THEATRE & TEACHING STUDIES ACADEMY OF THE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

PROCEEDINGS FROM THE 1999 QUT / AUSTRALASIAN DRAMA STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

A conference exploring the links between theatre scholarship and professional theatre practice

QUT 5th - 9th July, 1999

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Foreword

These papers were presented at “Industrial Relations”, the Australasian Drama Studies Association conference hosted by Theatre & Teaching Studies in the Academy of the Arts, Queensland University of Technology, from the 5th to the 9th of July, 1999.

Conference delegates included scholars and artists from across the tertiary education and professional theatre sectors, including, of course, many individuals who work across and between both those worlds. More than a hundred delegates from , New Zealand, England, Belgium and Canada attended the week’s events, which included:

 Over sixty conference papers covering a variety of topics from project reports to academy/industry partnerships, theatre history, audience reception studies, health & safety, cultural policy, performance theory, theatre technology and more;  Performances ranging from drama to dance, music and cabaret;  Workshops, panel discussions, forums and interviews;  Keynote addresses from , Josette Feral and Keith Johnstone; and  A special “Links with Industry” day, which included the launch of ADSA’s “Links with Industry” brochure, an interview between Mark Radvan and , and a panel session featuring Jules Holledge, Zane Trow, Katharine , John Kotzas, Gay McAuley and David Watt.

The proceedings are presented here in unedited form, with standardising only of textual format. An edited selection of some of these papers is currently being prepared for publication.

Paul Makeham Conference Convenor Theatre & Teaching Studies, QUT

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE: KEYNOTE ADDRESSES

Josette Feral ‘Culture versus Art: From Symbosis to a New Cultural Contract’ p.6 Wesley Enoch ‘With Quizzical Fingers Through the Flywire Door’: The Industry & The Academy p.21 David Williamson, interviewed by Mark Radvan: ‘Orthodoxy, Subversion, Transgression’ p.30

PART TWO: DELEGATES’ PAPERS Howard Bradfield Working Partners: A Discussion of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Working Partnerships p.41 Vanessa Byrnes Constructing the Stuff that Dreams are Made on: Bi-Cultural Processes of Investigation and Training at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School p.45 Christine Comans & Rod Wissler Brink Visual Theatre: A Case Study of Theatre Form and Drama Education p.51 Peter Copeman & Rod Wissler Towards an Industrially Responsive, Academically Rigorous Performance as Research Paradigm – The Centre for Innovation in the ‘After-China’ Project p.63 Sharon Cottrell Examination of a Journey from Ethno-Drama to Professional Standard Group Devised Theatre p.70 Michael Coe Making Theatre/Creating Possibilities: A Comparision of Practices Utilised in a Regional Theatre Company with Those in a University Environment p.76 Clay Djubal Selling Ourselves Short?: Reflections upon the Australian Commodity Musical p.81 Peter Eckersall Performing from the Academy: Theory and Revitalising Contemporary Japanese Theatre p.89 Lynn Everett From Paris with Love: The Lecoq on George Ogilvie’s Directing p.97 Richard Fotheringham When a Girl from Community Arts Meets a Boy from Las Vegas Inc – Some Occupational Safety Issues in the Tetu Case p.103

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Mike Foster All the World’s a Research Stage and all the Men and Women Practitioners Merely Paradigms of Reflexive Discourse p.107 Peter Hammond Career Trajectories: Launching Theatre Trainees from Tasmania p.115 Barbara Joseph Careering into Comedy: The Role of Industry in the Development of a Performance Career p.121 Debra MacAuslane The Ethical Police…Classifying Artistic Practice Under Human Experimentation p.129 Jacqueline Martin The Academy as Seeding Ground for Performance as Research p.136 Ian Maxwell Towards a Reflexive Sociology of Theatre Production p.145 Gay McAuley The Actor and the Specator in Contemporary Theatre Practice p.155 Robyn McCarron Regional Performing Arts Centres and Community Productions: The Amateur/Professional Nexus at the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre p.162 Andrew McNamara Ruins and Vestiges p.169 Paul Monaghan Managerialism Meets Dionysos: Theatre and Civic Order p.174 Mark Radvan Dialoguing the Bodies p.183 Meredith Rogers Design for a Found Space – Twice p.197 Rebecca Scollen Understanding New Audiences: An Audience Reception Study of ‘Non-Theatre Goers’ Attending La Boite Theatre Company’s 1998 Season p.203 Christine Sinclair Playing to Learn: Developing Reflective Practice in Emerging Artists a University-Industry Partnership p.216 Barbara-Rose Townsend Death Defying Theatrical Practice Staying Alive and Funded p.228 Stuart Young Threatening Theory?: Two Tribes p.235

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PART ONE

KEYNOTE ADDRESSES

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CULTURE VERSUS ART: FROM SYMBIOSIS TO A NEW CULTURAL CONTRACT By Josette Feral

JOSETTE FERAL is full Professor at the Drama Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. She is currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research, and is on the editorial boards of several international journals. She has published a number of books, including 'Mise en scène et jeu de l'acteur' (1997/98), 'Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine' (1995) and 'La culture contre l'art: essai d'économie politique du théâtre' (1990). She has also published articles on the theory of theatre in Canada, the United States and Europe, mostly in Cahiers de Théâtre Jeu, SubStance, Théâtre Public, The Drama Review, Modern Drama, The French Review, Discourse, Theaterschrift and Poétique.

* * *

I am afraid that my contribution may suffer from a certain fragmentation, that same extreme fragmentation which is precisely that of today's theatre and which constitutes one of its major problems. Moreover, the topics of this colloquium are so far-reaching and deal with so many interrelated fields that it would have been difficult for me to narrow down my presentation to one single field of studies, that is to say, examine either the connection between culture and society, or the relationship between theory and practice.

In order not to sacrifice any aspect, I have therefore chosen to draw parallels between both issues. My aim is to demonstrate that the evolution of theatre, within its relationship to the public and to society, can be compared with the evolution of theoretical research on theatre. Given the scope of this object of study, my approach can only offer but a brief overview, but I hope that it will open some new perspectives, thus allowing us to envision the relationship between scholars and professionals in a different way, provided this relationship is of an industrial nature which we will have to redefine.

Theatre and Society: from Symbiosis to Cultural Contract 1. Theatre, culture and society Today, Culture (with a capital "C") has become Western societies’ last refuge for their fading identities. Such is the case in Quebec as in many other countries in the world and I would think that Australia is probably no different. Much conceptual soul-searching and political energy is being devoted in many countries to anxious questionings in the face of globalization and the development of a world market that seems to turn anything and everything into a commodity. Hence the fierce battles that are raging in Europe and even North America over the contested notion of "cultural exception". As traditional nationhood feels increasingly threatened, the notion of "Culture" becomes invested with greater signification. It is thus not entirely surprising that Theatre has eventually become a nation’s ultimate cultural expression, or at least the most visible cultural asset a country can offer beyond the traditional monuments which constitute its conventional patrimony. At the same time, Theatre is paradoxically becoming more transcultural, or multicultural, a seeming inconsistency which is certainly noteworthy.

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Today's states and governments of all kinds (national, regional, local) seem particularly eager to proclaim their public support of the arts in general and of theatre in particular, while theatre schools are becoming increasingly popular and theatre programs are burgeoning within academia. Can the more or less "natural" development of civil society alone be accounted for such cultural fervor? Is it merely the logical consequence of increased prosperity? Does it perhaps, on the contrary, express some wild collective flight from reality, or is it one of the characteristics of our cultural bubble, which, along with our financial bubble, might very well burst at some point?

Whatever the answer - and we will attempt to provide one as we go further into this discussion - it appears quite clearly that Theatre is part and parcel of a tremendously intricate plot which involves historical, political and economic factors that reach much beyond the range of purely aesthetic or institutional debates. "Industrial relationships" there are indeed, but tied up in a network of many types of other relationships. Let's try to outline some of them, if only sketchily.

Today's Theatre exists within the confines of a complex structure that can best be described, for the sake of the present discussion, as a political triangle which encompasses "industry" (the uneasy combination of Art and Money), “society” (the uneasy combination of the Public and the State) and "criticism" (the uneasy combination of Journalism and Research). This triangle has known many variations in space and time, some of which require careful examination as they represent what I intend to describe as the basic social demands addressed to theatre over the course of the last century and a half. Let me distinguish more or less arbitrarily between three phases and three types of related social demands:

(A) A first phase could be characterized as the era during which Theatre was conceived of as pure entertainment. Indeed, at the time no specific social demand was made of theatre, which was simply considered as an event to be consumed and appreciated in the present, without any consideration for what preceded its occurrence nor for what followed its accomplishment. This 'degree zero' phase of social demand was the true "Age of Entertainment". Throughout the 19th century, in spite of a few crises of little consequence except in literary history textbooks (the battle of Hernani, for instance), the nature of theatre's relationship to society was very simple. People flocked to theatres with the understanding that it was the ultimate form of collective entertainment. Although ‘caf conc’ type events, dance halls, art exhibitions, fairs, universal exhibitions, horse races etc. had become theatre's most powerful rivals as the 19th century drew to a close, theatre still generally attracted the public's undivided attention. Every writer of repute seemed interested in writing plays, including Balzac, Flaubert and Zola who all gave it a go, however unsuccessfully, in spite of their utmost dismissal of the dominant bourgeois tastes - for indeed, there was much money to be made in the theatre. It is quite symptomatic that many of the playwrights of that time (Pixerecourt, Caigniez, Ducange, even Dumas fils) produced immensely successful plays that have all been forgotten for decades, rightfully so, whereas the writers who are now considered to embody "literature" in its highest sense (Hugo for instance) were all failures as playwrights (Le Roi samuse, 1832; Les Burgraves, 1843)1

Theatre thus remained an unquestioned item of the social contract and reflected the symbiotic function of Art at its most academic, firmly entrenched within both the social rituals and the

1 Hugo then stops writing theatre for twenty yeas, in spite of several major triumps: Cromwell (1827) and Hernani (1830). In the last case, critics hated the play but the public loved it. 8 Industrial Relations

conceptual ordering of things by bourgeois society at its apex. This was true of the developed West as a whole, whether we look at Paris, London or Vienna.

B) The second phase begins with the emergence of "Theatre d 'Art", symbolist enterprises, etc., during the fin de siecle era and extending up to the sixties. In the period between the two world wars, the view put forward by the Symbolists that dramas should be significant works of art conveying mysterious and superior realities through the intricacies of the text and the depths of the characters, gained much credibility among intellectuals. This new movement precipitated the emergence of high-brow plays and the dwindling of entertainment- seeking audiences. Such audiences' expectations were soon fulfilled by cinema, until the advent of << films d'art >> in the fifties whose authors shared the same convictions than the symbolist playwrights: experimentally daring films were then produced, and, again, audiences began to shrink.

During that period, Theatre was regarded basically as a committed art-form in the wider sense of the term. The social demand had drastically evolved and entirely new expectations had emerged. By then, Theatre was expected to tell the Truth: the truth about Man, about History and Society. Everything had become problematic and Theatre had ceased to be a mere item of the social contract: it asserted itself boldly as one of the contract's co-signers, as a voice which was able to question the very terms of this contract, and as the site within which such contract was to assume a visible and dramatic form. It is no coincidence that the State began to become involved more or less willfully, and at times dictatorially, in theatre-related affairs. Whereas earlier on its role had been limited to censorship and the distribution of subsidies to a restricted number of companies, it had eventually become a dominant partner intent on interventionism. During that period, theatre came to assume the role of guardian of the future, whereas it had originally been entirely embedded in the present. For writers, directors and critics alike, theatre was henceforth expected to foretell what would, should or could become of society. At the same time, the State, began to invest heavily in institutions that were supposed to somehow represent the renewed, progressive social contract of the future - that is to say, the glowing future that politics intended to bring about. A kind of utopia began to take shape with theatres occupying the central place in new model cities patterned after visions of ideally reorganized social relationships: theatre was to be "popular" in a highly mystical sense and theatres were to displace the traditional places of ritual. In France, Malraux built his "maisons de la culture" which were supposed to be today's cathedrals. At the same time, theatre began to be entrusted with a new task, that of questioning and reinterpreting the past: from the Greeks to Goldoni, a newly sought-after relevance was to be unveiled within forgotten texts now available for re- appropriation.

It was time for a new partner to enter the social contract: the scholar was from then on assigned the role of intermediary between society's present and its past. In their newfound role as intellectuals, theatre specialists were now requested to spell out the future.

Thus, the study of theatre gradually began to attract great minds originally shaped by rather traditional academic training (Dort, Barthes, Steiner, etc.) Business had no business in theatre any longer. Drama had become far too serious to be left in the hands of merchants.

C) As a result, within the last two or three decades, theatre has become the ultimate way in which many countries have striven to express their cultural self-respect. During these years many new theatres were built, theatre festivals emerged, theatre schools received growing financial support, states and governments designed public, policies of support and

9 Industrial Relations established new bureaucracies dedicated to the advancement and management of theatre enterprises. A large amount of public money was poured into exciting new artistic endeavors...

Theatre has thus been bestowed with new responsibilities: that of furthering the new values and fulfilling the new demands of post-modem societies. Instead of a social contract, we now have communities which are self-organised and which modify their own shape, structures and participants without external control. What now binds them is a communal cultural contract. The time-frame within which such communities exist and which they wish theatre to explore ranges from distant past to near future. What is now expected from theatre, as is the case with computers and systems in general, is total memory, that is to say, the ability to recall the totality of culture, and to explore the unknown as fully and truthfully as possible.

Everyone is now in the same situation as the spectators of the Phantom Menace: endowed with a very complex and uncharted future while striving to fathom our past, we perceive past and future times as equally strange, and confusedly grapple with cultural diversity, now an integral part of the multicultural/transcultural machinery which constitutes post-modern theatre as well as our post-modern societies.

D) This broad historical survey has no other aim than to point out the paradoxical survival of theatre up to now, in spite of its having been torn between the contradictory temptations of mass-appeal and elitist seclusion for virtually two centuries. In both cases, its existence has rested upon changing relations between changing ambitions and changing audiences. The question is : what are the structures, symbolic and otherwise, which used to be able to support such an unstable form and which have now evolved? The answer is in the development, at each stage, of different systems of << industrial relationships >>, provided that symbolic structures always come first. Social structures (that is to say, governments, communities, etc), are always too late when it comes to responding to collective aspirations. Witness the failure of costly revolving stages, so many white elephants which were built to meet the requirements of modem theatre precisely when most modernists began to endorse a 'poverty' of creative means.

What we have witnessed in fact across the centuries is an evolution of the theatre, whose relationship to the public and to society was first of a symbiotic nature, until a definite break-up with its audience and with society occurred. It is through that break-up -and because of it - that the States and Governments have been able to meddle with theatre's affairs, thus bringing about a new cultural contract which compels theatre to comply with an imposed agenda: that of reaching an increasingly larger cross-section of spectators.

In that query for culture in its widest sense, the meaning of theatre as art is sometimes lost. Theatre drifts slowly but irrevocably, or so it seems, towards the margins of a society which has to fight harder everyday to keep it within its centre. Is this difficult situation going to last? What does it imply for the people involved in the field and - lastly - what can theatre scholarship do to make sense of this evolution and help to ensure that theatre remains firmly at the core of post-modern societies?

Of course, I have no answer for such a question, but let us hope that this conference will come up with some suggestions and results.

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Let me move now to my second point: the position of the scholar faced with this new reality, what is expected from him/her, how does he/she face this new function I was referring to a few minutes ago, that of being an intermediary between society's present and its past, that of better understanding what theatre is and what it could be.

2. Tertiary drama studies and the theatre industry It is interesting to note that what we have previously stated about the evolution of theatre's relationship to the State and to the audience is comparable with theatre studies' relationship to professional theatre practice, which would seem to indicate that the rupture and the evolution identified within artistic practice also exists at the theoretical level.

a) Up until the end of the nineteenth century, the numerous studies carried out in the field of theatre research did not result in the gap which now separates theoretical studies (which we will label 'tertiary drama sudies' for the purpose of this discussion) and professional theatre practice. Studies by Lope de Vega, Boileau, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Rousseau, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Humbolde2 for instance, to quote only a few peak moments in the study of theatre practice, all seemed to be directly in touch with current theatre and artistic practices at the time at which they were published.

They were concerned with topics such as acting, dramatic poetry, tragedy, and endeavored to define the parameters which best applied to the theatre of their time. The links established between the body of thought regarding theatre and artistic practice itself appeared tangible enough, if not solid, so much so that Diderot, a man of theatre and a thinker nonetheless, was deeply sensitive to every aspect of the theatre event, from dramatic writing to acting techniques. Even philosophers such as Hegel (Aesthetics, 1832) and Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy, 1871) were able to approach the aesthetic questions of theatre while remaining connected to professional theatre and artistic practice such as it was conceived then or such as they thought it should be conceived. b) The twentieth century has somewhat gradually lost the symbiosis between the theoretical investigation of theatre and practice through a series of ruptures and drifts which have crystallized, an increasingly widening gap between both poles.

 The first rupture seems to coincide, as far as the body of theoretical knowledge on theatre is concerned, with the moment at which artistic practice loses its direct connection to its audience, namely, towards the end of the nineteenth century. As we have seen, the audience becomes more diversified, artistic practice is no longer taken for granted. and the director emerges, becoming a mediator meant to fill in the widening gap between a theatre which asserts itself as an artwork and the audience. Bernard Dort, in France, was among the first to analyze theatre's newly acquired position within the sphere of aesthetics, and to observe that it resulted in a qualitative change in the field of practice.

2 See the works by Jodelle (Leugene, 1552) de la Taille (Del’art de la tragedie, 1572) Lope De Vega (L’Art nouveau de composer des pieces en ce temps, 1609), l’Abbe d’Aubignac (La pratique de theatre, 1657), Dryen (essai sur la poesie dramitique, 1668), Boileau (L’Art poetique, 1674), Ricconobi (De l’Art de represnter, 1728), Voltaire (Discours sur la tragedie, 1730), Hume (diisseration sur la tragedie, 1757), Diderot (Le paradoxe sur le comedien, 1773), Rouaawu (Lettre a M.d’Alembert sur les spectacles), Lessing (Dramaturgie de Hambourg, 1767), Beaumarchais (Essai sur le genre ramtique serieux, 1767), Schiller (Preface des Brigands, 1781), Goethe (Traite sur la poesie dramatique, 1797). As well as the works which will be published during the XIXth century: works by Humboldt (De l’etat actuel de la scene tragique franciase), Schlegel (Cours de literature dramitique, 1808), Manzoni (Lettre a Mr C Sur l’unite de temps et de lieu dansla tragedie, 1823), de Stendhal (Racine et Shakespeare, 1823), de Hugo (Preface de Cromwell, 1827) Wagner (L’oeuvre d’art de l’avenir, 1850; and Opera et drame, 1852), Zola (Le naturalisme au theatre, 1881), Strindgerg (Preface a Mademoiselle Julie), Jarry (De L’intitule du theatre au theatre, 1899), Appia (La Musique et mise en scene)… 11 Industrial Relations

"What the emergence of this new function (that of the stage director) serves to establish seems to be the gap between theatre and its audience which has henceforth become more visible. Theatre is no longer meant to reflect back to the audience the global and uniform image of its desire, or of its propensity towards entertainment, but it now asserts itself as an aesthetic work of art […]. The latter can therefore be perceived as the consequence of a different relationship, which now exists in the theatre between the spectator and theatrical production.”3

"From now on, there is no longer any prerequisite, fundamental agreement on style and the signification of theatre productions between spectators and theatremakers. The balance between the house and the stage, between the demands of the audience and the ordering of the scenic space, is no longer taken for granted it must be recreated each time. The structure of the audience's demand has also evolved. A change in our attitude towards theatre is operating."4

The new direction taken by B. Dort is an interesting one in that it triggers a revolution which suddenly conceives of theatre not merely as the result of an internal revolution pertaining to a given artistic area - which is what research generally tends to prove - but also as the result of external changes which affect society and its relationship to art.

It thus reconnects theatrical evolution to the extra-theatrical, and more specifically to society, which remains one of the most determining factors. Hence, it is not surprising that these external changes also affect theoretical research.

 A few years later, the first writings conveying a specifically theoretical concern appear within the field of theatre studies. Such concern is no longer linked to theatrical practice as such but to its analysis as a phenomenon, which is to be grasped, seized and interpreted. The perspective and focus have shifted from "the artist who creates" to the spectator who perceives and analyzes. The first texts by Polti in the early twenties (Polti, The Thirty-six Dramatic Circumstances), or by Mukarovsky in the thirties (Art as Semiotic Fact), or by Souriau E (The Two Hundred Thousand Dramatic Circumstances, 1950), by Villiers A (The Psychology of Dramatic Art, 1951), or even by Yeinstein (Stage Directing and its Aesthetic Condition, 1955) are the various stages of a journey which is going to lead researchers further and further from the concerns directly connected to practice in and of itself. They are going to become interested in related phenomena pertaining to theatre as an historical phenomenon, of course - here's the connection to the past - but also as a reception mode or a system of communication - here's the connection to the present. This new trend is confirmed by the contributions of Szondi P (Theory of Modern Drama, 1956), Bentley E (In Search of Theatre, 1957), Frye N (Anatomy of Criticism, 1957) and all types of semiological investigations will henceforth develop.

