School of Performing Arts - Theses

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    A Creative Reconstruction of Pre-Islamic Naghali
    Sheshgelani, Elnaz ( 2020)
    Naghali is one of the most ancient surviving forms of Persian dramatic performance and focuses on storytelling. Severe restrictions were imposed after the Islamic conquest of Persia (c. 651 AD) and Naghali was recently placed on UNESCO’s "List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding". Only scant information remains about its pre-Islamic form. However, the subsequent changes were substantial because Islam proscribes many of the aspects that are believed to have been a part of pre-Islamic Naghali, such as dance, female performers, puppets, masks and music. The research described in this thesis adopts a practice-led approach that creatively reconstructs some of the lost aspects of Naghali, thereby synthesising new knowledge from the limited set of clues found in ancient illustrations from the Shahnameh (Persian Book of Kings). Because illustrations form the main source of information used for the reconstruction, this research focuses on the gestural, aspects of pre-Islamic Naghali, and a major research output of this project is the creation of the Naghali Gestural Vocabulary (NGV). The potential contribution of Naghali to Western dramatic arts is demonstrated through Naghali-based performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; an annotated video of one such performance accompanies this thesis and is an integral part of the research output.
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    Developing a computer-based interactive system that creates a sense of deep engagement
    Athugala, Renusha Mandara Vishruta ( 2020)
    This project develops a low-cost computer-based interactive system that generates a sense of deep engagement in the user, similar to that experienced when engaging with an artwork. It is based on the Buddhist concept of ‘Sati’; being relaxed, focused, aware, and paying attention to the present moment: which is understood as having a sense of deep engagement. Sati Interactive System integrates elements of an artwork; colour, sound, and body movement to create this sense. Research has shown that the independent use of colour, sound, and body movement can provide benefits such as: generating positive emotions, achieving a relaxed state, and improvements in psychological and physical health. This project integrates colour, sound, and movement in a low-cost computer-based interactive system to create a sense of deep engagement. Literature on colour, sound, movement, computer-based interactivity, philosophies of technology, human-computer interaction, aspects of grounded theory, and the arts, form the basis and methodology for the development and testing of the system. An evaluation of the system was based on data collected from 30 participants. 71 percent of participants provided positive responses to using the system, indicating that the Sati Interactive System was effective in creating a relaxed, focused state, and not feeling the time passing while using the system and afterwards. From this information we understood that a sense of ‘Sati’, or deep engagement had been generated. This project includes the application “Sati Interactive”, that can be downloaded and used on a computer with a Windows or Macintosh operating system. Max and QuickTime software should be installed before running the Sati Interactive application. Instructions and links can be found in the Instructions.pdf in the Sati Interactive folder. The computer should have a webcam, speakers, and a screen. The minimum system specifications are: Intel i5 or AMD Ryzen 3 2.7 Ghz processor, 8GB ram, and 1.5GB video graphics card to run on a laptop or a desktop computer without audio-video lags.
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    Contemporary Australian Gothic theatre sound
    O'Neil, Miles Henry ( 2018)
    This practice-based research analyses the significance of sonic dramaturgies in the development and proliferation of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre. Taking an acoustemological approach, I consider the dramaturgical role of sound and argue that it is imperative to the construction and understanding of contemporary Gothic theatre and that academic criticism is emergent in its understanding. By analysing companies and practitioners of contemporary Australian Gothic theatre, I identify and articulate their innovative contributions towards what has been called “the Sonic Turn”. My case studies include Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm and practitioner Tamara Saulwick. I argue that the state of Victoria has a particular place in the development of contemporary Gothic theatre and highlight the importance of the influences of Gothic Rock, rock band aesthetics, Nick Cave, and the Gothic myths and legends and specific landscapes of Victoria. I identify dramaturgical languages that describe the function of sound in the work of these practitioners and the crucial emergence of sound as a dominant affective device and its use in representing imagined landscapes of post-colonial Australia. I also analyse sound in relation to concepts of horror and trauma. I position my practice and my work as co-artistic director of the Suitcase Royale within the Sonic Turn and in relation to other Gothic theatre companies and practitioners. Drawing on theories of spectrality and presence, I formulate a theoretical language of the Sonic Gothic as it relates to contemporary Australian theatre. I contend that contemporary Australian Gothic theatre is culturally unique in its preoccupation with sound and that sonic experiments in the Gothic are creating new understandings of the use of sound in theatre. My creative work, a soundscape for theatre entitled Disappearing into Darkness, is submitted as a high-quality Mp3 file accompanying the written dissertation. It was created as an alternative text and will be used as the foundational material for the development of a new work of Australian Gothic dance theatre.
