Disability performance in Australia

In disability arts, as in so many things, Australia has both its own cultural specificities, as well as the cultural followings that come with being a colonised country. In Australia, our colonial legacy, multiculturalism, and Asia-Pacific location have always made our relation to our own arts and culture fraught, the subject of ongoing aesthetic, cultural and political contestation. We have historically suffered from what Phillips (2006) calls a ‘cultural cringe’, in which we worry about the individuality, value and volume of our arts and culture compared to others, and this comes up again and again in commentary to this day...

The Ex/centric fixations project # 2 - Memory, language and polyvocal performative writing

In this paper, Bree Hadley discusses The Ex/centric Fixations Project, a practice-led research project which explores the inadequacy of language as a technology for expressing human experiences of difference, discrimination or marginalisation within mainstream cultures. The project asks questions about the way experience, memory and the public discourses available to express them are bound together, about the silences, failures and falsehoods embedded in any effort to convey human experience via public discourses, and about how these failures might form the basis of a performative writing method. It has, to date, focused on developing a method that expresses experience through improvised, intertextual and discontinous collages of language drawn from a variety of public discourses. Aesthetically, this method works with what Hans Theis Lehmann (Postdramatic Theatre p. 17) calls a “textual variant” of the postdramatic “in which language appears not as the speech of characters – if there are still definable characters at all – but as an autonomous theatricality” (Ibid. 18). It is defined by what Lehmann, following Julia Kristeva, calls a “polylogue”, which presents experience as a conflicted, discontinuous and circular phenomenon, akin to a musical fugue, to break away from “an order centred on one logos” (Ibid. 32). The texts function simultaneously as a series of parts, and as wholes, interwoven voices seeming almost to connect, almost to respond to each other, and almost to tell – or challenging each other’s telling – of a story. In this paper, Hadley offers a performative demonstration, together with descriptions of the way spectators respond, including the way their playful, polyvocal texture impacts on engagement, and the way the presence or non-presence of performing bodies to which the experiences depicted can be attached impacts on engagement. She suggests that the improvised, intertextual and experimental enactments of self embodied in the texts encourage spectators to engage at an emotional level, and make-meaning based primarily on memories they recall in the moment, and thus has the potential to counter the risk that people may read depictions of experiences radically different from their own in reductive, essentialised ways.

Playing Pranks: Traditions, communities & co-creative cultural performance practice

Pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes are co-creative cultural performance practices that appear across times, contexts and cultures. These practices include everyday play amongst families, friends and coworkers, entertainment programs such as Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, and aesthetic and activist pranks perpetrated by situationist artists, guerrilla artists, and, most recently, culture ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning capitalist systems back on themselves. Although it can, in common usage, describe almost any show off behaviour, a prank in the strictest definition of the term is a performance that deploys a very specific set of strategies. It is an act of trickery, mischief, or deceit, that must be taken as real, and momentarily cause real fear, anger or worry for an unwitting spectator-become-performer, who is meant to play along until the trick is revealed and their response can be represented back to the prankster, other spectators, or society as a whole, either for the sake of entertainment or for the sake of commentary on a cultural phenomenon. A prank, in this sense, deliberately blurs the boundaries between daily and dramatic performance. It creates a moment of uncertainty, in which both the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever, or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to play along, discern the trick, discern the point of the trick, and, in the end, be duped, be a good sport, or even play/pay the prankster back, are both put to the test. In this paper, I consider a number of pranking traditions popular where I am in Australia, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. I use performance, spectatorship and ethical theory to examine the engagement between prankster, pranked spectator, and other spectators, in this most distinctive sort of community-driven performance practice, and the way it builds and breaks status, social and other sorts of relationships within and between specific communities.

Measuring impact: Positioning evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape

Arts culture organisations and funding authorities increasingly need to evaluate the impact of festivals, events and performances. Economic impacts are often privileged over 'soft data' about community experience and engagement. This new book offers a timely and scholarly demonstration of how cultural value and impact can be evaluated. It offers an innovative approach whereby the relationship developed between the researchers/evaluator and the commissioning arts and cultural producer provides an opportunity to rethink the traditional process of reporting back on value and impact through the singular entity of funds acquittal. Using three commissioned evaluations undertaken at an Australian university as an extended case study, the book investigates the two positions most often adopted by researchers/evaluators - embedded and collaborative, or external and distanced - and argues the merits and deficiencies of the two approaches. Offering an examination of how arts evaluation 'works' in theory and practice and more importantly, why it is needed now and in the future to demonstrate the reach and cultural gains from arts and cultural projects, this will be essential reading for students in arts management, professionals working in arts and cultural organisations, scholars working in association with creative industries and cultural development.

