Creating new folk opera forms of applied theatre for HIV and AIDS education in Papua New Guinea

This research investigated the potential of folk opera as a tool for HIV and AIDS education in Papua New Guinea. It began with an investigation on the indigenous performativities and theatricalities of Papua New Guineans, conducting an audit of eight selected performance traditions in Papua New Guinea. These traditions were analysed, and five cultural forms and twenty performance elements were drawn out for further exploration. These elements were fused and combined with theatre techniques from western theatre traditions, through a script development process involving Australians, Papua New Guineans and international collaborators. The resulting folk opera, entitled Kumul, demonstrates what Murphy (2010) has termed story force, picture force, and feeling force, in the service of a story designed to educate Papua New Guinean audiences about HIV and the need to adopt safer sexual practices. Kumul is the story of a young man faced with decisions on whether or not to engage in risky sexual behaviours. Kumul's narrative is carefully framed within selected Papua New Guinean beliefs drawn from the audit to deliver HIV and AIDS messages using symbolic and metaphoric communication techniques without offending people. The folk opera Kumul was trialled in two communities in Papua New Guinea: a village community and an urban settlement area. Kumul is recognisable to Papua New Guinean audiences because it reflects their lifestyle and a worldview, which connects them to their beliefs and spirituality, and the larger cosmological order. Feedback from audience members indicated that the performance facilitated HIV and AIDS communication, increased people's awareness of HIV and AIDS, and encouraged behaviour change. Tellingly, in one performance venue, forty people queued for Voluntary Testing and Counseling immediately after the performance. Twenty of these people were tested on that night and the other twenty were tested the following day. Many of the volunteers were young men – a demographic historically difficult to engage in HIV testing. This encouraging result indicates that the Kumul folk opera form of applied theatre could be useful for facilitating communication and education regarding sexual health and safer sexual behaviours in Papua New Guinea. Feedback from participants, audience members and other research stakeholders suggests that the form might also be adapted to address other social and development issues, particularly in the areas of health and social justice.

Folk conceptions of humanness: Beliefs about distinctive and core human characteristics in Australia, Italy, and China

The present research explores cultural understandings of what it means to be human. We used open-ended responses to examine whether the most culturally salient aspects of humanness are captured by two theoretical dimensions: human uniqueness (HU) and human nature (HN). Australians, Italians, and Chinese (N = 315) showed differences in the characteristics considered human and in the emphasis placed on HU and HN. These findings contribute to developing cross-cultural folk psychological models of humanness.

Folk theory of social change

People have a folk theory of social change (FTSC). A typical Western FTSC stipulates that as a society becomes more industrialized, it undergoes a natural course of social change, in which a communal society marked by communal relationships becomes a qualitatively different, agentic society where market-based exchange relationships prevail. People use this folk theory to predict a society’s future and estimate its past, to understand contemporary cross-cultural differences, and to make decisions about social policies. Nonetheless, the FTSC is not particularly consistent with the existing cross-cultural research on industrialization and cultural differences, and needs to be examined carefully.

‘Enough is enough’: Songs and messages about alcohol in remote Central Australia

This article examines some of the ways in which Australia’s First Peoples have responded to serious community health concerns about alcohol through the medium of popular music. The writing, performing and recording of popular songs about alcohol provide an important example of community-led responses to health issues, and the effectiveness of music in communicating stories and messages about alcohol has been recognised through various government-funded recording projects. This article describes some of these issues in remote Australian Aboriginal communities, exploring a number of complexities that arise through arts-based ‘instrumentalist’ approaches to social and health issues. It draws on the author’s own experience and collaborative work with Aboriginal musicians in Tennant Creek, a remote town in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Capturing Australian indigenous perception of virtual landscape

