Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Theses
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ItemPink God: An Ecstatic Communion of Choreography( 2022)This doctorate serves as a reflexive autobiography to expose a theatrical dynamism of a quixotic choreographer. Through a monotheistic gaze it strives towards queer philosophical introspection. Its investigation of personal Christian indoctrination (as a source of creative subjectivity) works through allegorical imagination, and themes of devotion, holiness, and transformation. What emerges is a twenty five-year interdisciplinary choreographic practice, a polymorphous interaction of multiple art forms, in which ‘learnt and unlearnt obedient and disobedient bodies’ reveal the philosophical underpinnings of my works’ social, religious, queer, cinematic, absurdist, historical and phenomenological experimentations. The DVPA traces the spaces that I have explored in creating my vision of the stage as an altar; a place for my work to serve a queer and non-queer community in lieu of (a) God but armed with the intention to be an artist in search of the divine. To this, I find in the dance, the dancers, staged objects and paraphernalia, an interdisciplinary adulation to the neo-baroque — a queer aesthetic to which I remain transfixed, and that insures my immaturity. To grow via this research is an ambition, but to remain in the childlike world of wonder and possibility is a necessary tonic to the sensible. The works presented below demonstrate my attempts to parody religion and cinema, which I refer to in this doctorate as Hollywood Blockbusters of Religious Catatonia — and that I use to interpret my own spectacles of the exaggerated and the absurd. My desire to deconstruct learned steppage of dance: ballet, court dance, contemporary, or jazz, is not as a rebuke to those styles but a means to innovate a dance vocabulary to express a vision of a queer empowered mythology-cum-reality. To this end, my writing demonstrates how a queering aesthetic remain the dominant partnership in my practice.
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ItemPhysical Acting: Words Made Flesh( 2022)This doctorate synthesizes the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the Pulse improvisation approach with a practical framework for practitioners to use Pulse as an applied process in training performers, developing original material, and rehearsing a dramatic script. The book project Physical Acting – Words Made Flesh represents thirty years of practice-led research and contributes knowledge in terms of praxis to the development of contemporary theatre practice. The book project is a trilogy – three separate yet interconnected parts. Two of the three parts are practical workbooks for performance practitioners; the third part provides complementary material to assist in the understanding of those workbooks. This dissertation begins with a Contextual Framing Statement focusing upon influences and key turning points in the evolution of Pulse and looks at its position within contemporary performance practice. The Training Workbook outlines the Pulse Canvas framework, supplying a practical, step by step guide through the eight phases of the training. It offers a way to teach structured improvisation through ensemble practice leading to the execution of Performance Improvisations. The Directing Workbook describes in detail how to apply Pulse improvisation to the rehearsal of a scripted text. Part One outlines the four phases of the rehearsal process: Intuitive Investigation, Immersion, Mapping and Rendering. It builds on the shared ‘language’ of process and skills developed by an ensemble and a trainer/director through the Pulse training. Part Two demonstrates how to apply the process outlined in Part One. Using case studies of productions that I have directed, both classical and contemporary, I describe how each of the rehearsal layers were used by offering detailed examples of potential rehearsal outcomes. The productions focused on are The Mill on the Floss, Pericles Punished, Five Kinds of Silence, Stage Beauty and Manbeth: Macbeth Amplified. The last part of the trilogy, In Conversation with Practitioners consists of edited extracts from interviews with former students and theatre artists who use Pulse. With my accompanying commentary, these extracts serve to give voice to the perspectives of others and to put a frame around the experienced outcomes of the Pulse work.
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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.
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ItemFilm and history: the representation of history in recent Australian film( [1982])The primary concern of this thesis is an exploration of the questions which film theory inevitably poses for any applied usage of historical films. It is a concern bred by experience: in fact, this work as it now stands is an attempt to highlight some of the problems raised by my research as it was first conceived. Initially working with the notion of using historical films within a sociological framework, I was first interested in the fact that such a steady proportion of our recent film and television productions were of an historical nature. More predictable, but no less interesting, was the fact that most of these Australian productions stem from fictional sources, e.g. novels, secondary historical accounts, myths and legends. This made me wonder what parallels might be drawn between earlier Australian films and the more recent historical ones, expecting that comparative questions of myth, genre, legend, tradition, melodrama, and the like, would all be there for the asking. For some time I worked upon the notion of 'major themes' in these historical representations, looking at Bushranging and the Kelly's in particular, and the depiction of Australian involvement in wars. Not for a moment do I regret this initial period of research, in fact I am positive that without having experimented with this kind of 'comparative philosophy', that I would never have realised the necessity of questioning the very basis of such idealist research. From which it became obvious that a more rigorous theoretical approach would be required. (From Introduction)