A world elsewhere : virtual reality, motion capture and early modern theatre

This paper investigates virtual reality representations of the 1599 Boar’s Head Theatre and the Rose Theatre, two renaissance places and spaces. These models become a “world elsewhere” in that they represent virtual recreations of these venues in as much detail as possible. The models are based on accurate archeological and theatre historical records and are easy to navigate particularly for current use. This paper demonstrates the ways in which these models can be instructive for reading theatre today. More importantly we introduce human figures onto the stage via motion capture which allows us to explore the potential between space, actor and environment. This facilitates a new way of thinking about early modern playwrights’ “attitudes to locality and localities large and small”. These venues are thus activated to intersect productively with early modern studies so that the paper can test the historical and contemporary limits of such research.

The candidate : a novella and examination of Australian Gothic crime fiction

Australia is a land without haunted castles or subterranean corridors, without ancient graveyards or decaying monasteries, a land whose climate is rarely gloomy. Yet, the literary landscape is splattered with shades of the Gothic genre. This Gothic heritage is especially evident within elements of nineteenth century Australian sensation fiction. Australian crime fiction in the twentieth century, in keeping with this lineage, repeatedly employs elements of the Gothic, adapting and appropriating these conventions for literary effect. I believe that a ‘mélange’ of historical Gothic crime traditions could produce an exciting new mode of Gothic crime writing in the Australian context. As such, I have written a contemporary literary experiment in a Gothic crime ‘hybrid’ style: this novella forms my creative practice. The accompanying exegesis is a critical study of a selection of Australian literary works that exhibit the characteristics of both Gothic and crime genres. Through an analysis of these creative works, this study argues that the interlacing of Gothic traditions with crime writing conventions has been a noteworthy practice in Australian fiction during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and these literary tropes are interwoven in the writing of ‘The Candidate’, a Gothic crime novella.

Undressing the actor : the erotic relationship with the audience

The intimacy and eroticism of the actor’s relationship with the audience is captured in the ecstatic revelation of the actor “being in the moment.” Drawing on the theories of Freud and Sartre and twenty years of performance praxis, this paper explores the exchange of erotic discourse between stage and spectator that not only heightens the experience of the liveness of theatre, but creates a symbiosis that is silently negotiated, agreed upon and sensuously performed during the suspended timeframe of the theatrical event. The actor draws the audience into the erotic transaction through various dramatic devices: the seduction of the soliloquy, the somatic and verbal discourses, the sensuality of light and costuming. The audience responds with its own paralingual and verbal foreplay: the playfulness of laughter, the slapping of hands and, most significantly, the gaze. While the gaze is often perceived as a form of voyeurism, this paper argues that the gaze of consensual agreement between audience and actor can work to unmask inhibitions enabling the actor to create the truth of the moment in complete abandon.

The theatre programme : a public discourse at a staging of Maxwell Anderson's "Anne of the Thousand Days"

The term ’public discourses’ describes a range of texts or signifiers that inform the conditions of audience reception. Public discourses include myriad written, visual, spatial, auditory and sensory texts experienced by an audience at a particular theatrical event. Ric Knowles first introduced this term in his recent work Reading the Material Theatre. Whereas Knowles was interested in how public discourses modified the conditions of reception, my broader research is to explore how these public discourses become texts in themselves. This paper will discuss one public discourse, the theatre programme, as it related to a staging of Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days at the Brisbane Powerhouse in June 2006. The significance of the programme was explored at symposiums held after the performances. Audiences generally view programmes before a performance and after a performance and its significance as a written text changes. The program became a sign vehicle that worked to expound and explicate the meaning of the play for the audience. This public discourse became a significant written text contributing to the textual whole of the theatrical event.

The miracle worker

Helen Keller’s fight to speak, to understand, to love aided by her teacher Annie Sullivan was nothing short of a miracle. This is her story. Crossbow Productions staged six performances of The Miracle Worker at the Brisbane Powerhouse in June 2009 to raise awareness of people living with disabilities. The play was shadow signed for the hearing impaired and tactile tours of the set were held before each performance for the vision impaired. Over 200 hearing and vision impaired attended and 70 of these had never been to the theatre before. I’m deaf and we should be able to go to anything, and you’ve done that for us. As a blind person, I got a great deal from it. I found it extremely moving. There should be a thousand or so in the audience rather than a hundred so that everyone can experience it.

