Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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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.
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ItemBegotten, not made: availing and performed sites for a poetics of being( 2013)This research has taken a practice-led form. The questions and issues are those arising in and through the practice of an artist working in live performance and were formed in and through personal, practical experience. The researching artist has undertaken a period of time- approximately two years- during which heuristic and creative data has been allowed to ascribe itself on various media and on the artist’s attending perceptions and responses. Seemingly disparate drawings, vocal and physical scores, text fragments and audio atmospheres were assembled and presented as a live creative work. The thesis presents an exegetical overview of the practices engaged and investigates the pathways common to arising and intentionality; their capacity to affirm and deny in the receiving artist’s experience and their capacity to conjoin the self with their intentions to abreact synergistic phenomena involved in the formation of imagined and actual poetic sites for their realisation.