Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDeveloping transnational networks, conduits, overlaps and intersections of heterogeneous histories – of culture, sub-culture and geopolitics – through five collaborative intermedial projects engaging visual form, musical performance and theatrical events( 2021)This research considers and enacts “transnationality”, “intermediality” and “networks” to rethink concepts of globalisation and regional/cultural-specifity through appropriate models of art production. This project asks what it means to collaborate on a transnational scale in a world of shifting geo-political, cultural and social realities. The various projects are developed from the complex sets of interrelations traversing these realities, the respective histories of art, music, architecture together with a commitment to engage both specialist and non-specialist audiences.
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ItemHow Does Collaboration and Joint Authorship Support Young Artists in Building Artistic Agency and Status?( 2021)This research-creation sits at the intersection of youth arts, socially engaged art and informal arts pedagogy. It investigates the impact a collaborative arts and joint authorship practice has on the development of young artists between the ages of twelve and twenty-something, specifically examining how a united front approach to making and presenting art supports young artists in building artistic agency and status. The site of this investigation is a thirteen-year-old youth-driven, adult and peer mentored artist-run initiative called tbC, based in suburban Melbourne, Australia. I am a founding member of tbC, and this investigation is based on my embedded observations of group methods and practices. Four case study artworks demonstrate how a united front approach to making and presenting art supports young creatives in building artistic agency and status. They include: a publication called Hoodie Mag, a public art project called The Blacksmiths Way Graffiti and Street Art Project, a digital artwork called The Art of Conversation, and a gallery project also called The Art of Conversation. Discussion around the fact that tbC is itself a collaborative artwork is included in this investigation. The data arising from this artistic research is mapped as an ecology of practice and inquiry via a dissertation and companion website. The companion website is this research’s creative output. Hyperlinks facilitate a connection between the two sites of knowledge. Together, they provide a fuller understanding of how a collaborative arts and joint authorship practice supports young artists in building artistic agency and status. Scholarship around relational art, authorship and the rhizome further support the theorising around this communal model of arts practice and the design of this multimodal submission. While there is substantial research around programs that engage and support young people, there are fewer examples of research, especially longitudinal, around the practices of young artists and how they can be supported. This investigation addresses this gap and is relevant to self-identifying young artists and those working with them. The significance of this study can be found in how a collaborative arts and joint authorship practice positions the young artist as practitioner and the agency and status this positioning builds.
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ItemDramaturgies of valuing in three unpaid-led theatre-producing companies in Victoria, Australia( 2021)Unpaid-led theatre has been cast in a myriad of roles by academics, policy writers, and in popular culture. From being characterised as a vanguard of cultural change to being stigmatised for unprofessional practice, unpaid-led theatre has also been variously co-opted to make claims about value in artistic, socio-cultural, political and economic debates. Yet, how unpaid-led theatre companies in Australia practice with values and how valuing can be understood dramaturgically has not been well understood. This thesis responds to this gap and examines how values are expressed in unpaid-led theatre-producing companies in Victoria, Australia. The identification of an unpaid-led theatre provides an unusual categorical framework for considering three theatres from various lineages, including amateur, independent theatre, and professionalised community arts led by people who are unremunerated. This inquiry was made through practice-led case studies with the aim of developing empirically based dramaturgical theories. If dramaturgy is defined broadly as both a creative logic (Barba 2010) and a practice (Romanska 2014) involving the enactment of values that shape meaning, then the specific interest of this study is to scrutinise how those values are expressed in theatre company practice. To do this, dramaturgy is deployed as the mechanism for researching, and the subject and frame of analysis. Accordingly, this thesis develops three dramaturgies of valuing: The Godot Effect, Polycultural Dramaturgy and Collective Institutional Dramaturgy. Each describes and analyses valuing in unpaid-led theatre practices, and contributes the novel theoretical convergence of unpaid-led theatre, valuing and dramaturgy.
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ItemTrance-Forming Dance: the practice of trance from traditional communities to contemporary dance( 2021)This PhD thesis presents the work and research of a practice-led investigation into trance and its application to the performative arts – in particular, dance aesthetics. While the project is the culmination of my performative practice over the past three decades, the intention has been to look at traditional trance practices, particularly in the South East Asia region, to answer the overarching question: How can trance be translated from its original traditional cultural context for practical application to a contemporary dance context? In this way, the research intersects three main investigations: i) Asian traditional trance practices; ii) Western and non-Western contemporary ideas and sensibilities; and iii) a new platform for theatre and performance. As such, the study can be framed by three main trajectories: trance, dance and transformation. These three themes will emerge repeatedly throughout each aspect of this study. In locating the research thus it is important to acknowledge how my own practice as dancer, choreographer and trainer has been strongly informed by a hybrid South East Asian heritage borne of Dao shamanism and local Malay animism. This cultural upbringing has long infused my work, enabling me to develop an idiosyncratic dance language and to provide a descriptive richness in the particular realms of trance and possession that extends beyond a largely Western framework of understanding trance within a contemporary dance/theatre practice.