

7. ‘Where’s the AV Guy?’: A Conversation with Rhian Hinkley, Margie Medlin and Nick Roux Yoni Prior

Three prominent Australian artists who work with projection discuss the ways in which they collaborate within creative processes and creative teams, forging new visual dramaturgies of performance-making in a rapidly expanding practice.

8. Seed Value: Collaboration and Creative Development in Composed Theatre David Megarrity

This practice-led research opens the heart of collaboration in Composed Theatre, capturing the dynamics of the earliest stages of creative development from the inside, through the eyes of artists who specialise in music, theatre and the territory in between. 
This paper uses text, image and sound to tune in to productive tensions in creative development of SOX , a work of non-verbal Composed Theatre led by live looped music within which artists may locate and concentrate the inventiveness necessitated by an intermedial approach to making performance. This note from the field examines themes of experimentation and collaboration, and identifies oscillations between form and indeterminacy, spontaneity and plasticity in creative development where music is allowed to lead.

9. Siren Song: Strengthening Community through Sonic Insurgency Miles O’Neil

Siren Song premiered at the 2017 Dark Mofo Festival, in Hobart, Australia. Twice daily for the duration of the festival, at dawn and dusk, 450 speakers, mounted on the roofs of 6 buildings across the Hobart waterfront as well as the speaker set from a tsunami warning system mounted onto a retired defence helicopter, blasted choral soundscape of female voices through the streets of Hobart and out across the Derwent River. I argue that Siren Song forms part of a wider sound-led shift in contemporary Australian festival programming which rejects English theatre hierarchies of text and vocal clarity, instead drawing on sounds ability to engulf, to rupture and to claim air space in contemporary performance. In this paper, I analyse the ways that Siren Song deployed politics of sound, how it claimed volume, took up vibrational space and asserted echo and how these vibrations and volumes possessed landscape and airspace. Drawing together theorists from sound studies, performance studies and gothic studies, I argue that the sonic innovations driving Siren Song are substantial and offer new approaches for the confrontation of cultural anxieties through a decentralising of text and an immersion in states of sonic extremity.

10. Towards a Post-Pandemics of Sound in Performance Chris Wenn

The radical disruption of live performance that began in 2020 and continues in 2021 raises a fundamental question regarding the presence of the present in the time of performance.
In this essay, I examine my own sound design and the evolution of a pandemic-restricted solo practice as a site in which a ‘post-pandemics’ of performance might become possible. If 2020 in its upheaval and chaos showed the all-too-narrow limits of our care for others, what is the role of performance design in the recovery of that care? I engage a poetics of care and consent in performance design through notions of Pirate Care, xenofeminist action, and the relation to Other proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy. I reflect on and dissect my own response to pandemic time and space, and the shapes that vulnerability, fear, and uncertainty build in our performed worlds. Deploying this knowledge I look to a way forward for performance design and live performance, real-time and asynchronous, physically distant and present, that can engender this ‘post-pandemics’.

11. Liveness in the Digital Age: Performance Case Studies Russell Fewster, Geordie Brookman and Richard Chew

If theatre reflects contemporary society, a director ignores screen cultures at their own peril. Audiences increasingly view and communicate via screens. Television in all its forms (live to air, subscription and on demand services) provide readily accessible content to the public in the comfort of their homes – a viewing pattern exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Screen cultures that overtook live performance in the 20^th Century as the preferred entertainment medium continue their dominance. However, when theatre did resurface from Australia’s first pandemic lockdown in late 2020, audiences returned in large numbers, suggesting a significant appetite for live performance still exists.  At the same time, screen aesthetics, because of its cultural ubiquity, shape how theatrical mis-en-scène is created. Theatre has been challenged for some time in the way(s) the presence of the live actor is staged in reference to screen technologies. Directors, Russell Fewster and Geordie Brookman, reflect on creating text-based work for the stage in a mediatized age. They refer to examples of their work to illustrate and examine how they create mis-en-scène with a keen awareness of the dominance of media technologies. As a composer and musician, Richard Chew reflects on how the physical presence of playing live music in a theatre context differs from its pre-recorded counterpart.


