Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAn Uncertain Time: toward an Australian dramaturgy for Theatre for Babies(ADSA, 2022-12-09)Theatre for the Early Years (TEY), or Theatre for Babies, looks and feels quite different to any other type of performance work. Defined as ‘professionally-created theatrical experience for an audience of children aged from birth to around three- years-old, accompanied by carers’ (Fletcher-Watson; 2016), theatre for babies is largely constructed as immersive, sensory performance, utilising music, dance and visual elements and only rarely positioning a central narrative or journey as part of the work. Critically, scholarship in theatre for babies has identified the doubling of audience involved in the carer/infant dyad and has termed this relationship the ‘Triangular Audience’ (Desfosses, 2009). This is particularly unique to baby theatre. This audience experience of baby and carer travelling together into the literal and figurative uncertainty provides a rich and dynamic provocation for artists working in baby theatre whose work must respond and provide an audience journey for all who attend. A highly varied, international practice which has taken some time to gain the validation and recognition that might lead to critical acclaim and increased funding and investment, there are now significant companies and practitioners working in the UK, Europe and America with a dedicated specialism in Theatre for Babies. The Australian sector, although small, has received little critical and scholarly attention to date. Whilst studies from the field of psychology and neuroscience in the last two years have measured the ‘engagement’ of children younger than 12 months (Barbosa, M., Vences, M., Rodrigues, P. M., & Rodrigues, H; 2021) and looked at the positive impact on the paternal child bond that results from interactions in baby theatre (Cowley,, B., Lachman, A. ,Williams, E. and Berg, A.; 2020), research into the creation principles and aesthetic methodology of theatre for the very young remains a neglected area of scholarly investigation. This presentation uses practice as research principles to explore embodied knowledge and attempt to elucidate the robust dramaturgical principles that have emerged after creating two original performance works for infants aged 0-12 months and their carers. These experiences of making theatre for babies resonate strongly with the conference theme of arrivals and new beginnings, and the experience of witnessing theatre for babies is one of great connection and exchange. Resisting any practice as led approach that might veer toward the ‘anecdotal’, the focus of my presentation will be on the rigorous creative and aesthetic considerations that might make up the dramaturgical principles of theatre for babies and how these contradict or are in tension with existing understandings of baby theatre. The presentation seeks to ask whether there are culturally specific understandings of childhood at play in the design of these works, and propose early thinking toward a possible Australian dramaturgy of theatre for babies.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCollaboration and consent: teaching boundaries in creation methodologies to Theatre undergraduate students at the Victorian College of the Arts(ADSA, 2022)This proposal is for a joint paper by Dr Sarah Austin and Isabella Vadiveloo, colleagues at the Victorian College of the Arts teaching into the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Theatre) degree. The presentation will detail how new approaches to curriculum and pedagogical practice are emerging that are designed to respond to urgent issues around intimacy, collaboration and consent in creative arts collaboration through two key strategic processes; the practice of Brave Space which has emerged from social justice facilitation discourse and consent and boundary practices developed by Chelsea Pace for tertiary students. These two approaches combine to provide new strategies for navigating this complex and nuanced area of theatre practice and our presentation will foreground how and why we are adopting these approaches and early indication of their impact on inclusive, safe and compelling theatre making. The presentation will introduce and demonstrate the emergent practice of 'holding Brave Space' in artistic collaborations with young people as a strategy for addressing the hunger for cultural change in the Australian arts sector. This practice is designed to foreground inclusion and safety and to strategically shift the way power might operate in a collaborative project. The framework for cultural safety posited by healthcare scholars Elaine Papps and Irahapeti Ramsden (1996) urges us to find ways of working that are ‘regardful of the unique intersections of individual identity’ rather than creating models for collaboration that are ‘regardless’ of these things. Moving from these foundational ideas from Ramsden and Papps, the framework for Brave Space works as a stakeholder-centred approach that emphasises ‘sharing decision-making, information, power and responsibility’ (de Souza, 2020) across collaborative contexts and disrupts and decentres the colonial paradigm that supports and upholds the status quo within Australian cultural institutions and conservatoire training environments. Likewise, United States based Intimacy director and scholar, Chelsea Pace (2020), has developed strong frameworks for actors and performers to recognise, articulate and document their physical boundaries. Combining this framework with above mentioned principals of cultural safety facilitation offers students an empowered understanding of agency and self-advocacy in setting physical boundaries and working with safe and appropriate limits of touch. This is especially pertinent in training spaces, where power differentiation between teaching staff and students is particularly pronounced. Kim Shively and Suzanne Shawyer have written about “repeated calls for ethical actor training that acknowledges the importance of boundary management” (2019) within the conservatoire model of training, and offered the consent-based tools the emergent field of Intimacy Direction as a “possible response”. When offering students vocabulary, time and encouragement to articulate physical boundaries, we are able to set a precedent for the management of emotional, cultural and spiritual consent and boundaries too. This helps us in creating and evolving our understanding of the brave spaces we are working towards. Responding to the urgent and compelling need and desire for transformation within the Australian theatre sector that acknowledges the inequities that permeate the industry ‘in an environment of increasing polarisation and heightened global attention on injustice, racism and inequality’ (Creating the Future, 2020), the combination of a brave space and boundary and consent centred framework intentionally creates accessible pathways for student to experience cultural safety within arts and training institutions. We ultimately posit that these approaches have the potential for fostering the capacity of these young people to reckon with the colonial paradigm of making work on stolen land, the ability to bring their full authentic selves to the work they make, and to move into significant artistic decision-making and culturally significant roles across the arts sector.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTen Years with the Journal for Artistic Research(Society for Artistic Research, 2023)
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ItemDid That Stone Move? Staging stone swarms in galleries and virtual reality(BCS Learning & Development, 2022-07)This paper presents the development of a forthcoming interactive multimedia gallery installation, Sacrifice. We introduce the rationale to examine relationships with the human audiences and a swarm of ground robots, through collective movement to engage with audience members. In global collaboration with archaeological researchers and cultural custodians, we have developed photogrammetric models of monoliths to disguise the ground robots. We explain our tandem virtual/actual reality workflow and how it has influenced the evolution of the exhibition concept and may have benefits for practice led design on interdisciplinary projects. We anticipate that the juxtaposition of ancient stonecraft with modern robotic control technologies will provoke a wider discussion about the future of human-robot collaboration in society.
