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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ItemFrom fact to fiction: a reflexive analysis of how screenwriter and subject intersect in the transformative process of authoring a modern biopic( 2019)The choice to work within the fictional frame of the biopic genre gives the screenwriter powerful representational tools to vivify character. But the tension between historical fidelity, and narrative fiction, raises important ethical questions. What responsibility does the marketing phrase, "based on a true story" place on the shoulders of the socially responsible screenwriter who is essentially writing a fiction? This practice-based enquiry responds to these questions by challenging the pervasive expectation that writers of historical and biographical fiction defend their truth claims on the methodological terms of the historian, and offers an alternative to a media studies proposal to cross-fertilise screenwriting practice with media ethics. By reframing the conversation away from empirical notions of historical fidelity, and consequentialist models of ethical evaluation, a significant methodological issue emerges, one that stems from a profound misconception of filmmaking practice that views the making of moving images as the non-reflexive application of mechanical skills. To counter this misconception, a working definition of filmmaking methodology is articulated, where mise-en-scene is shown to operate as a core reflexive strategy. This definition is intended to open up a conversation, and contribute to a better understanding of how filmmaking practice, of which screenwriting is a part, can generate and disseminate new knowledge in a range of forms and genres, including the biopic. Defining filmmaking as a creative practice also provides guidance to scholars, irrespective of discipline, who wish to engage with filmmaking as a rigorous methodological approach to conducting their own enquiries.
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ItemPerforming Credibility( 2018)Theatre practitioners have displayed an increasing interest in staging Refugee narratives, with approaches undertaking a number of methodologies. This thesis intends to look at a larger pattern of socio-political power relations, rather than a case by case analysis. The focus is on frame and thus primarily theoretical. Essentially this research looks at how Refugee theatre reproduces colonial terms of enunciation that restrict, limit, prescribe and demand how Refugees must perform to particular characters and narratives—both on and off stage. The research asserts that the performative demands of Refugee as a socio-political identity- exists before the theatrical site- extending to the performance demands of Refugee Theatre. I suggest that Refugee Theatre primarily relies on truth claims not because they are the most effective of all forms; but because it remains problematically tied to expectations to prove truth, authenticity and innocence. Refugee is continually asked to speak to these, as a Performance of Credibility. This has severe implications who gets seen and how they get seen. I argue that Performing Credibility is silencing rather than self determining. Thus it argues that that Refugee theatre as Performances of Credibility, function as an extension of the geospatial border in that they are just as oppressive, violent and silencing in its performative demands. The thesis offers two performative interventions that frame ‘Refugeeness’ in ways that resist these colonial narratives, as a form of anti-Performing Credibility dramaturgy. Drawing upon Latin American decolonial scholarship, the thesis argues for a conception of Refugeeness as ongoing and navigational, displacing borders and evading nationalist frameworks. The thesis explores how Refugeeness might be a useful re-frame to ensure Refugee challenges borders, rather than be assaulted within them; Refugeeness as a generative, creative site towards re-emergence and a step away from the burden of continuously Performing Credibility.
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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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ItemNo Preview AvailableFrom Tomb to Womb: How a Sensory Ethnographic Methodology can be Developed to Engage with Regional Communities and their Archives( 2020)This research creates a working methodology to engage with archives and communities in regional areas. Discussions on a community’s experience of their environment can be initiated through a sharing of personal archives and storytelling, touching on notions of memory, imaginings and change. My methodology is situated in a sensory ethnographic discipline. Through participation with communities, and my own photographic practice, I devise an applicable methodology for artists in regional environments. The research is developed through emplacement and community engagement, beginning with the Bring Your Own Archive event, and developing into an embedded approach that foregrounds listening and attention. It also expands upon discussions on the use and enquiry into the value of non-digital film material in a contemporary practice and as archival object, and considers what an archive image can tell us with regard to memory, histories and personal stories. Connecting to the notion of non-digital film, my own analogue practice explores place and history in Australian regional towns and this is developed as part of the research and the artwork. This research aims to show how an artist can participate in an active and honourable collaboration with regional towns, and engage in a re-imagination of their archives to create an interactive and lasting work that becomes an archive for the future. It also seeks to create a reflective space for the experiential histories in regional towns and a space for discussion on their future. The outcome of my research is entitled Glory Box. It is an interactive digital artwork that collages a series of archival reinterpretations into a new alternative archive of life in regional areas. It reimagines regional archives for future audiences. It connects my own experiential and dialogical methodology with my fine art photographic practice, commenting on the nature of film photography and on the position of the artist. The research proposes a progressive and experimental approach to archives through a sensory collecting of material, and a knowing or mindful handling of these tangible and intangible histories. A multiplicity of voices through a reauthoring of archive images manifests a contemplation of rituals and customs held within small regional towns today: a visual study on the local, unfolding into a wider reflection on the universal. It also uncovers delicate and indefinite contributions to a community’s connection to its archives that can reveal a deeply felt attachment.
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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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ItemMaking and sharing space: experiments with body, clothing and architecture( 2020)Making and Sharing Space: Experiments with Body, Clothing and Architecture investigates spatial situations generated by installations that test the optical relationship between the three ‘skins’: the body, clothes and architecture. As practice-led research, the resulting creations of the artistic practice are treated as experiments and consequently called ‘art-experiments’. The base of the art-experiments are participatory spatial installations that focus on the dressed, sensing body in movement. In the experimental set-up, the bodies, clothes and architecture are used as constructive elements to explore the three-skin relationship. The findings are the result of a collaboration between the researcher, the participants who visited the work, and the artworks themselves. The researcher is considered here as both an active participant and as an observer of the processes enabled by the art installations. Through their engagement with the art-experiments—as clothing and architecture—visitors also participate in the (re)making of the artwork and the architectural space. Each of the art-experiments propose procedures for three-skin exploration and ask questions about space-making and experience-making. Each of the four art-experiments asks a ‘what if’ question. The first art-experiment, Take Away Space, questions the three-skin relationship by asking the question: “What if architectural space is transformed into a wearable accessory?” In the second art-experiment, Clothed Paintings, the question is: “What if the clothed body becomes an architectural element?” The third experiment, [In]Corporeal Architecture, challenges the relationship even further by asking the question: “What if we can experience someone else’s personal space(s)?” Finally, the last experiment, in the form of a student workshop, shares the interest in ‘wearing space’ with the first art-experiment but asks the more precise question: “What if we use corporeal experience of an architectural space to make a wearable object?” Using a combination of critical reflection on my personal experiences of the art-experiments and the analysis of exhibition documentation and visitors’ response, the research explores how the clothed body participates in space-making processes. The methodology of the art-experiment has shaped the theoretical framework of the research, which includes theories and concepts that have contrasting viewpoints of the body and its multiple relationships with the immediate environment. Ideas of phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Juhani Pallasmaa on the sensorial relations of the body and its surroundings were adequate theoretical bases for the analyses of the corporeal experience as a starting point of each art-experiment. The spatial events generated by the experiments highlighted intricate and dynamic relationships between the human and nonhuman participants (clothes and architecture). To address these complexities, it was appropriate to expand the framework to include theories on the agency of nonhuman by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennet, Tim Ingold and Ian Hodder and the process philosophy of Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, Erin Manning and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The art-experiments could be described as a probing polygon for the disruption of a default three-skin relationship. The art-experiments resulted in the creation of a new body–clothes–architectural assemblages where skins continuously transform and absorb each other. Instead of providing answers to the ‘what if’ questions, the experiments revealed essential ‘cross-sections’ of the spatial situations resulting from the experiments: body-clothes, space-making, wearing space and sharing space.