12. Authenticity within Digital Performance: A New Framework to Understand the Relationship between Audience, Vision Technology and Scenography Tessa Rixon, Gene Moyle, Steph Hutchison and Joslin

The notion of authenticity is experiencing a resurgence within the theatre and performance field. With its myriad of meanings and associations – from ‘the original’, ‘the real’, ‘truthful’, ‘genuine’, ‘believable’, ‘emotionally resonant’, and more – authenticity is a key component in engaging audiences with live performance. Despite an increasing body of research considering the authenticity of performance, performer and audience experience, little conversation has taken place in the field of digital performance and scenography. This article examines the field of authenticity to arrive at a definition within the context of digital performance. Through the identification of the core constructs of truthfulness, believability and emotional engagement, we introduce a new Authenticity Framework to inform future studies on the authenticity of digital performance. Focusing specifically on vision technologies, we demonstrate the application of the framework through first-person reflection on two Australian digital performances - Laser Beak Man by Dead Puppet Society (2019) and Wireless by Lisa Wilson and Paul Charlier (2017) – and argue this Framework can offer new approaches to the creation of authentic digital performances for the benefit of practitioners and audiences alike.

13.A Feminist Lens in the Rehearsal Room: On the Bodily Education of Young Girls Pia Johnson in conversation with Adena Jacobs

Focusing on Fraught Outfit’s On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (2013), photographer Pia Johnson and director Adena Jacobs, reflect upon the unique collaborative relationship that was created for the production. Exploring how having a photographer as a visual dramaturg provided a different perspective on notions of the feminist gaze, the body, young women and the making process.

14. Genealogies of Darkness Paul Jackson

This essay seeks to think through some of the features and meanings of blackouts in contemporary Australian theatre. A blackout is normally understood as a visual and temporal absence, an agreed break, a functional, conventional hiatus, having developed from the use, and subsequent abandonment, of the house curtain. However, a range of contemporary Australian theatre works conceive of the blackout as more: a palpable presence, an affective void, tangible rather than conventional, informing narrative structures, and fundamental to the work’s understanding of image creation and meaning. These visual voids reflect different dramatic and philosophical traditions, drawing on and contributing to genealogies of darkness.

15. A Sound Conversation: Performance-Makers and Sound Practices with Roslyn Oades, Madeleine Flynn and Tamara Saulwick Kate Hunter

Four artists working across performance, music and sound consider the ways in which technological advances and embodied and material approaches to sound practice have shifted their work over time.

16. Reviews
17. Contributors

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 78 | April 2021

 

Table of Contents

1. Issue 078 (Full Issue PDF)

2. Contents
3. Editorial Yoni Prior
4. Staging Music in Shakespeare Richard Fotheringham   

An analysis of insights and limitations in using architectural and antiquarian approaches to staging Shakespeare’s plays in performance, then and now, particularly in relation to music, musicians, and the ‘music room’.

5. From Bejewelled Crucifix to Modern Dress: ‘Shakespeare and Stage Costume’ from Wilkie to Bell Rachel Fensham   

Theatre costumes except with rare exceptions are fragile artefacts – often worn out during their lifetime by use and re-use, sometimes used by multiple actors or exchanged between one company and another; and they are often adapted, lost or destroyed when they come to the end of their useful life. Aoife Monk’s ground-breaking book, The Actor in Costume, has invigorated research on the material culture of costumes although there is still much to be accomplished to understand the role of costumes on the Australian stage. They do however offer tantalising glimpses of the embodied life of theatre history and suggest new ways of responding to the role of archives in the interpretation of historical change.

With a focus on an object-oriented analysis of costume, this paper elaborates on a much earlier contribution from Oscar Wilde to debates on the historical authenticity of costumes in his essay, Shakespeare and Stage Costume, and examines its influence on the theatre entrepreneur, Allan Wilkie, and his Shakespeare company in the early part of the twentieth century. By looking at the role of selected objects, relics and costumes in Wilkie’s productions and comparable works from the same period, questions about theatrical aura, colonial transmission and the anxieties of modernity for the reception of Shakespeare in Australia can be explored.

