Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemEditorial: Queer Performance(Australasian Drama Studies, 2022)
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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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ItemHIV and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Performance(University of Melbourne, 2021-12-01)The project aims to argue the value and role of the arts particularly theatre and performance—in HIV prevention in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It identifies the widening gaps in access to health promotion and new biomedical HIV prevention methods. Our key questions are: what performance work exists already? What can we learn from them in terms of artistic choices and organisational strategies that make them successful in a health context in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?
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ItemThe Butch Monologues: Performance as a Bridge from “Border Wars” to “Playground”(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)In this chapter Alyson Campbell looks at The Butch Monologues (TBM) by Libro Levi (Doc) Bridgeman, directed by JulieMc McNamara (Mack) (2013–present). Based mainly on an interview with the writer and director, and Campbell’s own multiple viewings of the work, the chapter examines how the collection and, more precisely, the productions of it, make an intervention into this very painful contemporary context, and history, of ‘“border wars’ between butch lesbians and trans men” (Mackay in J Lesbian Stud 23:399, 2019b; and see Halberstam, 1998). It is suggested that TBM manage to blur these borders, or at least niggle this negative framing, and Campbell argues that the stories it tells are more relevant than ever, given this current tension.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTheatre and the archives: Directing as erotohistoriography(https://sexualitysummerschoolonline.wordpress.com, 2020)
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ItemOh wow! He's queer! Queering Panto in Belfast: An Interview with Ross Anderson-Doherty(Bloomsbury, 2021-01-14)In this chapter, based on interview with performer Ross Anderson-Doherty, the authors examine the ways in which the panto form might be queered – an especially charged project in the particular locality of Belfast, North of Ireland.4 The chapter focuses on how Anderson-Doherty works to queer panto, largely in the role of the dame, through casting, rehearsal processes and in performance. In the Cabaret Supper Club and in panto, Anderson-Doherty is performing to largely heterosexual audiences, and he highlights some of the challenges he has faced, but also the sorts of queer interventions he has been able to make through performance. His approach to gender and his lived experience, coupled with the range of his work, have often clashed with the culture he works within, leading him to identify and adopt a set of strategies we might see as queering the spaces and artforms he engages with.
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ItemQueering Pedagogies(Project Muse, 2020-07-21)