Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Research Publications
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ItemWhat Nick Cave Taught Me About Aesthetic Experience(Mongrel Matter, 2022)This chapter appears in the open access book "Aesthetic Literacy: A Book for Everyone" published by Mont and available at: https://mont-publishing-house.myshopify.com/products/aesthetic-literacy-a-book-for-everyone-volume-i-pdf-edition?variant=39777530052697
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ItemNo Preview AvailableYarning Up Relations: Enacting a Relational Ethics in Cross-Cultural Research-Based Theater(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-02)This is a reflection on The Score, a Research-Based Theater (RbT) project that has just begun, and some emerging ethical entanglements surrounding the work. The Score is a collaboration between First Nations and non-Indigenous artists and researchers, produced by ILBIJERRI Theatre Company—a leading First Nations theater company based in Melbourne, Australia. The goal is to create a community-engaged, participatory model for theater in health education that addresses sexual health for First Nations young people, to be delivered in schools, prisons, community centers and community health settings. Drawing on Indigenous and applied theater research methods, our article situates the discussion of ethics in RbT within the concept of relationality. Through a process of yarning (discussion), we explore the complexity of relations within the project and how relationality infuses all aspects of the project design. We argue that this approach is essential in ensuring respectful, accountable, and decolonial theater-research praxis.
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ItemListening to Country: Immersive Audio Production and Deep Listening with First Nations Women in Prison(Institute for Performance Studies, Simon Fraser University & Érudit, 2022-05-31)Listening to Country was an arts-led research project where, as an interdisciplinary team of practitioner-researchers, we worked with incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to produce a one-hour immersive audio work based on field recordings of natural environments. The project began with a pilot phase in Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre (BWCC), Australia, to investigate the value of acoustic ecology in promoting wellbeing among women who were experiencing separation from family, culture, and Country (ancestral homelands). The team facilitated a three-week program with the women, using arts-led processes informed by visual art, performance, Indigenous storywork, and dadirri (deep, active listening). The soundscape presented here is a response to the creative process that we led inside the prison and the audio work that the incarcerated women co-created with the research team. The accompanying text describes the background to the original project, the process we undertook in the prison, and our methodology for translating knowledge from the research based on the acoustic and poetic resonances of our experience.
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ItemTraction Youth Theatre Ensemble: Performing Social Cohesion(Queensland Theatre and Griffith Institute for Educational Research, 2017)This report details the outcomes of pilot research into Traction, Queensland Theatre’s outreach youth ensemble based in Logan City. The goal of the research was to investigate the potential for Traction to promote social cohesion, and was undertaken in partnership between Queensland Theatre and Griffith University’s Institute for Educational Research (GIER). Traction was established and has since been maintained with funding from the federal government’s Department of Social Services, in response to a perceived need in the Logan community for programs and initiatives that would promote social cohesion. Queensland Theatre knew from anecdotal evidence that there were significant outcomes occurring in Traction, and sought to investigate and frame these within credible empirical research. Queensland Theatre also wished to explore how Traction might be facilitating career aspirations and pathways for young people into the arts. For GIER, the research represented an opportunity to investigate a unique example of theatre outreach as undertaken by a major performing arts company. Combining ideas about social cohesion and applied theatre, this report investigates the value of theatre and drama for young people in the Traction ensemble, and the potential ripple effects into the wider community of Logan and beyond. Although a small pilot study, the research found that Traction provides a culturally diverse cohort of 49 participants with a strong sense of identity, belonging, hope and aspiration; and the ensemble plays a key role in positioning them for success as artists and adults in the broader community.
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ItemListening to Country: a prison pilot project that connects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women on remand to Country(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-04-03)Research shows that prison programs addressing intergenerational trauma and grief, loss of culture and spiritual healing are necessary for incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Indigenous-led or culturally focused programs receive little attention and limited resourcing in Australia’s prison system compared with mainstream rehabilitation programs. Depending on the jurisdiction and prison, such programs can be even less accessible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Listening to Country was an arts-based prison pilot project that was developed by and delivered to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre. It aimed to explore the role of acoustic ecology, soundscape and deep listening in connection to culture and Country. This article presents findings from a process evaluation of that pilot project in order to illustrate the potential for Indigenous-led, culturally focused and culturally safe prison programs to improve wellbeing for incarcerated Indigenous peoples.
