School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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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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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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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ItemSurveillance aesthetics and theatre against "Empire"( 2003)Over the 1990s technologies and uses of surveillance developed at an expediential rate. We became accustomed to the presence of micro-cameras, sound recording devices, cross-referencing databases and software designed to recognise shapes and patterns, even human faces. Surveillance now performs an expanding array of regulatory, disciplinary, entertainment and protective functions. State and government organizations have adapted surveillance technologies to measure, predict, control and protect citizens. In the light of a sceptical public, politicians use surveillance images, transmitted by compliment media companies, as ‘justification’ or ‘evidence’ for their acts of rule, border protection and warfare. The corporate state freely monitors the activities of its workers and customers; both are now observed and measured in their everyday behaviours, their work and consumption patterns are monitored, their communications and habitual movements are ceaselessly recorded and reviewed. Such information is used to administer workplace regimes, ensure compliance to corporate ideology, censure thought and prevent collective organisation among workers. Detailed customer information gleaned through surveillance is itself a commodity. Although sometimes regulated, the sale of such information without the knowledge or approval of the consumer is commonplace. In the private sphere, individuals responding to the marketing of a general ‘ambient uncertainty’ (Bauman, 1998) sustain a massive home surveillance industry of cameras, movement sensors, gated communities and the like that far exceeds either the value of home wealth that is being protected, or the actual level of the security threat. And all this is extracurricular to a military-surveillance complex that instructs us to obey through carefully selected cinema verite images of missiles that can reach every corner of the globe and enter every domain. With such a visible, affective presence in society and culture, it is important that we debate the ongoing implications of surveillance mechanisms for society and for cultural production. Specifically this essay will consider how theatre might address the surveillance world. Surveillance will be discussed as a function of ‘Empire’ - a recently developing notion of power approximating and extending the logic of globalisation (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The essay will ultimately consider how theatre has offered insightful possibilities for challenging and resisting Empire in its most dystopian forms.