Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemThree Act Plays( 2021)Three Act Plays is a practice-led Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) research project that considers how sculpture and performance combine to act as metaphor for audience/viewer relations. The research explores what it might mean to subjectivise or flatten these relationships within an interdisciplinary practice, and incorporates analysis of works that use cross disciplinary moments to further interrogate the discussion. Through sculptural and performance video works created throughout the research, the project seeks to elaborate upon definitions of the ‘backstage’, the ‘prop’, the ‘rehearsal’, and ‘the audience’ as a way to explore a space of inter-subjectivity. The dissertation addresses these tropes via a re-reading of Michael Fried’s influential 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, prompting a critical re-evaluation of the relationships between sculpture and performance.
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ItemCancerous dramaturgy: using biology as a dramaturgical template in writing for performance( 2021)This practice-based research investigates the concept of a biological dramaturgy, and is structured as a dissertation (60%) and accompanying creative works (40%). Working with cancer as a dramaturgical template, the research proposes that a creative writing practice which models itself on the biological processes which drive cancer will foster a dramaturgy that is essentially cancerous in nature. This proposition is tested through three creative experiments which use cancer biology (experiments A and C) and evolutionary-developmental biology (experiment B) as illustrative systems for the generation of writing for performance. The thesis employs a critical framework which synthesises Critical Literary Geography and Systems Biology to allow for a phenomenological account of the creative process. This synthesis enables the articulation of a textual system, one which encapsulates the dwelling within and shaping of imaginative spaces that come through the act of writing, as well as the notion of a dynamic creative system that is generated by concurrent environmental, structural (text-driven) and organisational (author-driven) forces. Through this combined practical and theoretical inquiry – and building on discourse concerning the relationship between form and content in the science play, as well as dramaturgical theories and practices that accentuate process, intertextuality, the organic and the viral – the thesis concludes that the deployment of cancerous processes has the potential to seed and nurture new performance texts that are cancerous in nature. Further, this approach to dramatic composition can be applied to biological processes more broadly, the results of the experiments revealing how a biological organism’s ‘evolution from within’ might be modelled in the dramaturgy of a performance text. The research establishes that working towards a biological dramaturgy requires the nurturing of an embodied sense of the relevant biological processes and a biological sensibility, such that the balance between the environmental, structural and organisational elements of the work might best be negotiated and the author-God resisted. It is also suggested that biologically driven dramaturgies might potentially facilitate a reconfiguration that pushes dramatic form beyond the postdramatic. The practice outcomes of the thesis are demonstrated by three performance texts: Blood & Shadow, Variation for Three Voices on a Letter to Nature and Self Portrait / In Cross-Sections / With Bird.