Chroma Key Theatre : an examination of similarities and divergences in the use of Green Screen in two experimental theatre works

This paper examines the frame as it contributes to the debate on contemporary intermedial theatre and performance practices in light of increasing astriction between filmic and theatrical discourses. Informed by Auslander (1999), Lehmann (2006), and Giesekam (2007), and through an extrapolation of the tenets Eckersall, Gretchen and Scheer identify in the theory of New Media Dramaturgy, it will analyse two recent works of experimental theatre-making. RUFF (2013), a New York produced solo performance by one of the world’s leading female performers, explores her experiences of having a stroke. Total Dik! (2013), produced in Brisbane, Australia, is an interdisciplinary collaborative performance that examines aspects of dictatorship. They are clearly very different works yet there are a number of significant theatrical similarities in their use of Chroma Key technology and live compositing as material scenic devices. These works overtly and evocatively draw on the cinematic technique and technology of Chroma Key to augment and reveal the tensions and overlaps in their production processes.

Lived experience and devised theatre practice : a study of Australian and Norwegian theatre students' devised theatrical practice

This study explores the incorporation of young people's lived experience upon the creative dynamics in the development of devised performance practice. By employing Vygotsky's creativity theory to devising processes the role of lived experience is analyzed through three case studies located in two theatre education colleges in Norway and Australia. The study demonstrates how young peoples' life experience is a primary resource that is developed and reasoned upon in the creative performance practice. A key finding of the study is the identification of two distinct type of performance outcome in devised theatre practice, described as "livsbasert/life-based" and "egenskapt/self-made" that will enable devised theatre to have a more nuanced understanding of both process and product in the Nordic context.

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...

Theatre, co-creativity & co-creative spectatorship

Theatre is a socially and politically aware artform. It participates in the construction – and, potentially, the contestation – of a community’s history, identity, and ideals. It does this live, in the moment, where artist, artwork and audience meet here, now, together. This, most theatre makers think, gives theatre special power to make spectators think about the stories it stages. But it also creates challenges.

More than just audiences : Developing communitas and social inclusion through theatre participation for young people

In a Facebook conversation about theatre going by young people in Brisbane playwright Valerie Foley noted, “theatre in and of itself may not have the cultural value it once had”. This chapter explores how three Australian live theatre/performance events – World Theatre Festival (Brisbane 2011 and 2012), Backbone’s annual 2High Festival (Brisbane 2012) and Next Wave Festival (Melbourne 2012) - repositioned the value of live performing arts to develop social cohesion and wellbeing for young people. The chapter draws out how these performance events developed communitas (Turner 2012) for young audiences.

De Profundis (Theatre Soundtrack)

This creative work is an original soundtrack for the multimedia performance adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, led by David Fenton and Brian Lucas and produced by Metro Arts. Intermediality offers unique challenges to the composer creating towards live performance. Given the text-based nature of the piece, and the prevalence of screen content, music had a distinct role to play in supporting the intermedial performance environment. Drawing from Oscar Wilde’s own writings in the initial stages [“...richer cadences…more curious effects” “…the cry of Marysas” and the “deferred resolution of Chopin”] , the deliberately risky compositional process experimented with improvised location recordings and found sounds, random and fragmented assemblages of vintage recordings, rough methods and obsolete recording technology, and the sonic kinship of the hissing sibilances of the sea, theatrical applause and the crackle of antique recording devices (which had just been invented in Wilde’s time) worked into wefts of sound. As the soundtrack emerged, is was clearly resistant to ‘concepts’ imposed from the outside, and as the field of possibilities expanded and engaged in dialogue with the other elements of the performance (live and projected) certain pieces were selected by the director and curated into the emerging work. Thus leitmotifs emerged, rather than being imposed from the outset, with a particular through line holding: if it was too obviously like ‘music’, (which is usually used in theatre as emotional lubrication and narrative signpost) it didn’t work, and if it sounded like avant-garde sound-art, it was too grating and detracted from the primacy of the text. As a composer I worked this sweet spot inbetween these two poles as well as serving David Fenton’s curation: he determined which compositions to incorporate, reiterate and omit as part of the process of writing text, action and image and the compositional process responded with organic elaborations and variations on these selections. Musical resolution was mostly deferred until the closing stages of the performance. The soundtrack was present for the duration of the show, and Artshub reviewed the musical component thus: “...the score by David Megarrity is a refined, understated ambient scaffolding.” It premiered at the Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, on 22 April 2015.

A role to play: Investigating concepts of masculinity in Australia through theatre

Health professionals, academics, social commentators and the media are increasingly sending the same message – Australian men are in crisis. This message has been supported by documented rises in alcoholism, violence, depression, suicide and crime amongst men in Australia. A major cause of this crisis, it can be argued, is an over-reliance on the out-dated and limited model of hegemonic masculinity that all men are encouraged to imitate in their own behaviour. This paper, as part of a larger study, explores representations of masculinity in selected works of contemporary Australian theatre in order to investigate the concept of hegemonic masculinity and any influence it may have on the perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’. Theatre is but one of the artistic modes that can be used to investigate masculinity and issues associated with identity. The Australia Council for the Arts recognises theatre, along with literature, dance, film, television, inter-arts, music and visual arts, as critical to the understanding and expression of Australian culture and identity. Theatre has been chosen in this instance because of the opportunities available to this study for direct access to specific theatre performances and creators and, also, because of the researcher’s experience, as a theatre director, with the dramatic arts. Through interviews with writers, directors and actors, combined with the analysis of scripts, academic writings, reviews, articles, programmes, play rehearsals and workshops, this research utilises theatre as a medium to explore masculinity in Australia.

