Potential climate effect on Japanese rice productivity

Adaptation to climate change has become an important policy question in recent years. Agriculture is an economic activity that is most sensitive to climate change. We evaluate the dynamic effects of productivity change and individual efforts to adapt to climate change. Adaptation actions in agriculture are evaluated to determine how the climate affects production efficiency. In this paper, we use the bi-directional distance function method to measure Japanese rice production loss due to climate. We find that (1) accumulated precipitation has the greatest effect on rice production efficiency and (2) the climate effect on rice production efficiency decreases over time. Our results empirically support the benefit of the adaptation approach.

Community engagement or community conversation?: Boomtown, a large-scale regional, outdoor community theatrical event

On the 18th of July 2013, three hundred local members of Gladstone, Queensland erupted into song and dance performing the fraught history of their community harbourside through tug boat ballets, taiko drumming, German bell ringing and BMX bike riding. Over 17,500 people attended the four performances of Boomtown, a Queensland Music Festival event. This was the largest regional, outdoor community-engaged musical performance staged in Australia. The narrative moved beyond the dominant, pejorative view of Gladstone as an industrial town to include the community members’ sense of purpose and aspirations. It was a celebratory, contentious and ambitious project that sought to disrupt the traditional conventions of performance-making through working in artistically democratic ways. This article explores the potential for Australian Community Engaged Arts (CEA) projects such as Boomtown to democratically engage community members and co-create culturally meaningful work within a community. Research into CEA projects rarely consider how the often delicate conversations between practitioners and the community work. The complex processes of finding and co-writing the narrative, casting, and rehearsing Boomtown are discussed with reference to artistic director/dramaturge Sean Mee’s innovative approaches. Boomtown began with and concluded with community conversations. Skilful negotiation ensured congruence between the townspeople’s stories and the “community story” presented on stage, abrogating potential problems of narrative ownership. To supplement the research, twenty-one personal interviews were undertaken with Gladstone community members invested in the production before, during and after the project: performers, audience members and local professionals. The stories shared and emphasised in the theatricalised story were based on propitious, meaningful, local stories from lived experiences rather than preconceived, trivial or tokenistic matters, and were underpinned by a consensus formed on what was in the best interests of the majority of community members. Boomtown exposed hidden issues in the community and gave voice to thoughts, feelings and concerns which triggered not just engagement, but honest conversation within the community.

The culture wars of climate change

Of late, there has been a growth in cultural expression about climate change – with the rise of climate fiction (‘cli-fi’); art and photography responding to changes in nature; musical anthems about climate change; plays and dramas about climate change; and environmental documentaries, and climate cinema. Drawing comparisons to past controversies over cultural funding, this paper considers the cultural wars over climate change. This article considers a number of cultural fields. Margaret Atwood made an important creative and critical contribution to the debate over climate change. The work examines Ian McEwan's novel, Solar, a tragi-comedy about authorship, invention, intellectual property, and climate science. After writing a history of Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have experimented with fiction – as well as history. This article focuses upon artistic works about climate change. It analyses James Balog’s work with the Extreme Ice Survey, which involved photography of glaciers under retreat in a warming world. The work was turned into a documentary called Chasing Ice. It also considers the artistic project of 350.org 'to transform the human rights and environmental issues connected to climate change into powerful art that gets people to stop, think and act.' The paper examines musical storytelling in respect of climate change. The paper explores dramatic works about climate change including Steve Waters' The Contingency Plan, Stephen Emmott's Ten Billion, and Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling and Hannie Rayson’s Extinction. The paper also examines the role of documentary film-making. It also considers the cinematographic film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Such a survey will enable a consideration of the larger question of whether creative art about climate change matters; and whether it is deserving of public funding.

Creative adaptations: Integrating Feldenkrais principles in contemporary dance technique to facilitate the transition into tertiary dance education

As conservatoire-style dance teaching has traditionally utilised a hierarchical approach through which the student must conform to the ideal requirements of the conventional technique, current discourse is beginning to question how dance training can develop technical acuity without stifling students' ability to engage creatively. In recent years, there has been growing interest in the field of somatics and its relationship to tertiary dance training due to the understanding that this approach supports creative autonomy by radically repositioning the student's relationship to embodied learning, skill acquisition, enquiry and performance. This research addresses an observable disjuncture between the skills of dancers graduating from tertiary training and Australian dance industry needs, which increasingly demand the co-creative input of the dancer in choreographic practice. Drawing from Action Research, this paper will discuss a project which introduces somatic learning approaches, primarily from Feldenkrais Method and Hanna Somatics, to first-year dance students in their transition into tertiary education. This paper acknowledges previous research undertaken, most specifically the Somdance Manual by the University of Western Sydney, while directing focus to the first-year student transition from private dance studio training into the pre-professional arena.

