School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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.
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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.