(Re)presenting Masculinity: A theatre director's critical observations of, and theatrical experimentation with, (re)presentations of masculinity in selected works of contemporary Australian theatre

Health professionals, academics, social commentators and the media are increasingly sending the same message – Australian men are in crisis. This message has been supported by documented rises in alcoholism, violence, depression, suicide and crime amongst men in Australia. A major cause of this crisis, it can be argued, is an over-reliance on the out-dated and limited model of hegemonic masculinity that all men are encouraged to imitate in their own behaviour. This paper, as part of a larger study, explores representations of masculinity in selected works of contemporary Australian theatre in order to investigate the concept of hegemonic masculinity and any influence it may have on the perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’. Theatre is but one of the artistic modes that can be used to investigate masculinity and issues associated with identity. The Australia Council for the Arts recognises theatre, along with literature, dance, film, television, inter-arts, music and visual arts, as critical to the understanding and expression of Australian culture and identity. Theatre has been chosen in this instance because of the opportunities available to this study for direct access to specific theatre performances and creators and, also, because of the researcher’s experience, as a theatre director, with the dramatic arts. Through interviews with writers, directors and actors, combined with the analysis of scripts, academic writings, reviews, articles, programmes, play rehearsals and workshops, this research utilises theatre as a medium to explore masculinity in Australia.

Theatre, networked performance, and notions of ‘democratised’ spectatorship

The potential to cultivate new relationships with spectators has long been cited as a primary motivator for those using digital technologies to construct networked or telematics performances or para-performance encounters in which performers and spectators come together in virtual – or at least virtually augmented – spaces and places. Today, with Web 2.0 technologies such as social media platforms becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and increasingly easy to use, more and more theatre makers are developing digitally mediated relationships with spectators. Sometimes for the purpose of an aesthetic encounter, sometimes for critical encounter, or sometimes as part of an audience politicisation, development or engagement agenda. Sometimes because this is genuinely an interest, and sometimes because spectators or funding bodies expect at least some engagement via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. In this paper, I examine peculiarities and paradoxes emerging in some of these efforts to engage spectators via networked performance or para-performance encounters. I use examples ranging from theatre, to performance art, to political activism – from ‘cyberformaces’ on Helen Varley Jamieson’s Upstage Avatar Performance Platform, to Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension installation where spectators around the world could use a webcam in a chat room to target him with paintballs while he was in residence in a living room set up in a gallery for a week, as a comment on use of drone technology in war, to Liz Crow’s Bedding Out where she invited people to physically and virtually join her in her bedroom to discuss the impact of an anti-disabled austerity politics emerging in her country, to Dislife’s use of holograms of disabled people popping up in disabled parking spaces when able bodied drivers attempted to pull into them, amongst others. I note the frequency with which these performance practices deploy discourses of democratisation, participation, power and agency to argue that these technologies assist in positioning spectators as co-creators actively engaged in the evolution of a performance (and, in politicised pieces that point to racism, sexism, or ableism, pushing spectators to reflect on their agency in that dramatic or daily-cum-dramatic performance of prejudice). I investigate how a range of issues – from the scenographic challenges in deploying networked technologies for both participant and bystander audiences others have already noted, to the siloisation of aesthetic, critical and audience activation activities on networked technologies, to conventionalised dramaturgies of response informed by power, politics and impression management that play out in online as much as offline performances, to the high personal, social and professional stakes involved in participating in a form where spectators responses are almost always documented, recorded and re-represented to secondary and tertiary sets of spectators via the circulation into new networks social media platforms so readily facilitate – complicate discourses of democratic co-creativity associated with networked performance and para-performance activities.

Experimental studies on comparison of microwave curing and thermal curing of epoxy resins used for alternative mould materials

In this present work attempts have been made to study the glass transition temperature of alternative mould materials by using both microwave heating and conventional oven heating. In this present work three epoxy resins, namely R2512, R2515 and R2516, which are commonly used for making injection moulds have been used in combination with two hardeners H2403 and H2409. The magnetron microwave generator used in this research is operating at a frequency of 2.45 GHz with a hollow rectangular waveguide. In order to distinguish the effects between the microwave and conventional heating, a number of experiments were performed to test their mechanical properties such as tensile and flexural strengths. Additionally, differential scanning calorimeter technique was implemented to measure the glass transition temperature on both microwave and conventional heating. This study provided necessary evidences to establish that microwave heated mould materials resulted with higher glass transition temperature than the conventional heating. Finally, attempts were also made to study the microstructure of microwave-cured materials by using a scanning electron microscope in order to analyze the morphology of cured specimens.