AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'In the first article in this issue, Julian Meyrick offers us a way of looking that seems particularly apposite in the current moment when the collateral damage from the COVID-19 pandemic to the practice and study of live performance so preoccupies us, and the way forward appears so opaque and contingent. To (perhaps grossly) simplify his far more complex assertion – that we occupy a space of both retrospective and prospective memory – the injunction to look back in order to look forward takes on poignancy in a time when we are still counting the losses in theatre scholarship and Theatre and Drama courses (particularly in Australian universities) that have been decimated in COVID-related restructures, with no clear signs regarding when or if our discipline might rebuild. And while performance venues have, on the whole, re-opened, performances or seasons are frequently cancelled as key artists contract the virus and are forced to retreat to isolation. We, as audience, have returned to witness these performances, with what Silvija Jestrovic describes as ‘an almost absurd suspension of belief, despite the all-permeating crisis which we live and breathe’.1 And, perhaps, absent a stable notion of a ‘new normal’, this condition of suspension currently conditions what Meyrick – in his article for this issue – describes our ‘capacity to imagine different futures now’. It is possible, I think, to acknowledge this positionality, or apply this useful frame, to all the articles in this issue, as each speaks out of a ‘space between’.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Only literary material within AustLit's scope individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
'Time's up, motherf*%ker': Emasculation and restaging justice for women in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nicola Hyland
The use of irony in pakeha performance by Adriann Smith
Traversing the Proscenium: Audience Enworlding in Musical Theatre by Stuart Grant, Narelle Yeo and Melissa Fenton
'What do you mean we aren't performing Shakespeare?: ' : A contemporary, devised performance curriculum at a regional Australian university by Gillian Arrighi, Clare Irvine, Brian Joyce and Carine Challandes
Between freedom and control: A chorus-centred bakkhai for community ensemble by Vahri McKenzie
Rediscovering Stanislavsky review by Stuart Young
The Undertow review by Moira Fortin
Dementia, narrative and performance: Staging reality, reimagining identities review by Sarah Peters
Contents
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Looking Forwards to the 1950s : Utilising the Concept of Hauntology to Investigate Australian Theatre History,
single work
criticism
(p. 7-41)'We do not live our lives entirely in the incident light of the present. The moment of actuality that we call ‘the now’ is suffused with memory. This is of two kinds: retrospective and prospective. We look back to the past, to what we recall as individuals and what is captured in mnemonic form by the communities to which we belong. And we look forward to the future, building scenarios about what could happen next, exercises in mental foresight that help us to manage the opportunities and risks of a contingent world. Retrospection and prospection are coextensive with living in the present, and our time-binding activities as human beings are continual, active and essential. Part of living in ‘the now’ involves making sense of it as a pattern of actual and virtual events, drawing a line from the past through the present to the future. The most obvious tool used to do this is narrative. The function of a story is to gather past, present and future into a coherent, cognitively traversable whole. The accounts so generated are open-ended. As long as we are alive, the narratives we tell ourselves are subject to continual revision. A ceaseless flow of new events, ideas and relations in the present, changes our view of the past and future also. Instead of thinking of past, present and future as separate kinds of time, we can see them as reflexive categories of understanding linked together in mysterious ways. Thus we can talk, as Jacques Derrida does, of a ‘non-present present, [a] being-there of an absent or departed one [that] no longer belongs to knowledge’:2 of the present haunting the past. Equally, we can talk of Mark Fisher’s ‘lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate’:3 of the futures haunting the now. The use of the plural is significant. As a virtuality, the future is a flickering quantum field of possibility, existing in a number of alternative states simultaneously. This should prompt energetic engagement with them. The ghosts of the future are more restless than the ghosts of the past, and ask for more than acknowledgement or a settling of accounts. They ask for concretisation and purposeful action, the transformation of desire into deed. If we have trouble with this aspect of our memory, it restricts the choices we make now, the decisions about what we will leave to the future when, eventually, we haunt it as the trace of the past ourselves.'