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.

Looking out of the void : Scaffolds to assist drama higher research degree students on the path to artist–scholar

In recent years, a number of Australian and international universities have offered the ability to complete postgraduate qualifications using the research frame known as creative practice as research. This has been particularly prevalent in the Drama discipline in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). There has been a noticeable shift away from students undertaking a traditional research Master of Arts (Research) or Doctor of Philosophy to a higher proportion of research higher degree students undertaking research through their creative work. The somewhat ephemeral nature of the theatre and performance practice can generate anxieties for students about how to best represent, analyse and discuss the creative practice within a theoretical frame. The argument in this paper is situated in the experience of two artist-scholars who undertook their studies at QUT while under principal supervision of the author and explores the research scaffolds that supervisors in Drama at QUT have developed to assist research higher degree students to navigate the tricky persona of artist–scholar.

The last avant-garde?: Disability arts and (rethinking) mobility

Taking as its starting point a remark by Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare that disability arts is “the last avant garde”, this panel focuses on the role of aesthetic experimentation in disability arts and the possible rethinking of the relationship between avant-garde aesthetic strategies and inclusive arts. Points of connection between the avant-garde and disability arts include a rejection of traditional aesthetic forms, the development of aesthetic strategies appropriate to non-normative bodies, politics and populations and the implications of these ideas for the conference themes. This panel is intended as a facilitated discussion involving researchers and artists undertaking work in this area. The panel will begin with some brief provocations reflecting on the implication of Shonibare’s comment. For example, Gerard Goggin will discuss three projects by Antoni Abad with artists and activists with disability in Barcelona, Geneva and Montreal as part of Abad’s Megaphone project, a decade-long, global digital art project. Bree Hadley will speak on performative interventions in public space, performance art, live art, activism and culture hacking by artists with disabilities, such as pwd's online performances, and artist’s performative responses to the austerity agenda in the US, UK, and Australasia. Eddie, Lachlan and Sarah will discuss ideas arising from their work on the project Beyond Access: The Creative Case for Inclusive Arts, which involved research with six Melbourne-based artists/artistic companies with disability, supported by Arts Access Victoria. Chair: Dr Eddie Paterson (School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne) Dr Bree Hadley (Creative Industries, QUT) Professor Gerard Goggin (Professor of Media and Communication and ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney) Dr Lachlan MacDowall (Head, Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne). Sarah Austin (PhD candidate, Theatre/Centre for Cultural Partnerships, VCA and MCM) Artists (tbc, based on existing relationships with artists developed in the Beyond Access research).

The prankster’s passion: Using theatrical terms to unpack players motivations in popular social performance

Amongst social players, the prank, as a social performance form, holds a lot of potential to impact on personal, relational and social status within a group or between one group and another group. More than simply showing off, a prank in the strictest definition of the term, is a social performance in which one player, a prankster, deploys mischief, trickery or deceit, to cause a moment of anxiety, fear or anger about a happening for another spectator-become-collaborating-player, a prankee – to enhance social bonds, entertain, or comment on a social, cultural or political phenomenon. During a prank, the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to be duped, be a good sport, play along, or even play/pay the prankster back, both become fodder for other spectators and society to scrutinize. In Australia, pranking traditions are popular with many social groups, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. In this paper, I consider whether theatrical terms – theoretical terms from the stage such as actor, acting, objective, arc, performance, audience and emotion, such as those offered by Joseph Roach – are useful in understanding the passion some social players show for pranksterism. Are theatrical terms such as Roach’s as useful as analysts of social self-performance such as Erving Goffman suggest they are? Do they assist in understanding the personal actions, reactions and emotions of prankster and prankee? Do they assist in understanding the power relations between prankster and prankee? Do they assist in understanding the relation between the prank – be it an everyday prank amongst families, friends and coworkers, an entertainment program prank of the sort seen on Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, or an activist pranks perpetrated by a guerrilla artist, ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning dominant social systems back on themselves – the social players, and the public sphere in which the prank takes place? I reflect on how reading pranks as performances, by players, for highly participatory audiences, helps understand why they are so prevalent, and so recurrent across times, cultures and contexts, and also so controversial when not performed well enough – or when performed too well – prompting outrage from the prankster, prankee or society as passionate as any debate about a performance by players in a theatre.

