AustLit

'The Australian Contemporary Theatre Company (ACTC) was resident at The Church Theatre from 1983 to 1989. The Church was an independent suburban venue, separate from the metropolitan theatres, and housed a season of works throughout the year, curated by the ACTC. Viewed in the context of the larger system of Melbourne theatre, the history of the ACTC demonstrates the value of a balance between large-scale, centralised, mainstream metropolitan arts centres and disparate, mid-sized suburban venues. During the 1980s, the presence of these companies and venues better enabled the kind of grassroots activity that fed the mainstage companies, gave crucial development time to emerging artists and artistic collaborations, and better integrated the performing arts into the wider community, encouraging ongoing engagement with new audiences.' (Publication abstract)

'Throughout the 1980s, a number of plays were produced in Melbourne which sat at the cutting edge of what was happening globally in site-specific practice at that time. Fefu and Her Friends (Maria Irene Forn, 1977) was produced in a house in Tennyson Street, Elwood, two years before Necessary Angel's celebrated house play, John Krizanc's Tamara, appeared at the Toronto Theatre Festival in 1981. Similarly, Bus, Son of Tram traversed the streets of inner Melbourne more than a decade before Forced Entertainment's much-lauded bus excursion, Nights in This City explored the suburbs of Sheffield in 1995. Described by Jack Hibberd as one of the most surreal events to animate Melbourne theatre, TheatreWorks' 'Tram Show', played to some 20,000 passengers, across 400 performances, generating (in today's figures) roughly $1 million at the box office - while trambulating a total distance that would have taken it halfway around the world. Bus, Son of Tram also became a recurring hit for the Banana Lounge's Rod Quantock and Geoff Brookes, who took their nightly audiences to police stations, private clubs, family planning clinics, the windows of expensive restaurants, and whatever city-wide events happened to be taking place at the time, which in February 1982 included the annual Moomba Festival.' (Publication abstract)

'This article presents a general explanation of government subsidy to the arts, drawing on the historical experience of Australian alternative theatre from the late 1970s to the early 1990s - a period of expansion for the sector, but not for alternative theatre. It describes the strategic categories of measurement used by the country's major cultural provision agency at the time, the Australia Council, and presents an eightpart model showing how natural language terms - 'excellent', 'innovative', 'experimental', 'accessible', etc. - were taken up and repositioned as functional operators of capture by the peer assessment process. Using the structural analysis adopted by Ernesto Laclau in the ground-breaking On Populist Reason (2005), most especially his theory of the 'empty signifier' and its role in organising 'equivalential chains', or broad-based alliances of social demand, it suggests how Australian theatre was fractured, fragmented and recuperated by the competitive grant system. 'Difference', an effect of creative activity, was expropriated as the mark of its value, a saleable symbol in a world of increasingly symbolic commodities. With the consolidation of the Australia Council's dominance over the theatre sector during the period, difference could be fed back as market difference with the government as a 'corporate regulator'. While the rebarbative rhetoric of alternative artists might have remained the same, a creusant in Mallarme's sense had taken place, a hollowing-out - and a return to the values that so many of them were trying to rebel against.' (Publication abstract)