The Yonder project : literacy and social competency development in primary school students through co-creation of live performance

Since 2007 Kite Arts Education Program (KITE), based at Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), has been engaged in delivering a series of theatre-based experiences for children in low socio-economic primary schools in Queensland. The artist in residence (AIR) project titled Yonder includes performances developed by the children with the support and leadership of teacher artists from KITE for their community and parents/carers,supported by a peak community cultural institution. In 2009,Queensland Performing Arts Centre partnered with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Creative Industries Faculty (Drama) to conduct a three-year evaluation of the Yonder project to understand the operational dynamics, artistic outputs and the educational benefits of the project. This paper outlines the research findings for children engaged in the Yonder project in the interrelated areas of literacy development and social competencies. Findings are drawn from six iterations of the project in suburban locations on the edge of Brisbane city and in regional Queensland.

Recipe for success : cooking up a storm in the technology classroom

Ingredients: - 1 cup Vision - 100ml ‘Real World’ Application - 100ml Unit Structure/Organisation - 100ml Student-centric Approach [optional: Add Social Media/Popular Culture for extra goodness] - Large Dollop of Passion + Enthusiasm - Sprinkle of Approachability Mix all ingredients well. Cover and leave to rise in a Lecture Theatre for 1.5 hours. Cook in a Classroom for 1.5 hours. Garnish with a dash of Humour before serving. Serves 170 Students

Fourth wall removed : womens' liberation or entrapment?

Australian dramatic literature of the 1950s and 1960s heralded a new wave in theatre and canonised a unique Australian identity on local and international stages. In previous decades, Australian theatre had been abound with the mythology of the wide brown land and the outback hero. This rural setting proved remote to audiences and sat uneasily within the conventions of the naturalist theatre. It was the suburban home that provided the back drop for this postwar evolution in Australian drama. While there were a number of factors that contributed to this watershed in Australian theatre, little has been written about how the spatial context may have influenced this movement. With the combined effects of postwar urbanization and shifting ideologies around domesticity, a new literary landscape had been created for playwrights to explore. Australian playwrights such as Dorothy Hewett, Ray Lawler and David Williamson transcended the outback hero by relocating him inside the postwar home. The Australian home of the 1960s slowly started subscribing to a new aesthetic of continuous living spaces and patios that extended from the exterior to the interior. These mass produced homes employed diluted spatial principles of houses designed by architects, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Adolf Loos in the 1920s and 1930s. In writing about Adolf Loos’ architecture, Beatriz Colomina described the “house as a stage for the family theatre”. She also wrote that the inhabitants of Loos’ houses were “both actors and spectators of the family scene involved”. It has not been investigated as to whether this new capacity to spectate within the home was a catalyst for playwrights to reflect upon, and translate the domestic environment to the stage. Audiences were also accustomed to being spectators of domesticity and could relate to the representations of home in the theatre. Additionally, the domestic setting provided a space for gender discourse; a space in which contestations of masculine and feminine identities could be played out. This research investigates whether spectating within the domestic setting contributed to the revolution in Australian dramatic literature of the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of the spectator in domesticity is underpinned by the work of Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. An understanding of how playwrights may have been influenced by spectatorship within the home is ascertained through interviews and biographical research. The paper explores playwrights’ own domestic experiences and those that have influenced the plays they wrote and endeavours to determine whether seeing into the home played a vital role in canonising the Australian identity on the stage.

Total Dik - Transmedia Concept development

Total Dik! is a collaborative project between the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Queensland Theatre Company (QTC). Total Dik! explores transmedia storytelling in live performance from concept development to delivery and builds on works, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, (Forrester2012), Hotel Modern’s Kamp (2005) and God’s Beard (2012) that use visual art, puppetry, music and film. The project’s first iteration enabled an interrogation of the integration of media-rich elements with live performers in a theatrical environment. Performative transmedia storytelling draws on the tenets of convergent media theory developed by Jenkins (2007, 2012), Dena (2010) and Philips (2012). This exploratory work, juxtaposing transmedia storytelling techniques with live performance, draws on Samuel Becket’s challenges to theatre orthodoxy, and touches on Brechtian notions of alienation through ‘sleight-of-hand’ or processual unpacking and deconstruction during performance. Total Dik! blends a convergence of technologies, models, green screen capture, and live dimensions of performance in one narrative allowing the work’s creators to test new combinations of transmedia storytelling techniques on a traditional performance platform.