Show

Script for non-verbal performance. Research Component: Silent Treatment: Creating Non-verbal Performance Works for Children The research field of theatre for young people draws on theories of child development and popular culture. SHOW explored personal and social development, friendship and creative play through the lens of the experience of girls aged 8-12. This project consolidated and refined innovative approaches to creating non-verbal theatre performance, and addressed challenges inherent in the creation of a performance by adults for young audiences. A significant finding of the project was the unanticipated convergence of creative practice and research into child behaviour and development: the congruence of content (Female bullying) and theatrical form (non-verbal performance: “Within the hidden culture of aggression, girls fight with body language and relationships instead of fists and knives. In this world, friendship is a weapon, and the sting of a shout pales in comparison to a day of someone’s silence. There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away Simmons, Rachel (2002:3) Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture Of Aggression In Girls Schwartz Books The creative development and drafting process focussed on negotiating the conceptual design and practical constraints of incorporating diegetic music and video sources into the narrative. The authorial (and production) challenges of creating a script that could facilitate the re-mount a non-verbal work for a company specialising in text-based theatre . Show was commissioned by the Queensland Theatre Company in 2003, toured into Queensland Schools by the Queensland Arts Council and in 2004 was performed at the Sydney Opera House.

Fallen Awake

Photo from process: David Megarrity, albury 2007 - example of convergence of writing/design/perfomance/video RESEARCH COMPONENT Fallen Awake was a practice-led research process that opened the development process to the influence of collaborative authorship across artforms. The project focused on of how multiple artforms and artists converge their vision into a singular text, in the context of collaborative authorship. The work also uncovered new questions relating to the dream-life of children. The stimulus for the work was a selection of verbal statements by three-year-olds, raising complex ethical questions as the project progressed about the child’s voice, mediated by the adult artist, for the eventual presentation to a child audience. With the text emergent and open to influence, this project raised other questions related to the lived experience of children, dreaming, creative play and the development of consciousness. It pushed the creative process to experiment with associative, rather then causal narratives, and to negotiate the challenges this raises for traditional story structures and the development processes that usually shape them. It led to the consideration of each artforms and artist as equal contributors in the development of story: traditionally the province of the sole author. The outcomes appeared in various artforms, none of which was live-performance based. An ‘artist’s book’ by the designer, a ‘video treatment’ - a DVD capturing the approach to the performance and a script for an innovative large-scale performance. Fallen Awake was developed with the assistance of Strut & Fret Production House, Arts Queensland, and HotHouse Theatre, Albury Wodonga, through their ‘Month in the Country’ initiative.

Sonic loom : beginnings

An introduction to the Sonic Loom research project, presented at the Drama Australia Conference, 2006.

Suicide plays

Suicide is a uniquely human behaviour and has always elicited strong - usually negative - opinions. Thus I would like to state from the very outset that this morbid collection of writing (all separately published elsewhere previously) should not be seen as an attempt to glamorise the act of felo-de-se. Nevertheless, one needs to recognise the inherent theatricality of suicide: too often it is a petulant, peevish performance intended to convey a bitter message to the audience of those left behind. Unfortunately, it is also a performance that many similarly unhappy souls try to emulate, and this phenomenon, known as “The Werther Effect”, is the subject of the first paper, which serves as a most appropriate introduction to the four plays that follow it. The first play, entitled “Hamlet + Ophelia = ?”, is deliberately provocative, and may easily be misunderstood as a call to commit self-murder. It is hoped, however, that the protagonists of this angry little piece are seen to be impetuous and childish, rather than noble or deep. The second play, “Games for Married Couples”, is less about seppuku than it is about the despair of child-less marriage. It is not much happier than the first, but may nevertheless raise a smile or two. “His ... or Her ... Suicide”, on the other hand, is utterly frivolous. I am sure no reader will take it seriously. Finally, and circuitously, is the stage adaptation (and translation) of Goethe’s classic 1774 novella "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers". This piece was produced as part of my 2005 Master of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Many thanks must go to my supervisor, Associate Professor Angela O’Brien, for prodding and poking me until the thesis was of an acceptable standard.

Negotiating selves: exploring cultures of disclosure

If identity is a construct—and, more critically, a construct defined and developed through relationships with others in public and private spheres—then an understanding of the processes, mechanisms and platforms by which individuals disclose information about themselves is crucial in understanding the way identity, community and culture function, and the way individuals can intervene in the functioning of culture.