School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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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ItemIntercultural performance in the context of cultural pluralism(Circus Oz and Monash University, Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, 2001)In this paper I will provisionally argue for the possibility of localised intercultural relationships in the live performing arts as an effective and pluralist site of resistance to totalising forces associated with globalisation. There will be four themes to my argument and I apologise in advance that I will only briefly touch on each of them. They are: i.Defining globalisation ii.Cultural pluralism iii.Australia and Japan (the two sites of performance culture that I have expertise in and have been asked to address) iv.Live performing arts: the Gekidan Kaitaisha-NYID project.
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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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ItemDiscussing theory-practice relationships in performance: a round-table discussion( 2001)With John Baylis, Tess DeQuincey, Deborah Pollard, David Pledger, Annette Tesoriero and Josephine Wilson. Edited and moderated by Peter Eckersall. On a hot day in January 2001, six artists gathered at The Performance Space in Sydney to discuss the meaning and relevance of “theory” to their work as arts practitioners.
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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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ItemFrom liminality to ideology: the politics of embodiment in prewar avant-garde theatre in Japan(University of Michigan Press, 2006)The aim of the avant-garde is nothing less than to bring about a revolution of everyday life by aesthetic means-to transform the modern world. This essay will examine the conditions for Japan’s avant-garde theater before World War II. A central theme of my examination will be the experience of embodiment, an active and visceral experience of the flesh in motion that is both essential to the theater experience as a whole and, when the politics of corporeality are brought into play, for example, of special importance in Japan. The avant-garde sensibility was and continues to be a fragile one in the context of Japan’s historical landscape, yet one that is ineluctably associated with ideas of cultural exploration, freedom, and above all, resistance to authoritarian forces. In the postwar period this is figured in the rise of a second wave of avant-garde theater tied to the counterculture and student protest movements in the 1960s. In the prewar era, the avant-garde’s cultural antagonist was rising militarism (that dystopian strand of the experience of modernity). In the course of their struggle, the avant-garde theater moved from exploring the body as a site of selfhood (shutaisei) to transforming itself into a quasi-socialist, social-realist vanguard force that came to reject its own historical formations.
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ItemThe space in between: four languages in a swamp( 2002)This paper was presented as part of a performance, comprising the delivery of the paper, visual signifiers consisting of four watermelons and a large wooden tub half-filled with water, and a 'group dynamics demonstration table'. On this table I used a box of fruit to demonstrate the changing dynamics of the group involved in the project under discussion. As will become clear, the dynamics started badly and deteriorated to the point of near hysteria. Since this demonstration cannot adequately be translated into linguistic signs on a page, I will indicate here only the general nature of the demonstration as it progressed to its point of explosion. The space: a lectern is placed downstage left; a very large wooden tub half-filled with water sits slightly upstage centre, with a table behind it. On the table are four large watermelons; downstage right is a large table, the 'group dynamics demonstration table', and behind it a basket filled with fruit. A full bottle of vodka sits on the table. Facing all of this is the audience seating bank, and behind it a very large projection screen. As the audience enter, a video of 'Inje', the production under discussion in this paper, is playing silently on the screen, and continues throughout, with slides also projected onto it at various times. SFX: Bulgarian music, quite loud, which fades out as I arrive at the lectern.
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ItemBloody Roman narratives: gladiators, 'fatal charades' and Senecan Theatre( 2003)In an interview not long before his death in 1995, East German playwright Heiner Müller predicted that the theatrical medium would soon be faced with an important decision. Provoked by the fact that one of his plays, Mauser, in which a character is executed, had been performed in a penitentiary by murderers awaiting the death penalty, Müller asked what it would mean for theatre if some one were to be really killed in a performance? A borderline would have been crossed and the medium would face a crisis: There will be gladiator games again in the not too distant future. There will be performances where people will be actually killed. There is already an indication of this in television, everything is moving in that direction: reality TV. What will that mean for the theatre? Will the theatre become part of it, will it be integrated or will it find another route and remain symbolic? That is the essential question (in Weber, 2001: 228).This paper seeks to ask a question: if it is the case that the audience of mainstream entertainment are showing an overwhelming preference for ‘reality television’ over fiction as represented in film and theatre, then what can we learn from history when the line between staged actual pain and staged fictional pain became blurred?