In fact, the image which surfaces from all these texts is that of a researcher who identifies first and foremost with criticism, becoming gradually less and less concerned with the creative process to finally concentrate solely on the work of art as a finished product. The theatrical performance becomes an object within the vaster sphere of aesthetics, which encompasses it. Roland Barthes himself, whose judicious analysis of dramatic art has branded the nineteen-sixties (On Racine, 1960; up to his Critical Essays of 1972), does not escape this general trend.

3 B Dort, “La condition sociologique de la mise en scene theatrale: in Theatre reel, essais de critique 1967-1970, Paris, Seuil, 1971 p58. 4 Ibid, p61 12 Industrial Relations

Theatre has become the object of a critical discourse cut off from artistic practice and focused on the spectator's eye. However, there are now different types of spectators, just as there are different types of artistic practices. The latter have become multiple, fragmentary, and have literally exploded. There is no longer one and only one form of theatre. It is therefore no longer possible, to let one voice alone account for theatrical production, and predict its destiny as Wagner did at the end of the nineteenth century in his major text The Work of Art for the Future(1850). Such an all-encompassing vision can no longer prevail, and is clearly dismissed by new critical discourse, which necessarily becomes multiple since it reflects the diversity of the practices, which it intends to study.

 The second half of the twentieth century (and more specifically the seventies and eighties) is probably the point at which this rupture reaches its climax, a rupture, which I plan to investigate here. It is important to remember, however, the fact that in spite of the rupture which is acknowledged by theatre studies in the twentieth century, another current of thought which was developed in the preceding centuries by artists concerned with their own practice, endures to this day. Hence, the writings of Antoine, Craig, Meyerhold, Marinetti, Copeau, Appia, Piscator, Brecht, Artaud, Batty, Decroux, Dullin, Jouvet, Barrault, Brook, Grotowski, Boal, Kantor, Fo, Foreman have continually sustained, throughout our century, a tradition hinging upon the art of the artist (actor, director, scenic designer). They are interested in artistic production, and their objective is to understand the theatrical phenomenon as a process rather than as a product. They strive to provide the practitioner with tools or methods that may enable him/her to develop his/her art. Their goal is, therefore, is to achieve an artistic knowhow. The gap separating these two currents (one focusing on the art of making theatre, the other which turns it into the viewer's object) is going to gradually widen throughout the years.

The importance suddenly granted to theoretical studies towards the mid-sixties is going to crystallize the rupture even more acutely. Indeed, we know that theatre research (tertiary drama studies) - that is to say, theoretical studies on the artistic practice - are a recent development in most European countries, in North America, and in Australia as well, I would imagine. It follows from theory's newly prevailing position at the turn of the nineteen sixties, which is itself derived from literary research influenced at the time by semiology on the one hand, and the writings of Derrida, Kristeva and Lacan on the other.

Such major influences (more significant in North America than in Europe), whether or not they truly impacted theatre itself, whether or not they were followed to a 'T', definitely affect the way in which we think about theatre.

They impose a degree of theorization which contributes to isolating the theatrical phenomenon as such and cutting it off more drastically than ever from professional artistic practice. Theatre studies thus become entirely based upon the performance as a finished product, an object destined to be dissected by the viewer in order to make sense out of its various components (writings by P. Pavis, A. Ubersfeld, A. Helbo, M. de Marinis, T. Kowzan, D. Cole, K. Elam).5 When research is not of a semiological nature, it is either sociological or anthopological (Duvignaud, Bums, Gourdon, Deldime),6 or descriptive and

5 A Ubersfeld, Lire le theatre (1977), P Pavis, Problemes d’une semiologie theatrale (1975), L’analyse du spectacle (1955?), A Helbo, Semiologie de la representation (1975), D Cole, The Theatrical event (1975), T Kowzan, Semiologie du theatre (1990?), M de Marinis. 6 J Duvignaud, Sociolgie du theatre (1963), Burns E, Theatricality. A Study of convention in the theatre and social life (1972), Gourdon AM, Theatre, public perception (1975), R Deldime, Le Quatrieme mur, regards sociologiques sur la relation theatrale (1990). 13 Industrial Relations

analytical (Gouhier, Veinstein, Bablet, Aslan, Jacquart, Banu),7 poetic (Chambers, Durand),8 historical ( Roubine)9 or even psychoanalytical. They rarely address the problem of the artist confronted with his/her creative work.

Obviously, the theatre studies I have mentioned seem to borrow matrices imported from other disciplines, in order to better analyze their object. It is worth noting that such theatre research hasn't produced a science pertaining solely to theatre but that it borrows methodologies and concepts from other fields of research. Necessarily fragmentary by nature, given that theatre practice itself is multiple and fragmented, theatre research has eventually convinced scholars that a scientific, all-embracing theory of theatre is no longer conceivable.

These analytical methods came up against a generalized suspicion directed towards any theory (be it political, ideological, scientific, literary or artistic) attempting to explain everything. Unifying, all-embracing theories no longer exist, just as dominating ideologies have become suspicious.

For several years now, we have been observing a fragmentation of homogeneous explanatory and analytical systems and the dawning of more compartmentalized theoretical approaches which attempt to bring out differences rather than to mark out parameters common to a wide range of phenomena.

Indeed, it has become obvious that the practice of theatre can only be grasped through a multiplicity of diverse theoretical approaches. Each of these approaches sheds its own particular light but always to a limited degree. Any analysis of the theatrical phenomenon will always leave something out that escapes any form of theoretical classification, however complete.

In many cases, critical discourse (be it sociology, semiology, psychoanalysis, socio-criticism, reception theory) has tried to grasp the manifold variety in performance, shifting its focus from one aspect of theatre to another (the text, the use of space, the acting, the relationship to society or to the audience); but no discourse has managed to build up concepts and notions which can adequately account for the system as a whole. Theatre remains a << fluid system >>, difficult to define.

It is worth noting at this stage of the discussion that theatre itself hasn't produced a science pertaining solely to theatre and able to account for all the phases of its elaboration. The various approaches, which always favor one aspect or the other, have always been fragmentary, thus bound to ignore either the production phase (theatre-making) or the reception phase (the spectator's function).

Without doubt it is these illusive boundaries, this << too much >>, << too many >>, this << surplus > that makes theatre so pleasurable. More than any other art form, theatre belongs to that which cannot be represented by critical discourse, that which cannot be foreseen, this << blurring >> which is its very essence.

Indeed, in spite of this diversification of tools, systems and concepts invented to help us grasp the nature of theatre, there is a field, which research has left virtually untouched, and which

7 D Bablet, La mise en scene contemporaine (1968), O Aslan, L’acteur au Xxeme siecle (1974), E Jacquart, Le Theatre de derision (1974), G Banu (?), H Gouhier, L’essence du theatre (1943), A Veinstein, Le theatre experimental (1968). 8 R Chambers, La comedie au chateau. Constribution a la poetique du theatre (1971), R Durand, La relation theatrale (1980). 9 J-J Roubine, Introduction aux grandes theories du theatre (1990). 14 Industrial Relations has to do with the very process of making theatre. How does a production come to exist? What happens during rehearsals? How does the stage director, the actor, make artistic choices? Very few scholars work in those domains, which are vital to the production of a play.

It follows directly from this that any attempt to build a science of theatre - and therefore any theory of theatre - has to be compartmentalized and based on a vision which is necessarily cut off from the phenomenon of theatre as a whole, and above all from the theatre as << creation >>. This is a first important drawback for artists in their approach of theory or tertiary drama studies. d) Let us add to this overall picture another aspect, which is essential when trying to understand the evolution of theoretical studies on theatre. Most of the theatre departments currently in existence in Europe and North America were created recently (within the last twenty years or so), and are sometimes only the by-products of old traditional literature departments in which theatre was a discipline considered as a strictly cultural, historical or literary phenomenon. In these literary-based departments, studies included the evolution of theatre throughout history, the major aesthetic forms linked to given artistic genres (drama, comedy, tragedy), acting techniques (the commedia dell'arte, for instance), and artistic movements (romanticism, naturalism). Theatre was first and foremost an aesthetics and not artistic practice in action.

The emergence of theatrical practice within the university system, the founding of departments which would train young artists who may then become professionals - a phenomenon much more common in North America than in Europe - is a recent development: almost twenty years old in Quebec, and slightly older in the United States. This recent opening towards practice within the university system is connected to an evolution of mind-sets leading to an acknowledgement of the possibility of teaching various forms of artistic creation at university. Much less frequent in Europe, and greatly questioned by the more established professional training programs (conservatories and national theatre schools), such practical training offered at universities should logically lead to bridging the gap separating artistic practice and theoretical research. Yet, at the end of these two decades, this gap still resides at the core of widely diversified, multifaceted departments which were to integrate both poles.

Indeed, we have to admit that despite the efforts and, notwithstanding, the proliferation of practices and of theoretical discourses, there remains a tension between practitioners (professional theatre artists) and theorists (tertiary drama studies). This tension is diffuse and does not lead to overt confrontation as might have happened almost 20 years ago at a time of theoretical imperialism; but the tension is nevertheless present under the surface, and constantly re-emerges even during the most trivial of debates.

This tension seems to stem more from a certain mind-set than from the actual nature of the thought processes which practice and theoretical discourse involve. What I mean by this is that theoretical discourse, whatever its nature, remains for most practitioners a suspicious exercise from the start, having little impact upon practice.

Even if an evolution can be felt within the domain of theory itself, due mostly to major changes, which have occurred in the past few years within the domain of theory, the suspicion is still present, in a more or less hidden form. It often translates into mutual ignorance and the

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refusal to acknowledge the benefits of theoretical training for the actor. Talent - bolstered by sound technical training - still remains one of the dominant values of the professional theatre world.

Due to these lacks within the realm of theoretical studies, the professional theatre world tends to disregard theory. But perhaps the practitioners' lack of interest in theory is due to the fact that theory shows little interest in practice in its most fundamental aspects.

What conclusions can we draw from this somewhat dark outlook? We may want to ask ourselves whether there is any possibility of bridging the gap between drama studies and the profession, whether these two domains dealing with different aspects of theatre could not meet, enter into a dialogue and enrich each other.

The most immediate conclusion is that it is absolutely urgent that we succeed in this enterprise, lest the gap widen even more, leading artists to further confirm their belief that theoretical studies are of no use to them, since they do not tackle the real problems pertaining to their art.

One of the solutions to this dilemma might entail defining fields of research within which practitioners and theoreticians could collaborate in order to develop new knowledge and, more importantly, to conduct experiments together.

Applying both types of knowledge - that of the artist and that of the researcher, which are different in nature - should lead to a complementary rather than antagonistic relationship and enrich both theory and practice. The theoreticians would contribute their analytical knowledge - concepts, methodologies, historical perspectives - while the artists would contribute their more pragmatic type of knowledge of the stage and of dramatic texts.

It is precisely with this prospect of a possible future that I would like to conclude my presentation. In this third section I will therefore provide a few concrete examples which demonstrate that a more balanced relationship between theoretical relationship and practice is not mere wishful thinking or the result of purely academic speculation, but a very tangible and productive reality.

3. What collaborations may thus be possible? What types of attempts at bringing both worlds together can be made?

I am convinced that there are a number of ways to build such bridges between theory and practice, from simply acknowledging the work done in each world to a more integrated relationship leading to close collaboration. Let us look at some simple examples to begin with. I will speak essentially of what is being done in the UQAM Theatre Department, which is not a model to follow – there are a number of problems pertaining to this department of which I could speak as well - but it can be seen as the testing ground for certain types of attempts at making both worlds meet.

At this point, let me specify that our theatre department is multi-faceted in that it offers a professional theatre training program (for actors and scenic designers) and also offers courses in criticism and dramaturgy. All drama students are required to take some theoretical courses, which make up one-third of their overall course-work.

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a) An elementary first, and practical, step can be made by hiring permanently within the university a number of artists who will continue to practice while working as professors.

This uncommon procedure has caused problems within certain European and North American universities, which have had to revise their evaluation policies in order to hire artists as permanent professors. Indeed, as with other university professors, they are first hired as assistant professors, then become associate professors, and eventually full professors, yet they are not required to produce research articles while working at university. Their creative work is accepted as a substitute for research.

Following this model, subsidising organisations which support university research have had to adapt their own policies so that such artists may become eligible and may benefit from the same rights as their colleagues, the theoreticians. The university system has suddenly had to consider artistic creation as seriously as research, which has led to epic controversies regarding the way in which artistic creation includes research and the evaluation of its results.

In spite of some logistical problems, this system works relatively well even if the legitimacy of these artists within the institution must constantly be reasserted.

b) A second and more superficial short-term solution would be to invite professional artists (directors, actors, scenic designers) to work within the institution temporarily, in order to guide students in their approach. Coming from the professional world, these artists end up with a more positive outlook on the institution and on what is being done there. Some actually see it as an opportunity to recruit young people who are then able to do internships in professional theatres and thus work as directing assistants, actors, walk-ons/extras, and puppeteers...). Integration is facilitated and young people are able to make a smoother transition from the university system to the professional world.

Moreover, our department is currently developing a large network with various theatres so that each one may offer one or two internships a year to our students according to the student's area of specialisation and the needs of the company. This type of cooperation requires a certain "savoir faire" in order to insure that the right students are assigned to the right companies so that neither side is disappointed. A bad experience may lead to the loss of a partner whose trust the university has worked hard at securing.

Although students are not paid for these internships, they are often very grateful to find an entry in the professional world with which they can become more familiar. We have even been contacted by theatre institutions which were recruiting dramaturg interns acting as researchers. One of our students was eventually hired as a professional dramaturg by an important theatre institution in Quebec. This is current practice in North America and some American theatre departments (CUNY for instance) systematically resort to internships.

c) Since UQAM also supports departmental productions (we produce approximately twenty plays a year), the university must necessarily guarantee a body of productions, which leaves room for experimental work to be carried out and which allows guest directors to try out new forms and thereby take risks which they cannot afford within commercial circuits. Obviously, a balance must be found between the rigor of sound training and the pleasure of experimentation so that the students do not become involved in wild experiments which turn out to be pointless as far as their pedagogic value is concerned.

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Some university theatres - though it is not the case with UQAM - are in charge of programming a season. Operating as a professional theatre, they commit to promoting research groups, which cannot be produced elsewhere. This is the case with the University of Bologna and the UNAM (Universidad Autonoma de Mexico) in Mexico. Acting as producers, such departments assert the research component of a certain type of theatre and provide the means of production, thereby building a bridge between the university and the profession. Hence, they function as "discoverers" and enlarge the gamut of productions attracting a public which is particularly keen on non-commercial new forms. In countries where theatre must be economically viable - and where programming is dependent upon the contingencies of the market-place - the university system fulfills a function - or should we say a "mission"? - which is to facilitate experimentation.

d) Within the institution itself, a number of laboratories have also been created so that the professors may experiment with certain techniques: for instance, the application of Kathakali to Western theatre, the application of martial arts to acting, the use of Noh in contemporary theatre, the resort to different styles of puppetry within certain specific experiments, etc.

During such workshops, the students attempt to delineate the possible connections between a type of theoretical knowledge and a practical know-how. Courses are taught either by artists specialised in their field (martial arts, puppetry) or by artists who are trained in these techniques without claiming, however, to have mastered Eastern forms of performing arts. Our perspective on such cross-cultural training is deliberately that of Westerners experimenting with various techniques. It is also possible to take an opposite approach by inviting an Indian director asked to stage a part of the Mahabharata with Western actors using Western acting techniques. These are the types of experiments which were carried out at UQAM. Such cross-cultural endeavors and cross-cultural acting training can become, in turn, the object of theoretical analysis which reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the experiment. The results are presented to the community at the end of the course.

e) As for advanced studies at the Masters and Doctoral levels within , it is possible for future artists (or professional artists who return to university) to carry out experiments based upon certain given hypotheses. Some attempt, for example, to compare different qualities of energy required from the actor on film and onstage.

 One of our current students, Danielle Lepointe, has based her Masters thesis (which is both practical and theoretical) upon the staging of a scene from a text by Andre Chedid both for film and for the stage, and has worked with a group of actors over a whole year, in a laboratory situation, in order to analyze the type of energy which is at work in both mediums and see how it can differ. Her study was theoretical to begin with and consisted in an attempt at defining what the concept of "energy" entails. It was followed by laboratory experiments on Chedid's text, which led to the filming of a scene. This scene was then directed for the stage, in a laboratory situation, in order to analyze the results of this work.

Another of our students, Robert Reid, worked on the Grotesque and attempted to test Bakhtine's theory in practice, in order to check whether his "dialogic system", which he defines as non-theatrical, can actually operate onstage. He thus chose to work on a scene from Shakespeare's Tempest, which he staged in a deliberately grotesque manner.

 Judith Pelletier, another student, is working on the relationship of the actor and space when the former steps onto the stage for the first time. Drawing from Paul Virilio's concepts

18 Industrial Relations of Critical Space, she is conducting interviews and experiments with a group of actors, in order to understand how they react when they make their entrance and begin to inhabit the space, and the appropriation mechanisms which they develop in order to tame space.

 Another student who specialises in vocal work, Marie-Danielle Boucher - has conducted research on the relationship between the actor's physical training and its impact on the voice. She has thus developed a progressive technique connecting vocal and physical training, in order to demonstrate that the latter can become part of traditional vocal training and complement it. Refusing to separate body and voice and seeking to integrate both aspects, she worked toward developing the actors' competence in an area which training programs do not sufficiently explore since vocal and physical work are usually taught separately.

 I could also refer to the experiment carried out by one of our students - David Whiteley - who staged the same scene from The Femmes Savantes three times according to three different acting techniques, in order to analyse the effects and the various interpretations summoned each time by the staging.

 Another of our students - Sylvain Letendre who is a professional light technician chose to demonstrate that lighting could play an active part within the theatre piece just as a character would, and thus alter its interpretation. He staged a scene by lonesco twice, using different lighting designs in order to analyse their impact upon the interpretation of the play.

All these students are completing what we call Creative Masters (memoire creation), that is to say a Masters program integrating theory and practice. These are definitely not formulaic recipes, and I wouldn't say that the results are always convincing, but they serve to unite a certain type of theoretical research with artistic practice. Such experimental work contributes to the development of these artists - who are often professional - by allowing them to achieve an osmosis between what they already know through practical work and the concepts and methodologies which they acquire at university. They are thus able to truly experience the symbiosis which can exist between these two areas of knowledge. Going back and forth from one pole to another, they are able to use theory as a spring-board to develop their art.

Moreover, their practical knowledge contributes to the experimental work conducted within theory and which a researcher alone cannot accomplish within the confines of his/her office or through the mere observation of the theatrical phenomenon.

What influence does such research have upon the profession? Although no direct influence can be observed, mind-sets are evolving and imperceptibly becoming, more open. Since many of our advanced students come from the professional world - in fact, they return to university in order to further their training, and acquire, interestingly enough, a theoretical background - the go back to the professional world and contribute to promoting a conception of practice which is no longer irredeemably cut off from theory.

There are also other means of cooperation through which two fields can benefit from each other's work: many directors find speech act theories useful to the study of dramatic texts prior to their being performed. With the help of locutory, illocutory and perlocutory acts they achieve, along with the actors, a minute analysis of the text. These examples are very limited and very specific, yet they illustrate certain given areas in which cooperation between theoretical and practical research may be feasible.

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However, there remain many other areas yet unexplored within which theoretical research may influence professional practice. It is rather astounding, for instance, that so little use is found by practitioners for the fruitful research conducted on audience research and reception theories.

This is particularly true of studies on the impact of the performance space upon the actors' work and upon the spectators, or studies on perception, on the poles of the performance which cause the spectators’ identification (especially with the main character), on the importance which the spectator grants to acting, using it as a scale for his/her appreciation of the play, on the way in which catharsis operates, along with simple and complex cognitive systems, the emotions, the necessary balance between the unknown and the familiar brought forward by communication theories (A. Moles), the way memory functions within theatre - such are the concepts whose knowledge may be of interest to professional artists. Concretely speaking, it is surprising that theatres and companies carry out publicity campaigns to expand their audience without ever putting to use, even in a very basic manner, the results of sociological studies which could direct their efforts and make them more cost efficient.

I would like to add that some new fields of research need to be created, within which practitioners and researchers have similar claims of questions and expectations: practico-theoretical zones whose questions are of practical concern but whose answers can only be found through co-operation between practitioners and theorists and their respective ways of thinking e.g. work on energy, the actor's presence, the body, the voice and its relation to the text. These are examples of << fluid>> zones, which are nevertheless fundamental both to the practitioner's approach and to the analyst's understanding. Such research laboratories would bridge the gap between tertiary drama studies and professional artistic practice so that both areas may enrich one another.

Conclusion: What shall be the conclusion of this open-ended exploration? In order to conclude, I would like to review the main points which I have attempted to bring forward throughout this presentation.