6. Visualising the Story of Theatre in Sydney: Venues, Repertoire and Change, 1920–2020 Jonathan Bollen              

Theatre is sometimes imagined as an art form at risk – from talking pictures in the 1920s and television in the 1950s to the Covid-19 pandemic in the 2020s. But the Wolanski Collection and data from AusStage tell a different story. Theatre companies and venue buildings come and go. Yet, over the last hundred years, theatre in Sydney is a story of growth: more venues, with more seats, presenting more performances in a wider range of genres to more spectators. This essay uses maps of venues in Sydney and visualisations of repertoire patterns to reveal insights into the city’s history of theatre production and cultural change between 1920 and 2020. It demonstrates an approach to research that integrates digital records of theatre production with theatre programs from an archival collection. Maps are arranged in a time-series to reveal what venues to audiences in Sydney. Genre terms drawn from theatre programs trace the evolution of performance, while information on the national origin of artists frame the efforts to produce Australian works. In visualising data on theatre production, the essay reveals longitudinal patterns in repertoire that challenge assumptions about theatre in Sydney and extend the story in new directions.

Keywords: theatre, history, visualisation, database, archive

7. The Guthrie Report and Its Discontents Chris Hay                                                                                                             

In March 1949, as an adjunct to a scoping mission for a return Old Vic theatre tour to Australia, famed director Tyrone Guthrie was invited to prepare a report on the possibility of an Australian national theatre. Government records indicate that he spent six weeks in Australia, before delivering a “Report on Australian Theatre” that was subsequently published in the June 1949 Australian Quarterly. Despite its famously dismissive tone, the Guthrie Report became a lightning rod around which demands for a national theatre and for federal arts subsidy finally began to coalesce.
However, tracing a coherent narrative about the Report is difficult. Sources and later accounts differ on details and these inaccuracies have crept into even the most authoritative accounts of Australian theatre history. In this article, I return to the original records that established Guthrie’s visit to Australia, as well as the government deliberations that his Report provoked, to reveal the Guthrie Report as offering a blueprint for the arts subsidy that developed in Australia during the 1950s. By further contextualising “the notorious Guthrie Report” (Meyrick 27), my work also interrogates the value of aetiological myths to writing and re-writing national theatre histories.

8. Recognising the Face of Australian Theatre: Authentic Diversity and the Case of Metanoia Glenn D’Cruz in interview with Görkem Acaroğlu, Shane Grant and Greg Ulfan                                                                           

Metanoia is a theatre company founded by Görkem Acaroğlu, Greg Ulfan and Shane Grant in 2013.  The group consistently redresses the under representation of non-Anglo writers, performers, directors and other theatre workers on Australian stages — this is especially true of flagship theatre companies (see Kim Ho, Cultural Diversity in Australian Theatre, 2017). Originally located at the Mechanics Institute in Brunswick, Melbourne, the company is now based in regional Victoria and continues to explore how questions of race, ethnicity, gender identity and class play out in a variety of local and international contexts. Metanoia has built a reputation for producing innovative works that span a variety of genres including narrative theatre, digital performance, immersive installations and live art. This paper identifies the company’s major aims and achievements with a focus on its political orientations and dramaturgical strategies by interviewing its principal creatives. Since the word, ‘metanoia’ refers to changes or shifts in perception, thought and action, this paper explores the company’s perspective on the problems associated with attempting to (literally) change the face of Australian theatre culture. This article includes hyperlinks to video recordings of selected Metanoia productions.
Keywords: Diversity; inclusivity; colour blind casting; Australian Theatre; Politics, Race

