School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemMore-and-less-than: liveness, video recording, and the future of performance( 2000)With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. This first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’.
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ItemHeiner Müller and Martin Wuttke: staging new images in a time of change( 2005)During the extended prologue of the Berliner Ensemble’s 1995 production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Heiner Muller, actor Martin Wuttke’s Arturo Ui moves around the stage like a salivating dog. Bare-chested and in military breeches, with white gloves making paws of his hands, and with his tongue stained red and hanging out, Wuttke’s body, is part pointer-dog, part-wolf, panting, impatient and on guard. The following year Müller's final work, Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man, is staged at the BE and directed by Wuttke. In the first scene, two male performers in top hats, black T-shirts, jackets with tails and bare feet, enter the stage. They could be clowns or Shakespearian grave diggers. They stare out at the auditorium and deliver the play's opening line – 'The mausoleum of German Socialism. Here is where it's been buried'. This article explores the performative representations of post-reunification German theatre through an analysis of the textual, visual and aural image-making of these two Berliner Ensemble productions. It suggests that the theatrical representation of historical and legendary twentieth century figures, that we find in these performances, such as Hitler and Stalin, old communist leaders and the mythical Erlkönig, form part of the re-mapping and re-configuring of culture that is taking place in contemporary Germany. This is especially so in regard to the inter-relations between the past and the changing political borders in the present that connect with the broader historical transitions affecting ‘east’ and ‘west’ Europe. These include the end of the Cold War, the eastwards expansion of the European Union and the movement into a globalised economy. This article contends that Müller's post-reunification theatrical offerings at the Berliner Ensemble, now separated from the state that funded it, are acutely and tellingly situated at the intersection of culture and politics.
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ItemPerforming Sexual Difference: a feminist appropriation of Brecht(University of Wisconsin Press, 2001)
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ItemFocus on the body: towards a feminist reading of Brecht in performance( 2000)In 1993 I directed Brecht’s The Good Person of Sichuan at the Open Stage Theatre at the University of Melbourne. Like most directors, I found the text’s tightly woven and theoretically inscribed composition resistance to meddling. Brecht’s dramaturgy, structured on a Marxist-derived aesthetic and embodied in the techniques of Verfremdung and Gestus, weighs heavily on the creative development of the play in performance. I am in full sympathy with Leander Haussman’s claim that Brecht’s plays are constructed linguistically and dramaturgically like a house of cards and therefore can only be reproduced by slaves to the text. Not wanting to be a slave but also, unlike Haussman, unwilling not to do Brecht, I prowled for gaps into which our production could insert a differently-motivated, feminist mise-en-scene.
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ItemWhite-out: theatre as an agent of border patrol( 2003)In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman’s 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.
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ItemThe desire to affirm and challenge: an interview with Hannie Rayson( 2003-04)Hannie Rayson is one of Australia’s leading playwrights whose career spans more than twenty years. Her first major success, Hotel Sorrento (Playbox Melbourne, 1990), won that year’s Green Room Award for Best Play as well as the Australian Writer’s Guild Award. In 1994 Richard Franklin filmed it in association with the Australian Film Finance Commission, and both the playscript (revised and reprinted in 2002) and the film as video are regularly prescribed for secondary and tertiary courses. A decade later, Life After George (MTC, 2000) broke box office records for the Melbourne Theatre Company and, amongst its many awards, was the first Australian play to be nominated for the Miles Franklin Award. One could say that after Rayson’s nomination playwriting in Australia had finally been admitted to the Australian literary mainstream.
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ItemRethinking the performance of Brecht: lines of flight, becoming and the female subject( 2000)This essay brings together a number of related but frequently separated discourses around the themes of performance, gender and Epic theatre within the frame of a feminist analysis of theatrical performance. It maps the possibilities of exchange across the borders of specific practices and their discourses in an effort to think about the productive value of border-crossing. I model this crossing-of-borders on a reading of the text and performance of Bertolt Brecht' s modernist classic, The Good Person of Sichuan, in which the theatrical notion of performance is examined through a feminist application of the Deleuzian concept of becoming. The Deleuzian analysis of Brecht adds a new dimension to performance analysis and helps to revise and historicise Brecht' s politics for a contemporary public. This task is an important one for Brecht is worth doing still. He returned to the Australian stage in 1998 and 1999 in two contrast ing productions - the true-to-Brecht Melbourne Theatre Company production of The Resistable Rise ofArturo Ui, directed by Simon Phillips and the 'renovated' Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney) production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Kantor - suggesting that a revival of interest in political theatre position s itself through a relation to Brechtian theatre. Finding a productive way forward for Brechtian theatre is crucial to the avoidance of the pitfalls that negate the cultural critique that the plays make possible.
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ItemTransit Heimat: Translation, Transnational Subjectivity and Mobility in German Theatre( 2006)This paper is interested in themes of translation, transnational subjectivity and mobility in German theatre between 1994 and 2004. It is set within the broader context of the expansion of Europeanisation that followed German reunification and the lifting of the Iron Curtain in central and eastern Europe. It is therefore especially concerned with theatre that responds to the issues that arise with the opening of Europe’s eastern borders and the tensions associated with increased cross-border movement.Some of the developing tensions will involve the changed status of nations in post-communist Europe, the future of national identity and culture and the formation of transnational or post-national subjectivities. Anna Langhoff’s 1994 Transit Heimat/gedeckte tische is the primary example used in this paper. It is a play about central and eastern European refugees written and performed in the critical early years of reunification that brings an early example of the changing face of Europe to the German stage. It is the little-known but important precedent for later more boisterous German-language treatments of the theme of refugees and xenophobia such as Christoph Schlingensief’s provocative Bitte Liebt Österreich (Vienna, 2000). Foreign subjects also find their counterparts in Heiner Müller’s posthumously performed Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man (Berlin 1996) and Germania Stücke (2004). The paper argues that these theatrical and performance pieces represent the downside of transnational or post-national subjectivities as experienced by the new Europe’s poor and powerless. In danger of falling into an underclass of stateless and itinerant welfare recipients, the characters display the trauma of the transition from the old communist regimes to the neoliberal economies of western Europe. It concludes that the play offers a timely reflection on the state of foreignness showing it as a transnational subjectivity produced by entrenched nationalist perspectives,
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ItemHeiner Müller’s Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man: atrocity and pain in German history and theatre( 2003)Language that injures and causes pain is embodied in the work of Heiner Müller. In evaluating this type of language, Judith Butler’s enquiry into injurious speech and linguistic vulnerability, applied in a case study of so-called hate-speech, might be usefully applied to theatrical speech:'When we say that an insult strikes like a blow, we imply that our bodies are injured by such speech. And they surely are, but not in the same way as a purely physical injury takes place' (Butler, 1997: 159).Racist, class-based and sexist hate-speech is injurious speech that exposes the linguistic vulnerability of subjects and the power of language to wound like a sword. Applied to Müller’s dramatic texts, I argue that the speeches uttered by various figurations mimic the operations of hate-speech in the social sphere, with the addition that the effects of the speech may also be shown.The question I pose is: Can the discourse of the performance text bear witness to and embody pain as well as demonstrate the violence that is both enacted within and a consequence of speech? I ask with Susan Sontag, What do these imaginary accounts do to the real pain of the victims of war and political struggle and what is the point of their transformation into art given that "the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree" (Sontag, 2003: 40)?
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ItemBeing Political in German Theatre and Performance: Anna Langhoff and Christoph Schlingensief(University of Sydney, 2008)