As far as the relationship between theatre and its audience is concerned, it has evolved, throughout past centuries, from being an unquestioned symbiosis to becoming a growing disharmony which now threatens the future of this art-form, inducing many theatres to desperately reach for a larger audience pool. As this discrepancy was becoming more important, the State began to impose itself as a regulator and mediator between art and the public. Its logic is a logic of mercantilism, which is justified by the State's concern for democratisation - the State speaks on everyone's behalf and feels legitimised since the subsidies it distributes come from the tax-payers, ie. the people - so that it has instituted a new cultural contract compelling companies and artists to fit within the framework of a cultural discourse rather than to develop their own artistic discourse, which is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

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‘WITH QUIZZICAL FINGERS THROUGH THE FLYWIRE DOOR’: THE ‘INDUSTRY’ AND THE ACADEMY By Wesley Enoch

WESLEY ENOCH is one of Australia's leading theatre directors and writers. The founding Artistic Director of Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, Wesley led the company to international prominence during his directorship. His critically-acclaimed play 'The 7 Stages of Grieving' (co-written with Deborah Mailman) has been published by Playlab Press. Wesley recently directed his new musical 'The Sunshine Club' (co-written with John Rodgers) for the Company. He is presently Resident Director with the Theatre Company.

* * *

This is a very formal setting and I doubt I’ll stick with it very long, so bear with me. I’m going to tape what I say, so I know what I’ve said afterwards; I have a formal paper here, but a lot of the time I like to open up. I actually feel that a lot of the things I try to say, I try to set up an opposition, and set up something that at least we can define ourselves against and say I disagree or agree with things. So if you find yourself sitting there fuming, then maybe I’ve actually achieved something.

I really just want to be honest about the very strong resistance in ‘the industry’ to acknowledging any role of academics. The industry looks very jealously at the resources of universities, and at what lecturers get paid, and are quite resentful at the sense of churning out graduates and trying to fill an industry or a marketplace or even saturate it. And there are lots of insecurities brought on by - and rightly so - a sense of the scrutiny of the academic critic, and watching academics building careers out of their discussion of our work in a language unknown to us. And to top it all off, it seems like academics and the educational pursuits of universities somehow have more legitimacy in the eyes of the government, the private sector and the public at large.

In an industry squeezed from all sides, the mere notion of academics being part of the industry is, frankly, repugnant. What do ‘they’ do to help us do our jobs better? What is the practical use of having them? What is their contribution? And why is it that there is more a sense of competition than co-operation these days, a sense that they are not moving in step with the industry, but attempting to develop their own. What are their contributions to the funding debates nowadays? What are there and skills? What is their practice, which places them in such responsible positions, and how current are they? Should the academy be answerable to an industry?

When they do pursue artistic aims, how come they stay within the safety of the university structure, and how come they never have to open up to the intense public scrutiny and the kind of responsibility that artists often have to do? And if they were do to this, would they be accused of taking our jobs anyway? A lot of questions – and a lot of them are based on a lot of insecurities, and a reluctance to enter into a discussion or debate, and a form of xenophobia; and one of them is a form of something I was reading about, which asked ‘Is

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there a cultural difference between the academy and the industry?’, and I think there is. That’s one of the things I’m going to talk about today.

I believe that there should be less formal connection between industry and academia, rather than more, which I think is rather a heresy in this kind of group – at least I hope it is….

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, my name is Wesley Enoch and if I haven’t met you already…Hello. This morning I think you are going to play witness to my confession. I will confess to you many things: my distrust of the academy, my rejection of notions of industry, the belief that formal structures do as much to hinder development as they do to support it, and my total addiction to achievement. Though, by the end of the next 30 minutes, you might think me addicted to the sound of my own voice, which is not untrue. I have just arrived back from London, yesterday morning, and have been kind of jetlagged, and I have been re-writing and re-writing, and I realised that I was being too agreeable - which is not like me at all. I’ve recently tried to assert a toughness in my own work, which I always find myself lacking, and so I went about re-writing this paper, and it hopefully now is a little more disagreeable. I’d like to open up at the end for discussion, from all of you, which is an opportunity that we rarely get in the industry / academy dialogue. I would first like to tell you all a little about myself.

I grew up in Brisbane, as did my parents and their parents. On my mother’s side I have English, Irish, Scottish, Danish, Spanish, German, and on my father’s side I come from the tribes of the Minjeribah (on Stradbroke Island), and the Gangu people, which is just north of Cairns, out to the Lockhardt River. I have a Filipino great, great, great grandfather. Someone recently said to me ‘You must be a child of the millennium!’ I said ‘Ah, get fucked…I am what I am.’ I grew up as one of four children and one of 45 first cousins, so needless to say there was little room for solitude. Sunday nights were spent in the backyard of our suburban house around a fire with country music blaring away. There was singing, dancing, storytelling, burnt meat and the odd argument, and I can’t remember if we did this just to piss off the neighbours or whether Dad thought it was something important for us to do. But either way the effect was the same, because the neighbours would sit there, behind the safety of the flywire doors, and look out at us, and I always thought they were pointing this quizzical finger and saying ‘what are they doing over there?’ as they ate their baked beans on toast for Sunday dinner. They would call it a suburban corroboree or something; they’ll never know.

I did well at school, but I watched lots of kids leave - more than half of them didn’t make it through to Year 12. I was the only one of five aboriginal students to graduate. Given that there were 60 of us to start in grade 8, this was a significant number to lose. I went on to study at QUT, did a BA in Drama and did every available credit point in Dance. Did a lot in classical dance. I survived on a strict regime of no drugs, no alcohol, no sex, no socialising, no cigarettes, and anything else a Christian upbringing could outlaw. And on campus, I was a bit of an outsider: this time it was my turn to have a look and to point the quizzical finger, and I think that’s what I have based my career on - and as you can work out, this is not going to be an academic paper. It’s not what I’m about. Early on in my career, I had to make a decision, which path was I going to tread. Was I going to do the academic thing, which is a choice I think I had, though I think some of the lecturers might disagree, or the practical?

And at this time I thought the polarity existed, that the two were irreconcilable, and in some ways I continue to think this. The image of the stuffy academic on a tenured position, whose practice is outdated, lusting after their students, spending their days pondering the symbolism of ships and Shakespearean texts, and drinking red wine. A useful cliché. Not based on any

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one truth, I might add, but it ultimately exists in my notion of what the academy is, I don’t know why. Just as the clichés of the frivolous, superficial, gregarious, sex-obsessed thespian is useless as well. It brings up the notion of the mind/body split, with the sense that those that do don’t think, and those that think, can’t do. I believe this to be outdated. I would argue that the academy and the industry are becoming closer and closer, but maybe this is not a good thing. More on this later, back to me…..

After graduating, I got a job at a youth theatre company - I say a job, but it was more like a traineeship for the first year and a half, and then it turned into a job. I worked on a number of productions, devising work, choreographing, and as a workshop leader, and I left that job to go freelance, and did some acting - which was very very uncelebrated - and travelled, fell in love several times. Wrote some more. I became very arrogant about my work and was ripped to pieces by my family. Found my life partner. I started to articulate my ambition and saw every bit of theatre I could. I eventually went on to run a company – Kooemba Jdarra. I had heaps of ideas for shows and started to explore my work and then I met people, people like my friends and my mentors, who showed me how much I didn’t know. How much the university hadn’t prepared me for my career, and I got very scared.

I was at the age of 27, and I was realising that I was constantly being called ‘young’. I was young, aboriginal, and from Brisbane. Now at this point it becomes descriptive, but it was always an excuse for the work or for the ideas. And I say young, but by the time my parents were 25, they had four kids and a mortgage, and in my family, my Dad now being 51 is the oldest living male in my family. So I now think 25 is about middle-aged for me, so I figured that was all right. I was becoming a kind of a fetish, the new and different, the other, and I had been coaxed along into doing what I was doing, with everybody being very supportive, and I played along with it – still do in some respects. I sat on committees, spoke at conferences like this, and was asked my opinions on things, but even when I thought I was doing my best work, the commentators seemed more interested in the ethnographic, the anthropological aspects of my work, not necessarily the craft. I always say falling stars shine the brightest, even if for the shortest time, and long careers need a strong skills base, so after 10 years since graduating from QUT, and half of that being a professional director, I think I’m ready to learn now. Learn craft. And that’s where I’m at at the moment.

When I was in the middle of a stage where I didn’t know what I was doing, a young woman came up to me and started talking about her studies, and she was asking artists about audiences’ reactions to their work, about responses to marketing and the like. I asked her what she was going to do with this information, to which she responded that she was likely to sell it to a company or a funding body, or maybe use it for her PhD. She was a middle-aged woman -around 25 - and she had never been out of the education system, and was considering a PhD in a subject that she had no practical experience of, and yet she was going to be offering her opinions to an industry for a price.

I began to question her credentials. What was she doing this study for, and expressed my indignation that she was going to benefit monetarily, and also professionally, through information I may pass onto her, knowledge I had learned through trial and error, often unpaid. If I had wanted to get that information back, I may have to pay for it. I’m amazed by this whole consultancy culture that we have at the moment. I think universities feed into this a lot, that you actually get a consultant to ask the people who know the answers, gather the answers, and then charge them to have the answers back again. I guess I’m wanting to illustrate that the notion of ideas, knowledge and experiences have become a commodity.

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They have become a currency you can buy and sell, and there’s a parallel industry which perpetuates itself through the valuing of set formalised knowledges, over the informal, intuitive and experiential. I know that everyone out there is saying ‘No that’s not me’, but we all feed into a system of formalising information so we can (a) be paid for it, and (b) gain status by it. I think this is the interesting thing in terms of this academic and industry argument.

At this stage, maybe I should set up parameters. What do I mean by ‘the academy’ and ‘the industry’? For the sake of this discussion, I’m using more traditional ideas and notions of both, though industry is a relatively new usage in the arts. I have chosen to define the academy in its broadest form, with traditions in pure and applied research, lecturing, academic journalism, critical thought, social commentary, documenting, quantifying. I think academic traditions have never really been focused on students – more heresy - and that the focus is on knowledge, and the students are part of that. For some academics, I think, research and publishing is and should be their focus, not teaching. The development of ideas and theory, and the synergy of peers, the promotion of hypotheses, and debate, these are at the core of academic traditions. We in recent times I think have been focusing more and more on the transference of knowledge to students, as opposed to the development of knowledge and learning and thinking. This is what I think academic tradition is.

In terms of industry, on the other hand, I think it is a very strange term, and I know very few artists who use the term ‘industry’ to describe our work. It has almost been adopted as a collective noun for a group of artists, including formalised funded and unfunded structures, independent artists, technicians, marketeers and the like. Some have countered this term with a more collective term such as an ‘arts community’; other less generous people have offered the collective terms such as a ‘whinge of actors’, or a ‘congratulation of writers’. (We still don’t have the collective noun for directors, because they refuse to agree and even be seen in the same room together.) ‘Industry’ is a term borrowed from another practice altogether, with its connotations of formality, and economic muscle. I believe the usage was an attempt to argue its legitimacy within the halls of power in the 80s and the heyday of economic rationalism; artificially uniting us against this external threat, and it stayed with us somehow. However you group us together, it remains an artificial grouping, as the industry shows its greatest unity against this external threat, and often remains an informal gathering with disparate opinions and practices. The traditions in our work as artists are both highly individualistic, and also striving to be collective.

There is an extreme elitism, and also an extreme popularity in our work. And with this kind of split focus, this kind of dichotomy, artists fall between the cracks, and rightly so; we try to filter the opinions of the world, or our opinions of the world through our work. And there is an undeniable skill level, which we sometimes forget. The history of the industry has been one of reactions, in terms of content and form, and artists - either singly or collectively – are in a relationship with their work and their audiences which is fluid; responding and creating meaning in a world which often defies conventional wisdoms. These traditions require a fleetness of foot. The power to change and adapt, sometimes to be outside moral or social structures, to be the unofficial, to avoid being tied down for fear of complacency.

It’s interesting that as an industry when we do unite, it’s often to argue for greater infrastructure. To say we want a built environment, we want a formal relationship with funding bodies, we want more money, we want more of the very things that tie us down. There is a sense that, as I see it, the academy often provides an infrastructure that has been

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very useful in terms of any historical view for an industry: an infrastructure of critical thought, an infrastructure of talking and debate that I think, as an industry, we don’t want to do. As directors, actors and writers, we often do not want to engage in a critical way with our work. There are rare examples of the opposite of that, but the creative act is one in which we feel exposed, and any form of critique is seen as attack – I’m speaking in broad generalisations there. Is the relationship between the academy and the industry symbiotic? I don’t think it is an issue unique to drama and theatre. I’m sure there’s a conference in another part of the country asking the same questions about chemical science, or architecture, metallurgy, or mining, except perhaps they’re having their conference at the Port Douglas Sheraton or somewhere the like.

And it’s at this point I think it’s the greatest wedge, in a society which has forgotten why it supports the arts. In the 1970s, in the great push of our God Gough, and where a lot of infrastructure came into play, there were reasons why the arts were important. In the late 90s I think we have forgotten that, and we are both to blame for that - the industry and also academia.

We have forgotten the social benefits, we have forgotten the development of ideas of cultural capital which the arts represent. The shrinking resources have created almost a paranoid competitive edge. It introduces notions of commercial and confident decision making, hampers altruism or sharing, and encourages consumption and volume, for in a larger market lies our survival. The industry has changed over the last few years, away from a belief in artistic pursuits, and now must bask in the heat of a market ideology, which rewards the known, the quantifiable and the safe. Pure market ideology says that competition creates innovation and efficiencies, creative thinking is rewarded, and popularity leads to expansion and success and financial returns. I would suggest that competition has not delivered this. In this country it has delivered less choice, in style of work, it has stopped the growth of middle- range companies, and has also stopped the career paths of artists. I on one hand, fulfilling some form of niche, have been feted. I have gone through the sense of the young, and everyone wanting to support the new and best thing. I haven’t quite got to the old established national treasure yet - I hope I get there within the next 10 years. There is a sense that there is a whole middle range of artists who have been left behind. This has been brought about because a lack of funding, but also a lack of support in terms of how, as an industry, we look after each other.

Along with this, we have seen the death of conviction politics, by which I mean a belief in a fundamental moral position, and we have turned more towards a consensus decision-making process. In politics, I think that this is very obvious, where we have turned from leadership to lowest common denominator politics. That has an effect on both an artistic level, and also on an academic level.

My understanding of the traditional relationship between the academy and the industry is that it was, in the past, less defined. It was actually accidental. We had more of a broad liberal arts education. It has brought around lots of successful artists in the last 30 years. Vocational studies were not favoured over this thirst for knowledge, a sense of self-knowledge, or even idiosyncrasies, our own ways of learning. There was no set path to becoming an actor, or a director in this kind of world. Such vocations relied on chance and drive, and undefined qualities, and mentoring, and personal journeys. The training of actors was more of a conservatory situation, more practical. The environment often self-selected those with connections, money and time. It sometimes became a very middle-class pursuit. Sometimes

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the actor would have to search out the right mentor or teacher. This might create a cluster of like-minded artists, which would then create a company, or ensemble, which would then create work from this like-mindedness.

What we’ve had in the last 20 years is that the academy has taken on the training of artists, to the point where it has sometimes created a homogeny of training. People would argue that there are specialised things from VCA to QUT to WAAPA, but what I think it does is create a homogeny in terms of how they are measured as artists, and that they have to go through a process and graduate at the end. We are talking about 17 year olds, and at the end (this has been my experience) lots of people have come out and said that they are actors or directors after graduating from a course like this, and I find that quite insulting in some respects.

I believe the academy and academic practice in this country is changing fundamentally as well. There is this commodification of knowledge, and the need to show financial returns, and to build reputations both individually but also as an institution. This cannot be seen outside of the funding cuts; I know there are reasons for this, but there are also repercussions. There is a shift away from the ideal of free access to education. The academy has slowly become a competitor to the industry as opposed to a support, as we start to compete for a very limited pool of private monies, public monies and the focus on performance projects or consultancies. And it cannot be underestimated, the role the university plays in the market, with its ability to pay certain rentals for venues, being able to hire lights and such which interferes sometimes with those market forces.

What are we to do about this, about these two traditions? One which I think puts knowledge in the centre, and should actually be focusing on the ideas of an infrastructure based on that knowledge, and new ideas of documenting practice; and one that the industry, which is searching for an infrastructure, is based on. These two have come together in ways which have been un-useful. The academy has become more and more practical in its uses of time and its training of students, its emphasis on practical studies in acting. These are responses to market forces, where young people are saying ‘I want to be an actor’, so we will create 30 acting positions, or ‘I want to become a director, therefore I as a university have to respond to that and deliver courses that will make these people into what they want to be’, as opposed to saying there is a rigour and a necessity to keep this tight. This is where I tend to get a bit funny, because I think that the industry and the academy - there is so much crossover of personnel and crossover of ideas and a sense of fluidity between them, and yet this is something that is watering both traditions down.

The universities have become the consultants, and the people who influence public funding, and the development of companies, and sit on committees that elect or appoint artistic directors. It has created a sense of ‘Where are those middle-range actors, and middle-aged actors and directors and writers, where are the positions that they fit into in an industry which has been taken up by university people?’ I don’t think either side has been holding up their side of the bargain. The academy, in a rush to become more relevant, has taken advantage of its place in the marketplace, and it has slipped in its social responsibility in terms of critical debate. No longer do universities engage in public debate as they have done in the past. The development of the whole idea of the uniqueness of the Australian voice, and the supporting of writers in that way from the academy, I don’t think exists in the same way now. We have asked the industry to stand on its own two feet, and it can’t do it by itself because of funding issues. The industry has acquiesced away from its duty in training and development of skills and long-term development. We are starting to see the industry in 12 month blocks, instead

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of seeing five or 10 or 15 years, or whole careers of artists. We are starting to see the new, the fresh, and it’s been the influence of television and movies that has done this. I think movies and television have influenced the academy as well, in terms of the intake of young actors, and their potential for filling a role in soapies etc. We have not succeeded in partnership or individually to expand the pie; to argue why we, as artists or as art academics, why the general public should believe in the arts any more. We have assumed those arguments. We think that everyone agrees and they haven’t. We are losing our social, artistic and cultural capital in the face of the American onslaught.

I say this because I was in London and I turned on the television, and I know we’ve never thought of ourselves as cultural imperialists, but London television is absolutely full of Australian stuff. It’s the stuff that I think has nothing to do with us. It’s some kind of package, yet I don’t know whether we are engaging in the debate which is offering an alternative view to those kinds of things. As artists, I don’t think we are. I myself am worried about where the next dollar is going to come from, and I think of myself as quite a successful artist. And as academics, where your teaching loads, and the pressure of having to get international students and greater student numbers through has created pressures too. Our traditional roles are being squeezed out. The sense of the longevity of our artists, of our training and our skills has been left to the academy to do. We no longer take responsibility as companies, we longer do traineeships, or understudies, or small roles. We now instruct our writers for no small roles. It has cut out a whole lot of stuff, and in the academy I see a sense of the pressure. When I started my course, where there were 34, and the teaching roles were I imagine quite reasonable, because we were such fantastic students…..But the numbers blew up over a five-year period, by hundreds of people in the academy. I think this has been a trend in which the amalgamations and the lack of diversity in the styles of teaching have created a pressure on everyone so that we now no longer play our social function - play our role in developing a social critique and a sense of the arts.

What can we do?

Does the academy make the ephemeral, the art more real? Is its job to create an accessibility and to document the arts? Is its relationship symbiotic or parasitic? The long-term development with relationships with the industry is there. And not to use the academy as the elephants’ graveyard, which I think lots of people have thought about where you pay your dues and then you go off. It is not a hiding place and still has to be active. But industry has to take responsibility to engage in a practical way with developing skills of artists - to take that responsibility back from the academy. To say ‘yes’, that after a three-year course, where an initial introduction to skills is possible, and where a self-selection process and the weeding process has happened, and then you start your apprenticeship, wherever that may be. That we as artists also take on the responsibility to engage with academics in a critical debate about our work, and refuse to close off. We must engage. We must also give our opinions and our own perspectives on the way we create work, and the valuing of the practical, and the use of that language.

I think the academy must take back its role in creating a critical debate in the public eye. Don’t leave it to the government or the artists, sometimes we don’t have the objectivity to do that. It’s time the academy took back that role of identifying the trends of what is lacking in the industry as a whole, to be developing a language which the general public can use to engage with artists’ ideas. Artists as creative thinkers are often engaged in the process of creating work and not of articulating those ideas, and I think the academy can do a lot more of

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that. We have also seen the running down of the critical journals, of ‘Theatre Australia’ and the publication that had all of the reviews in it [Australian and New Zealand Theatre Record]. All of this has been run down, de-funded and moved away from, but there are new opportunities in terms of new technology.

In closing, I would like to open up to a discussion with everybody here. My essential idea is that the academy and the industry have over the last 10 years been trying to form a partnership which is symbiotic, enmeshed within each other. I think that the structures of both deny the diversity of the ways in which we would like to work. In the future, our relationship should be separate, but always standing behind the flywire screen door pointing the quizzical finger, because it creates an objective eye and an outside pressure which I think artists, and hope academics, work well with. As an artist, I would much rather feel that there is an oppositional force at work, pushing me along and working on me, rather than something that is within and somehow congratulating me all the time. I’d like to open up to questions and some responses to that if there are any.

