Beauty and the market: Actress postcards and their senders in early twentieth century Australia

A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).

Modern Drama: Defining the Field

Theatre, like other subjects in the humanities, has recently undergone quintessential changes in theory, approach, and research. Modern Drama - a collection of twelve essays from leading theatre and drama scholars - investigates the contemporary meanings and the cultural and political resonances of the terms inherent in the concepts of 'modern' and 'drama, ' delving into a range of theoretical questions on the history of modernism, modernity, post-modernism, and postmodernity as they have intersected with the shifting histories of drama, theatre, and performance.

Understanding service experience in non-profit performing arts: Implications for operations and service management

Recent research in the non-profit performing arts has shown that marketing efforts designed to increase revenue from ticket sales are not achieving the results required to sustain the performing arts. This paper applies operations management analytical techniques to the non-profit performing arts to increase understanding of operational issues and inform service management strategy. The paper takes a two-study idiographic approach. Implementing a modified version of service transaction analysis (STA), Study One describes a performing arts service from provider and customer perspectives, identifies service gaps and develops an elaborated service description incorporating both perspectives. In Study Two, building on the elaborated service description and extant research, in-depth interviews are conducted to gather thick descriptions of predictors of satisfaction, value and service quality as they relate to repurchase intention (RI). Technical, functional and critical factors required to improve organizational performance are identified. Implications for operational strategy, service design and service management theory for this context are discussed. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Relationships between quality of experience and participation in diverse performance settingshttp://espace.library.uq.edu.au/workflow/edit_metadata.php?id=382160&wfs_id=778

The flow concept describes a model of enjoyment that has relevance for understanding participation and experience across a wide range of activities (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). The basic premise of the flow concept is that when challenges and skills are simultaneously balanced and extending the individual, a state of total absorption can occur. Research by Jackson and colleagues has examined the utility of the flow concept to understanding participation and performance in sport settings. Recently, Jackson and Eklund have examined flow in a range of performance settings: sport, exercise, dance, creative and performing arts, and music. In this paper, we present descriptive and construct validity data on how participants in these activities experienced flow, as assessed by the recently revised flow scales: The Dispositional Flow Scale-2 (DFS-2) and Flow State Scale-2 (FSS-2) (Jackson & Eklund, 2002). The fmdings will be discussed in relation to the utility of the flow concept to understanding participation across performance settings.