No Exit from the gaze: Sartre’s theory facilitated through aspects of Meisner’s practice

This article explores the theory/practice nexus in performance and considers a method for the transfer of theory in rehearsal and performance. In a 2011 production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s "No Exit", rehearsal, performance and post-performance exercises were devised to facilitate an understanding of Sartre’s existential concepts for audiences based on Sanford Meisner’s techniques. In this production, Sartre’s theory of “the gaze” was “practiced” by actors and audience members opening up new perspectives on the conflation of theory and practice in theatre productions.

The Pirate Bazaar: The Social Life of Copyright Law

This thesis provides a cultural history of Australian copyright law and related artistic controversies. It examines a number of disputes over authorship, collaboration, and appropriation across a variety of cultural fields. It considers legal controversies over the plagiarism of texts, the defacing of paintings, the sampling of musical works, the ownership of plays, the co-operation between film-makers, the sharing of MP3 files on the Internet, and the appropriation of Indigenous culture. Such narratives and stories relate to a broad range of works and subject matter that are protected by copyright law. This study offers an archive of oral histories and narratives of artistic creators about copyright law. It is founded upon interviews with creative artists and activists who have been involved in copyright litigation and policy disputes. This dialogical research provides an insight into the material and social effects of copyright law. This thesis concludes that copyright law is not just a ‘creature of statute’, but it is also a social and imaginative construct. In the lived experience of the law, questions of aesthetics and ethics are extremely important. Industry agreements are quite influential. Contracts play an important part in the operation of copyright law. The media profile of personalities involved in litigation and policy debates is pertinent. This thesis claims that copyright law can be explained by a mix of social factors such as ethical standards, legal regulations, market forces, and computer code. It can also be understood in terms of the personal stories and narratives that people tell about litigation and copyright law reform. Table of Contents Prologue 1 Introduction A Creature of Statute: Copyright Law and Legal Formalism 6 Chapter One The Demidenko Affair: Copyright Law and Literary Works 33 Chapter Two Daubism: Copyright Law and Artistic Works 67 Chapter Three The ABCs of Anarchism: Copyright Law and Musical Works 105 Chapter Four Heretic: Copyright Law and Dramatic Works 146 Chapter Five Shine: Copyright Law and Film 186 Chapter Six Napster: Infinite Digital Jukebox or Pirate Bazaar? Copyright Law and Digital Works 232 Chapter Seven Bangarra Dance Theatre: Copyright Law and Indigenous Culture 275 Chapter Eight The Cathedral and the Bazaar: The Future of Copyright Law 319

Under this Sky: Logan's Musical Celebration

A creative practice as research, UNDER THIS SKY is the latest investigation in a 12-year study into the “QMF Model”, an application of principles of community and cultural practice that generates large-scale, music spectacle events that derive their narrative and expression from the communities in which they are performed. UNDER THIS SKY is a large-scale musical specially commissioned for the city of Logan (Queensland) as the signature work of the 2015 Queensland Musical Festival. The investigation centres around the capacity of the “QMF Model” to engage with performers and musicians of Logan and then, through community consultation, create a narrative based on idiosyncratic stories and themes that would culminate in a performance event in August 2015. Previous creative projects, Boomtown (Gladstone), Behind the Cane (Bowen) and The Road We’re On (Charleville), were conducted in relatively small communities, Gladstone being the largest. In UNDER THIS SKY, the model is being tested in a large metropolitan city (Logan – 300,000). The core principles of CACD (community arts and cultural development) are being interrogated and adapted to fit this large-scale, whole of community environment. The purpose is to refine and further validate the “QMF Model” as a viable and effective process for community/artistic partnerships. Since February 2014, professional artists and managers have facilitated and shaped the work, up-skilling performers over a periods of 12 months, developing new relationships and creating opportunities for participation at all levels of experience. The research methodology involved creative practice through a continuous cycle of action, reflection, adaptation and application.

