Black Diggers: Out of the trenches at the Brisbane Festival (Theatre review)

The performance space in which Wesley Enoch’s play Black Diggers is being performed at the Brisbane Festival is a large black box. It features a raised stage in the middle which proves versatile for battlegrounds at home and abroad – and later as ground for discriminatory encounters experienced by Aboriginal returned ex-servicemen. The fire-filled 44-gallon drum off to the side creates another space of encounter; there are few other props. Now and then, dates and other details are whitewashed on the black walls...

Scripted drama: The long wait for football to be taken seriously as a literary subject

This article is a work of non-fiction which draws on my research in football fiction.

The Wuzhen Theatre, Zhejiang, China: An architectural review

Designed by Taiwanese architect Kris Yao of Artech Architects for the Wuzhen Tourism Development Company, the Wuzhen Theatre is situated in Wuzhen, a historic scenic water town located in east China's Zhejiang Province. This theatre stands as an architectural beacon for Wuzhen, and is to be considered an important place on the global atlas of theatre and China's epicentre of theatre, culture and arts.

Community engagement or community conversation?: Boomtown, a large-scale regional, outdoor community theatrical event

On the 18th of July 2013, three hundred local members of Gladstone, Queensland erupted into song and dance performing the fraught history of their community harbourside through tug boat ballets, taiko drumming, German bell ringing and BMX bike riding. Over 17,500 people attended the four performances of Boomtown, a Queensland Music Festival event. This was the largest regional, outdoor community-engaged musical performance staged in Australia. The narrative moved beyond the dominant, pejorative view of Gladstone as an industrial town to include the community members’ sense of purpose and aspirations. It was a celebratory, contentious and ambitious project that sought to disrupt the traditional conventions of performance-making through working in artistically democratic ways. This article explores the potential for Australian Community Engaged Arts (CEA) projects such as Boomtown to democratically engage community members and co-create culturally meaningful work within a community. Research into CEA projects rarely consider how the often delicate conversations between practitioners and the community work. The complex processes of finding and co-writing the narrative, casting, and rehearsing Boomtown are discussed with reference to artistic director/dramaturge Sean Mee’s innovative approaches. Boomtown began with and concluded with community conversations. Skilful negotiation ensured congruence between the townspeople’s stories and the “community story” presented on stage, abrogating potential problems of narrative ownership. To supplement the research, twenty-one personal interviews were undertaken with Gladstone community members invested in the production before, during and after the project: performers, audience members and local professionals. The stories shared and emphasised in the theatricalised story were based on propitious, meaningful, local stories from lived experiences rather than preconceived, trivial or tokenistic matters, and were underpinned by a consensus formed on what was in the best interests of the majority of community members. Boomtown exposed hidden issues in the community and gave voice to thoughts, feelings and concerns which triggered not just engagement, but honest conversation within the community.

Bangarra Dance Theatre: Copyright law and Indigenous culture

This article considers the artistic and legal practices of Bangarra Dance Theatre in a case study of copyright law management in relation to Indigenous culture. It is grounded in the particular local experience, knowledge and understanding of copyright law displayed by the performing arts company. The first part considers the special relationship between Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Munyarrun Clan. It examines the contractual arrangements developed to recognise communal ownership. The next section examines the role of the artistic director and choreographer. It looks at the founder, Carole Johnson, and her successor, Stephen Page. The third part of the article focuses on the role of the composer, David Page. It examines his ambition to set up a Indigenous recording company, Nikinali. Part 4 focuses upon the role of the artistic designers. It looks at the contributions of artistic designers such as Fiona Foley. Part 5 deals with broadcasts of performances on television, film, and multi-media. Part 6 considers the collaborations of Bangarra Dance Theatre with the Australian Ballet, and the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. The conclusion considers how Bangarra Dance Theatre has played a part ina general campaign to increase protection of Indigenous copyright law.

The culture wars of climate change

Of late, there has been a growth in cultural expression about climate change – with the rise of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’); art and photography responding to changes in nature; musical anthems about climate change; plays and dramas about climate change; and environmental documentaries, and climate cinema. Drawing comparisons to past controversies over cultural funding, this paper considers the cultural wars over climate change. This article considers a number of cultural fields. Margaret Atwood made an important creative and critical contribution to the debate over climate change. The work examines Ian McEwan's novel, Solar, a tragi-comedy about authorship, invention, intellectual property, and climate science. After writing a history of Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have experimented with fiction – as well as history. This article focuses upon artistic works about climate change. It analyses James Balog’s work with the Extreme Ice Survey, which involved photography of glaciers under retreat in a warming world. The work was turned into a documentary called Chasing Ice. It also considers the artistic project of 350.org 'to transform the human rights and environmental issues connected to climate change into powerful art that gets people to stop, think and act.' The paper examines musical storytelling in respect of climate change. The paper explores dramatic works about climate change including Steve Waters' The Contingency Plan, Stephen Emmott's Ten Billion, and Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling and Hannie Rayson’s Extinction. The paper also examines the role of documentary film-making. It also considers the cinematographic film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Such a survey will enable a consideration of the larger question of whether creative art about climate change matters; and whether it is deserving of public funding.

Audience as performer: The changing role of theatre audiences in the twenty-first century

'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don’t understand, we are just sitting here.' Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have scrutinised how audiences respond, make meaning and co-create while watching a performance, little research has considered the behaviour of the theatre audience as a performance in and of itself. This insightful book describes how an audience performs through its myriad gestural, vocal and paralingual actions, and considers the following questions: •If the audience are performers, who are their audiences? •How have audiences’ roles changed throughout history? •How do talkbacks and technology influence the audience’s role as critics? •What influence does the audience have on the creation of community in theatre? •How can the audience function as both consumer and co-creator? Drawing from over 140 interviews with audience members, actors and ushers in the UK, USA and Australia, Heim reveals the lived experience of audience members at the theatrical event. It is a fresh reading of mainstream audiences’ activities, bringing their voices to the fore and exploring their emerging new roles in the theatre of the Twenty-First Century.

