Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemCostume as a cultural marker: examining Australian identity through performance costume( 2022)As a nascent field, costume scholarship is yet to explicitly articulate performance costume as an indicator of broader cultural identity. This study positions costume in the context of notions of Australian identity, culture, and the performing arts archive. The project aims to explore if performance costume can be understood as a cultural marker, that is, a nuanced marker (or a sign, or indicator) of the cultural identity of the society which created it (the costume or set of costumes). The research questions how examining historical costume for dance in Australia can illuminate notions of an evolving cultural and national identity and challenge the dominant history. By positioning costume as a cultural marker, the study interrogates how costume can activate multiple histories, realities, truths, and knowledges. In order to achieve this, three exemplar sets of ballet costumes from Australia’s past are examined to construct a more detailed understanding of Australia’s identity at critical points in its history. Through the study of costume as an archived object, the project establishes new methods for understanding human history through costume. The research reframes interactions with costume through material culture, an interpretivist paradigm and constructionist epistemology, using archival research, interviews with industry professionals, and the creation of an experimental exhibition. These research approaches value the specific relationship between researcher and object, and the unique framing of each interaction and interpretation. Significantly, the research demonstrates how costume scholarship has the potential to change current belief systems by activating multiple histories and shifting societies’ relationship between their past and their present.
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ItemEnduramorphosis: A point of dynamic strangeness( 2022)This thesis will offer a framework through which to better understand endurance performance practices in the visual arts. Endurance performance is comprised of three core dynamic and mutually affective elements: space, time, and body. I propose that these contingent elemental interrelationships can give rise to a state that I call enduramorphosis—a neologism describing a point of emergence within which a particular strangeness can occur in a work of endurance performance through and at its near breakdown. Importantly, enduramorphosis is produced through a performing body that reacts as it undergoes transformation through reciprocal effects of physical and psychological duress. I argue that this barely perceptible and overlooked phenomenon transforms the ontological nature of the performance action itself to register as an elusive, experiential residue of excess. Although not necessarily perceived visually, enduramorphosis takes form through a dynamic, multisensorial, internal, and reactive set of processes. By developing and testing a practice-led method and framework built around this assertion, I seek to demonstrate how mutually informing relationships between space, time, and the body can—under certain conditions—give rise to this phenomenon. I also describe how performance in “pandemic-time” during the COVID-19 pandemic produced enduramorphosis in mediated livestream and video formats to create another dynamic form of liveness. I find that endurance, both as a method and compositional element in performance, pushes against the limits of space and time, including pandemic-time, in a manner that is made manifest through the performing body. Finally, I locate the unfolding of enduramorphosis as a point of dynamic strangeness in which a work of performance might open and potentially become something else altogether. I find that this shift is perceived through an excessiveness produced within and through the performing body as it undergoes a transformation that lasts.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDailiness, Multimodality, Performance and Meaning( 2021)This study closely observes, articulates, and expressively renders the intrapersonal dimensions of an artistic practice and the capacity and means by which a practice can reveal itself and meaningfully render the lifeworld and the artist in multimodal form. The methods are those of a primary source heuristic study attending to the experiential interplay and multimodality of an artistic practice and its changing states of assemblage. The practices and performative actions are undertaken and recorded in a wide range of settings. These include walks in suburban streets and parks and in rural forests, spoken annotations amidst everyday life, and occasional assemblages of materials self-witnessed or presented to one or two others. The collected raw data includes sketches, diagrams and drawings, poetic responses, vocal soundings, piano and multi-track audio recordings, photographs, and bodily-recorded movement gestures. A performative assemblage of selected materials was presented to a small audience in December 2018. It included the live performer placed in a range of multi-layered constructions, automated lighting effects, and objects present in the research and emerging performative canvas. The combined outputs of the study comprising the live performance and contextualising writings suggest that artistic practice can be a series of imaginal and physical actions and experiences that occur beyond and without, as well as through more formal studio or instrument-based activity and that an artist can be concurrently forming themselves as a poetic subject in the process of creating an artwork for meaningful reception.