This short paper presents a means of capturing non spatial information (specifically understanding of places) for use in a Virtual Heritage application. This research is part of the Digital Songlines Project which is developing protocols, methodologies and a toolkit to facilitate the collection and sharing of Indigenous cultural heritage knowledge, using virtual reality. Within the context of this project most of the cultural activities relate to celebrating life and to the Australian Aboriginal people, land is the heart of life. Australian Indigenous art, stories, dances, songs and rituals celebrate country as its focus or basis. To the Aboriginal people the term “Country” means a lot more than a place or a nation, rather “Country” is a living entity with a past a present and a future; they talk about it in the same way as they talk about their mother. The landscape is seen to have a spiritual connection in a view seldom understood by non-indigenous persons; this paper introduces an attempt to understand such empathy and relationship and to reproduce it in a virtual environment.

Remediating vernacular creativity : photography and cultural citizenship in the Flickr photosharing network

Read through a focus on the remediation of personal photography in the Flickr photosharing website, in this essay I treat vernacular creativity as a field of cultural practice; one that that does not operate inside the institutions or cultural value systems of high culture or the commercial popular media, and yet draws on and is periodically appropriated by these other systems in dynamic and productive ways. Because of its porosity to commercial culture and art practice, this conceptual model of ‘vernacular creativity’ implies a historicised account of ‘ordinary’ or everyday creative practice that accounts for both continuity and change and avoids creating a nostalgic desire for the recuperation of an authentic folk culture. Moving beyond individual creative practice, the essay concludes by considering the unintended consequences of vernacular creativity practiced in online social networks: in particular, the idea of cultural citizenship.

Singing the blues : developing a cabaret performance on depression

This paper will discuss the researcher’s practice-led study within the field of contemporary cabaret performance. The project is focussed on transforming personal stories of depression into cabaret with the aims of raising community awareness of the issue. In the process, the research aims to explore innovations within the field of cabaret. Interviews conducted with individuals who have suffered from depression are being used as ‘inspiration points’ for the development of the performance. This paper will provide a short contextual review for the project and introduce the researcher’s creative process. For the purposes of this research, cabaret has been defined as performances of songs and dialogue in direct-address with the audience. Cabaret performances merge ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms (often including satirical comedy), and are generally performed in small-scale venues. The accessible, intimate and light-hearted nature of cabaret offers unique opportunities for the discussion of social issues.

Capital music : personal expression with a public display of song choice

Using information and communication technology devices in public urban places can help to create a personalised space. Looking at a mobile phone screen or listening to music on an MP3 player is a common practice avoiding direct contact with others e.g. whilst using public transport. However, such devices can also be utilised to explore how to build new meaningful connections with the urban space and the collocated people within. We present findings of work-in-progress on Capital Music, a mobile application enabling urban dwellers to listen to music songs as usual, but also allowing them to announce song titles and discover songs currently being listened to by other people in the vicinity. We study the ways that this tool can change or even enhance people’s experience of public urban spaces. Our first user study also found changes in choosing different songs. Anonymous social interactions based on users’ music selection are implemented in the first iteration of the prototype that we studied.

Music is a Wordless Knowing of Others : Resilience in Virtual Ensembles

Music making affects relationships with self and others by generating a sense of belonging to a culture or ideology (Bamford, 2006; Barovick, 2001; Dillon & Stewart, 2006; Fiske, 2000; Hallam, 2001). Whilst studies from arts education research present compelling examples of these relationships, others argue that they do not present sufficiently validated evidence of a causal link between music making experiences and cognitive or social change (Winner & Cooper, 2000; Winner & Hetland, 2000a, 2000b, 2001). I have suggested elsewhere that this disconnection between compelling evidence and observations of the effects of music making are in part due to the lack of rigor in research and the incapacity of many methods to capture these experiences in meaningful ways (Dillon, 2006). Part of the answer to these questions about rigor and causality lay in the creative use of new media technologies that capture the results of relationships in music artefacts. Crucially, it is the effective management of these artefacts within computer systems that allows researchers and practitioners to collect, organize, analyse and then theorise such music making experiences.