Evaluation of Australian Performing Arts Market 2014-2018: APAM inter-year report 2015

In the awarding of the tender for APAM by the Australia Council to Brisbane Powerhouse for the delivery of the market in 2014-2018, a requirement is that a formal evaluation of the three iterations of APAM be undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Faculty, under the leadership of Associate Professor Sandra Gattenhof. The agreed research model delivers reporting on outcomes not only in the year in which APAM is delivered (2014, 2016, 2018) but also in the years between (2015, 2017). This inter-year report focuses on the domestic and international touring outcomes resulting from engagement in the 2014 Market and responds two of the three key research foci for the evaluation that are articulated in the Brisbane Powerhouse Tender (2011) document as: • Evaluation of international market development outcomes through showcasing work to targeted international presenters and agents • Evaluation of national market development outcomes through showcasing work to national presenters and producers. The reporting for mid-year 2015, a non-APAM year, collects data from two key sources – six identified case study productions that have been tracked for eighteen months, and an online survey delivered to all APAM 2014 delegates. This inter-year report is a six month follow-up with delegates and identified case studies companies that track the ongoing progress of market outcomes and levers for ongoing improvement of the APAM delivery model that was tabled in the Year One Report delivered to Brisbane Powerhouse in October 2014.

Scenographic practice in contemporary chamber theatre

This research study explores the practice of scenography in contemporary chamber theatre. The practice-led approach allowed for the exploration of theoretical insights around scenography (the arrangement of the performance space, lighting, sound, design, objects and performers) in chamber theatre, directly resulting in the creation and staging of a new theatre work, 'A Tribute of Sorts'. The production was directed by the researcher and staged in two professional theatre companies, Queensland Theatre Company and La Boite Theatre Company in Queensland, Australia. The study investigated if the scenographic components of the chamber theatre performance could be employed as a machine that operates according to its own logic of operations, psycho-plastic manipulations, and metatheatricality. By doing so, testing if the scenography becomes a dramaturgy that contributes to spectorial meaning-making in and of itself.

Musicalising theatre, theatricalising music: Writing and performing intermediality in composed theatre

This investigation combined musicality and theatricality in the creation of four shows: Bear with Me, The Empty City, Gentlemen Songsters and Warmwaters. Led by creative practice, the research identified four polyvalences that characterise Composed Theatre, a transformational artistic domain which offers distinct challenges for performance makers. These include tensions and resolutions between compositional and theatrical thinking; music and words; setlist and script; and finally persona and character. The research finds that these interplays not only lend Composed Theatre its distinct qualities, but offer a potential set of balances to strike for writers, performers, composers and musicians who mix music and theatre in intermedial performance.

Using children's picture books and process drama to develop students' critical literacy responses

This workshop introduces a range of process drama activities to develop students' critical literacy responses. Whilst children's picture books and process drama strategies have not traditionally been seen as sophisticated resources and strategies for developing students' critical literacy responses, this workshop shows teaching strategies that can be used in language instruction in primary classrooms with diverse student groups. The teaching activities include ‘attribute lists’, ‘sculptures’ and ‘freeze frames’.

Jumping the Gun

Jumping the Gun is a play written for secondary school audiences. It follows the lives of three senior school students as they navigate moral, ethical and personal choices during the final year of school.

Carrie the Musical

When Carrie the Musical first debuted in 1988 it (in)famously closed eight days later, earning the dubious title of being one of the biggest flops in the history of Broadway. This revived version of the work, the Queensland premiere of the production, presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse in January 2016, was a calculated experiment in the commercialisation of an historical flop into a contemporary success. Through collaboration between some of Brisbane's most promising young creatives, designers, choreographers musicians and performers, this production became one of the Brisbane Powerhouse's most successful shows and gained local, national and international recognition for its achievements. By pushing the boundaries of the most current trends in contemporary Australian directing and performance making, the creative team was able to draw on their innovative capacity as independent theatre makers to turn a once-maligned work into a modern-day financial and critical success.

Ma Ma Ma Mad

Ma Ma Ma Mad is an autobiographical work, written and performed by Singaporean-Australian theatre maker Merlynn Tong. This production, presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse in December 2015, was a multi-genre work incorporating aspects of Butoh, physical theatre, cabaret and contemporary monologue. More than an experiment in mixed performative forms, however, this particular production was also an exercise in inter-cultural collaboration as well as gender in (and of) performance. Heavily influenced by the creator's experiences growing up in urban Southeast Asia, the director's specialisation in contemporary Australian theatre and experience telling uniquely Australian stories worked to manipulate the form in an endeavour to succinctly speak to local audiences, without pandering to entrenched stereotypes or diluting the underlying Chinese-Singaporean themes. The success of this production was also somewhat of a personal challenge for the creatives, after being told by some of Brisbane's most influential theatre venues and festivals that they would rather not support the work because a) it was a one woman show, and b) it was a one woman show about an Asian woman; and therefore would not sell well. One very influential local producer even said that he already had a one-woman show about an Asian person programmed, so he couldn't possibly program another. Operating in such a biased and out-of-touch artistic environment was seen as an easy challenge for the artists involved, which resulted in a highly successful and critically acclaimed sell-out run of Ma Ma Ma Mad, followed by offers to tour the work nationally and internationally. As such, this production also stands as a practical example of the ingrained and patriarchal structures of the Australian arts scene, and how art can work to break down the very barriers that it has helped to construct through a lack of vision and diversity amongst its leaders.