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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ItemFocus on the body: towards a feminist reading of Brecht in performance( 2000)In 1993 I directed Brecht’s The Good Person of Sichuan at the Open Stage Theatre at the University of Melbourne. Like most directors, I found the text’s tightly woven and theoretically inscribed composition resistance to meddling. Brecht’s dramaturgy, structured on a Marxist-derived aesthetic and embodied in the techniques of Verfremdung and Gestus, weighs heavily on the creative development of the play in performance. I am in full sympathy with Leander Haussman’s claim that Brecht’s plays are constructed linguistically and dramaturgically like a house of cards and therefore can only be reproduced by slaves to the text. Not wanting to be a slave but also, unlike Haussman, unwilling not to do Brecht, I prowled for gaps into which our production could insert a differently-motivated, feminist mise-en-scene.
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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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ItemRethinking the performance of Brecht: lines of flight, becoming and the female subject( 2000)This essay brings together a number of related but frequently separated discourses around the themes of performance, gender and Epic theatre within the frame of a feminist analysis of theatrical performance. It maps the possibilities of exchange across the borders of specific practices and their discourses in an effort to think about the productive value of border-crossing. I model this crossing-of-borders on a reading of the text and performance of Bertolt Brecht' s modernist classic, The Good Person of Sichuan, in which the theatrical notion of performance is examined through a feminist application of the Deleuzian concept of becoming. The Deleuzian analysis of Brecht adds a new dimension to performance analysis and helps to revise and historicise Brecht' s politics for a contemporary public. This task is an important one for Brecht is worth doing still. He returned to the Australian stage in 1998 and 1999 in two contrast ing productions - the true-to-Brecht Melbourne Theatre Company production of The Resistable Rise ofArturo Ui, directed by Simon Phillips and the 'renovated' Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney) production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Kantor - suggesting that a revival of interest in political theatre position s itself through a relation to Brechtian theatre. Finding a productive way forward for Brechtian theatre is crucial to the avoidance of the pitfalls that negate the cultural critique that the plays make possible.