e-learning through digital theatre : breaking down the tyranny of distance and limits of location

In this article, we report on a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural digital exchange project between Australian Drama and Education students and Dutch English Language and Culture students, and examine the impact of the place-independent, technology-mediated communications and collaboration on their learning trajectories. The intensive, intercultural collaboration between the two groups of students resulted in a 50-minute group-devised, digital theatre play entitled Quarter Acre Dreaming. This play, performed through live interactive media by both Dutch and Australian students, traced the historical development of the Australian suburb, while integrating scenes of Dutch immigration into Australia. In the creative process, the students on either side of the globe interacted through Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and used videoconferencing and Skype for live rehearsals and discussions to advance their learning of English, their performance repertoire and cross-cultural understanding.

Multi-media and real fiction theatre making

Visual images, in the process of both the imagination and conception of a theatre production, are central to contemporary practice in drama-making. The use of multi-media in theatre is not only a fruitful way to represent the visual component of a particular experience, it but also constitutes a way of speaking the unspoken. Visual language expresses through multi-media and allows broaching taboo subjects, speaking directly to the audience in spite of the indirect form and drawing subtle connections with the live action so as to make meaning. The tension between live action and any form of visual art blurs the lines between imagination and reality. The multi-media theatre is a metaphor for the human mind exposed to social reality. It consists of interruptions, half-finished conversations and ideological aspersions including its primary function of meta-representation.

The performance of trauma in moving image art

This thesis argues that the perceptual apparatus required to view abstract and graphic films can illuminate our understanding of trauma as a social/medical concept. such 'materialist' films predict the new contemporary 'Gestalt of the senses' ushered in by digital media.

Stereoscopic theatre: the impact of gestalt perceptual organization in the stereoscopic theatre environment

This paper argues that it is essential for live theatre that incorporates stereoscopic imagery to reconceptualise the performance space to facilitate a successful audience experience. While 3D technology greatly increases artistic possibilities, the risks of perceptual confusion exist in live theatre just as in stereoscopic cinema, indeed more so given the coexistence of live performers. This paper argues that Gestalt perceptual organization theory can be valuable in informing how best to employ stereoscopic imagery within a live theater environment, with reference to the artistic works of one of the authors.

Refugee performance: aesthetic representation and accountability in playback theatre

This essay seeks to unpack some of the issues concerning representation when performing refugee stories using playback theatre. It questions the reductive influence of narrative structure and, using the framework of artist as ethnographer, it argues that strong aesthetic production is required to overcome the dampening effect of empathy when performing personal stories in refugee/asylum contexts. The tension that emerges among the key imperatives of accountable, accurate and aesthetic representation in refugee performance is then explored as a dialogic space.

The performance of trauma in moving image art

With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving ...

'The first time' performance and workshop

'The First Time' is a performance about twelve beginning teachers' first experiences, and is constructed from data generated throughout 2011 for my PhD through a theatre-based research approach. ‘The First Time’ is performed by teachers - most of whom are drama teachers - in order to sensitively represent the real stories of the research participants. 'The First Time' centers around first experiences in teaching, and while it is primarily about beginning teachers' experiences, the idea of firsts in teaching is a universal one, and one through which teachers share their experiences, knowledge and understanding of the ways of becoming a teacher. The workshop includes a performance of 'The First Time' and a discussion of the themes that have been raised through the staging of this performance - such as beginning teacher's experiences, performing the stories of real people, teachers' experiences as performers, and the uses of theatre-based research methods. The workshop also includes the opportunity for participants to experiment with the theatre-based research method.