9. ‘It Caught the Zeitgeist’: Interview with Andrew Bovell Nathan Hastie                                                               

Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling is one of Australia’s most critically and commercially successful plays of the twenty-first century, which tells the story of a family’s search for reconciliation across several generations, before, during and after an apocalyptic environmental event. Since its first performance in 2008 for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, it has become one of Australia’s most produced plays internationally. It is an early work of Australian environmentalist theatre, while also being one of the first plays to draw parallels between the generational inherited trauma of colonialism and environmental damage. For his Honours thesis at the University of Queensland, Nathan Hastie interviewed Andrew Bovell in his investigation of how Bovell’s play was able to find success from the Australian market to both Broadway and the West End. Bovell is one of Australia’s leading playwrights, with other major works staged annually on international stages, such as Speaking in Tongues (later adapted into the film Lantana) and Things I Know To Be True. The following interview provides an insight into Bovell’s creative process and discusses his thoughts concerning identity, nation and the disappearing physical and psychological landscapes, and how all of these elements come together in When the Rain Stops Falling. For Hastie’s thesis, he additionally interviewed the play’s director, Chris Drummond, while also comparing the success of When the Rain Stops Falling, to another successful Australian play, Holding the Man, in which he also interviewed playwright Tommy Murphy and director David Berthold.

10. ‘Sustained Personal Contact’: Recent Australian Productions on Tour in China Anne Pender                                       

In 2012 Australia’s first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, argued that Australians need a stretch of the imagination ‘to be able to imagine a different kind of relationship’ with China, one that is not merely transactional and commercial. Fitzgerald encouraged Australians to invest in the relationship in a way that we have with other important nations such as the UK and the US. He stressed the need for an ‘intensity of sustained personal contact’. The making of theatre is one of the ways in which sustained personal contact occurs, and a genuine cultural exchange.

Between 2012 and 2020 at least a dozen Australian theatre companies have taken their work to China. Companies offering opera, ballet, spoken word drama, physical theatre, puppetry and children’s theatre have all toured or appeared at festivals, some of them offering productions over multiple years. This article draws on extensive first-hand accounts by participants interviewed by the author to explore the recent experiences of actors, directors and producers involved in three touring productions and their reception by Chinese audiences, against a backdrop of expanding access to, and increasing interest in Australian performance in the People’s Republic. Using a case study approach, the article examines the development and production of three diverse works and the extent of their adaptation for audiences in China. The case study productions include Saltbush, an immersive children’s theatre production from Insite Arts, Baba Yaga, a children’s play and co-production between Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre and Scotland’s Imaginate, and desert, 6.29pm, a play produced by the Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, who were invited to perform at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival in 2018.

The article considers the spaces of aesthetic transformation and intercultural connection afforded by the productions, the long-term investment in children’s theatre in South Australia that has enabled the international reach of several companies, the finely balanced economics of touring to China, and the sustained personal relationships between the touring companies and the individuals who operate the highly successful Shanghai-based presenting company, A.S.K (Art Space for Kids). It speculates about performance futures and collaborative opportunities between China and Australia at a time of strained relations.

11. What Are The Ties That Hold Us Together? The Smartphone Networks in As If No One Is Watching and Body of Knowledge Abbie Victoria Trott                                                                                                                                           

In this time of ubiquitous digitality, the smartphone has become a central interface of connection. It gathers us together, tying us to people that we know – and people that we don’t – as we participate in what Shuhei Hosokawa described in 1984 as acts of ‘secret theatre.’ Considering two networked performances – Vulcana Women’s Circus and WaW Dance’s As If No-One is Watching (2018, 2019), and Body of Knowledge (2019) by Samara Hersch – I use network theory to examine the ties that assembled the audience members together. Watching a physical abstraction of the private, while listening to personal stories in public, the audience – through their smartphone – interfaced with the performance of As If No One is Watching, enabling them to engage with acts of theatre in secret. In contrast – working together to establish a ‘body’ of ‘knowledge’ – the audience of Body of Knowledge used smartphones to interface with each other and the performers. Situated firmly in the ‘physical,’ as opposed to the ‘virtual,’ these immersive performances were reliant on smartphone facilitated post-digital networks. In this article I explore how the smartphone in performance gathers audience members together over a network.

12. Reviews
13. Contributors

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 77 | January 2021

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 76 | April 2020

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 75 | December 2019

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 74 | April 2019

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 73 | October 2018

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the article Namatjira: Beyond the Script contains an image of a person who has died. ​

Australasian Drama Studies

Issue 72 | April 2018