Dramatic character development personas to tailor apartment designs for different residential lifestyles

This chapter reports on research work that aims to overcome some limitations of conventional community engagement for urban planning. Adaptive and human-centred design approaches that are well established in human-computer interaction (such as personas and design scenarios) as well as creative writing and dramatic character development methods (such as the Stanislavsky System and the Meisner Technique) are yet largely unexplored in the rather conservative and long-term design context of urban planning. Based on these approaches, we have been trialling a set of performance based workshop activities to gain insights into participants’ desires and requirements that may inform the future design of apartments and apartment buildings in inner city Brisbane. The focus of these workshops is to analyse the behaviour and lifestyle of apartment dwellers and generate residential personas that become boundary objects in the cross-disciplinary discussions of urban design and planning teams. Dramatisation and embodied interaction of use cases form part of the strategies we employed to engage participants and elicit community feedback.

Theatre audience contribution : facilitating a new text through the post-performance discussion

Theatre Audience Contribution introduces a new approach to theatre audience research: audience contribution through the post-performance discussion. This volume considers the physical and vocal behaviour of audience members as an integral part of the theatrical event that changes, adds to and informs the theatrical experience. Post-performance discussions, although rising in popularity, are yet an under-explored and under-utilised avenue for audience contribution. Beginning with an overview of reception theory and the historical role of theatre audiences, the author introduces a new method for the facilitation of post-performance discussions that encourages audience contribution and privileges the audience voice. Two case studies explore post-performance discussions that inform the theatrical event and discover a new role for the contemporary audience: audience critic. This accessible volume has significant implications for theatre theorists, practitioners and audiences alike.

Mrs Klein

Described as ‘ferociously sharp’, Crossbow Production’s Mrs Klein is about the formidable psychoanalyst Melanie Klein whose ruthlessly ‘objective’ case studies of her children won her acclaim as both an inspiring and appalling woman. Did her ‘study’ drive her son to suicide? Starring Therese Collie (La Boite), Louise Brehmer (QTC, La Boite) and Caroline Beck (New York Broadway credits). Directed by Dr Christian Heim. Live classical music and sharp wit combine to make this a memorable production.

IDOL

Idol is a collaborative performance work for vocal performer and dancers. The work explores movement and sound relative to a vocal interface called the eMic (Extended Microphone Interface Controller). The eMic is a gestural controller designed by the composer for live vocal performance an real-time processing. The process for generating the work involves the choreographer being provided an opportunity to experiment with gestures ad movement relative to the eMic interface. The choreographer explored the interface as an object,a prop, an instrument and as an extension of the body. the movement was then videoed and the data coming from the sensors simultaneously recorded. The data and the video were then used as part of the compositional process, allowing the composer to see what the performance looks like and to experiment with mapping strategies using the captured sensor data. This approach represents a new compositional direction for working with the eMic, in that previously the compositional process commenced at the computer, building processing patches and assigning parameters to eMic sensors. In order to play the composition, the body needed to adapt to 'playing' the instrument. This approach treats the eMic like a traditional instrument that requires the human body to develop a command over the instrument. Working with the movement as a starting point inverts the process using choreographic gestures as the basis for musical structures.

Visualizing digital media interactions : providing feedback on jam2jam AV performances

Instrumental music performance is a well-established case of real-time interaction with technology and, when extended to ensembles, of interaction with others. However, these interactions are fleeting and the opportunities to reflect on action is limited, even though audio and video recording has recently provided important opportunities in this regard. In this paper we report on research to further extend these reflective opportunities through the capture and visualization of gestural data collected during collaborative virtual performances; specifically using the digital media instrument Jam2jam AV and the specifically-developed visualization software Jam2jam AV Visualize. We discusses how such visualization may assist performance development and understanding. The discussion engages with issues of representation, authenticity of virtual experiences, intersubjectivity and wordless collaboration, and creativity support. Two usage scenarios are described showing that collaborative intent is evident in the data visualizations more clearly than in audio-visual recordings alone, indicating that the visualization of performance gestures can be an efficient way of identifying deliberate and co-operative performance behaviours.