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ItemPrison Theatre and an Embodied Aesthetics of Liberation: Exploring the Potentials and Limits(MDPI AG, 2021-09-09)Prison theatre practitioners and scholars often describe the sense of imaginative freedom or “escape” that theatre and drama can facilitate for incarcerated actors, in contrast to the strict regimes of the institution. Despite this, the concept of freedom or liberation is rarely interrogated, being presented instead as a given—a natural by-product of creative practice. Drawing from John Dewey’s (1934) pragmatist aesthetics and the liberatory pedagogies of Bell Hooks (2000) and Paulo Freire (1996), I propose an embodied aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre that adds depth and complexity to claims for freedom through creativity. Reflecting on over twenty years of prison theatre practice and research, I propose that the initial “acts of escape” performed through engaging the imagination are merely the first threshold toward more meaningful forms of freedom. I frame these as the following three intersecting domains: “Acts of unbinding”, which represents the personal liberation afforded by experiences with theatre in prison; “acts of love”, which expresses how the theatre ensemble might represent a “beloved community” (hooks); and “acts of liberation”, which articulates how these experiences of self-and-world creation may ripple out to impact audiences and communities. An aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre can, therefore, be conceived as an embodied movement towards personal and social renewal; an approach that deepens our understanding of its oft-cited humanising potential, and its limits
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ItemPerforming Te Whare Tapa Whā: Building on cultural rights to decolonise prison theatre practice(Informa UK Limited, 2021-07-03)Ngā Pātū Kōrero: Walls That Talk (2019) is a documentary theatre production staged by incarcerated men at Unit 8 Te Piriti at Auckland Prison in Aotearoa New Zealand. The performance was built around Te Whare Tapa Whā (The House of Four Sides) – a model of Māori health that participants engaged with as part of their therapy for being convicted of sex offences. This article discusses the use of masks in performance and the significance of Te Whare Tapa Whā as a dramaturgical device. What insights for decolonising prison theatre practices can be advanced by building on foundations of cultural rights?
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ItemCarcerality, theatre, rights(Informa UK Limited, 2021-07-03)Threatened with ever-increasing levels of surveillance and confinement, this special issue attempts to extend the discussion of Prison Theatre to consider ‘carcerality’ as a pervasive neoliberal strategy. The issue aims to steer the discussion away from considerations of utility and the aesthetics of redemption, towards understandings of the arts in carceral spaces as a fundamental human right. What role can theatre and performance play in highlighting the rights of those experiencing state-sponsored control, confinement and exclusion? And what role can theatre and performance play in challenging the exclusionary structures of carcerality by enhancing freedoms, liberty and inclusion?
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ItemFinding resonance: Applied audio drama, inquiry and fictionalising the real(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2021-10-02)This article examines the tensions and possibilities of audio drama in applied theatre and qualitative inquiry. Drawing on our experiences of making participatory audio drama, we argue that applied audio drama provides rich ground for generating new knowledge and approaches to applied theatre research and practice as informed by the cultural turn towards listening, sound, and sonic agency. Situating the conversation within fiction rather than documentary or self-revelatory podcasting, we discuss how applied audio drama is uniquely placed to explore ideas of truth and resonance at the interface between art, research, education and social justice.
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ItemPerformances of Healing and Reconciliation(International Federation of Theatre Researchers/Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 2020-04-29)This forum looks at a particular effect that is often claimed both ritual and theatre: that of healing or reconiclliation, whether social, political, or personal. In this forum, we bring together artsits who work both inside and outside what might be seen as the ‘applied’ theatre world to discuss what that healing or reconciliation might look like, and the challenges and problems with the way it can be thought about and executed. I would venture that most readers of this forum would be loath to abandon the claim that performance has the potential to offer some sort of social healing, but the critical examination here of just what sort of healing is possible, and how it might operate, can help us make better sense of the limits and possibilities of such claim.