COMMENT: I would like to put in a bid for the word ‘industry’, because the term in my experience first got used coming out of the 1970s push to acknowledge that people who worked in the theatre were workers, and it actually came out of socialist perspective initially, something within the union rather than it being a professional association, that there had to be a sense that one looked at oneself as a worker and that is how it got used - as an oppositional tool. I think that part of the problem is that when the term is used now, it’s used in terms of corporatisation, and that is where our opposition is coming from. I don’t think it actually came out of an acceptance of that corporatisation.

WE: One of the things I would add to that is the sense that the language has that now, and that we an industry and an arts group, the more we use that language, the less we find the power to own the things that we deal with. If we actually found another collective noun for this, that better described our own processes of working, as opposed to borrowing languages from other places.

COMMENT: Part of our problem with live performance now is that everybody wants to do it, but nobody wants to come and see it. That is part of the problem - that the audience for live theatre and performance are the ones doing it.

WE: I would argue that for live performance they are not doing it. They are just not going to theatre. I think one of the reasons people are not going to the theatre is the infrastructure that’s being placed upon the act of going to theatre. If you want to go to theatre in Brisbane - let’s say the Cremorne Theatre - I have to firstly find the phone number to ring, and if I don’t have a credit card, I can’t buy a ticket. And they have to answer the phone. I’ll tell this story about a show at the Next Wave Festival.

There was a show called ‘Sing Sing’, with a concert, dancing, performance and so on, and younger audiences were expected to come to it. They had three performances, and let’s say they had sold only three hundred tickets over three performances. So they cancelled some shows, and shut down part of the car park and the bar and didn’t have as many ushers and so on. And on the night, thousands of young people turned up - because they didn’t want to engage with the infrastructure, they didn’t care about the building and ringing to book tickets etc. They said to themselves, should I go to the movies, or a live band, or go and get pissed, or should I go and see ‘Sing Sing’, and that’s what they did. There’s a sense of we as an

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industry wanting a built infrastructure, which is the very thing that’s stopping audiences from coming to performances. And yet, when we are engaging with the government and private industry, that is the only thing they want to do. They want to build something that they can put their logo on, and say this is how I have contributed to the arts. It’s very interesting.

COMMENT: I was interested in your image of the screen door. Just the notion that you seem to be talking about the impetus to try to be it all at once. One of the interesting problems is that we are in a situation in which knowledge has expanded exponentially. There is so much more that people are expected to know. In the older conservatory training you were speaking about, one didn’t expect to know more than one’s teacher. The position of the teacher was one in which their very specific and refined experience was passed onto students who understood themselves to be on a particular trajectory. The generation that I belong to had wonderful joy in chucking all that out the window, having had our nice liberal arts education, putting on our Blundstones, going out into the world and making it all up as we went along. What I miss in the current generation is this namby-pamby thinking that somehow you can cram everything down their throat in three years. They end up with little bits of knowledge about everything, half the time being more confused at the end than they were when they went in. They have lost that sense of just being able to make it up, that sense of giving them permission to go out there and do it. I would be sad if the image of the screen door to you meant that academics didn’t have a part to play in some sections of what might be out there after the process. I do think that some of us old elephants in the graveyard do have something to contribute to the creative process, possibly in experience or suggestions and so on.

COMMENT: Who defines that relationship afterwards? There is more a sense for me that if I found a particular relationship with a teacher was important, it is not just about having a class between 3 and 5. It is a relationship that develops from one of teacher to one of mentor to one of friend etc. The student defines how that relationship changes.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your questions and comments. They’ve helped me re- think my own responsibilities. Thank you.

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ORTHODOXY, SUBVERSION, TRANSGRESSION:

DAVID WILLIAMSON interviewed by MARK RADVAN

DAVID WILLIAMSON is Australia's best-known playwright. The author of more than 30 plays and screenplays, he has made a major contribution to the development of the Australian mainstage over three decades. His plays, produced regularly throughout Australia, are commonly the focus of academic analysis. At the same time, Williamson is known for his own, often satirical, representations of academics and academic discourse. His recent work, 'Corporate Vibes', had its world premiere in Brisbane just prior to 'Industrial Relations'.

* * *

MR: Thank you David for being here today. I might kick off with a very general question, which is really to do with your work across the industry. You have worked very successfully across the worlds of theatre, film and now television, and I’m wondering what pressures you may have experienced as you’ve worked on the more commercial end of that market; what pressures might press on you that bring with them the commercial imperatives, and that in some way ask you to adapt or alter the kind of writing that you do?

DW: The example of the most pressure in that area would have been my time looking over to LA and trying to work on American projects towards the late 80s and early 90s. LA is the centre of the commercial film industry of the world, and there are certain assumptions about the viability of the sort of films made there, that are made known to you fairly strongly. This is not to say that good films aren’t made out of LA, and indeed I was asked to write some quite challenging scripts. In fact, because I was the scriptwriter on the films ‘Gallipoli’ and ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’, and even ‘Don’s Party’, it was assumed that I was a very serious and committed scriptwriter. So I was hauled in to do projects that were by and large critical of the fabric of American society. These were of course films that were never going to be made! But you did have producers who wore their heart on their sleeve and said ‘I want to make a film that is challenging, and says that we’re doing a lot of things wrong in this country.’ There, you did feel that mood change after you had delivered the first draft, which was actually critical. The pressures there were formulaic ones, I think would be the general way of describing it. Producers, some of whom were the worst human beings I’ve ever encountered, in terms of their cynicism, would say ‘the characters have to be likeable – I have to want to spend two hours of my life with these characters.’ (The characters would not like to spend two hours with the producer…).

‘Nice-ification’ was the term I used: no darkness in the characters, they all had to have an ‘arc’, and there had to be one central character. That was the one undying rule of commercial film - or a duo, for buddy movies, and romances naturally! But generally it was one person’s journey, and the arc of development was such that the character had to start out not knowing enough about life and about themselves, and had to go through a series of testing situations in which their self-knowledge and their knowledge of the world grew, so by the end of the film they’d presumably be as fine a human being as the producer who’d commissioned the film in the first place. They had no idea that I was seen in Australia as a comedy writer, and in fact when one of my plays ‘’ was done in a respectable LA theatre, one of my

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producers remarked on the coincidence that there were two writers in Australia by the name of David Williamson - one of whom did satirical comedies on stage, the other who wrote serious films. In my other comedic life, I tend to disbelieve the human growth theory; I believe that most of us are neurotic, and we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again and never learn anything much, and that in fact is the very basis of comedy.

Comedy assumes that people at some stage have enough knowledge to realise that they are doing something wrong with their lives. They make valiant resolutions to change, it is a struggle and a lot of people fail, and the rest of us laugh and say the human comedy goes on. I found myself at odds with nice-ification, with the arc of development, with happy endings and a general pressure to blandness, and a sense that no particular group in the community could be offended; that the characters could show no darkness and no malignancies.

Commercial film in some way has become, as many people have commented, the new church of America. The traditional church, preaching values of decency and humility and compassion, virtually doesn’t exist any more as an institution. So people walk off the mean streets of America – which economic rationalism has made into a place of intense self-interest and self promotion, as it has in the rest of the Western world - they walk off the mean streets where that goes on, into the cinema where people are nice and endings are happy. It’s sort of a re-affirmation that somewhere out there, there must be a more decent reality than the one they’re currently living in.

MR: You were saying some time ago that there is actually still an interesting debate in terms of commercial art and high art, and in some ways commercial art does have - despite ‘nice- ification’ - that it does have some redeeming features in its attempt to be broad. I’m wondering whether you would like to comment on that?

DW: The word ‘commercial’ has always troubled me because commercial to me means that people just want to see it. Whatever the reasons they want to see it, one shouldn’t assume that inferior human beings, with an inferior map of the world in their heads, are susceptible victims to the dreadful Hollywood moguls who create commercialism. That is a very common assumption. I don’t think that this is true. I think people know consciously that their lives are not what they should be, and they go into the cinema to see a better version of life, a more optimistic version of life, and they consciously choose to do that, and they may not be intensely manipulated by these evil money-making people. These evil people may in fact be supplying the very deeply-rooted need of that audience, and I think that it is very typical in some quarters to despise and deride an audience that goes to so-called commercial product. But it’s worth remembering that the definition of ‘commercial’, or the definition of serious art versus popular art, veers ideologically from century to century, and those espousing the concept of serious art are usually not aware of the embedded ideology of serious art that they are carrying around in their heads.

I have written a satire on the excesses of postmodernism and social constructionism called ‘’. But I don’t disbelieve all of the tenets of that philosophy, and I think Foucault was right when he said that there was a lot of embedded unconscious ideological matter in our heads, and it is no less in our heads on the question of serious art. If you ask a lot of critics out there who deride popular art what their ideology of serious art is, they would say ‘I have none - it is just my own personal perception of what is good and what is bad.’ In fact they do have an ideology that is unconscious of what serious art constitutes, and basically I think the current ideology is that art has to be subversive and transgressive, and those are

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two of the big buzz words. (No-one seems to ask ‘serious and transgressive about what?’, but I could go on about that if anyone wants me to.) That serious art must be opaque, it must be difficult to penetrate, it must have multiple meanings, and those meanings must be difficult to extract or it is not serious art. This goes totally against my grain: I as a writer really like to make my meanings plain, and even my subtext as plain and accessible as I can make it. The third, current strand of ideology of serious art is that it be essentially pessimistic and bleak about the human condition. That great art concentrates on the known capacity of the human species to be highly egocentric and highly selfish, but ignores the also known capacity of the human species to be sociable and sympathetic and empathetic.

So that is usually the baggage that contemporary critics are carrying around in their heads when they evaluate serious art. But that ideology switches from century to century, and indeed the definition of serious art switches from century to century. Hugh Passmore, the wonderful Australian philosopher who wrote a book on the subject, said it is fairly standard that the serious art of one century becomes the forgotten art of the next, and that some of the popular art of one century becomes the highly regarded art of the next, as the ideology of what constitutes serious art changes. One of my favourite playwrights is Moliere: his life was a wonderful example of this. His passion was to write tragedies, but his tragedies emptied houses better than any theatre in France at that time, and his company was urging him to write another comedy to keep the company alive and keep the people coming through the door. So Moliere thought his great work was tragedies, but nobody in their right mind would do a Moliere tragedy these days. But the comedy quickies that he used to whip up to keep his company alive have endured as masterpieces in comic theatre. So you can get into very muddy and tricky ground when you try to define ‘commercial’, ‘popular’, ‘serious’, and there’s a lot of hidden ideology and baggage that shifts, and generally everybody thinks that everybody else has ideological baggage that is distorting their view of the world, but in fact they haven’t.

MR: Just to shift the subject a little David, I wonder if there are specific writing or craft skills that you find actually differ quite strongly from medium to medium, from film to television. What adjustments do you find yourself making?

DW: There certainly are. I think you can see the difference if you look at the script on the page. You can actually see the nature of the difference between film, television and drama. The typical drama format is a little bit of stage description, and lots of character dialogue. In realist theatre, which is the sort of theatre I write, just looking at the format shows that there is little stage direction and a lot of dialogue. People do a lot of talking in theatre, and they do a lot in television too, but less. In film, a huge amount of atmosphere, moods, physical images, evocation of the physical landscape, is written at length; dialogue is comparatively minimal compared with stage, and to some extent television. I think when I’ve done an adaptation of one of my plays to film, at least half the dialogue has to go to make it work. People who see the film of ‘’ and the play of ‘Travelling North’ will think they’ve seen something very similar, but in fact in the film version they have 45% of the dialogue that was there in the stage play. So essentially, the difference to me, if we’re talking about realism in all three of those genres, is that film has three informational channels: the visual image, dialogue, and the body language of the actor. In television, the body language is not as compelling because the screen is simply not as big - it may be in the future. The visual image is still important, but the visual landscape of the human face is far more important seemingly in television than in film. On stage, you only have the two informational channels: the body language and the face of the actor, with the scenic backgrounds adding to the spectacle.

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But essentially to me, drama is the study of character and character development, and you can go into the character in greater depth, and can have much more fun with the way people use and misuse language to deceive themselves and to deceive others. To me, the drama I write is a study of the humour inherent in the misuse of language, both the unconscious misuse and the conscious misuse. You can have a lot of fun in drama. But if you’re writing a film script, you can get a wrap around the knuckles if any dialogue is more than five words long. Also in form, as I was saying, film tends to follow that simple narrative structure: find the central character and follow their journey. So it’s very narrative driven, often in an emulation of the theories of Joseph Campbell, the man who analysed the myths, the hero’s or heroine’s journey. A single character, with the camera coming in on our character’s face, seems to define who the film is about and we follow their arc of development as they learn about themselves and the world. Drama, at its best, can handle six, seven or even eight characters of almost equal importance, and interrelate and juxtapose those characters. Chekhov, who is one of my favourite dramtists, can take eight or nine characters and make all of their lives and all of their interactions equally interesting, so that we can look at the play as being a journey (or the lack of journey if you’re a comic writer) of six, seven, eight or more characters.

MR: Your writing has been very successful at the box office, but you’ve used the word that had been used by Josette Feral in her key note speech, which is ‘unease’, or ‘uneasy’. You have had an uneasy relationship with critics and reviewers, and I wondered if you had wanted to comment on it at all?

DW: Yes, I think part of that has been my fault, where in the early 90s I became too reactive to what they were saying, and it’s a silly thing for any artist to defend themselves against what the critics say; it only irritates them further and they get you eventually! You just have to learn to shut up and put up with their stupidity. No, I’m just being facetious.

I do think that it’s to do with the ideology of what constitutes art. I believe that I am still writing well. The fact that my plays are connecting with audiences as well as they ever did indicates that I am doing something right. It’s actually very hard to write a play that works in front of an audience. I know when it is working, and when it is not. I am the first to know. I know after the first preview whether I’ve written something that is connecting or not. I still think that I am writing well; some critics acknowledge that, and some do not. Partly it is to do with the buzzwords ‘subversive’ and ‘transgressive’. And it has something to do with the question ‘What are you being subversive and transgressive about?’ Until the early 80s, if you were being subversive and transgressive about the norms of society that are taken to be bad, or regressive or reactionary by you the writer, if you attack those norms, and you assume that your audience in the ideal case believes in those norms, then the theatre becomes an act of attacking the ideas of the audience that goes to the theatre, that they believe in consciously or unconsciously.

Up until the late 70s, I think the subversive and transgressive norm was a Marxist one; Stephen Sewell wrote out of a Marxist framework largely in those years, and he was attacking Western capitalist society through that particular framework. Then I think there was a mood shift. So I got attacked in those years for not being Marxist enough. Briefly, ‘’ was seen as subversive and transgressive for attacking the authoritarian forces of law and order, attacking the police force. In fact anybody that reads ‘The Removalists’ carefully can see that my working class hero Kenny Carter is just as bad as the two policemen, considerably worse, in fact, than the young constable who is innocent, who is responsible for his death. ‘The Removalists’ is a far more complex play than it was taken in

33 Industrial Relations some quarters at the time. But it was seen to be subversive and transgressive, saying that police are rats etc. and therefore got a lot of critical plaudits. In fact, it was a very black satire about the worst aspects of Australian social behaviour, and in particular the male social behaviour.

Then in the 70s when it became obvious that Marxism was not going to sweep the world, even to the true believers, when the Berlin Wall was in danger of coming down, and later and when the tyrannies of Marxism were being thoroughly exposed, the focus switched to identity politics: disadvantaged groups such as the gay community, the feminist movement, the indigenous movement and the ethnic movement, began to feel that this was the area to be subversive and transgressive in, to reveal the viciousness of the patriarchy, the viciousness of heterosexual dominance and the orthodoxy - again I was not subversive and transgressive enough in this particular area, as indeed I hadn’t been when Marxism was the main framework of subversion and transgression. I have never been subversive and transgressive enough for quite a few critics out there. I do think I am in my own way, because I think the orthodoxy of theatre has become so identity politics bound, that it is almost subversive and transgressive to say: ‘the nuclear family at all times and in all instances is not the worst thing that ever happened in the Western world, John Howard notwithstanding.’ That was basically why ‘Dead White Males’ was attacked: it was described as a pro-family play - God help us. That doesn’t mean that I am aligned with John Howard. I just happen to have spent a life in a family that by and large has given me huge amounts of satisfaction, with five children who, in spite of their ups and downs, I am glad we had. So I am not prepared to say that the nuclear family or that heterosexual relationships are the worst thing that ever happened to the Western world and that they are all part of a patriarchal plot, which is a common assumption.

For instance, Barrie Kosky’s very vigorous production of ‘Tartuffe’ switched the focus of the play, and Barrie was working very directly off gay ideology, and he switched the focus from a play about a very seductive and persuasive hypocrite named Tartuffe, the religious hypocrite coming in and seducing a family with his hypocrisy. Barrie opened his production with the kid of the play shooting up heroin on Christmas Day, giving a fairly clear signal to the audience that the nuclear family had gone to shit - having to shoot up on Christmas day. It went on from there: Tartuffe, instead of being a silky smooth hypocrite and seducer, was given a hugely funny performance by a well-known comic actor, and he was so gross, so obvious and so hideous that only an imbecile - i.e. the head of a nuclear family, the male head of a nuclear family - could ever be deceived by this character. So Barrie twisted it around, and it’s a legitimate interpretation if you are working out of that ideology that the nuclear family is always hideous. The only time when father and son bonded was when they were beating the Christ out of Tartuffe, once the had finally discovered that he was a hypocrite and they were bonded in male violence, and the wife of the family recoiled in horror, seeing what true maleness was about. Subversive and transgressive assumes that you are actually preaching values that are not shared by your audience. The night that I was there, the audience at the were truly sharing the ideology about the horridness of the nuclear family, and they were enjoying the spectacle immensely, or at least the majority of them were.

It is not truly being subversive and transgressive to come out of a gay or feminist ideology, because everyone in the audience believes those ideologies these days. So I think we are quietly being subversive in saying that in all times and in all circumstances, all males and females aren’t destined to hate each other for ever, and in all times and circumstances the

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nuclear family is not the worst invention that ever happened to the human species. I like to think of myself as one step ahead of the current ideology.

QUESTION: I was in the same theatre the other night watching the Mark Radvan's production of ‘Third World Blues’, and it was good because I got two shows for the price of one. The first show was ‘Third World Blues’ and second was David Williamson watching ‘Third World Blues’ which he was obviously deriving enormous joy from - not quite to the point of mouthing the words of the actors, but it was terrific to see you getting so much pleasure from the theatre. I wonder more generally do you enjoy and go to the theatre?

DW: Yes I do, a lot. The thing that got me into the theatre and the reason that I wanted to write for theatre is that very interaction between stage and audience. The humans, and the very fact that there are real human beings out there in a real audience. In the electronic age, it is one of the last communal experiences we have to get together with a group one night and see something that is unique. I do enjoy theatre - not just my own - and I don’t think it is a dying art form for that particular reason. I have said it before, that it can deal with a range of characters in some depth, and also that it’s a wonderful communal experience and there is nothing quite like a three-dimensional, live actor using language and body language and connecting with the audience. Mark’s production was a particularly good production, and it is always a joy for a playwright to see a really good production of their work, done with great integrity and with the right balance between humour and pathos.

QUESTION: You referred to Barrie Kosky’s production, have you ever experienced such a radically different, unexpected interpretation of a play of your own?

DW: No, I haven’t. Barrie has never shown an interest in doing anything of mine. He seems to spend most of his venom on me. Most of the directors that I’ve worked with have wanted to realise what I have written. I have been very fortunate. I had one exercise, a play called ‘’, which I wasn’t thrilled with the fact that Wayne Harrison did push it in the direction of a piece of musical theatre more than I would have liked to have seen, but I did have the satisfaction of seeing a very straight production of it in Wellington, New Zealand which was wonderful, and the play worked on the same merits. Occasionally, I have had a bad experience, but it hasn’t all been one way: Wayne’s production of ‘Dead White Males’ was very good, and his direction of ‘Third World Blues’ was good too.

QUESTION: David, getting back your experience in Carlton, La Mama, the APG and the collaborative nature of those earlier works and working as an actor in some of your plays. What now is your relationship to the rehearsal room when a company, especially a mainstream company, is producing a play of yours. How much access do you have to the rehearsal room and how much freedom do you have to give comment or influence the way a production will go?

DW: Sometimes, I have a pre-reading, before the rehearsals actually start. Some directors will get a good group of actors together and let me hear the play, which is enormously helpful. There is a shift between the page and when the words are spoken that is very important, because you can never quite pick the bad patches of your own writing on the page, but they certainly stare at you when the actors are saying them. And you can see what’s working. Sometimes I do a re-write after a pre-read and then I will come to the first reading with the real cast and always do a re-write after the first reading. Sometimes a reasonably substantial re-write, but not in terms of the structure - if you haven’t got the structure right, you are really

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stuffed by that stage. Usually an edit, some 10% will go after I have heard the first read, and some scenes and lines will be re-written, but basically an edit, and then I’ll tend to stay away. I think actors and directors like the freedom of being able to slag off at the writing and the writer behind their back. So you leave them to that. If everything is going well after that re- write, I’ll come back about the third week and see a run through on the Friday of the third week, and it really starts to look like it is going to look. After the first read through, I talk with the cast and the director, I don’t just listen and go away. They will always have their opinions on what’s right and what’s wrong, and often these are intelligent opinions and often, too, very disinterested opinions. You will not always get the cliché of the actor trying to increase their part; often actors will prefer sections be cut that are not working, so I have that discussion and then I’m away. At the end of the third week, see a run through and then do some more shaping up, and by that time it is usually set. Often after a preview, you will know what you’ve got. That collaborative thing is always present in theatre to a greater or lesser extent and I welcome that input because the cast and directors are usually highly theatrically intelligent people.

