AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
-
form
y
Sadness : A Monologue
( dir. Tony Ayres
)
Lindfield
:
Film Australia
,
1999
Z1000591
1999
single work
film/TV
(taught in 3 units)
Based on photographer William Yang's one-man stage show, Sadness is a journey into the past and a heartbreaking testament to the significant traces people leave behind. Through the use of slides, oral history, and stylised recreations, Yang investigates the murder of his uncle Fang Yuen in the sugar cane fields of northern Queensland. Running alongside this narrative is a series of moving portraits of the many friends and lovers Yang has lost to AIDS. What emerges is a powerful requiem for the dead and a moving portrayal of the legacy that family and friends leave with the living.
Works about this Work
-
The Aesthetics of Simplicity: Yang's Sadness and the Melancholic Community
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Intercultural Studies , February vol. 27 no. 1-2 2006; (p. 83-100) This essay makes use of the work of semioticians such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to discuss William Yang's Sadness (1996). Caluya chooses not to interpret Sadness as an autobiography. He prefers to mobilise the realism of photographic and anecdotal detail in what he terms 'an aesthetics of simplicity', ultimately reframing the work through tropes of loss and melancholia and considering how it intervenes 'in the ethics and politics of grief as an art work' (paraphrased from author's abstract). -
'Homescapes' and Identity Reformations in Australian Multicultural Drama
2001
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Theatre Research International , vol. 26 no. 1 2001; (p. 47-59) A consideration of identity formation in contemporary Australian multicultural theatre is offered through a re-assessment of the unsettled (and unsettling) constructions of Australia as 'home' in the work of three playwrights. William Yang's Sadness disrupts a localized perception of home, space, and cultural communities to amalgamate two disparate communities (the queer/homosexual community in Sydney and the Asian-Australian, or 'Austasian' community) into a reconfigured Australian identity. Janis Balodis's The Ghosts Trilogy uses many actors who play across the unsettled lines of history, amid numerous voices, homes, and homelands that indicate the enormity of what 'Australia' comes to signify. Noëlle Janaczewska's The History of Water constructs a way of locating the self by means of a metaphoric home as each character establishes herself on a psychic plane rather than choosing the strictly physical locations to which she has access. In their interrogations of home and homeland, these plays challenge assumptions regarding identity, disrupt notions of the ultimate ownership of land/culture by anyone, and problematize the idea of settlement as it is currently articulated in Australia.
-
'Homescapes' and Identity Reformations in Australian Multicultural Drama
2001
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Theatre Research International , vol. 26 no. 1 2001; (p. 47-59) A consideration of identity formation in contemporary Australian multicultural theatre is offered through a re-assessment of the unsettled (and unsettling) constructions of Australia as 'home' in the work of three playwrights. William Yang's Sadness disrupts a localized perception of home, space, and cultural communities to amalgamate two disparate communities (the queer/homosexual community in Sydney and the Asian-Australian, or 'Austasian' community) into a reconfigured Australian identity. Janis Balodis's The Ghosts Trilogy uses many actors who play across the unsettled lines of history, amid numerous voices, homes, and homelands that indicate the enormity of what 'Australia' comes to signify. Noëlle Janaczewska's The History of Water constructs a way of locating the self by means of a metaphoric home as each character establishes herself on a psychic plane rather than choosing the strictly physical locations to which she has access. In their interrogations of home and homeland, these plays challenge assumptions regarding identity, disrupt notions of the ultimate ownership of land/culture by anyone, and problematize the idea of settlement as it is currently articulated in Australia. -
The Aesthetics of Simplicity: Yang's Sadness and the Melancholic Community
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Intercultural Studies , February vol. 27 no. 1-2 2006; (p. 83-100) This essay makes use of the work of semioticians such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to discuss William Yang's Sadness (1996). Caluya chooses not to interpret Sadness as an autobiography. He prefers to mobilise the realism of photographic and anecdotal detail in what he terms 'an aesthetics of simplicity', ultimately reframing the work through tropes of loss and melancholia and considering how it intervenes 'in the ethics and politics of grief as an art work' (paraphrased from author's abstract).
Last amended 8 Jul 2004 15:56:08
Export this record