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ItemManagerialism meets Dionysos: theatre and civic order( 2005/06)I want to begin my talk with a rhetorical quiz. I say ‘rhetorical’ because, if you do yell out the right answer, it will spoil my punch line. You have to guess who is being referred to by X in the following quotation (which I have adapted very slightly):The underlying messages of X’s system are efficiency, professionalism, management by experts, social order...all this is to take place in a society balanced by...leadership and market forces. Any one of a number of our most enlightened federal leaders might come to mind, though, if you are from the state of Victoria like me, you are likely to guess that X refers to our beloved state leader. If you are in the business of applying for arts funding in Victoria, you may have even guessed that X refers to Arts Victoria, the state government’s arts funding department. And indirectly, you would indeed be absolutely right. However, in this particular instance, the quotation from John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization (1997: 27) refers to Benito Mussolini. I would like to propose that there is an underlying connection between that earlier leader with an edifice complex, contemporary corporatism, and arts funding (quagmired as it is in managerialism and a ‘performance management’ structure) on the one hand and citizenship, Greek theatre, and the absence of an arts industry, on the other. Oh, and bread. I’ll come to the bread bit later. In this paper, I am going to explore these connections, drawing upon my recent experience running a theatre company and venue for five years in Melbourne (namely, Theatreworks in the bayside suburb of St Kilda) and upon my experience (now using that word in its mostly vicarious sense) of ancient Greek theatre, both as an academic, a sometimes practitioner, and an audience member. In examining these connections, I will be exploring the balance of, and the tension and state of suspension between, a number of oppositions, such as order and disorder, concreteness and fluidity, predictability and unpredictability, industry and system. Towards the end of the paper, I will be suggesting that the situation we find ourselves in at the turn of the century does not have to be tolerated, that we do not in the end need to enter into the transactions on the menu (to use Adorno’s phrase) and on the terms offered. At the very end, I will be offering you an opportunity to participate in a Bacchic orgy - well, one suitable to a conference on industrial relations at least.
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ItemArt War ‘44: documentary theatre from an Australian culture war( 2005)On page four of the Sydney Morning Herald, 24th October 1944, two seemingly unrelated news items were reported. The first, CHALLENGED ART PRIZE – Court Hearing Begins, reported the commencement on the previous day of the legal challenge to William Dobell’s victory the year before in the Archibald competition for portrait painting. In what is now a well-known case, Dobell had entered a ‘portrait’ of fellow portrait painter and friend, Joshua Smith. Lower down the page, and to the left, was another important headline: LIBERAL PARTY APPROVED. Some days earlier, the same paper had reported that, if all relevant parties agreed, the title United Australia Party would disappear and all non-Labour opposition parties (except for the Country Party) would unite under a new name, The Australian Liberal Party. Here, on the same page, was notice of two events that proved to be more than incidentally linked, and which served as the basis of a theatrical production called Art War ’44, performed in the Open Stage, University of Melbourne in October 1999. I devised, directed, and co-created the work with third and fourth year undergraduate students in Theatre Studies from the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne, who also performed the piece. This work preceded by several years a similar theatrical treatment of the Dobell trial, entitled Art on Trial, written by Robert Smith and performed early in 2002. There is an intriguing confluence of events, themes, forces and people that swirl around – before, during and after - the Dobell trial, and others that resonated in a particular way in Art War '44. The human agents in this confluence (as I interpreted and 'reconstructed' it) include Sir Robert Menzies, Sir Garfield Barwick, Sir John Kerr, and John Howard, as well as William Dobell and Joshua Smith. Other significant facets include the birth of the Australian Liberal Party and of the Australian Academy of Art, and the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ art movements in Australia. Australia’s Constitutional Monarchy, the sacking of the Whitlam Labour Government in 1975, and the Republic Referendum in 1999 (one week after the performance season of the show) all make an appearance. Of course, not all of these figures and events were involved directly. But there are a number of fascinating connections between them that provided excellent material for a work of ‘documentary theatre’ (especially one created and performed in the spirit and exaggerated style of Dobell’s painting of Joshua Smith).In this paper, I briefly examine some of the trial’s more ‘theatrical’ elements (a detailed account of the trial can be found, for example, in Adams, 1983: 92-224 and Gleeson, 1964: 115-144) and aspects of its wider social, political and cultural contexts. I will also call to witness those later events involving both the people and the themes of the trial mentioned above, and detail how all these factors were structured into our work of ‘documentary theatre.’ This paper, then, is an analysis of aspects of the ‘dramaturgy’ of a work of documentary theatre. The term ‘dramaturgy’ is slippery, but here is taken to mean ‘the relation between the means of expression (the narrative material, stage space and time, formal organisation) and the vision of the world to be expressed’ (Helbo, 1991: 2). Dramaturgy, by combining ideological and aesthetic structures, involves active choices about what is included in the work, when, in what way, and the interpretive frameworks that are set up by these choices for a particular set of audiences.