QUESTION: David, speaking on behalf of the Academy, do you think playwriting can be taught and what advice can you give us about courses in this?

DW: I think a supportive atmosphere can be generated in which talent can be nurtured. I think an awareness of the various genres of theatre can be taught and recognised. The old adage goes ‘Rules are there to be broken’, but if you don’t even know the rules, then there’s nothing there to break except intuitively so to speak. So I think good playwrights have emerged from creative writing courses, and it is largely that immediate feedback, that all playwrights particularly need at an early stage. The feedback I got at an early stage was from my audience and that was my learning process, but not everyone is lucky enough to be around at La Mama when plays are being done, when there is a hunger for new scripts and new plays are getting onstage. I recommend the quickest learning experience is to face an audience, because I rapidly learnt that my earlier pieces were not working, and you learn that when people either walk out or go to sleep. In the absence of that opportunity, the feedback from caring intelligent staff and other people can be a substitute for that, and also the simple craft rules: clarity and brevity. Drama in general is not a subtle artform; even the great bard sets up his plays with a real rush. has three daughters – you suck up, you suck up, you don’t suck up, you’re stuffed. Off goes the play. So those simple craft rules could be very helpful.

QUESTION: Given your earlier influences in what was your major period of experimentation in Australian theatre, I’m interested in whether you’ve spent much time in recent years in going to see a different kind of work, where the writer is not actually allowed the liberty of coming into the rehearsal process with a finished draft, when in fact the writer has to start off with the whole group and in a sense is maybe one of the least important people in how the end result comes up. There is a whole tradition of this in Australian theatre which suggests that there is now a whole lot of different ways of writing, but to simplify it: there’s the model that you work with, where a writer comes in with the work and it is fairly much set up as a draft with some alterations and re-writes. And I know you do re-write a lot. But then there’s a situation where a lot of writers are working with a sense that they can’t own what goes on at that stage, and I wondered if you have been going to performances seeing what has been evolving, and whether you want to comment?

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DW: In my early days - everything goes in cycles, and that was the very much the ideology of the time then too, in group-devised work, that the writer was dead. I got very depressed at the time, because I tend to be susceptible and I believed that ideology, so I found myself in groups with a lot of loudmouths saying this that and the other - they almost ruined ‘Don’s Party’ for all time. The ideology then, even though they deny it, was a fairly Maoist one, of total collaboration: everyone hated elitism of any form, and no-one in this ideology had any more talent than anyone else, it is just that some had a little more training than others. So Max Gillies and I had to clean the toilets, and collect tickets, and all of that. And I hated that after a while. I thought it was hypocrisy, it was stupid. Max Gillies is a much better comic actor than X (I won’t name who). We had a three hour collective meeting in which it was three hours of rationalisations as to why Max Gillies got 16 roles in the revue, and actor X got only five, and it was put down to the scheduling etc. But everyone knew in their hearts that all the training in the world wasn’t going to make X actor as good as Max Gillies. After it while it got to me, and I said that I was a better writer than that. I painstakingly go away and do nine or 10 or 11 drafts that are carefully thought out at all sorts of levels. It might work for some groups but it didn’t work for me.

QUESTION: This is different in recent times, it is very much a director’s theatre. That’s why I’m curious as to whether you have been following that as a development. Certainly not that kind of equalising collective process by any means, but the writer is not the important person in theatre, the director is.

DW: Well in those days directors were just as bad as writers were. Bill Garner put out a manifesto saying ‘Good theatre is not important, what is important is that we live well, and if the theatre is worse because we all participate well then so be it, we live better and we feel better.’ There is a certain validity in that, Bill is a lovely guy, now he is a writer. I still think the careful orchestration of character and the vantage point of one person orchestrating that character is going to for me lead to interesting work still. I can’t imagine, for instance the subtle and wonderful orchestration of the theme, character and mood in the Chekhov play not emanating from someone like Chekhov.

QUESTION: My understanding is that you tend not to work with dramaturgs very much, I may be wrong on that, but I am wondering what your feeling is about the use of dramaturgs in script development – have you had to use an ABC supplied script editor on your ‘Dogs Head Bay’?

DW: I have always found my dramaturgs to be the directors. I forgot to mention that after writing the successive drafts, the directors all get to see them and are encouraged by me to react to them and they react to a greater or lesser degree. Aubrey Mellor will send me 25 pages of fax, saying ‘Ignore this if you want, it’s just thoughts’ – and he means it. To me part of the theatre directorial function has been that dramaturgical function, and the good directors have been very canny about script structure and providing good feedback over the years. Maybe a separate person can have that role, I’m not denying the fact that some writers may find the role of a dramaturg very useful, and some have said to me that they’ve found the dramaturg is usually their ally against the director. In certain circumstances, the role could prove very useful, but I’ve been very fortunate that my directors have been very good on script analysis.

QUESTION: One of the forms that I think fits into the general area that you were referring to is that which is not necessarily totally subversive and transgressive as you were saying, but

37 Industrial Relations celebratory of difference, for example, as a guiding principle. I would be interested to hear your reaction to that area as a theatre form. Do you see that sort of work retaining any validity in the late 90s?

DW: Yes, I am not decrying the fact that theatre should recognise the various groups and roles that it has hitherto ignored, and celebrate the potential for diversity. No I am not in any way saying that shouldn’t happen. It is just when the ideology becomes overly strident. The best aspects of the nuclear family should be celebrated as much as any other element of society. It is when theatre gangs up against a certain way of living, and celebrates a diversity that is not inclusive. My vision is that there are many lifestyles and many ways of living that are equally valid and should find representation on stage, and do.

QUESTION: My question follows on from that. About writing for your audiences, do you find it hard to have exposure to the people you are writing for and about? Do you feel insulated at all as a ‘great writer’ figure? I’m thinking of that in relation to ‘Dogs Head Bay’ and those two really different families?

DW: I have been very careful to never be an isolate - even though I am living up North now. I am very quick to find local people to connect with that are not connected with the theatre or not connected with the arts. I find this is a sanity point. I get to know people who are not in the same, rather incestuous field that I am. I have certainly kept in touch with the younger generation having five children, with various interests and inclinations, and their friends. I will never become an isolate and never want to, and never want to mix in totally rarefied circles.

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PART TWO

DELEGATES’ PAPERS

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WORKING PARTNERS: A DISCUSSION OF THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF PERFORMING ARTS WORKING PARTNERSHIPS By Howard Bradfield

WAAPA holds a unique place in the spectrum of Arts Training in Australia. Although geographically isolated the institution has grown over 20 years to occupy a prominent and special place in the professional arts arena of . The State Government constituted the institution under an act of parliament with programs in acting, dance and music. The emphasis was to be on performance training rather than replicating already existing academic based courses at other universities.

Some 20 years on, a number of additional programs have evolved, many of which are Federally funded with some having an increased academic component. More recently the School of Visual Arts was added under the umbrella of WAAPA which further enriched the artistic endeavours of the institution. However there has been little if any distinction between the various programs based on their financial or academic content. The current enrolment is around 1400 full-time students.

Up till 1999 WAAPA had three schools of study, The WA Conservatorium of Music, The School of Dramatic Arts and The School of Visual Arts. This configuration is about to change as Classical Music studies are now conducted under a joint program arrangement with the University of Western Australia. Jazz and Commercial Music Studies will be amalgamated within the current area of Dramatic Arts and will form the new School of Performance.

Survival in Academia Like so many of our colleagues in the arts we face the annual likelihood of government reductions to programs, increased cost of delivery and often the associated financial constraints of working within a larger institution. We are always on the lookout for alternative approaches, cost saving measures etc. and have come to accept that this situation is par for the course. An additional aspect related to funding viability, which we find particularly irksome is the nature of the annual RAI procedures. Although I may appear to be straying from the topic I believe it is timely to include a few comments on research and its relevance within this discussion.

While much of the individual workload of lecturers in our related institutions, is based in teaching and associated activity, we also engage in the extension and development of our professional skills or practice.

Dennis Strand (1998, p. 19) states "there is a strong conceptual link between the creative output of people doing their professional practice and what is widely accepted as genuine research in other fields. This is not a new concept, as I believe most of us working in the arts recognise the link between ‘the academy’ and ‘the field’.

We acknowledge that we must be pro-active in fostering and stating this connection thereby drawing parallels with any disciline which promotes professional practice as research

41 Industrial Relations equivalent (Strand 1998, p 53). And indeed why not? The arts are no different to areas such as science, business, engineeringg etc. which, also base much of their research in the field. At a local level WAAPA has been advocating the adoption of a CPA index with some degree of success, using as a reference the work of Dennis Strand and in particular the 8 categories he suggests as a Creative Arts Checklist (Strand, 1998, p. 52). While we have not achieved full recognition of all that we deem to be research, we have made considerable gains. Staff members, who have been involved with any of the following, partnered works have aided in the process of gaining legitimate recognition of their endeavours and linking them to the CPA index.

Industry-Links The School of Dramatic Arts At present the School of Dramatic Arts encompasses a number of disciplines including - acting, technical production, design, broadcasting, dance, directing, musical theatre and arts management - all of which are very much based on industry practice.

With its particular emphasis on performance, WAAPA made an early commitment to foster and develop strategic alliances with industry, so as to maintain currency of course content, links for student secondments and a resource base of expertise.

Many of these links with industry were based on casual arrangements and have developed into associations, which are of mutual benefit. They have enriched our student programs in a number of ways, enabling WAAPA to better manage its training obligations while providing the industry with highly skilled prospective employees. A number of opportunities have occurred where, with the support of state and federal arts funding programs, we have been able to jointly work on initiatives such as new works and new technologies. As these initiatives have developed further they are rapidly becoming highly significant components of the various programs and involve local and interstate choreographers, writers, directors, dancers and theatre companies

The Black Swan Theatre Company - The recent 1998 Festival of Perth production Merry-go- Round by the Sea presented by the Black Swan Theatre was workshopped and developed by the writer using our 1997 third year acting students. WAAPA and Black Swan received funding from Arts WA to jointly develop the new work as part of the Acting Program. It was staged in workshop format as a student performance during the year.

A similar arrangement is currently underway with this years’ third year acting students who are engaged in workshopping a further piece for Black Swan based on the Mystery Cycle Plays. To date a number of sessions have taken place with the latest being conducted at the New Norcia Benedictine Monastery 110 kms from Perth. The finished work is to be presented at the Festival of Perth 2000.

Writer/Director Robyn Archer In 1996 we discussed with Robyn the possibility of her directing a musical theatre production. The resultant project was funded on the basis of developing new works with the aid of the state and federal arts agencies. The work, The Bridge, was based in Sydney during the 1930's depression and resulted in a highly enjoyable student performance.

Playwright We have been very fortunate in gaining the services of Nick Enright over a several years. He has likewise workshopped a number of new works with the acting students under similar arrangements.

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Working Partners More recently a number individuals and a variety of companies have looked to WAAPA as a possible avenue for the development of small and large works which would otherwise have been beyond their means due to either financial or logistical factors. An added benefit of joint partnerships is not only the exchange of expertise and experience but also the inclusion of students, staff and graduates in the resulting performance. A number of teaching residencies, exchanges and workshop sessions have developed in return for access to facilities and staff resources.

‘Skadada’ The work of the West Australian based company - 'skadada'- with their recent performance of the production Electronic Big Top, at the Perth and Sydney Festivals was accomplished as a direct result of partnering involvement with WAAPA. I was particularly interested in the performance, as a number of students I had taught in the technical theatre program were employed on the show in Sydney and Perth. They were very fortunate in having the opportunity to work with the show as it evolved during the final year of their studies at WAAPA. As a consequence of this collaboration, I was able to incorporate the Perth performance into a student assignment as part of the BA Performing Arts Graduate Program which I co-ordinate. This program enables advanced diploma graduates from acting, technical theatre, broadcasting and music to complete a degree qualification via an additional years study, featuring a self devised performance project. The 'skadada' performance encompassed a range of theatre skills and was highly suited to our current theme 'analysis of devised work'. Jon Burtt, the co-director, was able to discuss the performance with the students and spent considerable time explaining the basis of the work as well as focusing on funding and the benefits of collaborative approaches.

'Skadada' is a unique Australian multi-artform performance group, formed in Perth in 1995, as an initiative of co-founders Jon Burtt, Katie Lavers and John Patterson.

The group have mounted a number of projects including boop, 1997, a performance piece presented at the Sydney Opera House for the Sydney Opera House Trust, Paper Kite, 1997, a short multi-artform presentation for the Huntington Music Festival and Auto, Auto, 1998, a multi-media video presentation at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Jon was trained in classical dance at the Halliday School of Ballet in Sydney, and gained a scholarship to the London School of Contemporary Dance. He has danced with companies in London, Canberra, Melbourne, Hobart and later in Perth with the Chrissle Perrott Dance Company. Jon has developed his interest in choreography and recently worked with the West Australian Ballet. Katie trained at the Sydney College of the Arts and was later awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. Her work includes installations, multi-media and cross-artform collaboration. John Patterson was awarded his BA at Curtin University of Technology in Perth and went on to develop his music and computing skills utilising a wide range of Macintosh software. In 1993 he was warded the Multi-media Project of the Year Award in the Western Australian Information Technology Awards. He has created sound piece for performance works across a range of disciplines.

The Electronic Big Top performance is dance informed by circus and includes unusual trapeze sequences and other aerial work using various apparatus. Built into this milieu are a number of other aspects including the use of computer animation, interactive sound and puppetry.

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For Burtt and Lavers the production offered an opportunity to bring together unusual combinations based on everyday objects and every day situations presented in a bizarre synthesis. Puppetry was particularly useful in transferring domestic situations into a completely different context. During the course of our discussions, Jon explained that for some time he had been looking to present a large work which would start in Perth and move elsewhere. The prospect of performing in the Festival of Perth arose and was extended to the Sydney Festival. Having the backing of the Festival organisations, Jon sought funding through state and federal arts agencies using external sponsorship and in-kind arrangements to support the applications. The proposal encompassed a range of sponsorships including computer animation components developed with Imago and Whizz Digital in Perth.

The Academy's role in this partnership, incorporated a number of reciprocal arrangements. The main theatre was to be used to rehearse the rope work, which featured as a key element in the production. Two sessions each of two weeks duration were set aside for this purpose. In return, Jon conducted master classes for the Postgraduate Dance program. He employed this time to choreograph a number of floor routines for the show and included one of the dancers in the trapeze element. While developing the music component of the show Jon turned to Lindsay Vickery, a staff member of the conservatorium for support and later included him in the music ensemble. Likewise, Jon received support for the lighting requirements from Mark Howett of the Production and Design Department who developed a stunning lighting design. Two of the third year production and design students were seconded to the show, one as a lighting technician, the other as a mechanist/prop builder. Both students toured with the show to Sydney.

Future Trends The current attitude of the Federal Government is to centre 'training' in the industry sector. In many ways this is also true for the arts industry. The emphasis of many funding initiatives is on partnering with industry, and if this is the case then we must be prepared to take up the challenge. No tertiary arts program can afford to miss the boat. Strategic partnerships in their varied forms are here to stay and in order to retain prominence and relevance in the training sector, we as educators must be prepared to make them work for us.

While resulting gains may not be immediately apparent, future rewards can be significant. The spin offs can be of enormous value to the students and staff. The various initiatives will provide added exposure to a variety of professional performers and experiences, which in turn will enrich programs in affordable ways.

References

Strand, D. 1998, Research in the Creative Arts, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra.

Festival of Perth. 1998, Skadada, Electronic Big Top, Festival of Perth, Alpha West.

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"INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS" "CONSTRUCTING THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE ON: 'BI-CULTURAL' PROCESSES OF INVESTIGATION AND TRAINING AT TOI WHAKAARI: NEW ZEALAND DRAMA SCHOOL" By Vanessa Byrnes

NOTE: This paper was defivered verbally with several accompanying visual images and slides which are not included in this published form. Some content was elaborated on with these images.

mihimihi: Tena koutou katoa Ko Aorangi te maunga Ko Opihi te Awa Ko Ngati Aerihi te iwi Ko Byrnes te whanau Ko Jim toku papa Ko Sandra toku mama Ko Vanessa ahau

My name is Vanessa Byrnes and I am pleased to be here to talk with you today about the "bi- cultural" processes of investigation which underline the training of actors at Toi Whakaari/ NZ Drama School. I think it's worth discussion at this Conference, which serves to focus on the relationship between the industries of training and practise, because the work is unique, and although it has pitfalls, it is proving to be a training process that has immense potential.

I want to consider here the broad issue of how practical training and theatre-making benefits from an awareness and employment of identity within performance. The processes of "bi- cultural" investigation and training which are employed at NZ Drama School warrant scrutiny, because they are simultaneously difficult and beneficial paths which, I believe, provoke empathy and identity for the actor.

In a recent degree monitoring report about the School, Dr. Geoff Gibbs of the International Foundation for Arts and Culture pinpointed this very aspect of the program. He says, "The bi- cultural approach is a special quality and an enriching feature, without its dominating the final outcome of the education and training of the students. The spiritual and cultural underpinning that that provides makes the program unique."1

At this point, I should say that in using the term 'culture', I'm aware it's a tenuous term which has been described by British scholar Raymond Williams as one of the "two or three most complicated words in the English language”.2 So let's take a moment to define my terms of reference here.

As disciplines, I'm going to assume that Performance and Cultural Studies are largely and generally concerned with distinctions founded on post-Marxist readings of class.

1 Gibbs, Dr Geoff, Degree Monitoring Report, November 1998. 2 William, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev.ed (New York: OUP 1983) pp87-93.

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They also explore boundaries defined by ethnicity, intercultural encounter, and social circulation. Such interpretations frequently look to cultural anthropology for their theoretical paradigms. My own definition here is focussed on the practical training of actors, and therefore must allow for positionality and boundaries - or the assumption of authority from which cultural position, or positions, one is allowed to speak. Or, put another way, the paradigm exists that in order to explore another cultural discourse, you must be able to define your own.

So what I'm suggesting here is a definition of 'culture' that allows for the 'inter- cultural' constructions of ethno-centric, academic, pragmatic, physical, theoretical and creative discourses within the training. From a inter-cultural or inter-textual relations point of view this might suggest the politics of post- modern representation; inclusion/exclusion, identity and difference, negotiation and appropriation. But let's not forget that this is a creative art that necessarily relies on healthy dialogue and conflict. 'Difference' is the name of the acting game, but 'similarity' makes sense of the performance and storytelling genre.

Ko te kai a te rangatira, he korero. - Storytelling is the sustenance of chiefs.

Right now, New Zealand theatre is embracing the challenge of what its role may be in an increasingly bi-culturally aware environment. The past two decades have seen an exponential growth in the amount of home-grown, both original and adapted works, that are concerned with the bi-cultural, ethnocentric, issues between Maori and non-Maori. The list of quite recent productions that have investigated the question of ethnic identity are too numerous to mention individually in this session - Purapurawhetu, Michael James Manaia, Nga Moea Moea - but I will refer to a particularly significant new piece that involves Toi Whakaari graduates (director, actors, technical designers and crew) and points to a big step forward. The Sojoums of Boy is a collaborative drama by Jo Randerson and Briar Grace-Smith, respectively, Pakeha and Maori writers. It is finely directed by David O'Donnell, a Wellington-based academic/ practitioner.

The play could be described as an absurdist drama, where "the comic and surreal are fuelled by a strong sense of reality".3 Maori and Pakeha actors, use both languages to explore the currently fashionable pre-Y2K discourses of apocalyse and redemption. But, significantly, it does not make an issue of race - the bi-lingual, bi-cultural interactions are not explored as some kind of utopian vision or separatist hell or purgatory; rather, ethnic patterning is simply part of the given, accepted, theatrically constructed environment. This is a big step forward from the kind of declamative drama that has, as commentator Roma Potiki has stressed, hitherto placed Maori into set stereotypes; the child beater, the drunk, the urban dispossessed. (evident even in such important dramas as Hone Kouka's Waiora concerned with the urban drift, or films like One Were Warriors). Boy is risky, sophisticated, bi-cultural play-making at its best.

Within this arena, Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School performs its role as the national training facility for acting and production professionals. As such, we believe it has an important responsibility to ensure its graduates have a vision for the future and the necessary skills to enable them to influence that future.

