School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAustralian Coal Theatrics(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2023-03)Climate change was the defining issue in the 2022 Australian federal election. As a new administration takes power, all sectors, including the performing arts, need to keep up the pressure. An iconic moment of “coal theatrics” in Parliament House, so labeled by the Australian media, stands in contrast to artistic performances that continue to put pressure on the framers of political and cultural policy.
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ItemThe Climate Siren Hanna Cormick's The Mermaid(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2022-09)An accomplished dancer, acrobat, and physical theatre performer, Hanna Cormick became ill in 2014 with a trifecta of rare genetic conditions that make her severely allergic to pollutants in the air — smoke, detergents, and food particles — and her bones and internal organs prone to dislocation. In January 2020, during Australia’s summer of unprecedented bushfires, Cormick stagedThe Mermaid, risking her life to make a performance about the climate emergency and how we are all vulnerable bodies at risk in a changing environment.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSolid and Liquid Modernities in Regional Australia(PALGRAVE, 2013-01-01)This chapter focuses on mobile and fluid identities in performance in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and in the Kimberley region of Western Australia: territories and regions with unique geographical and cultural features; that are closer to Asia than the large population centres of the nation; are both ancient and modern; and connected to local and global flows of culture, trade, technology and finance. Solid and liquid modernity cohabit in these regions in the form of iron ore, copper and gold and in the stocks and shares that circulate ‘free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints’ in the global marketplace (Bauman, 2000: 14).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntroduction: Regional Modernities in the Global Era(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
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ItemCaught in the Anthropocene: Theatres of Trees, Place and Politics(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2022-03)This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances by Indigenous companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku. It sets the scene with a visit to the Curtain Tree in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia, arguing that the vitality and display of its root system models a special kind of reciprocity between the performative elements of the environment and the environmental elements of theatre and performance. This is traced through recent short-run immersive works, Hanna Cormick's Mermaid (2020) and Melinda Hetzel and Company's Conservatory (2020), and a rereading of a canonical Australian drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
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ItemIndigenizing the Colonial Narrative Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife(University of Michigan Press, 2021)The white woman is a contested figure in Australian theatre and in recent Indigenous poetry. She was the colonial mistress of indentured Indigenous servants and a conflicted embodiment of competing modern identities. This chapter discusses Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife (2016), a significant new Australian play that radically historises Henry Lawson’s 1890s representation of the colonial white woman in the short story of the same name. Purcell is a Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Murri woman from Queensland and a widely known actor, writer, and director in Australian theatre, film and television. Lawson’s comic story describes an episode in the life of a long-suffering drover’s wife, who is left to fend for herself and her four children in an isolated bush hut. One night a wily snake disappears under the hut and the woman puts the children to bed and waits with the dog for it to reappear. Since then, the story has alluded to, challenged, painted and sung in over a century of rewritings and parodies. Purcell’s adaptation retains the original story’s nineteenth century bush setting but replaces the comic scenario of the original with a carefully woven drama that gradually reveals the woman’s mixed-race heritage, and that of her children. As a white woman, Purcell’s drover’s wife, performed by the playwright, is subjected to sexual violence in a lawless colony, but her discovery of her Indigenous heritage exposes her to racial violence and the loss of her children. In an effective transposition of human and animal, the snake from the original story is an Aboriginal man, Yadaka, himself a fugitive, whose dying insights help the woman acknowledge her identity. The chapter argues that Purcell’s adaptation of the iconic colonial story breaks new ground by not only deconstructing the certainties that underpin Lawson’s story, but shows how the white settler identity is inseparable from its historic encounter with Indigenous peoples. Moreso, The Drover’s Wife (2016) is a key play by an influential Indigenous woman that performatively deconstructs the singular category of the white woman and offers her the gift of a rich cultural heritage.
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Item'Not Now, Not Ever': Julia Gillard and the Performative Power of Affect(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
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ItemFeeling, Sensation, and Being Moved: Case Studies in Affective Performance(University of Toronto Press, 2017-09-01)This article examines three recent adaptations of canonical works of modern drama – Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Botho Strauss’s Gross und Klein – that resituate their historically troubled female characters within the temporality of the contemporary spectator. It argues that Katharina Schüttler’s cool and detached Hedda for the Schaubühne Berlin production, Isabelle Huppert’s karaoke-singing Blanche DuBois in Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe’s Un tramway, and Cate Blanchett’s emotionally vulnerable Lotte in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Gross und Klein bring gestural extra-literary qualities to the characters and unexpected affective registers that call for a new interpretation of gendered experience. The analysis focuses therefore on the feeling, somatic, non-cognitive, and pre-rational sides of lived experience in the west today. It is interested in how gender and emotion, sociality, and historicity produce gestic affects that move audiences along the pathways of reactive feeling and sensation.
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ItemMinor Characters in the NT Medea(http://www.skenejournal.it, 2017)This article considers contemporary trends in classical theatre and performance through the lens of the 2014 National Theatre London version of Euripides’ Medea directed by Carrie Cracknell and adapted by British writer and dramaturg Ben Power. The production team included Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin, who created a radical physicality for the Chorus of Corinthian Women, to a soundtrack composed by electronic pop duo Goldfrapp. As the audience enters it sees two young boys lying on the floor eating crisps and playing a video game while the Nurse looks on. Dressed in modern trainers, wide-legged highwaisted navy cotton pants and a pale blue sleeveless top, she is elegant, professional and in charge. Marketed as the NT Medea, the production was also transmitted through the National Theatre’s global live broadcast service to cinemas allowing many thousands of people to view the performance in their own cities and towns. When she speaks to the contemporary audience about the Argos, the fleece and blood, her words cross several time frames and spatial locations from Colchis to ancient Corinth to classical Athens, contemporary London and global cinemas, her words refer us to past and present places of private and civil unrest. This article considers the bringing together of the contemporary and the classical in a contemporary setting and behind that the question of theatre, its classical heritage and continuing cultural force.
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