Damned to fame: The moral rights of the Beckett estate

The Company B production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot raises important questions about copyright law, moral rights, and dramatic works. The playwright's nephew and executor, Edward Beckett, threatened to bring a legal action against the Sydney company for breach of contract on the grounds that unauthorised music appeared in the production. The Company B production denied that the contract made any such express provisions. The director Neil Armfield complained: 'In coming here with its narrow prescriptions, its dead controlling hand, the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art'. In the biography Damned to fame, James Knowlson documents a number of other proceedings taken by Beckett and his agents to control the productions of his work: 'He was often represented as a tyrannical figure, an arch-controller of his work, ready to unleash fiery thunderbolts onto the head of any bold, innovative director, unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause.' However, Knowlson notes that Beckett was inconsistent in his willingness to use legal action: 'It made a tremendous difference if he liked and respected the persons involved or if he had been able to listen to their reasons for wanting to attempt something highly innovative or even slightly different'. Famously, in 1988, Beckett brought legal action against a Dutch theatre company, which wanted to stage a production of Waiting for Godot, with women acting all the roles. His lawyer argued that the integrity of the text was violated because actresses were substituted for the male actors asked for in the text. The judge in the Haarlem court ruled that the integrity of the play had not been violated, because the performance showed fidelity to the dialogue and the stage directions of the play. By contrast, in 1992, a French court held a stage director was liable for an infringement of Beckett's moral right of integrity because the director had staged Waiting for Godot with the two lead roles played by women. In 1998, a United States production of Waiting for Godot with a racially mixed cast attracted legal threats amid accusations it had 'injected race into the play'. In the 2000 New York Fringe Festival, a company made light of this ongoing conflict between the Beckett estate and artistic directors. The work was entitled: The complete lost works of Samuel Beckett as found in an envelope (partially burned) in a dustbin in Paris labelled 'Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!'. The plot concerned a fight between three producers and the Beckett estate. In the wake of such disputes, Beckett and later his estate sought to tighten production contracts to state that no additions, omissions or alterations should be made to the text of the play or the stage directions and that no music, special effects or other supplements should be added without prior consent.

Evaluation of Australian Performing Arts Market 2014-2018: APAM inter-year report 2015

In the awarding of the tender for APAM by the Australia Council to Brisbane Powerhouse for the delivery of the market in 2014-2018, a requirement is that a formal evaluation of the three iterations of APAM be undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Faculty, under the leadership of Associate Professor Sandra Gattenhof. The agreed research model delivers reporting on outcomes not only in the year in which APAM is delivered (2014, 2016, 2018) but also in the years between (2015, 2017). This inter-year report focuses on the domestic and international touring outcomes resulting from engagement in the 2014 Market and responds two of the three key research foci for the evaluation that are articulated in the Brisbane Powerhouse Tender (2011) document as: • Evaluation of international market development outcomes through showcasing work to targeted international presenters and agents • Evaluation of national market development outcomes through showcasing work to national presenters and producers. The reporting for mid-year 2015, a non-APAM year, collects data from two key sources – six identified case study productions that have been tracked for eighteen months, and an online survey delivered to all APAM 2014 delegates. This inter-year report is a six month follow-up with delegates and identified case studies companies that track the ongoing progress of market outcomes and levers for ongoing improvement of the APAM delivery model that was tabled in the Year One Report delivered to Brisbane Powerhouse in October 2014.

Warmwaters

This project originated from both investigation of the musicalisation of theatre and impact of gender upon contemporary physical comedy. Developed as a ‘music first’ proposition, the initial experiment was to blend music and theatre so they were indistinguishable. Musicalising theatre, and theatricalising music. This established a covert intermediality with the potential to work in theatre or music venues. An iterative cycle of writing, performance, and videography over two years in venues ranging from small cafes to Woodford Folk Festival resulted in a full-length performance premiering at Brisbane Powerhouse’s Queensland Cabaret Festival 2015. The soundtrack to the show was recorded as a full-length album at QUT’s Gasworks Studio and released in 2014. It’s become clear that male/female musical comedy acts are an extremely rare pairing. Certain preconceptions about gender and comedy complicate the field; indeed the comic tropes of the double act which the Warmwaters flow around and through. Brian Logan (2011) even poses that “the male-female dynamic militate[s] against comedy”. This performance-led research draws on Comedy Studies to examine three classic formulations of the comic duo as they are manifested at critical incidents in the Warmwaters’ show. These moments are examined in terms of comic functionality and gender, evaluating and potentially reformulating them, whilst working towards a better understanding of the relative scarcity of the male/female musical comedy duo. Prototypes have been performed in various venues, utilising performance as research: cycles in which discoveries made during unpredictable gigs in music venues are captured on video, transcribed, rewritten, then fed back into live performance.