3 O’Donnell, David, The Sojourns of Boy Program – Director’s notes,p2.

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About one third of the current student body are Maori, although there is not a set quota policy about establishing such a percentage. Toi Whakaari fundamentally acknowledges the Treaty of Waitangi, and, accordingly, has an active and long- term objective to explore the significance of biculturalism for the drama profession. The Magna Carta of this School is the Treaty of Waitangi, and for those of you who do not know this document, to simplify it, the principle of Partnership is its fundamental backbone. It is a challenging process training practitioners in such an environment, but as we are discovering, a worthwhile one. Any training process that seeks to promote a dialogue within a multi-skilled discipline is taking on a huge challenge. Within my role at Toi Whakaari, I teach a variety of subjects contributing to the three year Bachelor of Performing Arts Degree and the two-year Diploma in Technical Production. For the purposes of this paper and conference, I will focus on the former degree in Performance. This course is holistic, with each unit being interdependent. The degree is divided into five core components, each with its own major elements;

1. Voice Voice, speech, singing

2. Movement General movement, mime, physical theatre

3. Acting Improvisation, text analysis, acting methodology or technique

4. Performance for Camera History of film, multi camera, studio technique, single camera, film performance, comedy for TV, camera audition technique

5. Cultural & Theoretical Studies History, Theory, and Philosophy of theatre, Taha Maori, world philosophies, survival skills, and professional discipline.

Significantly, no single unit stands alone, and students are expected to achieve satisfactory levels in all subjects of the program. (The pass/ fail system of assessment eliminates grading difficulties so common in arts training). This could pose a perennial problem for trainee actors who have strengths in particular areas like movement or physical theatre, and converse weaknesses in history of theatre or philosophy. But the current approach is to encourage a dialogue - a bi-cultural conversation, if you like, between the disciplines. In this manner, competencies in one area can build confidence and underline the path in to another. I'll give you an example.

Last year I worked with two first year trainee actors, (respectively Maori and Samoan) on the nunnery banishment scene between Hamlet and Ophelia. I encountered an initial reticence of the language, which was to be expected from first year trainee performers, but this was supported by a very real and constricting fear of performing a convoluted, seemingly alienating text, that reeked of 'the Other'.

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Where to begin? Well, we worked on physical ways of telling the story, experimenting with gesture, action, textual methodology and combat metaphor work that aimed to be non culture-specific. Vocal exploration of the story proved to be the next valuable way of opening up the emotional resonance between the two actors.

But, somewhat ironically, the most important and direct road into the work was to use the language; and in fact only via this direct understanding of the language did we achieve an essential rendition of the scene. The clue was to create a thorough dialogue, or meeting, between the actor and Shakespeare's text. We paraphrased the scene firstly into a general English language rendition, then into each actor's individual colloquial speech or street parlance, then parts of the text into Samoan or Maori. What we discovered was that Shakespeare's language employs metaphor and syntax in a very similar way to traditional Samoan and Maori.

Suddenly, the actors grasped wh such fullness of expression is used in metaphor, and in validating their own linguistic understanding, the results were exciting. The emotional commitment to the given circumstances of the scene were given their due fullness.

Such an interpretive strategy relies upon definitive cultural and linguistic boundaries, and on a deliberate braiding of inter or bi-cultural reactions. In this context, theatre becomes the mediator between historical and cultural difference. If you like, the ceremonial officiator at the wedding.

An obvious constraint here is the appropriation or misrepresentation of culture through language, and this is nothing new to the field of intercultural performance studies. Racial and cultural stereotypes can be imposed, or worse, attempts to 'universalise' the text may obliterate the specific, constructive, cultural paradigm implicit in the writing, and erase their uniqueness, even as it purports to celebrate the common existence. It would be wrong to invalidate Hamlet's constant intellectual frame of reference, for example, simply because the actor has not also been to Wittenburg, and because intellectual pursuits may not attribute cultural status or 'meaning' in a similar fashion. The importance of empathy as a developing skill really comes into play here.

More recently, I directed a production of Sue Glover's gritty Scottish drama, Bondagers. The play depicts a group of six nineteenth century female farm workers who are hired under the 'bondage' labour hire system (a kind of itinerant slave labour practise) that existed in Scotland until halfway through this century. This environment presents the student actor with tough challenges, for they must embody the accent, period, physical environment, storyline and realistic style with truth. It's necessary to research the world of the play vigorously, but it's also very tempting to apply these technical aspects TO the self and get weighed down by the application of such traits.

But at Toi Whakaari we also encourage the actor to discover their own cultural or historical frames of reference to the situation - to apply their own philosophical assumptions to the 'character's'. Through practical philosophy, daily 'Training' discipline and the improvisation work, the acting students attain skills necessary to define points of similarity and difference between their philosophical paradigms, and the supposed ones belonging to 'the character.' Again, an awareness of one's own culture or cultural paradigms provides the key to finding truth within the fictional situation.

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Historical similarities can provide important in-roads here; eg. Similarities between farming in South Canterbury and hiring itinerant labour in NZ, and the Scottish situation, or being a young woman making tough choices for the survival of the self.

E hara taku toa / te toa taki tahi, engari takimano noo aku tuupuna. - My strength comes not from one source, but from thousands - from my ancestors.

Actor training is an exercise that requires connection to the self and others. Process of emotion and thought, connection, ability to listen, be spontaneous, be specific, follow impulses, and trust are fundamental aspects of a performer's craft. But, most often, the key area that acts as a lynchpin for all these skills is empathy. Without it, the actor is incapable of translating the given circumstances of a story or environment with simple, direct, uncluttered truth. But how do you develop empathy? Or measure it? Perhaps it comes back to a clear understanding or definition of the self in relation to others...

He aha te mea nui o te ao? Maaku e kii atu te tangata, he tangata. - What is the greatest reality in the world? / say it is people, it is people, it is people.

In the School's Taha Maori program, all students are expected develop their skills of speaking, performing, behaving and understanding more about Maori culture. This requires a lot of consultation with the advising 'Tangata Whenua', and often means encountering resistance from both Maori and non-Maori students. This can challenge quite traditional notions of cultural expression, such as the right that women have to speak formally on a marae. But it does have several direct spin-offs.

Firstly, if they understand some of, or can converse in another culture, a graduating actor is likely to be employed in works that consider the culture, or incorporate it directly into the work such as The Sojourns of Boy. Recently we had a Te Reo Maori week, where students and staff were encouraged to converse in the language - to take risks with speaking it, and expressing themselves in it.

Secondly, it provides a universal, and unifying, behavourial language within the School. When visitors arrive to our fantastic new premises, we 'powhiri' or welcome them in the traditional Maori ceremonial way. After in-house or visiting performances, a contingent from the audience will reciprocate by singing a waiata or song for the actors. It is a moving and very selfless form of thanks.

Thirdly, and most significantly, we have found that learning about another culture forces students to look at their own heritage and rituals. There is nothing like learning about others to understand the value of learning about the self, and appreciate it as unique or something to behold. We are committed to the identification and exploration of the New Zealand voice in performance, in its key cultural and experiential forms.

The second and third year components of the course require students to devise work either individually or collectively, and more often than not, issues of self- identity are paramount. I'm not talking drama as therapy here, but storytelling that depicts the celebrates the individual experience, and in doing so, discovers both its rich uniqueness, and its universality. As Augusto Boal has frequently recognised, the quality of selfawareness in the actor is a necessary part of the 'unmasking of character'.

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To paraphrase, when the human being observes itself, the it perceives what it is, realises what it is not, and imagines what it could become. This could also be articulated as daring to use our own stories; to express one's own 'obviousness', as theatre practitioner Keith Johnstone has reiterated at this present Conference over the past few days.

Training to be an actor is hard work; it's a discipline that is becoming increasingly expensive and pressured in the current New Zealand Educational and Arts funding environment. But, alongside this perennial catchcry, I am excited about the potential that exists in applying the fundamentals of dialogue - bi-cultural relations - to this live, creative, and dream-constructing art.

Thank you for your time here today. Tena koutou katoa

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BRINK VISUAL THEATRE: A CASE STUDY OF THEATRE FORM AND DRAMA EDUCATION By Christine Comans and Rod Wissler

The Company description Brink is a visual theatre company founded in 1994 by Jessica Wilson and Ainsley Burdell. For most of the past five years the other two key artists have been film-maker Randall Wood and Composer Rodolphe Blois. Brink's work has been described in the press as surreal, comic and full of memorable images...(OHT of press selections). Their work is amongst the most inventive, complex and compelling theatre seen in Brisbane in the past four years; and while at the surface Brink's work seems rather like a pop-up picture book of amusing suburban stories and types, there is as well a disturbing undertow. Their sub-texts grapple with larger concepts of landscape, exploration, settlement and ownership. In this realm, they generate impressions of the troubled psyche of contemporary Australia, as it listens to that whispering in the heart Henry Reynolds has written about. Trying to come to grips with Australian geography and history is of primary significance to Brink, as they explore "the ritualised habits of contemporary Australian life".

Some examples of Brink's work: HENRY's SHADOW was the first major Brink show, produced for the Brisbane Fringe Festival - a whimsical journey into the nostalgia bred of isolation in contemporary Australian life staged outdoors at the abandoned Teneriffe Dock in early 1995. It established the basic components of their style in puppetry and projected image.

PAPER CROWN took collective festivity in a domestic setting as its theme. It was a satiric look at contemporary Australian celebration in the form of a Friday night party, and was presented in 1996 in the crumbling hundred year old Princess Theatre in Woolloongabba.

BRITTLE #1 was a short pilot work presented at the open air LIVID Festival in the contested terrain of Musgrave Park, South Brisbane

A woman dressed in a nineteenth century dress crosses what might be her backyard, battered by wind to get to her Hills Hoist. Is this a Woman of the West, a nineteenth century settler or a suburban mum? What is her relation to the landscape? In seeking an answer, the spectator journeys into the ambiguous space of the visual image.

UNDER THE BIG SKY was co-produced with Queensland Performing Arts Trust for the inaugural Stage X Festival for young people in the Spring of 1997. It was performed on the vertical plane of a thirty metre cliff face at the Howard Smith Wharf under Brisbane's iconic Story Bridge and on the bank of the Brisbane River. It was a pioneer parable of exploration and settlement which, within the world of the performance, metaphorically posited this jagged, sheer cliff face as the Australian continent, stark and forbidding but not without grandeur. The danger of the performance site and its moonlit beauty provided a subliminal but key thematic tension. Watching the performers actually performing up, down and across the cliff face while harnessed to cables rigged from above provided a theatrical excitement that combined the best of the roman colosseum, the high trapeze and added a dose of extreme sports. The audience was never quite sure how dangerous it is - is it merely an illusion?

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And even this kind of question is thematically pertinent as the journey depicted is a dangerous one into the unknown land - but that notion of the unknown land might be an illusion too, born of the legal fiction of terra nullius and the colonial mythology of heroism. BRITTLE was staged in the recently opened studio space of another recycled heritage landmark the Old Museum at Bowen Hills late in 1998. It revisited the saga of settlement in a contemporary context of urban sprawl, as the "outback" is subjected to "development" which transforms it into the secure suburb. The trauma at the heart of this lifestyle and its selfdestructive fragility are captured in a narrative of turf wars, and the oozing wounds of an earlier civilisation are now present as avenging spirits posing as garden ornaments.

THE END OF TIME, Brink's latest work which has just concluded its creative development phase, was inspired by the Millennium myth and the frenzy of apocalyptic rumours which accompany the year 2000, including the infamous computer bug. Popular fears and celebration once again figure in a social critique- aimed at the abuses of technology such as genetic manipulation, time management mantras and the subordination of the natural world.

The striking feature of all these works is the complex visual texts which are the building blocks for narrative and meaning. There are many dimensions of Brink's productions worthy of analysis, not least of which are the aesthetic features and implications of their work as theatrical product. For example, the hybridity of their presentational style stands in interesting contrast to that of other theatre makers operating with multiple media such as Lepage , particularly through their reliance on puppetry. Their emphasis on metaphor, fantasy and the bold juxtaposition of the sublime and the banal evokes a sometimes cryptic poetry which is a hallmark of postmodern theatre practice.

However, the focus of this paper is not directly in that area. Rather our focus relates to the framework of this conference's attention to industrial relations; and within that, we want to look at Brink's working process, their way of making work over the past two years, largely in partnership with a University - QUT. And although Brink is a small professional company, and hence very different in its intentions, market and operation from a State Theatre Company or, say, a Commercial Theatre enterprise such as the Cameron Mackintosh organisation, we view this as an industry collaboration, and one which is both a striking example of one form of creative industries R&D and also a model for curriculum change in drama and theatre studies at secondary and tertiary level. The potential for the outcomes from such a partnership to resonate broadly within the Theatre Industry in this country is significant.

The Visual Theatre Context Having classified Brink as a small professional company, it's important to further locate it as operating in a particular genre - that of Visual Theatre. This nomenclature is consciously adopted by the company, partly in acknowledgment of influences such as Philippe Genty, whose black theatre magic and gallic wit are clear inspirational sources for Brink. The lineage of Visual Theatre can be traced in performance and video art since the sixties as well as in the older fields of puppetry, and the incursions of film and projection technologies into mainstream theatre of the twentieth century since Piscator and more latterly Svoboda.

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This style of theatre currently claims as its major practitioner Robert Wilson, and to place these works in a general field in Australia would be to mention pre-eminently Nigel Triffitt, whose production of "Momma's Little Horror Show" for the Tasmanian Puppet Theatre in 1976 started the ball rolling on Australian puppet theatre for adults, and designer Kim Carpenter, who, following a year working with Robert Wilson in New York in 1982, has operated within the cognate terminology of theatre of image. In most instances, this kind of work emanates from the personage of a dominant designer/director. Against this kind of background, I would cite three aspects of Brink's work which set it apart. Firstly, it is the radically collaborative multi-artist construction method. Secondly, it is the combination of puppetry and other object manipulation with the designer driven visuals (alongside the other media of performance which all figure to a greater or lesser extent in the work of visual or image theatre proponents); and thirdly, it is the reliance on digital technology in image and sound manipulation which characterises a new wave of visual theatre activity of which Brink is a part. The very importance of video and sound as aesthetic forces in Brink's work has only been possible because of advances in digital technology over the past five years.

The Partnership It is in this area of digital technology that the creative partnership between Brink and the QUT Academy took root. Through projects over the past four years, the University has provided resources to the company and also has become a physical base where Brink artists focus the development of their work. The Academy provides a network of academic and technical support staff to maximise access to specialised video and computing equipment and performance studios; and accommodates Brink's space needs for an administrative base, including the hiring of additional work space when necessary.

QUT has also become a location for continual and varied interaction between Brink and academics, postgraduate and undergraduate students. Brink artists have been able to participate in an exchange of ideas about their work which is often difficult to achieve in the forward rush of professional arts work. As well as the informal corridor chats, there have been specifically arranged colloquia, forums, and lectures addressing matters central to the artistic work of Brink and many other contemporary artists working in multi artform and new media formats. This has been of benefit to Brink in consolidating their sense of their own work, to the conceptual development of productions like "Brittle" and "The End of Time" and also to the dynamics of their process and presentational style. Equally it is clear that the physical presence of the Brink artists has strengthened the impact of their explorations of new theatre form on many of the Academy's students, as is evidenced in their assignment and practical work and the directions they have begun to pursue after graduation.

The Policy Context The residencies have enabled Brink to establish a new network of artists, academics, supporters and new audiences. This leads to further exposure at professional and academic conferences for the work of Brink, and indeed for the Australia Council partnership scheme itself, which is one of the more forward looking arts funding policy initiatives of recent times, unfortunately not replicated at the State level, where there is a continuing counterproductive attitude to University-based creative artists and University supported partnerships. This scheme has become even more important in terms of developing new work in light of the Funding Agencies' reticence to fund infrastructure in small companies. How can they survive let alone develop on project grants?

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The difficulty of these kinds of policy questions is of course compounded for a company like Brink operating across the boundaries of performing arts disciplines, the visual arts, and film. This multi-disciplinarity is in fact a rather longstanding problem for the Australia Council and highlights the rigidities in the structure of many Arts funding agencies. It's interesting to note that it's now fifteen years ago that the Australia Council first tried to grapple with such emerging forms, about the same time as it commissioned its first report on the impact of new technologies on arts practice in 1983. In the intervening years of Australia Council operation, in the absence of any real policy accommodation of what has become an increasingly common form of working, cross artform peer assessment panels would convene to consider grant applications that didn't slot easily into the available pigeon holes. Some money would be set aside from the budget of the artform boards , but often this kind of work was subject to a kind of buck passing as funding bodies were and still are more on the lookout for reasons to justify not funding rather than funding.

It wasn't until the re-engineered performing arts board subsumed smaller discipline groupings and then launched its hybrid arts initiative in 1994 that companies such as Brink could come into being with some hope for support. Of course it didn't take long for that initiative to narrow towards the flavour of the month digital, screen-based arts; before re-emerging last year as new media arts with the specific warning that, "The focus of the New Media Arts Fund is on work which is highly collaborative in nature and which crosses artistic and cultural boundaries. Such work may or may not involve the use of new technologies and it is important for applicants to be aware that the focus of the New Media Arts Fund is much wider than digital or screen-based arts."1 Despite these protestations, the membership of the Fund now seems to indicate that the digital, screen based arts are indeed the focus of New Media Arts, leaving such radically multi-artform work as Brink's once again in funding limbo in spite of its reliance on digital technology.

We're going to shift focus now into the other stream of the paper in connection with Arts Education, and to begin with Christine will provide some policy context in that area.

Collaborative creative process There are six key features of the collaborative process which should be highlighted:

 Role Definition  Paradigmatic Clashes  Work functions  Key Stages  Process Dynamics  Advances through the partnership

Role definition This is a safety net in traditional theatre. In Brink the key collaborators started by doing everything then gradually refined roles to maximise the value of their specific creative skills. Jessica Wilson took responsibility for the visuals; Ainsley Burdell for the content and the dramaturgical throughline. As they have continued to work with their earliest collaborators and new artists they have all committed a large amount of time to describing the roles for each other. Sometimes these roles are hard to capture: for instance should Randall Wood be thought of as a film maker or as an Image composer? What might be the correct title?

1 Australia Council Grants Handbook 1998, p24

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But even though the roles in Brink's work might not easily fit into traditional definitions, it has been accepted that there is an absolute priority on early agreement about job descriptions - naming the functions becomes a way of organising the artistry and the workload.

A new function which has assumed significance is that of Design Consultant- but what is the nature of consultancy in this context? It seems to imply an acceptance of outsider status : it's not the same as a "collaborator", and implies a different level of involvement in the creative development. In this way a hierarchy is established in the collaborating team, just as a hierarchy is implied by their titles as Artistic Directors. All the Brink collaborators seem to accept that theirs is a directed collaboration- it's not collective creation, even though a great deal of attention is paid to managing and facilitating the input of all contributors.

In a process which will involve up to 26 other artists the logistics and financing of the work are time-consuming. Wilson in particular assumes a great deal of the administrative and production management burden of the company. The length of time for which each person will be employed is also a crucial foundation of the creative process. For instance, the Electroacoustic sound collaborator is employed for 6 weeks of an eight-week creative development phase. Very often, a composer's work is solitary, and when working by himself, Brink's composer Rodolphe Blois describes himself as being involved in an alchemical process. He cites as an example the transformation of the sampled sound of a fly into a birdlike motif used in Under the Big Sky which can take hours of solitary manipulation in the computerised sound studio. In the Brink collaborative process, Blois and the others face constant decisions about either letting their material go its own direction or bending the material to one of the other texts (eg. film).

Paradigmatic clashes spark the creative process but maintaining the role definition is a way of giving shape to those differences.. Making multi art form theatre can be an untidy process, and as such it can be threatening, or even unacceptable to for example a particular kind of lighting designer who may be much more comfortable with entering the process late and working to a specific brief. In fact in the Brittle development process prior to 1999, the Lighting Design and Physical performance aspects did come in much later. The disadvantage of this is that they then often proved difficult to incorporate. So what is needed is an array of specialists prepared to commit to generate ideas and then work through the often uncomfortable process of artistic compromise as a workable performance text is created.

The collaborators need the freedom to own the whole process not just their bit of it. They must commit to learning the processes of other artists working in different ways at a different pace from artform specific premises. There is often a real difficulty of conveying ideas in verbal language during the creative workshops and the journey is a different one for different collaborating artists - cultural differences also play a significant part and sometimes there are communication difficulties .

There is also an awareness that the role titles can sometimes limit the reception of the individual's work, and to militate against this, and the other potential difficulties, a number of work protocols are needed , and this has led Brink to refine an approach to the different aspects of and the timing of their creative process.

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Work Functions In the 1998 residency Brink crystallised their understanding of their creative development process as consisting of the following functions: Brainstorming, physical work, research, structuring, shooting and editing, composition and debrief and planning. This has now become a consciously applied model giving form to their collaboration.

Brainstorming sessions: Brink's four key artists were engaged in conceptual discussion for the development of the scenario; Ainsley Burdell as dramatist, Jessica Wilson as multiartform. director and designer, Randall Wood as director of projected image and Rodolphe Blois as composer. Physical workshops: Three Brink performers experienced in circus and puppetry skills, contributed to the project two days per week in sessions of puppetry manipulation, physical devising with objects and experimentation in the interaction of physical performance with projected image and sound. Research sessions: Brink dramatist, Ainsley Burdell collated visual and verbal materials related to the thematic concerns of the production. This research information was then fed into the brainstorming sessions and formed the thematic premise of the scenario. Structuring sessions: The Brink artistic directors met to structure concepts arising from the week's activities into scenario form. Shooting and editing sessions: Randall Wood went on various location shoots to collect visual material which was digitally manipulated and edited for the experimentation sessions, for general research and for the exhibition. Composition: Rodolphe Blois worked independently to produce sound pieces for the experimentation sessions and for the conceptual development process. Debrief and planning sessions: the four key artists discussed the direction of the project and the scenario.

