Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemAn HIV Love Story: Jacob Boehme's Blood on the Dance Floor's Queer and Indigenous Revolt(Australasian Drama Studies, 2022)This article is part of an ongoing conversation between Jacob Boehme, Alyson Campbell and Jonathan Graffam about Boehme's play 'Blood on the Dance Floor' (Melbourne and Sydney, 2016; Australia and Canada tour, 2019), and we see it now as a kind of queer collaborative musing that we are doing together to think through how the production works. While we have published some of our thinking on the play before, we realised that none of us was finished trying to articulate how it was created (Boehme), and the impact it had on us as spectators (Campbell and Graffam) and, indeed, that there was still so much to unravel in terms of its place in the context of queer performance in Australasia. In this article, we focus on key decisions made during the dramaturgical process of composing two sequences from the production, 'Sandridge Beach' and 'Anthony'. In examining the production's 'dramaturgy', we refer both to the structure and content of the piece and the processes of decision-making that are key to composing the work. While the term 'dramaturgy' is used to describe the selection of material in crafting and organising new work, on another level it seeks to make explicit the relationship between the artistic composition and the socio-political and cultural context in which the work is staged. There are multiple ways to approach any framing of 'Blood on the Dance Floor (BOTDF)' - Indigenous identity, queerness and HIV - and, though we start from the perspective of queerness for this special issue, they are as inextricably interwoven and inseparable as the double helix of DNA. In our conversations for this article, what emerged most strongly from Jacob were ideas of love, the complexity - or, perhaps more precisely, absence - of Indigenous sexual lives from stage and other representational forms, and queer kinship.
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ItemBaking Cake Daddy: transforming fat-phobia to fat-positivity with a slice of fat-queer subversive fun to fatten the stage(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-09-02)This article examines the genesis, making processes and performance choices of Cake Daddy, a queer and fat-positive live performance work (Belfast, Melbourne, Sydney, 2018–19). The show was made in response to performer-creator Ross Anderson-Doherty’s experience of shock and fatphobia in the audience’s reaction to his naked fat body in a previous production. This experience–and the unpacking of it–proved a catalyst for Anderson-Doherty to respond in the best way he knows: through performance and his own form of queer performance pedagogy. Through a Practice as Research methodology we, who are also members of the Cake Daddy creative team, trace the queer and “fat” dramaturgical choices within the creation and staging of this fat-positive and celebratory production. This includes the hybrid cabaret-theater form of the production, its (at times) conversational/dialogic mode, the visibility and participation of audiences, the virtuosity of Anderson-Doherty’s singing and hosting, the sharing of deeply personal material, the flaunting of fat/ness and fat sexuality onstage and the shared act of committing to a fat-positive community pledge: all of these, we assert, lead to a fat-queer utopian performative moment. Borrowing from queer theory’s move to see queer as a verb, rather than a noun, Anderson-Doherty’s co-option of fat as a verb has brought this forth: Anderson-Doherty “fattens” the space–and in the performance’s final moments he teaches audiences to conjugate that verb together as a temporary community.