School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
-
ItemThe challenges of valuing culture in Australia, and the role of symbiosis in understanding cultural interactions( 2019)This research examines the conditions and narratives that surround cultural value, particularly within the fields of cultural diplomacy, cultural policy and the arts. These conditions and narratives are situated within the context of knowledge or innovation-based societies where, over the past two decades, a rise in cultural value discourse has occurred. Knowledge-based societies also feature post-industrial economies and, therefore, in this thesis, the tendency to value culture in terms of economics is of particular significance. In Australia, this is evident across various municipal levels, from local councils to the federal government. Through a series of case studies encompassing the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the City of Melbourne and a federal policy proposal for a National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, I argue a common approach to the valuation of culture is evident, and is one that is rooted in instrumentalisation—or what Yudice characterises as expediency, where ‘culture-as-resource’ is a means to an end. However, this narrow scope limits the possibility to understand more about the different types of value that culture (such as the arts) can have, particularly when it comes to aesthetic exploration of new knowledges, global networks and relationships. To explore alternative considerations of what value culture can offer to both societies and people alike, I consider European theatre collective Rimini Protokoll’s ability to display the culture of nations in their touring performance of 100% City. Here, another realisation of the value of culture is discernible. In political terms, this is cultural value that resides outside the typical state-to-public facilitation of public diplomacy and rests on a people-to-people mode of communication. As a result, I argue that the current, utilitarian vocabulary surrounding the value of culture should be expanded and developed further to reflect its operation today in the age of global networks and relationships. Such an expansion incorporates a symbiotic consideration of the interactions that occur over the course of cultural relationships and counterbalances the over-reliance on economic and political factors and evaluations. My proposal serves to further refine understandings of ‘the cultural’ within the discourse of cultural value. To do so, I draw upon the biological understanding of relationships, referred to as symbiosis, to study how cultural value is understood amongst the private and public sector actors across three key dimensions: the economic, the political and the social. As a result, I propose cultural symbiosis as a conceptual metaphor that assists in the articulation of the more complex and multifaceted relations that cultural activity can generate. This conceptualisation provides the basis for an approach that better articulates the relations of cultural activity and one that extends the neoliberal vocabulary currently used to describe culture and the discourse of cultural value.
-
Item‘Awkward moments, optional electric shocks’: the products and politics of intermedial participatory performance( 2017)This project argues for a more nuanced understanding of performances that frame social interactions and technological mediations as aesthetic experience. Through observation, interviews, participation and dramaturgical analysis, this thesis interrogates the roles and agencies of artists, participants, technologies and institutions in interactive and participatory performances. The detailed description of these performances provides substantial insights into the entanglement of human and non-human actors within participatory art, and the important aesthetic and political implications of these contemporary participatory practices.
-
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)
-
ItemDecentred perspectives: dramaturgical developments in dance( 2014)This thesis investigates dramaturgy in the development of contemporary dance. It examines how dramaturgy, which has previously functioned as the structuring of text and narrative practices in theatre, has been transformed in its alignment with dance. Using case studies from modern and contemporary dance, observation of rehearsals, and interviews with dance dramaturgs, my research develops the terms ‘decentred dramaturgy’ and ‘body dramaturgy’ to demonstrate how the practice of dramaturgy augments dance. In the process I argue that to acknowledge the particularities of dance dramaturgy enables us to open new dramaturgical considerations in theatre. To do this the thesis examines how the epistemology of dance has moved dance practice towards dramaturgical innovations that reconsider the frame through which to engage with performance. It argues that a comprehensive dramaturgical perception of dance incorporates a review of how experience and reception of performance can be an embodied as well as a culturally relevant experience. It considers how the role of dramaturg contributes to the discourse of dramaturgy and examines how the role of the dramaturg broadens the perspective of dramaturgy to include the conceptual as well as the practical aspects of the process and the production. The thesis concludes that the term ‘decentred dramaturgy’ – that works with as well as from simultaneous and multiple perspectives – best describes the approach to understanding and articulating a dance dramaturgy.
-
ItemTrance forms: a theory of performed states of consciousness( 2004-06)This study investigates forms of theatre/performance practice and training that can be seen to employ ‘trance’ states or engage the concept of ‘states of consciousness’ as performative practice. Trance is considered to be the result of sustained involvement with detailed information that is structurally organised, invoking imaginative and affective engagements that are maintained as interactions between the performer, other performers, the environment and audience of the performance. This thesis investigates trance performance through the conceptual lens of dramatic arts practice. In their respective cultural contexts, trance and theatre attain qualities considered as sacredness. Trance practice and performance, across a range of cultural contexts, are analysed as social processes - as elements of power relations that influence the performer, audience and environment of the performance. As performance traditions and events, this study will examine strands of praxis that can be drawn from Constantin Stanislavski to Lee Strasberg to Mike Leigh; from Antonin Artaud to Samuel Beckett and Jerzy Grotowski; from the Balinese trance performance form of Sanghyang Dedari in the 1930s to the 1990s; from the Channeling practitioners in the U.S. in the 1930s to Seth and Lazaris in the 1970s to the 1990s; and from traditions of military training, performance violence, and rhetoric associated with the attacks of the 11th of September 2001 in the U.S. and its aftermath.
-
ItemDialectical aesthetics: war theatre in the twenty-first century( 2013)This thesis analyzes twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 Western military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It examines six recent anti-war plays by renowned Western playwrights and theatremakers Tony Kushner (America), the Théâtre du Soleil (France), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) and Caryl Churchill (Britain). The study employs a methodology based on the theoretical writings of seminal playwright, director and thinker Bertolt Brecht and his application of Marxist dialectics to the theatre. It reviews the historical relation between Marxist dialectics and dramatic aesthetics for Brecht and develops a definition of the ‘Brechtian dialectical aesthetic’. It argues that the critiques of war and its effects in the chosen contemporary plays can usefully be understood in relation to the Brechtian devices of Verfremdungseffekt, gestus, historicization and the refunctioning of the passive spectator. Employing these Brechtian tools, the thesis shows how the chosen case studies are critical of the rhetorical and visual depictions of contemporary conflicts in the Middle East, as represented in the mainstream media and public discourse. This research proffers a vocabulary for better understanding and articulating the relationship between the politics of war and dramatic aesthetics in the twenty-first century.
-
ItemWherefore art thou bro'?: youth, hybridity and cross-cultural retellings of Romeo and Juliet( 2011)This thesis explores five performances which utilise Romeo and Juliet narratives to highlight the ‘hybrid’ experiences of othered youth in contemporary cross-cultural communities. Traversing diverse productions from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Britain, the research considers the complex and contingent role of youth and performance in negotiations of cross-cultural conflict and identity. Each study is framed by the development of a methodological model, the “alteri-teen”, a trope which exemplifies the live, located and heterogeneous experiences of contemporary othered cultures. The thesis also explores the ‘hybridity’ of forms in each production; shaped by the retelling of a canonical text as a vehicle for resistance and/or homage, and as an aesthetic expression of the creative and contradictory experiences of othered youth.