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    Bodies of influence: contemporary dance in Melbourne 1995 – 2005
    Miller, Sarah Elizabeth ( 2016)
    In the 1990s, prompted by the widely held view that the contemporary Australian dance sector was struggling, the Australia Council began a process of policy change aimed at ensuring the sustainability of contemporary Australian dance. The changes enacted by the Australia Council had a profound effect on the make-up of the Australian dance sector and dramatically changed the nature of contemporary dance practice in Melbourne in particular. In this thesis I examine choreographic works produced in Melbourne in the period 1995 – 2005. Focusing on selected works by key choreographers from this period, I argue that the period 1995 – 2005 marks a clear and fundamental change in the status of the contemporary choreographer. Shaped by an increasing trend towards professionalisation and the requirements of recurrent funding models, the craft of choreography during this time came to rely upon the language of business and mainstream culture to justify its value. At the same time, because contemporary dance became further ensconced within the university sector, it became a critical practice that provided a performance based model for exploring and critiquing social issues and ideas. I present a case study analysis of five Melbourne-based choreographers from which I demonstrate how individual choreographic works reflect the institutional and organisational demands placed on choreographers within this landscape as much as they reflect each choreographer’s personal narrative, formal enquiries, or experiments in embodied expression. I argue that during the period 1995 – 2005 there is an underlying tension between a critique of mainstream culture and the utilisation of its resources, institutions and technologies.
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    An unfinished mindful body meets live choreographies of solo dance
    Roberts, Paul H. ( 2017)
    My practice-led research that utilises live solo performances of improvised contemporary dance, explores the notion that the body can be considered as unfinished, unresolved. My research shows that such conceptualisations foster productive links between dance and bodily specificity. Furthermore, how somatic attentiveness, a key element in my praxis, links to values such as human development, and social responsibility, is also explored by this dissertation. These explorations consider the socio-political agency of my work with live performance. This dissertation shows how awareness of bodily specificity clarifies understandings of personal and social response-ability. The consistent application of somatic attentiveness throughout my praxis has provided a sense of continuity between experiences of movement associated with personal, political, cultural, social, and academic actions. A theme returned to repeatedly throughout my thesis is that the personal, the social, the cultural, the political, and the academic are enmeshed. No one precedes the other. Phenomenology as a philosophical approach positions lived experience, and the body, centrally. My research has been significantly supported and furthered through exposure to materials from this field. The work of philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Philipa Rothfield, Elizabeth Behnke and others in response to Husserlian Phenomenology has informed my work. Perspectives which have guided my inquiries have also come from autoethnography, dance theory and performance theory, through the work of theorists and philosophers including Carolyn Ellis, Bojana Cvejić, Danielle Goldman, Susan Leigh Foster and Ann Cooper Albright.
