Into the wilderness; Gilgul's 'physical' theatre 1994

Gilgul Theatre was founded in May 1991 by director Barrie Kosky and manager flighting designer Robert Lehrer, who aimed to establish 'Australia's first professional Jewish theatre company'.

Evaluating The Scared Cool project : understanding peacemaking through creativity and personal development in Timor-Leste

This article presents an evaluation of Scared Cool, a physical theatre project for young people in Dili, Timor-Leste. The project was hosted by non-government organisation Ba Futuru as part of their ongoing efforts to promote peace and conflict resolution in that new nation. Qualitative interviews and focus groups were undertaken with a range of stakeholders: participants; staff; the host organisation; audience members and the wider community, to determine their perceptions about project outcomes. The article also describes the ‘theories of change’ that leaders used to guide their work, and issues arising from the data.
The Scared Cool initiative appears to provide significant cultural and social benefits for the young participants. These include development of capacity for artistic expression, creative and analytic thinking, confidence and English language skills. There were also benefits to other stakeholders including audience members. These included the enjoyment of attending a live performance, and the potential for trauma resolution and positive relationship building. This study confirms the potential for participatory arts projects to assist with the positive development of young people in highly disadvantaged communities. In so doing, such projects can contribute to positive social change by assisting the resolution of trauma and violence.

Can't sleep

A devised, alternative musical set in the future, the play charts the story of a group of scientists, who have been tasked with capturing light in deep space. The play’s premise is bound to a strong ideological question: Life After Death or Light After Death? While religions believe in, but cannot prove, ‘life after death’, science proves that there is ‘light after death’… Lotu then asks, what if light holds consciousness? And what if scientific technique could be developed to capture light and experiment on it? “Can’t Sleep” is a story that will trick you into believing that you have embarked on a journey into the absurd, only to reach the destination of a collective reality. Lotu Theatre was awarded a $15,000 Arts Project Grant from Regional Arts Victoria to create the play and to explore the process of professional artists development through the collaborative process.

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.