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ItemComposing Cultural Reclamation — Reconnecting to an Indigenous Cultural Heritage through a Music Practice( 2021)This thesis is a first-person account detailing my reclamation of my First Nations Australian cultural heritage through my creative practice. To understand the project, it is pertinent to first understand two important aspects of my identity: 1. I am a First Nations Jaadwa man, raised disconnected to culture as a result of colonisation. I did not always know this, but it has always been true. 2. I am a musician, engaged with composition and performance practices since I was a teenager. As a result, music and sound is an embedded part of my identity. The aim of the research is to understand my Jaadwa heritage, and to realise this through my music practice. That practice consists of two creative outputs, the first of which consists of five long-form, improvised soundscape works which I call ‘Country-songs’ in consideration of their existing in the intersection of music and Australian Indigenous understandings of Country. These works aim to develop my relationship to my cultural Jaadwa Country, and to consider my place on Boon Wurrung Country, where I was born and continue to reside. The second output of my practice consists of six lyric-centred songs in the style of folk and country & western music, in which I share narratives of my experience as a Jaadwa man disconnected from, and reconnecting to culture. Composing and performing these songs allowed me to generate a space in which I can reflect on my ancestors, family, identity, and my social and political responsibilities in the context of cultural expression. The research is embedded in four primary fields: Western understandings and creative expressions of soundscapes; sonic expression within Indigenous communities; histories of the relationship between Indigenous communities and developing sound technologies; and, Indigenous identity and reclamation through creative practice. The discussions I share around my creative works stem from, intertwine, and further these fields. My understandings of these fields, experiences during periods of field-work, and development of the creative works all contribute to an emergent conception of my Indigenous cultural heritage and its expression through composition. The research consists of a written thesis, and digital audio recordings of the five ‘Country-songs’ and six lyrical songs, totalling approximately 45 minutes of audio. Together, the written thesis and the audio works document my observed changes in self, and positions my creative output as a space through which I realise and reflect these changes.
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ItemIn the Moment: A Practice-Led Investigation of Presence and the Possibilities of Dancer Experience in Singapore’s Contemporary Dance Pedagogy and Practice( 2021)This practice-led research, some aspects of which are informed by heuristic methods (Moustakas, 2001), adopts a phenomenological stance and seeks to understand, in Singapore’s contemporary dance pedagogy and practice, the phenomenon of presence in process and performance. According to Trenos (2014), definitions of presence can vary from the intangible or mystical quality possessed by the actor (or performer), to “the actor’s most important creation”; and to “the most significant interaction in theatre” (pp.64 – 65). Debates on the fundamental nature of a dancer’s presence have been at the heart of dance practice and theory since the late 1950s. As a significant area of inquiry within dance and performance studies, the metaphysics of presence has also been touched on by philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger and Derrida. Is presence an ineffable and captivating quality, or a buzzword in the dance scene referring to a mysterious ‘something’ escaping words? This research hypothesises that presence is neither the exceptional dancer’s prerogative nor property, but rather, is a quality involving a vigilant, rigorous moment-to-moment attentional effort, an investment of disciplined attention and awareness. In other words, presence demands a focused application of self in the moment, in terms of the mind and body. This hypothesis is interrogated by asking what the Singapore contemporary dancer’s experience is when optimally immersed in dancing. By focusing on their embodied experience, being attuned to what and how of this experience: what they are attending to; how they feel; the processes or activities they engage in; and what they deem to be of potential significance, I attempt to also uncover factors that enhance or inhibit the dancer experience. While this research outlines a range of notions of presence, drawing attention to the ambiguous and often imprecise use of the term in the performance world, it does not, in the main, attempt to validate any particular theories of it. Rather, as a reflective practitioner deeply engaged in the creative process and research, my aim is to use the phenomenon or notion of presence as a springboard for interrogating and interpreting the experience of the dancers involved in this study. While not arriving at a universally accepted definition, this research can yield important insights into what presence means, or might mean, in the Singapore contemporary dance. My research findings can contribute to new knowledge in the field of Singapore’s dance research, currently in its nascent stage. They potentially have a specific, twofold impact. Firstly, they can yield meaningful insights into the complexities of contemporary dance performance as an artful, embodied practice. Secondly, they can usefully and strategically inform dance pedagogical approaches in Singaporean schools and dance companies. This thesis is complemented by films featuring choreographic works developed as an integral part of the research process. These films are interrelated and respectively illustrative of the creative process and areas under investigation. The weightage of the creative component of my submission is 50%, and the written component, 50%. The final choreographic work, 'For Reasons Undisclosed,' was to have been performed ‘live’ (with audience) at the Victorian College of the Arts as part of the examination. The global pandemic and air travel restrictions unfortunately necessitated a pivoting to the performance video approach instead. While there will be exposition in the thesis on 'For Reasons Undisclosed,' the focus of the thesis is on 'Insistence and Burn' created in 2019 during the formal 4-month research period, when data was first gathered and analysed.
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ItemHolding space and taking time: locating quiet resistance through artistic practice( 2020)The research considers daily rituals, tactics and actions for artistically reimagining lived experience. Using a variety of distributed, site orientated and lens-based methods, I speculate upon ways that daily routines can be utilised as forms of restoration, resistance and care. In developing the creative outcomes, presented in conjunction with a dissertation, particular notions of feminism and postconceptual methodologies are drawn upon. These contribute to the imagining of ways in which artistic gestures of holding space and taking time might suggest more mindful and empathetic engagements with the world.