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    Microsound, spectra, and objectivity: tracing memetics in organised sound
    Giles, Vincent ( 2016)
    This dissertation proposes a novel memetic framework and creative methodology to probe the mechanism underpinning the transmission of a composer’s intention to an audience, contending that cultural replicators – memes – drive our understanding of a composer’s intention. It is hypothesized that memes catalyse the creation of artefacts which, in turn, act as instigators for memetic replication in brains. Additionally, it is hypothesized that microsound – sound at the edge of perception – may play a key role as memetic instigator. Thinking about these hypotheses and how they might be interrogated through works of organized sound (music, sonic art), yields creative deployment of microsound in primarily scored works. This creative process allows the researcher to arrive at a deeper understanding of memetics and to formalize the conceptual memetic framework and hypotheses described herein. In this way, theory and practice become interlocked in the search for evidence of memes in the creation of works of organized sound, and the role memes play in an audience’s ability to (re)construct the intention of a composer. The scope of this methodology facilitated the creation of a large quantity of creative works throughout candidature, of which four notated/semi-notated musical compositions and one piece of software (made in MaxMSP) are included in the final thesis, with the other related works are included in the appendices and accompanying media. Mozart Variations is an open, graphical score for any number of musicians that assisted in formalising the small- meme stance; silver as a catalyst in organic reactions takes the meme as a metaphor, using existing data structures (a silver atom bonded with a carbon atom) as the source to be ‘read’, akin to genetic replication, and is for solo baroque violin; End to Reattain for violin and electronics is a structured improvisation that plays with microsound and its perceptual bases; It needs a big ‘ow’ sound; ow-nd... ground! for solo low woodwind attempts to trace the lineages of microsound (and by implication, memes) across multiple iterations of music, by ‘tracing’ composer Evan Johnson’s Ground and creating a variation piece that retains key structural information but is otherwise thoroughly transformed, and; Spectral Domain Microsound Amplification Software (SDMAS) is a software prototype to amplify those sounds in a frequency spectrum that are generally inaudible, and was deployed in pieces that are listed in the appendices. All works include a score and recording, or the software, as appropriate.
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    "Dwelling" and "un-dwelling" into auto-ethno-topographic performance
    Fedorova, Olena ( 2016)
    In this thesis I explore questions about home through two important philosophical groupings: “dwelling” and “un-dwelling.” Tuan’s notion that place is a “pause in movement,” a “dwelling,” invites us to see migration and exile as “un-dwelling,” as a loss of home. My childhood exposure to the Chernobyl disaster and subsequent migration/exile to Australia is personal, and it creates for me a sense of displacement and the loss of my former self. Through performance practice and dissertation this research is a practical and theoretical investigation into complex ideas about home, “dwelling” (an attachment to place) and “un-dwelling” (loss) in relation to the self and others. The study engages with philosophy, geography, memory studies and environmental ethics, which open up a wider political, social and philosophical engagement, paying attention not only to the politics of place, but also to the political potential of performance. Drawing on these ideas, I propose a concept of an auto-ethno-topographic model of performance/installation and, through this model, argue that this mode of performance can be political and social. Applying qualitative, heuristic and practice-based research methodology, I theorise my use of this new mode through particular dramaturgical strategies: installation, immersion and audience participation. The relationship of the creative work to the written dissertation follows the “Research Question Model” – where both the dissertation and the performance address the research question in complementary but different ways. My creative work 4383 days of the child (December 2014) investigates how home, “dwelling” and “un-dwelling” can be “re-created” (Heddon, 2008) through live performance/installation. In the practice I attempt to create a haptic, visceral and experiential performance that can convey personal story in a powerful and resonant way, identifying and giving access to a connection between my own story and “social identity” (Tilley, 2008) and between my memories and the memories of audience members/participants.