(Introduction)
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Before Neo-burlesque, There Was Queer Cabaret : Revisiting Queer Performances from Melbourne in the 1990s,
single work
criticism
(p. 12-71)
DAVEYIn Melbourne in the 1990s, a burgeoning ‘queer cabaret’ scene and Dockland parties produced by the ALSO (Alternative Life Style Organisation) Foundation provided regular performances for LGBTQI+ audiences. Fundraisers and fetish club nights, with titles like ‘Libido Unbound’ and ‘Flaunt Your Fetish’ incorporated dance, spoken word, music and drag. These performances articulated developing ideas about lesbian and queer identities, feminist and female subjectivities, and the ‘body’: the status and state of corporeal-ity in the increasingly mediated and corporatised environment. This article takes an autoethnographic approach, drawing upon primary sources including performance texts, and journal entries (autoethnographic record), to examine the cultural currents that were coming together ahead of the Burlesque explosion of the late 1990s–2000s.' (Introduction)
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Shadows of the Australian Performing Arts Ecology,
single work
criticism
(p. 72-92)'In 1977 in Ankara, Turkey’s capital city, I starred in my first theatrical production, a series of Nasredin Hoja tales. Nasredin Hoja – a philosopher, a Sufi – is remembered for his funny anecdotes in a series of Aesop-like fables that each contain a moral and a message. Nasredin Hoja is the wise fool who famously sat on his donkey backwards and, when asked why, replied: ‘it’s not me that sits on my donkey backwards, it’s my donkey that is facing the wrong way’.' (Introduction)
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Director / Mother / Outlaw,
single work
criticism
(p. 153-183)'This article examines the practices of Australian women theatre directors as an act of resistance that de-centres conventional and historical thinking. It investigates the innovations that emerge from the powerful intersection of the creative work of directing and the creative work of mothering. As identified by Throsby and Petetskaya (2017) in Making Art Work: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia,1 a large percentage of theatre directors in Australia function within what is a freelance or ‘gig’ economy. At its core, the theatre industry is a low-income-earning sector that is old-fashioned in its hierarchical and male-dominated structures. This context takes a toll on the number of women who aspire to careers as directors. However, like many sectors, the balance of family life and work affects opportunities for women directors as well. While there is growing scholarship and policy on gender equality in the theatre ecology, little research has been done on directors who are concurrently doing the work of creating theatre and mothering. This article reports on research arising from my doctoral studies. It examines the significant impacts of childbearing and rearing on the way women direct and the creative work that they produce, through two case studies,2 and it further discusses key findings for creating environments that enable women directors to flourish and that facilitate new mothers’ return to rehearsal rooms across the different facets of the theatre industry.'
(Introduction)
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Driving 'Transformational Change' : Using Ecodramaturgy to Develop a More Sustainable Theatre Ecosystem,
single work
criticism
(p. 278-303)
As the impacts of climate change become increasingly visible, the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns that global warming now requires '"transformational change" in every sector in every region of the world' to stay below the crucial 1.5 degrees warming necessary for a sustainable future. Following three years of COVID shutdowns, an already economically devastated Australian theatre sector is also calling for radical change: 'the solution has got to be a completely new model to how we do [publicly funded arts]'. COVID is perhaps the most recent, obvious and catastrophically comprehensive example of the correlation between climate and human activity. Climate change is clearly no longer a distant threat or intangible concept, nor can it be fixed - it is a certainty transforming how we live.' (Publication abstract)
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Oppression and Allyship in Australia's Deaf Arts,
single work
criticism
(p. 304-332)
'Research in the field of disability arts to date has understandably focused on the right to education, employment, self-representation, and the right to access the arts industry afforded under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD Article 30). Achieving universal access requires a move beyond the medical model, which casts disability as a cognitive or corporeal deficit, to be cured, accommodated, assimilated and/or tolerated in mainstream society. Mainstream arts production models need to embrace d/Deaf and disabled artists as a cultural group with shared identities, beliefs, behaviours and discourses, based on a shared experience of social oppression, and a shared desire to tell stories in their own way and on their own terms. Non-disabled policy-makers, managers, administrators, directors, playwrights and colleagues can play a pivotal role in supporting d/Deaf and disabled artists and arts workers to exercise their right to participate in a range of roles the arts industry.' (Publication abstract)
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[Review] Australian Theatre After the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist,
single work
review
— Review of Australian Theatre after the New Wave : Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist 2017 multi chapter work criticism ;(p. 333)'In this timely and important book, Julian Meyrick effectively asks: ‘What happens when a national arts funding body operates without a national cultural policy?’ While he is writing about the two decades from 1975 to 1994 – from the founding of the Australia Council for the Arts to the launch of the country’s first cultural policy, Creative Nation – he could be speaking about our own era, given that Australia has been without a cultural policy since the election of the Coalition in 2013. The answer, then as now, is that a series of assumptions are made by artists, bureaucrats and governments alike. The problem is that these assumptions are rarely articulated, let alone shared, meaning that there are misunderstandings at best and outright culture wars at worst. In the midst of our own battles, this book offers significant insight, though not necessarily comfort. (Introduction)
