Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemLocating Care in curating queer performance in Belfast and Manchester:Gemma Hutton and Greg Thorpe, interviewed by Alyson Campbell, Meta Cohen and Stephen Farrier(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023)An interview with Gemma Hutton and Greg Thorpe, queer performance makers and activists in Belfast and Manchester, respectively. Published in Interventions, the online Open Access site connected with Contemporary Theatre Review. The interview is part of the work undertaken by Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier as co-editors of a special edition of Contemporary Theatre Review (33.1-2), called What’s Queer about Queer Performance now? In the interview we ask Gemma and Greg what is queer work in the particular context in which they make it. We talk about who’s making queer performance, who’s watching it, and how’s that happening, and about what they think the future of queer performance might be, what it might look like and what it might do. For both, questions of care in the context of queer performance communities was foremost in their work.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTo sound the drum: A dialogue on value and change in relation to First Nations music and research in the academy(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)A raft of complex and dynamic barriers to the participation and inclusion of First Peoples and Indigenous knowledges and practices in the academy exists. Not least of these barriers are assumptions about authority and ownership in relation to knowledge, that inform teaching and research. This chapter, co-authored by an Indigenous academic and multi-disciplinary artist and ethnomusicologist of settler/non-Indigenous ancestry, interrogates the contemporary academy and a vision that is inclusive of First Peoples and Indigenous knowledge systems through a reflective dialogue on individual and collaborative experiences of teaching and research related to Indigenous music. Through a reflection on axiological differences that come to bear in teaching and research related to Indigenous music, and on projects stemming from one author’s family practice of biganga (possum skin cloak) making, the authors consider the provocation: ‘what does it take to sound the drum?’, referring to the biganga (possum skin cloak) percussion instrument that has been used historically in much of south- eastern Australia and is undergoing a current process of reclamation. Through this dialogue and reflection, conventional notions of quality and value that are persistent in both teaching/learning and research in the contemporary university are addressed and expanded upon, and the question of what methodological and systemic change is required to centre Indigenous knowledges and people in the work of the university is considered.
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ItemDon't Be Like the Jebarra: Reconsidering the Ethics of Ethnomusicological Practice in an Indigenous Australian Context(Routledge, 2022-11-30)An implicit goal of ethnomusicology is acquisition of knowledge about music—historically the music of a cultural world other than that held by the outsider ethnomusicologist prior to their study. Our methods are often sound recording and other forms of collection, and participation in musical practices. Complex issues arise when the assumptions and methods of ethnomusicology are valued differently by region, group, generation, individual, or otherwise. Likewise, complex issues arise when the ethical framework for holding knowledge in a particular cultural context is at odds with institutional and disciplinary expectations with regard to authority, publication, and ownership of knowledge, in the academy. Via two provocations–that sound recording and collection, and participation in musical practice such that the ethnomusicologist acquires knowledge that is then held in their bodies, might be compared to the actions of the Jebarra (and ancestral figure in Ngarinyin lifeworld who stole communal resources and broke the Law of sharing) – in this chapter the authors (one an outsider ethnomusicologist and one an insider researcher and cultural custodian) reconsider the ethics of outsider ethnomusicological practice. Through reflection on a 20-year history of collaboration, the chapter considers local frames for understanding the role of the work of repatriation and return, and other forms of collaboration. It finds that there are local strategies for sustaining people and place across generations despite massive periods of disruption, and that these are also deployed to manage the risks attendant with the interventions of outsiders, and makes a case for outsider and insider researchers and practitioners to consider the role of care and nurturing in research.
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ItemMusic Endangerment, Repatriation, and Intercultural Collaboration in an Australian Discomfort Zone(Oxford University Press, 2021-04-15)To the extent that intercultural ethnomusicology in the Australian settler state operates on a colonialist stage, research that perpetuates a procedure of discovery, recording, and offsite archiving, analysis, and interpretation risks repeating a form of musical colonialism with which ethnomusicology worldwide is inextricably tied. While these research methods continue to play an important role in contemporary intercultural ethnomusicological research, ethnomusicologists in Australia in recent years have become increasingly concerned to make their research available to cultural heritage communities. Cultural heritage communities are also leading discovery, identification, recording, and dissemination to support, revive, reinvent, and sustain their practices and knowledges. Repatriation is now almost ubiquitous in ethnomusicological approaches to Aboriginal music in Australia as researchers and collaborating communities seek to harness research to respond to the impact that colonialism has had on social and emotional well-being, education, the environment, and the health of performance traditions. However, the hand-to-hand transaction of research products and represented knowledge from performers to researcher and archive back to performers opens a new field of complexities and ambiguities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants: just like earlier forms of ethnomusicology, the introduction, return, and repatriation of research materials operate in “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 2007 [1992]). In this chapter, we recount the processes and outcomes of “The Junba Project” located in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. Framed by a participatory action research model, the project has emphasized responsiveness, iteration, and collaborative reflection, with an aim to identify strategies to sustain endangered Junba dance-song practices through recording, repatriation, and dissemination. We draw on Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” as a “discomfort zone” (Somerville & Perkins 2003) and look upon an applied/advocacy ethnomusicological project as an opportunity for difference and dialogue in the repatriation process to support heterogeneous research agendas.