As well, Brink have consolidated a model to shape the timing of their collaboration after the initial creative development phase - they refer to this as the construction process, which precedes the actual rehearsals.

The key stages in the Brink construction process are as follows:

1. A verbal document describing the work that all art forms can understand emerges at the end of the creative development. Wilson and Burdell take responsibility for generating this.

2. Scenario and design drawings. This phase reveals a conscious adopting/appropriation of storyboarding in film.

3. Construction of physical, sonic and visual elements follows over a period of weeks

4. A tech skeleton phase in which constructed elements are trialled together. This occurs without performers because there is a sense that too much waiting around would be involved. The technology is time consuming, and many breakdownsare fairly common. This is a variation on the Tech runs familiar in theatre parlance; but in the Brink process it is more integral to the creative process and has to happen well in advance of rehearsals.

The overall period for creation of a new work is lengthy but as Wilson and Burdell point out it is much less than that of many European Counterparts governed by the search for originality, the valuing of multiple creative inputs, and the need to mesh artforms.

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Process Dynamics The process starts from a thematic premise advanced by the initiators who have usually written an initial treatment for the purpose of securing funding. Once the other collaborators are involved in the creative trajectory towards public presentation, the initiators try to offer no givens, all the collaborators are swimming around for some time (ideally about nine weeks) Thematic research is undertaken by Ainsley Burdell and all 4 key collaborators are responsible for thematic growth, but then Wilson & Burdell will take the best and do some early exploratory work with performers. They give feedback to the key artists. The material is then formed into a scenario and design drawings - this becomes the blueprint for future development This Original scenario serves as a tool to contain the input of subsequent consultants and performers. However this scenario retains some freedom into the beginning of a rehearsal period. There is in Brink's philosophy an acceptance that a certain level of chaos can produce the best work. They cite John Cage's philosophy that you shouldn't try to create your idea, just live to it, it's your friend.

However, the reliance on high tech sampling and digital manipulation of sound and image means that once key elements have been constructed, it becomes difficult to remake them, and working to minimize the rigidities that this can produce is a major focus in the creative process. During the partnership with QUT certain advances in the Brink process have taken place.

Advances in the Creative Process For instance in previous works, the electro -acoustic sound collaborator had worked to a thematic/stylistic brief (the thematic premise) but in the "End of Time" project the music formation was allowed a primary role by which the other artforms were inspired and from which they built.

In earlier work the scenario had not been strongly enough informed by technical limitations. Increasingly the company has come to accept the need for a balance between going with ideas and accepting the deadline impact on collaborative creative process. These constraints are made severe by the extent to which Brink's work relies on film video and computer technology. In other words, a great deal of time is needed to construct the images (rendering of digital work, editing etc) and sampling and remixing of sounds. They now try to ensure that if in the final rehearsal phase it seems that an image/sound sequence isn't working, that they do have other possibilities to fall back on.

In the 1999 residency they identify a general shift in process from a lot of talking around tables to generate and agree on ideas; to now relying more on the physical workshops with performers for content development.

Brink have been able to provide new challenges to, and strengthen relationships with, performers and consolidate vital skills through training workshops in areas such as puppetry. These workshops have been crucial to the development of a physical performance style for Brink performers.

The contribution of students in ideas generation, in information gathering and also in skill inputs in particular areas has allowed the scenario to be informed by a wider range of creative approaches. In both residencies, students have participated in some of the workshops in an equally important commitment to the development of their own skills, and this process has very usefully extended into the exhibition presentations, which require the students to

57 Industrial Relations demonstrate some of their inputs. This is both a valuable challenge and a pay-off for the key student participants; and it is this territory which Christine is now going to explore in more depth.

Through constant exposure to students Brink has strengthened its company base, by tapping into a potential new audience and advocates for the company and for the experimental visual theatre form in general. This audience development, which is building ticket sales and aesthetic development, has already paid off in connection with the "Brittle" production, for which school group bookings were received for the first time, largely on the basis of extensive teachers notes prepared by a QUT Academy student. As well, relationships were formed with a number of seconded students with the potential for future professional collaborations.

The partnership has allowed Brink to engage in an extended non-product focused exploration of ideas and techniques, in other words to pay detailed attention to the process of making the work - a difficult process because of the different artform languages spoken by the artists and the complex technical requirements of each contributing artform. It has granted the company the time crucial to the development of a visual theatre scenario informed by all artforms. Randall Wood has been able to explore an animation style and interaction methods with performers. The residencies have given Rodolphe Blois the opportunity to develop new composition techniques that are less time consuming.

The partnership has facilitated the production of scenarios for two major new works, and developed new support networks for the company, stimulated academic discussion of the new form, influenced students in their present and future practice, and begun to model the role of the teacher artist within the company's process.

Finally, in listening to this account of the residency projects, it will have been apparent to you that the presenters have different points of focus in the nature and significance of Brink's work. This has been intentional on our part, as an indication of our conviction that this kind of industry collaborative work can serve multiple purposes, each reinforcing and illuminating the others. In particular, the Brink partnership should serve to remind us of the mutual benefits of the arts industry and the education industry working symbiotically, and of the positive influence of policy which encourages this. The stand-off between the arts and education in this country since these policy portfolios were split in Federal and State jurisdictions in the mid sixties, largely in the belief that the professionalisation of the arts in Australia required such a rupture, has been a most unfortunate and largely counterproductive power play. A range of half-hearted attempts have been made at Government level to correct this mistake - I refer, for instance, to the failure of the Queensland State Government to take up the inquiry proposed in "Queensland -a State for the Arts" in 1991, and to the lack of Federal action after the Senate Inquiry into Education and the Arts in 1994.Let us hope that there is a more effective uptake of the most recent suggestions pointing in this direction, in the Major Organisations Fund report of June 1998, where one of the significant options for the future of the performing arts industry in this country is to:

Encourage the development of audiences for the future.

Possible initiatives include support for the development of education and youth initiatives and advocacy for a greater focus on the arts within the education system. Perhaps here we are on the brink of a breakthrough for both theatre and for education.

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Part Two

Brink Visual Theatre - A Case Study of Innovation in Theatre Form and Drama Education

Christine Comans is a lecturer in Theatre and Teaching Studies at QUT Academy of the Arts.

She is immediate past President of Drama Australia (formerly NADIE) and is currently its Director of Publications. Recent performance projects through QUT's Centre for Innovation in the Arts were Rivers of China directed by Judith Pippen and After China directed by Rod Wissler. This joint presentation will report on two Australia Council-funded residencies by Brink Visual Theatre at QUT Academy of the Arts. The collaborative creative process of this multiart form company will be showcased against a background of recent policy frameworks. Spinoffs in the domain of arts education and secondary curriculum development will be discussed. This arts education partnership is posited as an important model for industry rejuvenation in terms of both form and outreach.

The Context of Drama in the Academy of the Arts To understand how this project fits into Drama within the Academy of the Arts at QUT let me first describe the structure of our department. We are called Theatre and Teaching Studies and are administratively separate from the other strand of Drama which is called Acting and Technical and Production Management. Theatre Studies offers a Bachelor of Arts in Drama with the option of an Honours year, and attracts very bright, creative students who are interested in a broad based education in drama. This course has a good balance between practice and theory and gives scope for autonomous and guided explorations of drama with vocational outcomes in such areas as performance, directing, playwriting, dramaturgy, arts research and arts administration. Historically students from this course have been amongst the most interesting graduates from any of our Drama courses in terms of their impact on innovation and experimentation in Australian theatre. Indeed both Ainslie Burdell and Jessica Wilson are graduates from this very course!

Teaching Studies offers students a four-year double degree - the Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Education (Secondary Drama) course. These students (we take in about sixty every year) come to us for the first two years to complete the BA component and then are owned by the Education Faculty for the final two years. However, we are in the unusual position in the Academy of teaching the Drama curriculum subjects to the third and fourth year students -usually such lecturers are contained within the Education faculty. Lecturers such as myself, Judith McLean, Brad Haseman and Lowanna Dunn comfortably straddle both theatre studies and teaching studies.

A strength I think of our BA/BEd is not only the students complete immersion in Drama for the first two years of their course, but the dynamic relationship that exists in those two years between the double degree students and the BA students. It is most significant that the education students have the opportunity to develop a sense of themselves as young artists and, for the mutual benefit of both groups, to blend and interact fairly effortlessly in areas of drama theory and practice for those two years.

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The Context for Theatre Studies students The Brink Visual Theatre project was a marvellous opportunity for third year Theatre Studies students to connect with a company that was working across forms in an innovative way. Brink's presence in a residency at QUT gave our Theatre Studies students the chance to be apprentice artists with a professional company - to experience the interaction between artists and between directors and artists in a concentrated creative development process. And it wasn't always a comfortable experience for them! But more of that later.

Three third year Theatre Studies students participated (for credit in a subject called Hybrid Arts) in the seven week creative development process on the theme of the new millennium - later crystallised into a working title After the World had Not Come To An End The students participated in physical workshops which introduced them to Brink's style of working - exploring and interacting with materials, objects, elements, as well as new puppetry, image projection and sound. They participated in scenario development, working on characters that had evolved out of the physical workshops. Finally one student's creative contribution had been impressive enough for her to perform her character, alongside three professional artists, in the final scenario presentation at the end of the creative development stage.

The Context for Teaching Students The approach we take to our teaching students is deeply influenced by the notion of aesthetic learning. Such an approach involves our students embracing the concept of themselves as teacher artists. It is based on experiential learning in the classroom with teacher and students working as co-artists. It is marked by teacher and students working within the three aesthetic fields of forming, presenting and responding in an experiential way that involves direct engagement with the materials and forms.

Aesthetic learning demands human presence and participation and the dialogic nature of working within the medium of drama is acknowledged. Central too is reflection that ranges from spontaneous response to critical, analytical reflection - and this reflection respects and validates the students' voices.

In order to privilege this aspect of their education, our teaching students are encouraged in their fourth year to undertake not only the compulsory in-school practicum experience, but to choose a field-based practicum that allows them the opportunity of working as teacher artists or as artists. The brief they are given is to fully involve themselves as artists or teacher artists in their chosen project and to transform their experiences of artmaking into a curriculum document - a four to six week unit of work for any level of secondary school drama.

The Partnership with Theatre Studies Students I'd say this immersion into a company's creative processes was a 'real world' experience for the students and whilst much was very positive about the experience some of it was problematic. Let's look at positive outcomes first. The students were required to journal their experiences of the creative work and to critically reflect on the entire experience. Their reflections showed how much they gained from working inside a professional company in a kind of modest apprenticeship. Experiencing a whole range of innovative workshop exercises, techniques and approaches related to a kind of contemporary arts practice they had never experienced before - that was exciting and they believe the processes they learnt will influence and shape their own emerging arts practice.

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In fact, one of the spinoffs I would be realistically expecting if Brink continues its partnership with Theatre Studies at QUT, is that one or two of our students could find their way into the company having developed initial skills and passion for the work through this relationship and through the mentoring of young artists that can informally happen.

Such a model already exists in TATS with Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre Company. The artistic directors Lynne Bradley and Simon Woods teach the Physical Theatre unit and through this work with our students have generated considerable interest in their work. As a result, QUT final year students and graduates are significantly present as artists in their Company.

And now, those aspects of the collaboration with our Theatre Studies students that were problematic. Most difficult for them was accepting the discipline and rigour involved in working as 'co-artists' with a professional company which has a defined agenda - to work through a creative development process with a professional, marketable product always in mind. I know for Ainslie and Jessica, there was a certain amount of frustration because the students could not give the kind of commitment they expected from artists (albeit student artists). And that was a commitment to be on time, to attend every session, and to commit physically and intellectually to each session. Difficult, given the fragmented nature of students' lives these days.

Hardest of all for the students was the frustration they felt at being 'left out' of the brainstorming sessions and only ever superficially understanding the conceptual material - the key ideas - that were driving the creative development. They were not comfortable with the implied status that emerged for them between directors and artists. They felt as artists they were being 'worked on' to service the visual imagery that the directors were trying to establish -rather than working collaboratively with a shared intellectual understanding at least. Interestingly, this did not seem to be a problem for the professional artists, who had worked with Brink before (who were dancers and were perhaps more used to being worked on!) and enjoyed a more symbiotic, instinctive, freer relationship with the work and the directors.

It was tough for these young artists not to be central to the work. This is both an interesting reflection on the nature of visual theatre - where the body of the actor is only one of many elements at play - and something interesting for the directors to consider in relation to their working methodology. A creative development residency in a university setting gives the opportunity for an interplay that involves more than artists working with artists - the interplay of students and academics creates another dynamic that can in its own way nurture the work by giving the company the space and time to reflect and grow because they are out of their usual environment.

The Partnership with Teaching Studies Students and Secondary Drama Teachers I think the experience for out teaching students was a very different one. The Brink project was ideal for the six students who chose this project. Or rather - for the five students who were asked to participate in it. The model we tried to set up was one of matching Drama teachers who had shown an interest in Brink's work in 1998 with the student teachers who were to be placed with them in their schools for their teaching practicum some weeks after the Brink project had finished. This is in keeping with the close ties the Teaching Studies lecturers have with the Drama teaching community and the strong partnership that has developed between both communities.

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However, this model only worked really well with one pairing of student with teacher. Teachers' lives are so complex that only one could in the end make the commitment to attend the weekly classes. The thinking behind that particular partnership was of supervisory teacher sharing the same experience with pre-service teacher, then planning a unit together on Visual Theatre and co-teaching it during the student's teaching practicum. For the teachers and teaching Studies students, Brink ran a series of six Masterclasses - a very different model from the one set up for Theatre Studies students - which were participatory workshops exploring Brink's multi-form artform processes. Each workshop had a different focus:

 Working with objects  Physical interaction with raw materials  Responding to the theme of the millennium with objects and materials Experimentation with projected image, sound and design  Introduction to puppetry manipulation and the animation of objects  Extending exploration of movement, mannerisms and material performance.

This was an exceptionally successful experience for these pre-service teachers. The structured, developmental nature of the workshops mimicked in many ways the approach a Drama teacher might take in introducing a new form or style to a class (eg. the epic form). What was most exciting however for these students was the innovative nature of the work they had experienced with Brink. This was not an exciting rehasing of a familiar form of theatre but an entirely new form of theatre practice that could nevertheless find a legitimate place in the S eD ior Drama syllabus or the Years I - 10 Drama syllabus.

Whilst student artists might find problematic the notion that the body of the artist is only one of many elements in visual theatre, many secondary school Drama students who are not so keen on performing as actors, will find a safely net in this type of drama work where the focus of the images being created can be well away from the body of the student.

Brink extended their partnership with Drama teachers by running a workshop for the Queensland Association for Drama in Education (as part of QADIE's State Conference). Based on the success of their collaboration with teachers and teaching Studies students, Ainsley and Jessica are now embarking on discussions with the Queensland Arts Council about the feasibility of offering Visual Theatre workshops in schools.

This creative collaboration with Brink has been mutually beneficial to all partners - and one of the most interesting outcomes of this project might well be the influence of Brink's creative processes on secondary classroom Drama practice by providing a model of practice that allows teachers and students into ways of exploring new forms in contemporary theatre practice through the curriculum.

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TOWARDS AN INDUSTRIALLY RESPONSIVE, ACADEMICALLY RIGOROUS PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH PARADIGM - THE CENTRE FOR INNOVATION IN THE AFTER - CHINA PROJECT By Peter Copeman and Rod Wissler

This paper is about industry, new work, and universities.

Fairly recently the concept of industry has been taken up by the proponents of the kind of theatre that departs from the amusement intentions of the commercial sectorin simple terms this can be called the realm of state subsidised professional theatre, and it's the visibility and importance of its activities that makes so much more complex the idea of the industry in this country.

But this kind of debate isn't new. In 1909, J. C. Williamson's opposed the registration of the Australian Theatrical Choristers Association in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court on the grounds that choristers were not legally an industry. JCWs argued that bad it been suggested that these provisions were likely to be applied to the ladies of the ballet, the framers of the Constitution would have been very much surprised. These young ladies might be unusually industrious with their feet but that does not convert them into an industry within the Act.' The judge rejected that argument To my mind it is obviously an industry ... catering to the public for reward by theatrical entertainments..."1

Katharine Brisbane in her article on "Industrial relations" in the Currency Companion goes on to tell us that in 1912, actors sought to unionise in order to deal with the problem of imported companies. And in this case too, opposition was mounted on technical grounds, this time from an actors' faction, the so called Actors Association which rejected the nomenclature of unionisation. They argued that there shouldn't be a union because the theatre was not an industry, it was a profession with contracts for service.

This complexity remains, but what complicates our current understanding of industry in the context of Australian theatre is the way that that the nineteenth century strand of commercial theatrical endeavour has over the past forty years merged and hybrised with the other great strand of theatrical tradition in this country - the amateur theatre. This strand has, in its earlier guises, been known variously as the little theatre, or the repertory movement, and over several decades it grew, out of a variety of social, educational, political and high artistic motivations, to reach its apotheosis in the National Theatre movement of the postwar period, and then to receive succour not from the marketplace but rather from ideologically driven governments through the fifties and sixties. What the amateur theatre became by the mid sixties in Australia was the subsidised professional theatre, premised on artistic policy ideals and protected from the need for box office profit by government grants. The pursuit of Artistic Policy was this sector's answer to the commercialism of the other industry sector. But this industry focus and the confusing interface between commercial and not for profit theatre has backfired more than once.

1 Brisbane, Katherine (1995) “Industrial relations’ in Companion to Theatre in Australia, Philip Parsons (General Ed) with Victoria Chance, Sydney.

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An example... As Justin MacDonnell tells us in his book "Arts, Minister?", in 1974, the commercial managements and the large venue managements and subsidised companies approached first the federal and state governments and then the Australia Council seeking various forms of tax relief (payroll tax and sales tax on sets) and amongst other things assistance, via a ticket subsidy, to fulfil the aspiration of some of them to provide more risky product to the theatre going public.

Amongst those commercial managers was Harry M. Miller who had been by that time responsible for some innovative imports such as "The Boys in the Band" and "Hair"

Macdonnell reports that "The Australian Council for the Arts, believing that assistance might be warranted in some instances to commercial management, advised a reference to the Industries Assistance Commission."2 Unfortunately, through what appears to have been a Council oversight (on the part of its then Chief Executive Dr Jean Battersby), the brief to the Commission in conducting the subsequent investigation read much more broadly than commercial management. The key question was framed as "Whether assistance should be accorded the performing arts in Australia and if so, what should be the nature and extent of such a system?"3 The ensuing investigation over about two years turned out to provide a platform for the commercial sector, the free market apologists and Commissioner Boyer to attack the philosophical basis of subsidising the not for profit sector. It was a serious fiasco for the Australian Council for the Arts in trying to accommodate the commercial theatre.

However once it was all over the subsidised professional sector survived, the commercial sector didn't receive its ticket subsidy; and responsibility for innovation was left with the subsidised companies; and I now want to speak a little about that responsibility and how its being dealt with.

Initially the focus on new work in the Australia Council policy was a nationalistic carry-over from the anti establishment politics of the sixties student movement - an isolationist, - protectionist, largely male chauvinist push for status. A second stage was to do with the cultural ambassadorship role of the Australian arts, since being able to identify a body of uniquely Australian art works if not forms is the foundation for self-esteem on the international political stage. A new phase in this thinking is to do with globalisation and our capacity to put product into a worldwide market with consequent spinoffs in terms of political kudos and prestige, trade and the idea of Australia as a desirable tourist destination. Art helps us to sell all our other products in the global marketplace.

The policy focus on new work was perhaps most clearly articulated in Creative Nation in 1994 -the last gasp cultural policy of the Keating Government - which five years on still looks like an impressive framework for Australia's cultural development. The Preamble read:

"...traditional values are in flux and the speed of global economic and technological change has created doubt and cynicism about the ability of governments to confront the future. What is distinctively Australian about our culture is under assault from homogenised international mass culture".4

2 Macdonnell, Justin 1992, Arts, Minister? Government Policy and the Arts, Currency Press, Sydney p143. 3 Ibid 4 Creative nation – Commonwealth Cultural Policy, October 1994, Sydney p1

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Creative Nation went on to chart a way out of this problem by attending to Australian content, and in spite of the occasional lapse such as, "The ultimate aim of this cultural policy is to increase the comfort and enjoyment of Australian life." (p.7) which sounds very "relaxed and comfortable", this first Australian cultural policy set the creation of Australian content at the heart of our artistic life.

The quantity of new Australian work in subsidised theatre companies varies from those few which produce only new Australian work such as Aubrey Mellor's Playbox down to around thirty percent at some of the state companies. What are the different existing models for the generation of new works in Australian theatre. Of course new plays still happen by dint of the sole playwright's inspiration and effort, and sometimes, such unsolicited plays get into production; but increasingly over the past twenty years we have seen a higher level of management of the invention process in an attempt to reduce risk for the company producing the premiere production.