Performing beginning teachers’ ‘firsts’: exploring a theatre-based research method

Theatre-based research methods have been employed in a variety of ways to transcend more traditional research methods, and bring research findings to a broader and relevant audience. Performing research to an 'expert' audience is transformative in nature. The audience share a collective understanding of the material presented, where their understandings can be challenged or confirmed. The ethical responsibilities of the theatre-based researcher are therefore paramount in presenting the research in a manner that respects the research participants, and allows the audience to make informed judgements.This paper outlines my experience in devising and performing 'The First Time' - a performance about twelve beginning teachers' firsts. The performance was constructed from their interview data and performed by teachers - most of who are drama teachers – in order to sensitively represent the real stories of the research participants. The research was framed within a practice theory approach (Schatzki 2001) with a focus on the transformation of practices situated within a particular time and place. The method of performing the research to an 'expert' audience of performing arts practitioners, teachers, and teacher educators created an opportunity for both the transformation of teaching practice and the transformation of theatre.The research findings focus on the importance of creativity and flexibility in an approach to both research and teaching. The outcomes of my research have implications for theatre-based researchers, as well as teacher educators, in-service teachers, and beginning teachers. All these practitioners are continually negotiating the waters of their ever-changing professions.

Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: performance and silent film

The most famous stage actress of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt enjoyed a surprising renaissance when the 1912 multi-reel film Queen Elizabeth brought her international acclaim. The triumph capped her already lengthy involvement with cinema while enabling the indefatigable actress to reinvent herself in an era of technological and generational change. Placing Bernhardt at the center of the industry's first two decades, Victoria Duckett challenges the perception of her as an anachronism unable to appreciate film's qualities. Instead, cinema's substitution of translated title cards for her melodic French deciphered Bernhardt for Anglo-American audiences. It also allowed the aging actress to appear in the kinds of longer dramas she could no longer physically sustain onstage. As Duckett shows, Bernhardt contributed far more than star quality. Her theatrical practice on film influenced how the young medium changed the visual and performing arts. Her promoting of experimentation, meanwhile, shaped the ways audiences looked at and understood early cinema.

Cameras and body memory create new blends of performance with visual art practice

I propose that a learnt somatic experience of dance can translate into another discipline such as visual art. In my visual art practice I combine both photography, which is traditionally seen as a still medium, and performance in order to create a new form of embodiment. I have developed two series of art works of prints and video made in response to the Australian landscape. By analyzing my method of movement and photography I will describe how an embodied dance language can result in a material outcome – a series of drawings of light and movement, a body signature made possible through old and new technology. I have activated a performative state while capturing images discovering new ways of using technology reliant upon my knowledge of dance, performance and photography. Making a human size camera to make analogue prints I gained an intuitive knowledge of light – a skill that has become foundational in performance and photography. In response to space and light in the Australian landscape I then built a custom made camera that allows for the longest possible time to capture an image. I move while taking the image and use the camera as if an eye at the end of my arm. In this way I activate dance skills and embodied knowledge of space, timing and light, opening up a radical space for new thinking, making and performing.Furthermore this process engages memory and sentiment embodied through age. Many artists have responded to the unique qualities of the Australian landscape and by using a performative/photographic approach I have engaged with my own body memory. Being brought up in the landscape and training in ballet my body has acquired memories at a cellular level. My method has given memory a voice. In doing these works I have become conscious of how unconscious memories of the space and light in the landscape is a movement vocabulary activated in a way that ‘feels’ like dancing. As an ageing person this experience is profound and the resultant materialisation of the photographs and videos leave a material record of the event. The sentiments evoked through my process bridge the past with the present, the body with the mind, memory with body and space connecting disciplines in a new way.The materialisation of artworks itself continues cross-disciplinary processes using a technique that is a continuum of the performative. Through using technology I release memory of the landscape and pixel by pixel build imagery that relies on and is a part of the performative process. It is a photographic performance dance manifesting as pigment on paper exhibited a gallery context. The exhibition allows a space for the viewer to respond - re-membering the universal the act of moving. The works titled ‘body signatures’ and ‘Fly Rhythm’ become a communicative device in the gallery context.My paper through an analysis of process and methods used in making the two series will talk to several of the subjects listed and reveal a new way of connecting performance and visual art and old and new technologies.