Using video to promote pre-service teachers’ thinking about their transition to teaching

This paper reports on research investigating the use of video representations of first-year teachers’ experiences in undergraduate teacher education workshops that focus on the transition to teaching. The use of the video is a responsive act that draws on the notion of looking back, where graduates in their first year of teaching ‘speak to’ current students. Scenes from video footage of the theatre-based research performance The First Time shaped workshop activities and discussions in the unit. Themes ranged from pedagogical to practical, covering topics such as teacher identity discourses; epiphanic and revelatory moments of transition to becoming a teacher; and preparing for job applications and interviews. Data from the researcher’s journal, Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units (SETU) comments, and semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students upon completion of the workshops are framed within a phenomenographic paradigm. The aim in phenomenography is to describe variations of conception that people have of a particular phenomenon (Sin, 2010), in this case the video as a tool to promote critical thinking about the transition to teaching. The researcher explored her own, and participants’ experiences, and identified a range of conceptual meanings of the phenomenon. These were classified into categories according to their similarities and differences concerning the effectiveness of this specific video in assisting undergraduates in their transition to teaching. Early results reveal some similarities and many variations among participants as to the effectiveness of the video as a tool. Their conceptions of the phenomenon are individual and relational, and as such are quite varied. Emergent varied themes include: ‘I know what it is that I need to learn’; ‘Is this theory or practice?’; and ‘I don’t do drama’. Emergent similarities include: ‘Preparing for the unexpected’.

Anthology

This research is a practice led investigation of large-scale site specific performance installation works that respond to local and historical trauma, place making, and belonging for communities and audiences. The research is part of an ongoing PhD which is primarily questioning how layers of history and lived experience manifest or ‘imprint’ upon natural landscapes and urban sites using the driving concepts of landscape, archaeology, and community immersion to inform the practice. The site of the primary research investigation was Anthology www.anthology.net.au- a major site-specific theatrical journey through Westlake, now known as Stirling Park – Ngunawal land, a traditional pathway and the site of one of the camps created to house the workers building the new city of Canberra. Tents and a hall were erected followed by 61 cottages built in 1923, for married tradesmen building the infrastructure for the new Federal Capital of Australia. These families lived at Westlake for 50 years until the 1960’s when the families were relocated, the houses sold and removed. A community demolished. Westlake is now parkland (and prime real estate), nestled between the lake and the Embassies of Yarralumla. The event took place between 26th November and the 6th December 2014. The performance installation was created and produced over a 3-year period with $45,000.00 in funding provided by ArtsACT and the Centenary of Canberra. Anthology alluded to the power of immersive, site-sympathetic performance as a regenerative force for communities right now. What lies in wait for artists in sites, in places…to be uncovered…with its final form revealed through careful excavation? Anthology centralised rituals of remembrance and the importance of place as vital to the restoration and regeneration of community through processing and transcending what has been lost, hidden, suppressed or in the case of Westlake or Stirling Park ‘vanished’.

Working with technology/making technology work: a round table discussion

What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on the topic of performance and technology at the Mechanics Institute, Brunswick, on Saturday 3 November 2013. The participants - Suzanne Kersten, David Pledger, Julian Rickert, Tamara Saulwick and Hellen Sky - are all practising artists who have engaged with various forms of everyday and extra-daily technologies in their creative work. Gorkem Acaroglu and Glenn D'Cruz facilitated and moderated the discussion.

Finding the edge: online persona creation in fringe art forms

This study investigates the experience of persona creation by eight artists working in fringe art forms. The research demonstrates that for these artists, the online persona can operate in three registers of performance—professional, personal, and intimate—and in creating their personas, participants draw on socio-cultural discourses of artistness.

The silent screen (1895-1928)

In chapter 1, Victoria Duckett introduces the silent screen years (1895–1927) by investigating the American poet Vachel Lindsay’s claim in 1915 that European stage acting was unsuited to film. This critique held sway for decades, during which commentators celebrated American, as opposed to European, contributions to the new craft of motion picture acting. European acting became associated with mannered staginess in contrast to a more subtle American style. Building on recent scholarship that questions this dichotomy, Duckett skillfully analyzes the screen performances of two women actors: the French Sarah Bernhardt, arguably the most famous late nineteenth-century actor, who electrified theater audiences but made relatively few film appearances, and the American Lillian Gish, who began her career as a child in stage melodramas but whose fame derived from her appearances in films. Duckett’s nuanced reading of Bernhardt’s performance in the film Camille (Film D’Art, 1911) and Lillian Gish’s in Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) reveals that despite their differences, they both used their bodies expressively to convey meanings and emotions.

Cyborg presence in narrative theatre

New technologies are transforming the shape and function of contemporary performance practice. Dance in particular has been at the forefront of dissolving the boundaries between humans and technology. In Australia alone, works such as Gideon Obarzanek's GLOW (Chunky Move) and Garry Stewart's Proximity (Australian Dance Theatre) have offered technology a role traditionally preserved only for the live human performer. As these technologies infiltrate theatre practice and their capacity to be co-actors with humans on stage increases, we need to carefully interrogate the notion of the actor's presence. For an overwhelming number of scholars and critics, presence is the defining quality of theatrical performance. Theatre has been privileged as the site where people witness other people together in the same physical space. Digital technologies can be seen as a threat to this and to the actor's presence. Cormac Power's Presence in Play provides a comprehensive analysis of theatrical presence that encapsulates a poststructuralist critique of presence while maintaining the notion of 'presence' as a key aspect of theatre. In this article, I take up Power's category of the literal mode of presence and examine three case studies that use digital technology in ways that disturb traditional conceptions of presence. I investigate the impact that digital technologies in live performance have on theatre's claims to literal presence. I also investigate the indirect impact that these technologies have on forms of fictional and auratic presence (these are Power's terms, which I will define shortly). First, I will establish the centrality of presence to the vast body of commentary on theatre; then, I will draw on Derrida's analysis of the metaphysics of presence to unsettle dominant assumptions about the function of presence in theatre, arguing that such a privileging of presence demonises projected media as a form of contamination that impedes theatre's ability to represent 'truth'. I use Jennifer Parker-Starbuck's term 'Cyborg Theatre' to discuss three examples of digital performance that have used technology to question and challenge our relationship to technology in everyday life. These works challenge traditional notions of selfhood and force us to interrogate the borders between the live and the mediated.

Sayonara interviews: android-human theatre

Featuring a life-like humanoid robot, Seinendan Theatre Company (Japan) brought their performance Sayonara: Android-Human Theatre to Melbourne in August 2012. Geminoid F, an android, starred alongside Canadian actress Bryerly Long, in a performance that asks the question: What does life and death mean for humans as opposed to robots?

Experience and the artist's body : resisting the Uber-artist construct in socially engaged performance

Looking back over the past 20 years of my practice, the vista is littered with ambiguities of process and form within socially engaged performance. Sifting through the debris, one question arises: what have I been doing?; another might be: what have I been making? What feels relevant to me is the aggregate of my experiences; the who I am. With the current sector creep towards instrumentalising arts for social agendas, the value and relevance of experience ebbs. Demands on artists extend well beyond aesthetic skill, process facilitation and project management. In this essay, I critique the risk within socially engaged practice of art becoming subservient to social agendas and consider how the shift towards an uber-artist construct renders the sector unsustainable.

The status and function of Inanimate 'object-actors' in cyborg theatre

 This practice-led research investigates the relationships between human and technological actors in theatre with specific reference to theatrical presence.The research proposes to advance knowledge in the fields of directing and theatre making by putting forward new strategies for directing actors who perform with computer-based technologies.