Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications

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    Creating Kaleidoscopic Characters: Working with Performance to Develop Character Stories Prior to Screen Story
    Black, A ; Dzenis, A ; Taylor, S ; Batty, C (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
    This chapter draws on practice that begins the filmmaking process with character performance before developing a script. Hence characterisation precedes the script and suggests a viable model of story development and film production. This chapter examines a development process of creating nuanced characters prior to the screenwriting practice through a comparative examination of the methods used by contemporary filmmakers working with actors and performance prior to story or script. The chapter investigates approaches to screen work and methods used by UK filmmaker Mike Leigh and Indie US filmmaker Miranda July and draws from Angie Black’s filmmaking practice in the development of the feature film, The Five Provocations (Black, 2018) as a case study. This chapter highlights the importance of character in story creation and how collaboration with cast at the initial stages of the screenwriting process can play a significant part in capturing compelling screen performances that lead to greater character verisimilitude and emotional integrity in the completed film.
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    Vertiginous Viriditas: for a Planthropscene, not a Plantationocene
    Laird, T ; Green, C ; Cattapan, J (Art + Publishing, University of Melbourne, 2021)
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    The Butch Monologues: Performance as a Bridge from “Border Wars” to “Playground”
    Campbell, A ; Rosenberg, T ; D'Urso, S ; Winget, AR (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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    “Very Much a Laboratory”: Barrie Kosky and the Gilgul Ensemble 1991–1997
    Prior, Y ; Delbridge, M ; Phillips, J ; Severn, JR (Springer, 2021)
    This chapter surveys the work of the Gilgul Ensemble, an independent theatre company established by Barrie Kosky in 1991 to investigate Jewish identity, history and performance. Across the six-year lifespan of the company, Gilgul created five works that cemented Kosky’s growing reputation as a director and theatre-maker of uncommon vision and boldness. The authors, Yoni Prior and Matthew Delbridge, were members of the original ensemble and the chapter draws on interviews with past ensemble members to consider the idiosyncratic dramaturgy and collaborative working methods that forged the work, and the evolving stage language that developed across the span of the works. The chapter also reflects on the local and international cultural contexts out of which the work emerged, locating it in an historical moment when Australian (and peculiarly Melbournian) theatre artists were responding explicitly to the diversity of the Australian population through investigations of narratives of migration, and the transmutation of languages, accents and traditions of originary cultures. This work tended to the postmodern, multi-modal, multi-lingual and self-reflexive, whilst cannily appropriating and adapting the high theatricality of past performance traditions.
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    Curating with the Internet
    Lowry, S ; Buckley, B ; Conomos, J (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020-01-01)
    This chapter explores Internet-based and Internet-activated approaches to curating art through both established and non-traditional exhibition circuits. Today, new curatorial approaches are emerging in tandem with digitally-activated modes of presentation and dissemination distinguished by perpetual reproducibility, multiple intersecting temporalities and materializations, and the subsidence of physical space. Accordingly, this chapter will discuss networked, distributed, and modular approaches that variously disrupt, democratize, antagonize, institutionalize—and in some cases altogether bypass—the figure of the curator. Significantly, many of these approaches are no longer necessarily connected to singular events or spaces and are perhaps better understood as omnidirectional movements between modes of conception, production and dissemination connected through the screen as a communal space. This communal space might offer either access to new works, illuminate the existence of works understood to be elsewhere in time and space, or offer multiple or alternative materializations, versions, attributions, interpretations and representations of existing works.
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    Beastly Beauty: ecological entanglement via colour separation
    Laird, T ; Laird, T (National Gallery of Victoria, 2020)
    This chapter is a fictocritical response to the work Extinction, 2020, by the Italian Design duo Carnovsky. The article draws both on my background with colour studies (A Rainbow Reader, 2013), and animal studies (Bat, 2018). Responding to each colour Carnovsky has used in their installation (RGB - Red Green Blue) in relation to the IUCN red list of extinct and endangered animals, I weave a conversational text that is both about aesthetics and ecological politics. The text is deliberately poetic in order to evoke the beauty of the natural world, and of the work itself. But it also, like the work, hopes to engender reflection on the reality of the 6th Major Extinction Event.
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    Keep New Zealand Green
    Laird, T ; Stone, V (McCahon House Trust, 2020)
    This special publication marks the 100th anniversary of Colin McCahon's birth. To celebrate, over the course of a year, 66 authors, critics, and cultural commentators within New Zealand and beyond, reflect on the cultural legacy of McCahon via engagement with the McCahon artwork of their choice. Originally published online, this book consolidates all the texts in print form. My own contribution discusses McCahon's Keep New Zealand Green variations, a suite of paintings with environmental themes, through the lens of contemporary eco-feminism.
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    The Promiscuous Screenplay: A Tale of Wanton Development and Loose Authorship
    Jackson, S ; Batty, C ; Taylor, S (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
    The highly standardised and industrialized models dominating script development have left little room for esoteric meanderings in either screenplay form or content. Having recently completed the independent feature film You can say vagina, which employed highly unorthodox development and writing methods to generate content and performance, I am happily reminded that there are many ways to skin the cinematic cat. This project has also generated in me a proselytising urge—not to gather disciples for a particular ‘new way’ of developing screenplays, but rather to urge some old-fashioned rule breaking and rebellion. In this chapter I outline what, for this film project, was a flexible and generative mode of working outside of the commercial system, employing both alternative technologies (mechanical and organic) and unconventional content generation strategies. I affectionately describe this method of working as ‘promiscuous collaboration’—collaborative practice that is wide ranging in its artistic liaisons and often indiscriminate when it comes to authorship.
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    Oh wow! He's queer! Queering Panto in Belfast: An Interview with Ross Anderson-Doherty
    Campbell, A ; McTighe, T ; Edwards, M ; Farrier, S (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.