School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
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.
-
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.
-
ItemHeiner Müller’s Germania 3 Ghosts at Dead Man: atrocity and pain in German history and theatre( 2003)Language that injures and causes pain is embodied in the work of Heiner Müller. In evaluating this type of language, Judith Butler’s enquiry into injurious speech and linguistic vulnerability, applied in a case study of so-called hate-speech, might be usefully applied to theatrical speech:'When we say that an insult strikes like a blow, we imply that our bodies are injured by such speech. And they surely are, but not in the same way as a purely physical injury takes place' (Butler, 1997: 159).Racist, class-based and sexist hate-speech is injurious speech that exposes the linguistic vulnerability of subjects and the power of language to wound like a sword. Applied to Müller’s dramatic texts, I argue that the speeches uttered by various figurations mimic the operations of hate-speech in the social sphere, with the addition that the effects of the speech may also be shown.The question I pose is: Can the discourse of the performance text bear witness to and embody pain as well as demonstrate the violence that is both enacted within and a consequence of speech? I ask with Susan Sontag, What do these imaginary accounts do to the real pain of the victims of war and political struggle and what is the point of their transformation into art given that "the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree" (Sontag, 2003: 40)?
-
ItemNo Preview Available"White out: theatre as an agent of border patrol"(Cambridge University Press, 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.
-
ItemNo Preview Available
-
ItemNo Preview Available