“I Just Didn’t Think” – Orientation Drama

The resulting live and video performance follows the stories of Jared, Amanda and Sonia and the issues they face in transitioning to university, and uses interactive elements to engage real university students in thinking about approaches to their studies. It has been commissioned for presentation 5 times with varying groups of actors since it was created.

Large-scale community projects in regional Queensland : unlocking creative potential and community identity : Artspoken Queensland Regional Arts and Culture Conference 2011

In this presentation, renowned arts practitioner, Sean Mee, and Nigel Lavender, Executive Director of the Queensland Music Festival, talk about how community arts practice can be used to build cultural captial in communities, using examples such large-scale musicals such as The Road We're ON (Charleville) and Behind the Cand (Bowen), Mee and Lavender highlight the importance of community-driven narrative and particiaption.

An afternoon with Chopin and George Sand

An original edutainment piece written by Caroline Heim and Christian Heim. Frederic Chopin and George Sands' turbulent and fraught relationship is dramatised through Chopin's music and Sand's writings.

Fever pitch

Queensland Theatre Company's season-opening production is a double bill: two one-person plays, two hours to pitch them and two dynamic actors (Hugh Parker and Barbara Lowing). Peter Houghton's works The Pitch and The China Incident caper somewhere in between stand-up comedy and Yes, Prime Minister. Both plays are about "double guessing the bullshit'', in the frenzied worlds of two success compulsives: Walter and Bea.

Emptiness and fullness : Pinter, anti-architecture and politics

Classical architecture has a long history of representing the idealized proportions of the human body, derived from the Vitruvian man. This association with the idealized human form has also associated architecture as symbiotic with prevailing power structures. Meaning that architecture is always loaded with some signification, it creates a highly inscribed space. In the absence of architecture space is not necessarily without inscription, for within the void there can exist an anti-architecture. Like the black box theatre, it is both empty and full at the same time, in the absence of the architecture, the void of space and how it is occupied becomes much more profound. As Dorita Hannah writes, ‘In denying a purely visual apprehension of built space, and suggesting a profound interiority, the black-box posits a new way of regarding the body in space.’ This paper analyses the work of Harold Pinter and his use of the body to create an anti-architecture to subvert oppressors and power structures. Pinter’s works are an important case study in this research due to their political nature. His works are also heavily tied to territory, which bound the works in a dependent relationship with a simulated ‘place’. In the citation accompanying the playwright’s Nobel Laureate it states, '...in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.' In Pinter’s work oppression manifests itself in the representation of a room, the architecture, which is the cause of a power struggle when objectified and defeated when subjectified. The following work examines how Pinter uses the body to subjectify and represent architecture as authority in his earlier works, which relied on detailed mimetic sets of domestic rooms, and then in his later political works, that were freed of representational scenography. This paper will also look at the adaption of Pinter’s work by the Belarus Free Theatre in their 2008 production of ‘Being Harold Pinter.’ The work of Pinter and the Belarus Free Theatre are concerned with authoritarian political structures. That is, political structures that works against ideas of individualism, ascribing to a mass-produced body as an artifact of dictatorship and conservatism. The focus on the body in space on an empty stage draws attention to the individual – the body amongst scenography can become merely another prop, lost in the borders and boundaries the scenery dictates. Through an analysis of selected works by Harold Pinter and their interpretations, this paper examines this paradox of emptiness and fullness through the body as anti-architecture in performance.

Transcending the inanimate : evoking the sublime in puppet-based performance

This study investigated how contemporary puppet-based theatre can create deeply imaginative experiences for adult audiences. Designed to interrogate the potential effects of double-vision (Tillis, 1992), the theories of the sublime (Kant, 2008; 2003) and the uncanny (Jentsch, 1906; Freud, 1919) were used to create a series of creative guidelines. As practice-led research, the project embraced an iterative approach consisting of two cycles for creative experimentation, and a third for the creation of the final performance work The Harbinger, presented as a part of La Boite Theatre Company’s mainstage season. A theoretical investigation was also conducted to inform the developing practice.