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ItemThe art of solidarity: Street Art Activism(Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities, 2019)This paper looks at the relationship between graffiti, street art and activism in the inner city suburb of Footscray in Australia, which is known as a culturally diverse neighbourhood. The works presented were created in the last decade and feature works painted on walls, both legally and illegally.
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ItemAnywhere and Elsewhere (2018): Art At The Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity(Parsons Fine Arts, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design; Project Anywhere; and University of Melbourne, 2018)This biennial conference event features presentations from artists that have successfully navigated blind peer evaluation as part of Project Anywhere's Global Exhibition Program (2017-2018), together with a series of invited presentations from established artists, designers, scholars, curators and writers actively engaged with practices outside traditional circuits. Today, an increasing number of artists and creative practitioners are working across spaces, places and temporalities well-beyond the limits of established exhibition formats. Accordingly, much contemporary creative activity is more concerned with events, actions, sites, relations and processes than with discrete outcomes. Artistic research can be represented in multiple ways as it moves between modes of conception, production and dissemination. This free two-day conference will explore questions associated with presenting, experiencing, discussing and evaluating art located anywhere and elsewhere in space and time. ISBN 978-1-692-06323-1. https://issuu.com/projectanywhere/docs/anywhere_elsewhere_2018_lores
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSounds of Unridden Waves - Dark Eden version(CoVA, 2021)Is it possible to make a surf-film without humans? Sounds of Unridden Waves is the world’s first feature length surf film without any human surfers. Its accompanying original soundtrack is produced by The Ghosts of Nothing— a fictional rock band formed in 2014 as a conceptual vehicle through which a diverse range of objects and activities can be produced. Taken together, these different objects and activities are understood to collectively point to, yet do not constitute, the work itself. This new work was developed as a collaboration between The Ghosts of Nothing (aka Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre) and over a dozen renowned surf film makers. It also includes contributions from over a dozen renowned surf film makers. The result, we argue, provides an example of contemporary post-conceptual art. Significantly, some forms of post-conceptual art do not manifest as a singular materialisation. Instead, they might be accessed in numerous ways or as an aggregate of medial elements. Presented as an unfolding series of speculative and immersive journeys across time and space, Sounds of Unridden Waves seeks to revive romantic ambitions historically associated with the so-called “total work of art”. Although fragmentary glimpses of recognizable surf breaks are occasionally apparent, the specific time and place at which Sounds of Unridden Waves is located is deliberately fluid. Far more than a straightforward moving image experience, its Dionysian omnivorousness occasionally veers towards the outermost limits of unbounded maximalism and conceptual chaos. In this respect, it is partly reminiscent of the content-saturated psychotropic dream states of early Surrealism, 1960s psychedelia, 1970s surf iconography, together with some recent examples of romantic conceptualism and neo-Baroque currents in contemporary art.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCelebrations, borrowings and appropriations: the authorship of identity in Australia’s costume history(Critical Costume, 2018-09-13)Conference presentation at 'Critical Costume' Conference 2018, with a focus on ethical costume.
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ItemEmbodied Imagination: An Approach to Stroke Recovery Combining Participatory Performance and Interactive Technology(ACM Press, 2019)Participatory performance provides methods for exploring social identities and situations in ways that can help people to imagine new ways of being. Digital technologies provide tools that can help people envision these possibilities. We explore this combination through a performance workshop process designed to help stroke survivors imagine new physical and social possibilities by enacting fantasies of "things they always wanted to do". This process uses performance methods combined with specially designed real-time movement visualisations to progressively build fantasy narratives that are enacted with and for other workshop participants. Qualitative evaluations suggest this process successfully stimulates participant’s embodied imagination and generates a diverse range of fantasies. The interactive and communal aspects of the workshop process appear to be especially important in achieving these effects. This work highlights how the combination of performance methods and interactive tools can bring a rich, prospective and political understanding of people’s lived experience to design.