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    (K)rap(p): voice as gaze in the mundane
    Loughrey, Sean ( 2015)
    (K)rap(p): Voice as Gaze in the Mundane examines ekphrasis - the “telling of vision” - in contemporary art. Between the scenario of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; unorthodox voice recordings by Konstantin Raudive, recorded interviews and archived material relating to my deceased parents’ involvement in the Communist Party of Australia during the 1950s; a type of proletarianisation of the gaze, an ekphrastic dematerialisation and re-materialisation of vision is interrogated into political and uncanny dimensions. The ekphrastic relation to art is that of viewing and articulating, visually rendering an articulation as an inversion of ekphrasis. The sonorous act of verbalizing becomes visual representation, therefore art. Paradoxically the notion of what constitutes art is complicated by its own description. The research begins with the examination of art and voice in relation to ekphrasis, hypothesising whether ekphrasis might be made visible as art through its inversion and concludes with voice in relation to the spectral, invisible in both social and political terms, made visible through the unification of sound (voice recordings) and image (archival and artefact), in which selected audio and visual material are manipulated to form artwork. The exhibition created for this project was an accumulation of these manipulations, found and fabricated artworks in the form of photography, voice recordings and collated archival material including original documents regarding the Communist Party between 1948 and 1960. The selected material was presented with archaic voice recording equipment as part of the Installation project exhibited at the Margret Lawrence Gallery in February 2015. The exhibition was not just a product of research into the Communist Party of Australia, but of voice in the broader sense. Voice has been examined from multiple facets, in its many incarnations and it is through Samuel Beckett’s work and Raudive recordings that voice as a subject of the gaze has highlighted the uncanny potential of voice as gaze.
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    Listening art: making sonic artworks that critique listening
    Robinson, Camille ( 2016)
    Sonic artists and listeners to sonic artworks tend to take for granted that how a listener listens to a sonic artwork affects what that listener perceives that sonic artwork to be, through the listener’s inclusion, exclusion, and interpretation of the sonic events that constitute a given artwork. This tendency leaves the act of perception un-theorised in the production of sonic artworks, and unquestioned in their reception by listeners. This project seeks to address this problem by making sonic artworks that take criticality of listening as their primary focus, on the part of artists and listeners. Its aim is to explore structuring sonic artworks around critical discourses on listening, and for those artworks to foster critical reflection on listening by listeners, hinging on the question: “how can sonic artworks be made that form critiques of listening?” Based on an integration of schema theory and immanent critique, I devise and apply a rationale for making sonic artworks structured as discourses on listening. I complement this with an original adaptation of the Heuristic Research method, which I use to determine whether the artworks made for the project foster critical reflection on listening in audience experience, through the collection and appraisal of a group of listener’s descriptions of their experiences of the works.
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    Creative collaboration in and as contemporary performance practice
    Lifschitz, Sonya ( 2014)
    Situated within the practice-led research paradigm, this thesis comprises a folio of recordings of four new works for piano and a dissertation, Creative Collaboration in and as Contemporary Performance Practice. Using the specific examples of the collaborative projects involving myself as performer and four Australian composers, this study integrates artistic practice and qualitative analysis to investigate collaborative creativity in composer–performer dyads working within the contemporary Western art music tradition. Three of the four recorded collaborations are used as case studies in the dissertation. Framed by the contemporary theories of collaborative creativity proposed by Vera John-Steiner and the creative cognition theory developed by Thomas Ward, Steven Smith and Ronald Finke, the discussion aims to provide insight into the creative processes of musical work-realisation and the way collaboration between composers and performers impacts on content-generation, notation, interpretation, and transmission of new musical works. Challenging the apparent schism between the ‘constructive’ and the ‘reproductive’ modes of musical practice characteristic of Western art music, a model of musical work co-construction is proposed, in which the ‘musical work’ is seen as a complex and dialectic interplay between the generative, interpretive, and performative processes that the composer and the performer engage with through a bi-directional feedback loop that exists within the collaborative setting. The study draws on a variety of qualitative research approaches and the method of Thematic Analysis specifically, enabling the identification of key themes through which to conceptualise, interpret and report the results of the research. The rigorous investigation of the collaborative case studies suggests that co-creative engagement between contemporary performers and composers in the process of musical work-realisation significantly enhances artistic outcomes and has important implications for contemporary performance and notational practices, the locus of creativity, and the participatory nature of artistic practice.