Life Drama : an arts education response to social and cultural challenges in Papua New Guinea

The Life Drama program is a theatre-based experiential learning program developed in Papua New Guinea over the past seven years. The Life Drama team recognises that a significant proportion of “education” for learners of all ages takes place outside formal education systems, particularly in developing nations such as Papua New Guinea. If arts education principles and practices are to contribute meaningfully and powerfully to resolving social and cultural challenges, it is important to recognise that many learners and educators will encounter and use these principles and practices outside of school or university settings. This paper briefly describes the Life Drama program and its context, highlights its two streams of operation (community educators and teacher educators) and indicates some ways in which an arts-based education initiative like Life Drama contributes to Goal 3 of the Seoul Agenda:“Apply arts education principles and practices to contribute to resolving the social and cultural challenges facing today‟s world.” In particular, the project addresses sub-goal 3b:“Recognize and develop the social and cultural well-being dimensions of arts education”.

Life Drama Papua New Guinea : contextualising practice

This article presents the Life Drama project as a case study in how theoretical and contextual factors may inform the development of an applied theatre initiative. Life Drama is a workshop-based, participatory form of applied theatre and performance being developed in Papua New Guinea. At this time, the aim of Life Drama is to address the gap between ‘awareness’and behaviour change in relation to sexual health, particularly HIV. The paper situates Life Drama within three fields of theory and practice – applied theatre, theatre for development and HIVeducation – and critically reflects on the ways in which this program is attempting to meet key challenges identified in the literatures of these fields.

Folk opera : stories crossing borders in Papua New Guinea

The Life Drama project is a drama-based sexual health promotion project, developed by a cross-cultural research team in Papua New Guinea (PNG) over the past four years. Recognising the limitations of established theatre-in-education and theatre-for-development approaches when working across cultures, the research team explored ways of tapping into the everyday performativity of PNG participants and their communities in order to communicate more powerfully about the personal and social issues involved in sexual health. Through the Folk Opera form, developed by PNG theatre company Raun Raun Theatre around the time of national Independence, the research explored the importance of ‘story’ in identity formation, maintenance and change, the communication of meaning, and the transmission of tacit local knowledges. In a highly diverse and rapidly-changing country like PNG, enacted stories inherently compel the exchange and exploration of different knowledges, and promote the dialogue and ownership that drives social change. The paper will present and unpack the folk opera form as developed in the Life Drama program, drawing conclusions which may apply to other programs which to promote health and social justice across cultures.

Boomtown

This creative work was commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival (artistic director: James Morrison) as the signature regional event for the 2013 festival. With book by David Burton and music by Scott Saunders, this original music theatre piece was creatively developed and directed by Sean Mee under the overall control of creative Producer, Marguerite Pepper. The production was created using the stories of Gladstone and performed by over 300 local artists, school children and industry partners on the foreshore of the Gladstone Marina on a purpose built stage, designed by Josh McIntosh. The production played over 4 nights (18-21 July 2013) to an estimated audience of just under 20,000.

Preparing for performance capture #1

This video article articulates two exercises that have been developed to respond to the need for preparedness in the growing field of Performance Capture. The first is called Walking Through (Delbridge 2013), where the actor navigates a series of objects that exist in screen space through a developed sense of the existing physical particularities of the studio and an interaction with a screen (or feedback loop). The second exercise is called The Donut (Delbridge 2013), where the performer continues to navigate screen space but this time does so through the literal stepping through of a Torus in the virtual – again with nothing but the studio infrastructure and the screen as a guide. Notions of Motion Captured performance infer the existence of an interface that combines performer with system, separating (or intervening in) the space between performance and the screen. It is precisely the effect and provided opportunity of the intermediary device on the practice, craft and preparedness of the actor as they navigate the connection between 3D screen space and the physical properties of the studio that is examined here. Defining the scope of current practice for the contemporary actor is a key construct of this challenge, with the most appropriate definition revolving around the provision of a required mixture of performance and content for live, mediated, framed and variously captured formats. One of these particular formats is Performance Capture. The exercises presented here are two from a series, developed over a three year study that contribute to our understanding of the potential for a training regimen to be developed for the rigors of Performance Capture.