Measuring impact: Positioning evaluation in the Australian arts and culture landscape

Arts culture organisations and funding authorities increasingly need to evaluate the impact of festivals, events and performances. Economic impacts are often privileged over 'soft data' about community experience and engagement. This new book offers a timely and scholarly demonstration of how cultural value and impact can be evaluated. It offers an innovative approach whereby the relationship developed between the researchers/evaluator and the commissioning arts and cultural producer provides an opportunity to rethink the traditional process of reporting back on value and impact through the singular entity of funds acquittal. Using three commissioned evaluations undertaken at an Australian university as an extended case study, the book investigates the two positions most often adopted by researchers/evaluators - embedded and collaborative, or external and distanced - and argues the merits and deficiencies of the two approaches. Offering an examination of how arts evaluation 'works' in theory and practice and more importantly, why it is needed now and in the future to demonstrate the reach and cultural gains from arts and cultural projects, this will be essential reading for students in arts management, professionals working in arts and cultural organisations, scholars working in association with creative industries and cultural development.

Who Rules Japan? Popular Participation in the Japanese Legal Process

"The dramatic growth of the Japanese economy in the postwar period, and its meltdown in the 1990s, has attracted sustained interest in the power dynamics underlying the management of Japan’s administrative state. Scholars and commentators have long debated over who wields power in Japan, asking the fundamental question: who really governs Japan? This important volume revisits this question by turning its attention to the regulation and design of the Japanese legal system. With essays covering the new lay-judge system in Japanese criminal trials, labour dispute resolution panels, prison policy, gendered justice, government lawyers, welfare administration and administrative transparency, this comprehensive book explores the players and processes in Japan’s administration of justice."--publisher website

When Japanese law goes pop

Japanese law is going ‘pop’. Since the turn of the century, Japanese popular culture, especially prime-time television, has dedicated more time to legal themes, characters and settings. Lawyers, overwhelmingly women, are the heroes in both dramatic and comedic television series (Nakamura, 2007). Courtroom battles are the scene for plot developments (Ishikawa, 2004). Practising lawyers are the new celebrities, joining actors and singers on the light entertainment talk show circuit. To be sure, law is not a new thematic preoccupation on Japanese network television. Nor is it one that has become so dominant that it overshadows more traditional genres such as workplace romantic comedies, coming-of-age dramas or family soap operas (eg, Dissanayake, 2012, p._194). But, its growing presence on the silver screen in twenty-first-century Japan is a trend that merits analysis. The purpose of this chapter is to explore that socio-legal significance. This presents theoretical and empirical challenges. Theoretically, is there explanatory potential in the link between law and popular culture in Japan? Empirically, does the greater embrace of law-related characters, plots and scenes in prime-time television series since 2001 provide compelling evidence of changing popular attitudes to law and legal process among Japanese viewers? The inspiration for both the title and theme of this chapter comes from Sherwin’s When Law Goes Pop (2000). But it departs from Sherwin in how it defines and analyses the issues. For Sherwin, ‘pop’ means ‘implosion’.

When Japanese law goes pop

This article explores the extent to which the growth in law-themed popular culture since the turn of the century, especially television shows, signals a shift in popular attitudes towards law. Four decades of research into Japanese legal consciousness has called into question the extent to which there is a Japanese cultural aversion to Jaw, with most scholars expressing doubt over whether culture properly explains the comparatively low litigation rates in Japan compared to other industrialised nations. This article argues that popular culture, although not without its limitations, offers new clues into how legal consciousness is developing and changing in 21st Century Japan. The article concludes that popular culture paints a picture of a greater readiness by Japanese people to engage with Jaw, although scepticism remains about the law's promise to achieve justice and social solidarity.