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ItemEarly Childhood and Music in Indigenous Contexts: Approaches to Teaching and Learning in an Indigenous Australian Community(Oxford University Press, 2023)Descriptions of children’s musical experiences and practices in Indigenous Australian contexts often reflect holistic approaches to identity, linked to ancestry, spirituality, and place. Simultaneously, the musical worlds of Indigenous children are interconnected with complex social, cultural, historical, spiritual, and political contexts that draw upon local, regional, and global musical styles. This collaborative chapter reviews selected literature that addresses cultural identity and expression in the context of babies and children in Indigenous Australian and Indigenous Canadian contexts. This literature is used as a foundation from which to present accounts of childhood musical cultural practices from the Mowanjum Aboriginal Community in the Kimberley region, northwest Australia. Focusing on musical teaching and learning, the chapter considers the musical landscape, cultural inheritances, and active roles that young children play through their musical activities, in cultural resurgence, in stimulating new music (and dance) practices, and in social wellbeing.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGuuranda( 2024-02-29)This creative work is a new First Nation's work and the World Premiere of Jacob Boehme's 'Guuranda' at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, telling stories of the Narungga people with a queer First Nation's lens and transforming Australian theatre and Australian dramaturgy, at scale.
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePretty polyglot: parrotisation as the difference in repetition, again(Unlikely, 2023)This paper was written on Kulin Country — moving between the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri, Boon Wurrung, and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples. On Kulin Country, birds are powerfully symbolic: Bunjil, the creator spirit, travels as a wedgetail eagle, and Waa, the protector, travels as a crow. Even the humble parrots, as Wurundjerri knowledge holder Mandy Nicholson reminds us, are Bunjil's children, and they carry Bunjil's messages, for those who know how to listen.
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ItemRapture: A Study in Pathos and Scenography(International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC), 2022)This article presents Aby Warburg’s art historical approach as a potential guide for scenographic creation and analysis, forwarding Rapture as an example: a song cycle presented by Sydney Festival 2021 to a live and livestreamed audience. The author designed the set and costumes for Rapture and here reflects upon the following questions: can Warburg’s appreciation for “emotive formulas” and “engrams” assist in the making of compelling scenography when conditions for live performance are so altered from the standard? How does a design methodology championing synoptics, analytics and empathy, as Warburg did, integrate within a broader collaboration? Reconstructing Rapture’s design evolution, this study looks to the Laocoön Group, Il Medico and geometries associated with hypnosis as three persuasive pathos carriers. It finds that scenographic focus, potency and expediency arise from the proposed methodology.
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ItemHidden diversity in the conservatoire: A qualitative enquiry into the experiences of higher education music students with disability(SAGE Publications, 2024)Students undertaking higher education music degrees represent a rich tapestry of experiences, cultures and needs. However, equity and inclusion issues related to music students with disability in higher education are frequently addressed in generic ways, and without consultation or consideration of their unique requirements. With limited research available, this qualitative study within an Australian Conservatorium of Music analysed the experiential and situated reflections of 18 music students with disability. Based on our reflexive thematic analysis, we propose that issues related to equity and inclusion for music students in higher education are multi-faceted and interrelated. By foregrounding the participants’ voice, the qualitative themes suggest that enhancements related to disclosure processes, quality of communication and reliability of resources, would fortify equity and inclusion. The findings span the need for reforms at the institutional level, as well as specific professional development for educators and awareness raising amongst the student cohort. Informed by the participants’ lived experience, the findings call for music educators, professional staff and institutional leaders to effectively apply features of inclusive, caring, professional practices so that music students with disability can thrive in higher education.
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ItemDramaturgical Thinking: A Creative Conversation About Australian Dramaturgy(IATC, 2023-12-01)This recorded public panel discussion brings together five graduates of the Victorian College of the Arts’ (VCA) Dramaturgy Masters program with the course’s founder Alyson Campbell. The only course leading to a degree in dramaturgy in Australia was introduced in 2015 as part of the graduate training program at the VCA, University of Melbourne. This course grew from the ecology of VCA’s theatre school and its Animateuring postgraduate course that produced influential graduates working experimentally at the intersection of theatre and site-responsive, community-engaged, solo, and directorial practices. Dramaturgical thinking is central to the course’s pedagogical rationale, designed around the premise that, while we may not always be in the professional role of “dramaturg”, we bring with us a set of practices, ethics and knowledges that can mobilise insight and productive discourse across a wide array of contexts, collaborations, and forms, including community engaged and pedagogical practices, First Nations theatre, new writing, devising, criticism, organisational management, live art, curating, opera, musical theatre, new media, transmedia, screen, and dance.