From cultural to creative industries : theory, industry, and policy implications

Across post-industrial societies worldwide, the creative industries are increasingly seen as a key economic driver. These industries - including fields as diverse as advertising, art, computer games, crafts, design, fashion, film, museums, music, performing arts, publishing, radio, theatre and TV - are built upon individual creativity and innovation and have the potential to create wealth and employment through the mechanism of intellectual property. Creative Industries: Critical Readings brings together the key writings - drawing on both journals and books - to present an authoritative and wide-ranging survey of this emerging field of study. The set is presented with an introduction and the writings are divided into four volumes, organized thematically: Volume 1: Concepts - focuses on the concept of creativity and the development of government and industry interest in creative industries; Volume 2: Economy - maps the role and function of creative industries in the economy at large; Volume 3: Organization - examines the ways in which creative institutions organize themselves; and Volume 4: Work - addresses issues of creative work, labour and careers This major reference work will be invaluable to scholars in economics, cultural studies, sociology, media studies and organization studies.

Little Birung

The field of research was contemporary indigenous theatre practice. The aim of the project was to produce theatre that remained as close and true to its source as possible, in both form and content. Little Birung is the final part of a 6-year mentorship of young indigenous artist, Megan Samardin, conducted by renowned musician and composer, John Rodgers, producer Leah Cotterell and director Sean Mee. The culminating event of the mentorship was to develop to create an original music theatre piece, composed by John Rodgers and Megan Samardin, that featured both Megan’s prodigious talent as a singer and her family’s remarkable story. Creative development consisted of extensive interviews with family members, creative development workshops (supported by both State and Federal Government) and critique and input from leading indigenous creatives such as Wesley Enoch (artistic director, Queensland Theatre Company). The challenge was to keep faith with the family and their story whilst creating a work that would appeal to national/international producers and their audiences. The result is a song cycle of 12 original songs that presents an intensely personal exploration of 6 generations of Megan’s family down the maternal line, as told through Megan’s sometimes uneasy relationship with her great grandmother, Flora. Uniquely, each of the 12 songs presents the personal response of each of the women as they confronted the often-brutal consequences of institutionalised racism and government-imposed oppression. The work was produced in Cairns in 2011 as part of the Cairns Festival to substantial critical acclaim and was an official event of Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair. A revised version was successfully presented at the Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane in November 2011. As a result of the Brisbane season, Little Birung has been invited to make a presentation at the 2012 APAM (Australian Performing Arts Market) in Adelaide. Importantly, the family and the indigenous community have embraced the work and have continued their fervent support. It has strengthened them as a family and as a part of the indigenous people of Australia.

Final call

Travel writing published by Swamp : A Journal of Post-graduate Creative Writing.

Shades of grey

Poem published in Islet

Where the bridge is

Memoir excerpt

Mythos

Poem

Winter Harmonica

Poem

Adaptation and empathy : intercultural communication in a choreographic project

The tricky terrain of intercultural communication within the pressure-cooker environment of creating new performance work is explored through the experiences of five Australians working with 55 artists in Hanoi, Vietnam on a project called Through the Eyes of the Phoenix. Key cultural communication issues such as the concept of ‘face’, identity, translation, adaptability, ambiguity tolerance, empathy, enmeshment and the development of shared understandings are examined in relation to theories of high and low context cultures and individualist collectivist frameworks. The experiences of both Australian and Vietnamese artists are foregrounded, revealing the importance of other intercultural communication modes such as visual, kinaesthetic and tactile languages as well as the languages of their art forms. Immersion in social activities and the importance of the emotional domain are also highlighted as essential factors to survive and thrive in intense creative collaborations across cultures. These dance perspectives, embedded in practice, provide alternative contributions to the messy complexities of intercultural communication.

Don's Party and the AV Jennings type 15 home

Australian housing underwent a watershed when 1960s mass-produced houses slowly started subscribing to a new aesthetic of continuous living spaces, known as the ‘open plan’ home. This created a new landscape for Australian playwrights to observe and explore in their work when representing domesticity on the stage. Instead of representing a single room of the house on the stage, plays such as ‘Don’s Party’, started to work with a number of openly connected spaces bound by doorways to private sections of the house or to specific outdoor areas. In representing this dialectic between interior and the exterior, private and public spaces in the home, the continuous spaces of the AV Jennings house in ‘Don’s Party’ acted to blur these conditions creating an outer interior. These connected spaces became the place for an outward performance on the family’s interiority, while simultaneously presenting a boundary to an inner interior in the offstage spaces of the home. This paper focuses on the play 'Don's Party' by David Williamson and how the spatial arrangements of the AV Jennings home, in which it was set, influenced the playwright. The research includes a textual analysis of the play, biographical research and interviews with the playwright alongside an analysis of the spatial arrangements of AV Jennings houses.

Things that fall over : Women's playwriting, poetics and the (anti-)musical

Abstract: This study explores the contradictions and ambivalences experienced by a working artist at a time when her age, her gender, and broader cultural shifts are all potential obstacles or liabilities to creative flourishing. It is the product of practice-led research into the creative process from the perspective of the female "late bloomer". In this phrase, I have in mind the mature-aged woman who is, in mid-life, suddenly seized with inspiration and fired with creative energy. At its heart is the question: If an Elizabeth Jolley were in our midst today, would we hear from her? The result is a full-length libretto and accompanying exegetical binoculars in the form of a Preface and an Afterword. The creative work, Things That Fall Over (TTFO) is conceived in two parts: a libretto and oratorio for performance. It begins as a play, but over three acts and into a coda, the work becomes something entirely other - an (anti-) musical. The work grew from a personal interest in the nexus between women, ageing and creative practice, via investigation into the oeuvre of two Australian artists, Elizabeth Jolley, author, first published at age 53, and Rosalie Gascoigne, sculptor, first exhibited at 58. A second strand of the research grew from a fascination for the stage musical, especially in its more alternative modes as in the hands of Stephen Sondheim, or in more provocative manifestations as witnessed in recent Tony Award winners Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon. Contextually, this research is conducted at a time when anecdotal evidence suggests that women’s work in the performing arts and in literature is being pushed to the margins after a late twentieth century Golden Age on page and stage. Using hybrid practice-led methodologies - bricolage, log-keeping - and working within queer and feminist paradigms, this study seeks to counter that push with a new work that is all-female, part-pantomime, part monstrous allegory. In illuminating the creative process of a mature-aged playwright it concludes that hybrid and interstitial forms still offer an inclusive and democratic space in which voices that may otherwise be muted will continue to be heard.

Because you told me to

I knew a woman who lived by herself in a white brick house near the light house at Watson’s Bay. As she grew older, and her memory played tricks, she started to collect odd things. At breakfast each morning, she pulled the stickers off fruits—apples and pears and mandarins—and stuck them to her shoes. When she finished a meal, she stacked the dirty dishes on the couch in her sun room. In spring, when her garden bloomed, she cut orchids from their stems and arranged them in bowls of water around the house. When she ran out of bowls, she used butter containers instead...