School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemJames McCaughey and the Mill Community Theatre Company 1978 -1984: the history of a brief theatrical experiment with a long tail( 2014)In Australia the 1970s could be characterised as a decade of civic generosity and cultural expansiveness. In terms of theatre and performance that expansiveness was reflected in the emergence of the community theatre movement and a determination to re-imagine the audience/performer relationship as one of inclusion and shared agency. My research places the specific and local work of the Mill Community Theatre Project within the wider context of national and international movements in the 1970s and early 1980s that identified art as generative of social change; of art and artists as agents for cultural transformation. While the company’s life was relatively short, its legacy, along with that of the Deakin performing arts course, which founding artistic director James McCaughey created simultaneously, has been substantial. McCaughey’s particular vision, derived from influences as diverse as Athenian tragedy and the aesthetics and techniques of contemporary postmodern dance, was for an integrated program of work in which formal innovation and artistic excellence could sit alongside an approach to community engagement that was process-based and inclusive. The Company’s location in a former Woollen Mill in the regional city of Geelong was provided by Deakin University, itself a radical new institution in 1976. This abandoned industrial space offered both subject matter and a context in which to explore the idea of “community” in relation to the uses of theatre and to question and test the form’s continued relevance in the late twentieth century with its plethora of competing media. While other community theatre companies in the country pursued essentially British models of popular theatre – circus, cabaret – or the agitprop political theatre models of an earlier era, the Mill under McCaughey set out to discover how the aesthetics of late modernism could be re-fashioned to serve particular social purposes but more particularly, as Copeau would urge, “to renovate the theatre and its audiences rather than to reinvent them.” (Copeau, 1913)