AustLit

'In Dianne Ried's recent work Dance Interrogations (a Diptych), performed a part of the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival by Ried and collaborating artist Melinda Smith, spectators had no seats but rather roamed, observing two mature dancers. In this article, I explore Reid and Smiths's live performance, a combination of structured movement improvisation and screendance, as a provocation of the relationship between movement and agency. I address the theatrical though the multifaceted lens of the performers' experiences, spectators responses and my own observations.Smith is also a wheelchair user and her movement quality is in stark contrast to that of fellow performer Reid, who sweeps through the space with the typical ease and flow of a trained dancer. Spectators' identification of Smith's particular movement aesthetic not only expands traditional conceptions of the dancerly body , bears social implications for those of us perceived to be with disability. Most poignantly, one such implication is the importance of being seen on one's own terms. As Smith crawls on the floor, stands precariously on her knees and is lifted in the air, her palpable effort and slow movement defy what Tobin Siebers identifies as an 'ideology of ability' (2010).

(Publication Abstract)

Migrants are mobile by definition. They literally uproot themselves and move to sometimes-distant lands for a variety of reasons. Some move away from real or imagined threats to theirs very existence. Others seek a better quality of life. And Some adventurous souls are inhabited by a restless wunderlust - a desire to roll the dice and see what happens. Such mobility requires fortitude and faith. Migrants move through space and, if they have an aspirational disposition, they attempt to accumulate symbolic capital to move up those social and economic hierarchies that bestow status and prestige within their adopted homes.

The migrant journey to Australia often ends with the realisation that one as to make and remake one's identity, and perform a series of adjustments - adjustments in terms of comportment, dress, accent and disposition. this article is a critcal reflection on a multi media presentation that tells a story about the author's father, A. J. D'Cruz. It draws on historical archives and the material remnants of A. J. D' Cruz's relatively short life( letters, photographs, sound recordings, 8mm films). It also provided a singular account of the performance practices involved in becoming a 'New Australian" Combining personal anecdotes and philosophical ruminations on history, technology, and cultural identity, the article interrogates and performs a series of migrant mobilities.

(Abstract)

According to Peter Brook's famous dictum, it requires more than just an empty space , an actor and someone watching to constitute an 'act of theatre' (The Empty Space). The actor must also walk across the space. Setting aside the questions of why she is walking or where ( the narrative factor), it is motion in theate practice that remains the connecting spark. And that for site-specific theatre especially, it is mobility - either of audience, performers, or stage - that 'ignites' into being the dramatic space in which events may occur. De Certeau also finds that space is 'composed of intersections of mobile elements' and is 'in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements within it'. Space is 'like a word when it is spoken' (Everyday Life). Lebrve, taking his cue from the astrophysics of Fred Hoyle, similarly argues that space may be created 'by the energy deployed within it' (Production of Space).

This article examines two recent productions in real places where performance space is created and maintained by the movement of actors and / or audience through it. I argue that both Guerrilla Street Theatre's Sir Don V The Rat Pack (November 2009), enacted outside BHP Billiton's Annual General Meeting, and Northern Rivers Performing Arts' Railway Wonderland (November 2014), sited on the platform of Lismore's now disused railway station, institute different practices of mobility which not only facilitate the intrusion of space, but also enhance audience's complicity in the occupation that invariably follows - both vital to the site- specific agenda.

As With riding a bicycle, balance becomes feasible through forward movement. Opposites are reconciled, suspension of disbelief (place and space) suspended, arrest avoided (mostly), progression of story achieved. Through the strategies, and by these means, the practice of sire-specific performance continues to thrive outside dedicated theatre buildings and does so in ways that move the art of the 'theatre' (Appia) into literally new territory. Richard Sera' assertion that 'to move the work is to destroy the work' may well app;y to sire specific sculpture (one need only look at the peripatetic travails of Ron Robertson-Swann's (in)famous Vault aka The Yellow Peril). However, drawing on my study of TheatreWorks plays in trams, boats and houses (2013). I would argue that quite the reverse applies to site-specific performance - where not to move the work is to risk potential failure.