Such management practices include commissioning, playwright residencies, play competitions, and a network of play development agencies, pre-eminent amongst them the ANPC, Playlab and Playworks. Other managed features of the R&D cycle for new plays are the markets such as the Long Paddock venue managers market and the biennial Australia Coucil- sponsored Performing Arts Market where venue and festival managements make programming decisions crucial to the shelf-life of new work. It would also be reasonable to include in this concept of an R&D field the activities of publishers (who disseminate the playtexts for further productions) and perhaps less obviously the media, all of which affect the longevity of even the best and most fully formed new work.

A number of these mechanisms, while having delivered new works over the past twenty years, seem to be suffering wear and tear. For instance: a) what has become of the Literary Manager/Dramaturg role at State Companies? In many cases these positions, filled by champions of new work, seem to have shrunk or disappeared, according to the vagaries of management and the particular interests of this or that Artistic Director. Commissions are often unsuccessful in all artforms and the benchmark success stories such as "Cloudstreet" involved extended periods of collaboration between two major companies and a flagship festival. Similarly, we can identify b) a lack of follow through on competition winners. To some this would appear to be a case of inconsistency or our collective unwillingness to back winners; to others, it is simply a matter of the winnowing process whereby the play most likely to succeed eventually achieves prominence. There are positive examples of uptake of winning plays of course from "The Doll" right down to the local example of the George Landen Dann shortlisted piece "Vertigo and the Virginia" currently in performance with the QTC following a four year development cycle managed within the QTC. In the case of the play development agencies we see a number of instances of, c) an increasing alienation of such agencies from producing organisations. Some artistic directors are of course deeply sceptical about the dramaturgical practices, which underpin play development outside a company setting.

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This isn't intended to be an exhaustive account of the avenues for new product development in Australian theatre but simply an indication that there may be openings for other ways of addressing the issue and heightening the role of Universities in the process. Perhaps there is a role for the kind of incubator approach, which is employed in science and technology areas to stimulate the uptake and commercialisation of research by industry entrepreneurs.

One of the earlier examples of this kind of idea might be identified in the Jane Street seasons which generated some 28 new plays between 1966 and 1981. Ron Blair records that:

The Jane Street Theatre was intended as a place where the Old Tote Theatre Company could bave another theatre, no matter how modest, in which new Australian plays can be produced, simply but professionally', according to one of its program notes in 1966. An initiative of Robert Quentin with funding from the University of NSW Drama Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, it was a joint enterprise of the Old Tote company, the National Institute of Dramatic Art and the University's School of Drama... 5

The “Legend of King O’Malley” is but one example of the new work produced under this scheme which has subsequently had many productions and become part of the canon (if such an accolade is not to betray its iconoclastic intentions). This kind of new work development has continued to have a place at NIDA in various guises over the past years, as director John Clark noted at the 1997 National Symposium on Research in the Performing Arts.6

Earlier attempts at QUT include the commissioning and presentation of Sue Rider's "Bumpy Angels" in 1992, and Janis Balodis "Double Take" in 1996. "Bumpy Angels" has had subsequent productions and the Balodis piece was picked up by the QTC for further development during 1998. There are many variants on this theme with striking examples of professional company collaborative activities at Universities, many of which involve the generation of new works including residencies (Uni of Sydney's 1998 residency for Musik Kabau), collaborations (eg between Riverina Theatre Company and Charles Sturt University), spin-offs (think of the community companies that the VCA spawned under Peter Oyston).

I want to provide one further element of context for this discussion by referring to one of the most telling recent pictures of Australia's theatre industry, the report "Australia's Major Performing Arts Companies - Managing for the Future”7 released in June of last year by the Australia Council. This report deals with the seven theatre and thirteen other large music, dance, circus and opera companies which are handled by the Federal department or the Major Organisations Fund of the Australia Council and which have the relative financial stability that goes with forward commitment receiving triennial funding. It signals probably the most significant re-think about the subsidised sector since the IAC inquiry twenty-five years ago. This report and the subsequent inquiry which is still in train are an attempt to find ways out of the cycle of deficit in which many of Australia's largest theatre, music and dance companies find themselves, largely through improving their financial and marketing skills and savvy. The main problems for these companies are identified as: 1. the underlying cost structures of the industry (for which read high labour costs and the resultant high cost of product reproduction); 2. Static base funding and customer resistance to price increases;

5 Blair, Ron 1995, “Jane Street Theatre”, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, op cit, p305 6 Proceedings of the National Symposium on Research in the Performing Arts, VCA, Melbourne 1998 pp107-8 7 Australia Council, Sydney 1998

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3. Increased competition not only from mechanical entertainment sources but also from state subsidised flagship festivals (for which read imported companies), venues (for which read a new breed of commercial managers), and touring schemes (Playing Australia).

I want to cite a couple of the specific aspects of the report which link to the general thrust of the research we are discussing in this paper. The report notes that for these companies "The primary driver in the cycle of success [is] the capacity to select an artistic program with a viable cost structure" (p5); and when it comes to the nature of that artistic program (beyond its cost implications), and ways of improving its appeal and outreach the Report points to four factors which I believe link with the model of research under discussion in this paper:

1. Infrastructure sharing 2. Extended development time to create work with a global market 3. Collaboration to encourage joint commissions by festivals, companies and venues 4. Greater focus on the arts within the education system

The final and most far-reaching "option for the future" is "changes to the product delivery structures for the industry".

All of these suggestions could, if they are taken up vigorously, open the way for more intensive relations between the major performing arts companies and Australia's universities in a progressive and mutually enriching industry R&D collaboration.

One model for this might be the way we tried to work in developing "After China". The industrial responsiveness of this model in connection with making new work inside universities has centrally to do with operating according to a different set of constraints from the ones that usually apply to theatre making in universities. It means acknowledging:

1. The Financial Realities of play production especially in connection with labour costs; and what follows from that in one sense is a product focus rather than a process or learning focus

2. 1ndeed, Working processes would have to comply with awards and regulatory frameworks such as those dealing with rehearsal hours, travel, living allowances)

3. Accepting the usual high risk of innovation, it would mean seeking Product Viability both in terms of audience appeal and the cost of subsequent remounting of the play.

4. In Personnel, it would also of course mean working with experienced artistic, technical and marketing staff in as many areas as possible rather than with students - with the different demands, difficulties and delights that that brings.

Progressive and strategic imperatives must also be included in Industrial responsiveness rather than simply replicating current industry practice and norms - this might be something to do with the social purpose of the play and/or with industry change. If the industry segment in question is the subsidised professional area then such aspects of artistic policy are still a consideration. So the process and product should aim to be policy responsive for example, engaging critical contemporary issues and attempt to provide valuable models for future practice.

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Some major features of the model developing from the "After China" project. I would call key success factors, the funding dance and shelf-life. Firstly

1. Key Success Factors I would list these under the headings of the development cycle, continuity of personnel, the producer role, financial management, administration and marketing, educational imperatives, and intellectual property.

The Development Cycle: (It must be long and involve fallow periods). The total development period for the play was just under two years. Through this cycle the play was reshaped, shortened, and the cast size was reduced from eight to six. Continuity of personnel is crucial to maximising the financial benefit of the long development cycle, and this is true in all areas including production staff and admin support. We were very fortunate to keep a significant majority of the people involved from the beginning of 1997 connected with the project right through to late 1998, albeit in different functions in some cases. The most significant changes came about through the unavailability of key members of the original student physical theatre troupe Box of Birds. What ensued from this was the recasting of the play to include the original director Simon Chan as an actor and codirector, and the original movement director Anna Yen also joined the performing troupe. Another vital personnel issue is having a punctual playwright The producer role - the key tasks . involve meshing the educational and the theatrical imperatives, and securing resources Financial Management and Administration, Marketing The finance and admin proved to be a stretch for Uni processes especially in connection with actor contracting and the administration of Living and Travel Allowances through the university finance system which has little tolerance of these variations from the normal pattern of university employment.

Technical Inftastructure - the availability of university infrastructure including rehearsal space, lighting, sound and digital video equipment at no cost to the production was essential Educational Imperatives - These operated at both the Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels. Students involved throughout were enrolled in credit bearing courses and their work on the production had to be contracted according to subject outlines and assessed accordingly. What is implied by this is the need to accommodate varying levels of skill and experience in all sectors of the production at different times, so that there is a training aspect to the work of the professional artists engaged on the project at certain points.

'Timetabling issues were a particular concern in the early part of the project Intellectual property, An initial agreement with the playwright alongside his appointment as Postdoctoral Fellow, provided an important framework, contribution of students and other artists.

2. The Funding Dance - Funding Availability in the various funding schemes which had to be accessed relied on the "street cred" of key personnel and on there being a pre-existing research program plus wider Academy links. It's worth noting that at least eight separate funding sources had to be accessed in order to gather the finance required.

3. Shelf-life – (i) What is a programmable product?

Though it may seem somewhat crass to do so, I would list a number of factors that point towards the play's box office viability. It is potentially a Star Vehicle for the likes of , say, .

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It also has the cachet of Brian Castro's reputation as a major novelist. It is quite spectacular, featuring both physical theatre, perhaps with the collaboration of a company like Rock & Roll Circus or Legs on the Wall and opportunities for striking visuals, as well as an original and effective score that can be played live to great effect or recorded relatively inexpensively. It has the right size cast and about the right running time to avoid overtime problems. The scale of the work is elastic, bumping in and performing easily on a postage stamp stage or because of its potential for spectacle expanding to fill those eight hundred seat theatres that are the staple of commercial touring circuits here and in south east Asia.

Beyond all that and perhaps even more fundamentally it is topical, and in spite of One Nation's having dropped out of the headlines, the theme of intercultural relations remains powerful and in some locations controversial.

Another aspect of the play's interest to future producers I would see in this very issue of multiethnic casting and rehearsal process. For the subsidised theatre companies in particular the explorations inherent in mounting such a work relate to some big issues around casting policy in multicultural Australia - issues which by and large the state companies skirt around.

(ii) Commercialisation

The next step will be to secure a major funding partner to undertake commercial production. We have launched a "Spin-off company" with the name "Another Country" to pursue other intercultural projects. We could also approach a commercial sponsor with a connection to Singapore, with a view to taking up the interest shown in the play by Singapore Repertory Theatre.

CONCLUSION

What we are searching for in future application of this idea is a model for the involvement of a university-based theatre research unit in the making of new product in collaboration with industry partners in the expectation that this activity can be valuable to both partners, that is that there is a cost and quality benefit to the industry and there is an advancement of knowledge from the point of view of the scholarly community. This is not research at arm's length from the subject of the research, but it is anything other than critically passive, in that it seeks to apply analytical rigour within an industry setting which is conceived of as dynamic and hence changeable. While mainstream in intent, the work is not merely entertainment. It is issue-based and provocative.

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“AN EXAMINATION OF A JOURNEY FROM ETHNO-DRAMA TO PROFESSIONAL STANDARD GROUP DEVISED THEATRE” By Sharon Cottrell

This paper is an example of reflective/reflexive practice. It is an examination of my journey of research-based discovery from the Ethno-Drama process through to a final product, a professional standard theatre production based on a Group Devised theatre process.

The final product was the staging of the play Lost and Found: The Adoption Triangle, which had its season in the Drama Theatre of Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus from 14 to 17 and 21 to 24 October 1998, during which over 400 people attended. The production, was supported by previews and reviews in the Gold Coast Bulletin, and other local newspapers during October.

The production was developed as part of a subject called Stagecraft within the Bachelor of Arts at Griffith University – Gold Coast.

The focus of the play was experiences of people involved in the adoption triangle – the adoptees, relinquishing parent/s and adoptive parents.

A Chronicle of Process Firstly, we brainstormed the ideas, concepts, issues and performance experience the group wished to incorporate and then established a goal or aim for what the group wished to achieve. Ky (July 1998), stated that she wanted to gain the experience and emotion involved in a large-scale performance that previous groups had experienced. This really emphasised what one of my main goals was for the production. I believed that this cohesiveness could be successful through the group devising process, which meant that a strong group and personal commitment was achieved, as the production was rehearsed as it was created.

There was an initial hesitancy in the group, which I think was due to the fact that they expected to do a large scale production of a scripted piece; they did not realise that the equivalent, if not better, could be achieved through a group devised production. One of the performers, Tanya (July 1998) stated in her process journal, which was a component of assessment,

“I felt I was missing out on something. A devised piece I had already been a part of… and I was ready for something different, the challenge of a script, the ‘team’ work of a whole cast, working with a director.”

Then Tanya also stated in October 1998, after four months into the process,

“I had reservations at the beginning of the devising process when I was thinking – What can this production do for me? What can it give me? It wasn’t until I started thinking – What can I do for the production, that I began to learn and progress into making my character.”

This demonstrates the understanding that the process was affecting the individual and development of performance.

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The main limitations involved within the development of the production, especially within a tertiary institution were:-

Firstly the student group were not homogenous re: their background knowledge or experience regarding adoption and the group devising process.

Also student theatre entails a variety of ages, experiences and status within year groups, also my own control difficulties, as my position entering the subject was a an unknown, therefore I had no real status, only that conferred by the subject convenor regarding my previous experience.

The team I worked with were very supportive and together we achieved our aim and gained a tremendous amount of knowledge in the process. I believe this was achieved by initially outlining our own expectations of the project and providing choices for the group as to their involvement. Also any queries and problems were discussed up front so as to establish a group cohesiveness, responsibility and ownership of what was about to take place. Also, I believe that I was very organised and had researched thoroughly what I expected and required, thus providing people with the initial security that they needed entering the production. This was reinforced and supported by the people involved within the process through such comments from their process journals as:-

“I’m happy about working with Sharon – she seems really nice and funny, and very willing to listen to our ideas and opinions – which is important. It seems as though she is happy for us to have a lot of input in how the production is shaped – so we have that element of control, which is good. We definitely won’t be passive actors being told what to do and where to stand with Sharon. Her directorial style seems to be one which incorporates a great deal of the actors interpretations.” Danielle (July 1998)

“I like the idea of Sharon being director, her thorough knowledge and research is obvious and I feel confident she will bring out truth and dramatic appeal through her experience.” Sally (July 1998)

“I immediately drew to Sharon’s particular project which she had researched. She seemed clear in her topic of adoption and was a very organised and focused individual who would get things done, something I like.” Tanya (July 1998)

The research together with ideas formulated from the group contributed to establishing a basic attitude towards the most useful material and how the decision-making would occur. This included workshopping and improvising particular ideas to observe how they linked with the theme and storyline or with final decisions being made by myself about what linked to the theme.

I needed to take a non-judgmental and objective view of these ideas, as everybody’s contribution in the group devising process is valid. Eventually the decision-making process became clear with discussion and reasonable agreement towards a particular idea.

“Take steps to protect the group from yourself; your ego can destroy a project if it becomes rampant,” Bray stated (1991, p.1). I continually reminded myself of this statement, allowing the group the freedom to experiment with many creative ideas and concepts which I believe, allowed the group to find the most interesting ideas to contribute.

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The group then devised a series of scenes that represented all of the issues that we wished to confront and present. Each scene was video recorded, scripted and rehearsed again until we had a collection of scenes that we felt were close to performance level. The group collated some of those scenes and spent time on rehearsing them to take to the Newcastle Festival of Australasian Student Theatre (FAST). Using video documentation of scenes and rehearsals was an innovative new technique, thanks to available resources and personnel that allowed us to watch and script later, instead of trying to document while rehearsing.

The use of video documentation was suggested as a form to use so as not to lose any workshopped ideas that we wished to revisit. This was a great advantage for when we could not remember what performance techniques we had incorporated into the improvised scenes. We later then used the video within performance, initially so as all audience members could see some of the scenes, but also to provide the audience with options for conclusions to scenes - to encourage an awareness in the audience that there could be a variety of situations/conclusions within the adoption reunion process.

These scenes partially related to each other, but initially presented a variety of issues involved within adoption, including perspectives of the adoptee, relinquishing mothers, adoptive parents, and others affected by the issue of adoption. The styles of these initial scenes included: mime; song; monologue and duologue; comedy; poetry; film; documentary and verbatim styles. The festival performance received a great response for a first time showing – we had people crying and laughing and one audience member/performer from Newcastle (Angela) wanted to contribute her story to the show. Greta, a performer in Lost and Found stated also as part of her journal, “ ‘Thought-provoking’, ‘full-on’, ‘sad’, ‘impressive’, and ‘true’ were some of the responses to Lost and Found. Several audience members approached us and discussed their interpretations of the play, and their own experiences with adoption. I was pleased with the interaction our play provoked – audience members wanted to comment and wanted to share questions and stories. I felt relieved that Lost and Found was succeeding in its aims to provoke thought and challenge peoples’ knowledge and beliefs.” (September 1998)

This spurred us on to return home and complete what we wanted to achieve. It was on the bus home that I discovered a narrative for the performance – as this had been everyone’s concern from the start – how would it all relate and how would it finish? The main issue was that we might only develop a series of scenes that had no relevance to each other; and to encourage audience thought and reflection we would need some characters to relate to each other or to have a linking narrative to establish some storyline patterns. This was observed by the performers at the festival and later during a production team meeting.

The narrative created Sharon’s (myself) and Sonia’s (my sister) stories, the adoptees, Felicity, Mick and Irene, their relinquishing parents, and Wayne and Sue, their adoptive parents – creating the three groups involved within the adoption triad/triangle. Each of the other scenes established other people’s perspectives and how everybody in one way or another is affected by issues surrounding adoption. I believe this assisted the performers in further establishing and maintaining their characters, and provided the audience with ideas that provoked further thought about the production and its issues.

I was continuing to ask myself throughout the process - how would the process affect everyone involved. I believe the group devising process had a profound effect on the group, the people they were portraying and the audience, and therefore, all of the people involved

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gained knowledge of the issue of adoption and the group devising process. This is supported through comments such as those by Greta (September 1998):-

“I was discussing adoption with Meghann and we found that our opinions on adoption and reunions conflicted, she did not want to meet her father and I did want to meet my sister. Writing my monologue, I began questioning myself. Is this what I really think, do I really feel this way? It was difficult to define particular emotions, as there were so many of them. I realised that much of what I was saying was selfish. I tried to be objective, but it was difficult. I couldn’t stop thinking about it! I felt curious, annoyed, sympathetic…I wondered if I was intruding too much.”

And in October 1998, at the end of the process, Greta stated:-

“I’m glad I was part of this play. I never expected it to be so mentally exhausting. I’ve confronted an issue that I knew little about and look forward to addressing in the future. I really enjoyed working with my friends and the opportunity to find new friends. I felt comfortable working with these people. I’m happy that Sharon chose to share her life story with us, as it opened up a whole world of possibilities and opportunities. I hope, performance wise, that I have benefited from this play. I’m eager to meet my sister now, so hopefully I will. This is one of the only plays I’ve done that I honestly won’t forget. I still think about it now and wonder how people’s searches turn out. It was a worthwhile, productive, challenging, exciting experience which I am honestly happy to have had!”

Also Tanya (October 1998) stated:-

“For me the learning process will never end. The production of Lost and Found may have finished in itself, but the experiences to draw on will be unlimited. The maturity and growing I have done will not turn back – only continue, with Stagecraft as a reference point. The friendships will always be and the character of Carol will be one to which I will draw on in many cases in the future I am sure. In myself I feel I have grown as a person and as an actor. From this point on I will do what I can to fulfill this title, and will endeavor in the future to share my experiences and teach what I have learnt.”

These quotes affirm that it was appropriate to be concerned about the process and how it would effect the people involved, so as to be reminded that it was important to make sure that the team was achieving what we wanted and that nobody was going to be harmed. I also knew from the beginning that I would have to complete the process from research through to production to discover if, indeed, the process would be effective. This coincided with my belief in the notion of performance as research, where group devising theatre and “researching” are seen as connected elements of a related process.

Further to the previously mentioned performer responses, audience reaction was very supportive and people’s reactions were documented in the comments book with such remarks as (October 1998):-

“So many aspects of adoption I have not thought about before. Really good production.” Shirley Faulkner

“Congratulations to everyone for such stunning and moving theatre.” Cheryl Barnhart

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“Well done all of you. You’ve voiced thoughts one doesn’t dare entertain for too long. Very confronting. Very heartfelt.” Karen Turner (adoptee)

“Excellent. A good account of what can happen.” Catherine McCosker (adoptee)

“Thanks for challenging me about a topic I knew nothing about.” Adam Drake

Within the group devising process and generally in community theatre, audience reaction is of vital importance. With Verbatim Theatre performances Rony Robinson (Paget, 1987, p.333) states: “for some audiences, the nostalgia is all they relish, and why not?” and also Gary Yershon (Paget, 1987, p.334) feel’s “there was a tremendous warmth that you get back from an audience.”

Tom Burvill (1995, p.155) in his review of Aftershocks for Australasian Drama Studies made reference to the audience “hearing their own words (and also for those hearing the words of their friends), the repetition, the re-inscription of those feelings, reactions and reflection must have been an eerie experience.”

Audience reaction is where the most interesting performances occur. Within the ethno-drama Syncing Out Loud (1992) production, where the belief that the audience relationship was optional, audience members, who included people with schizophrenia, entered the performance space and even confronted the performers, by walking on stage and speaking to the performers – as they could not differentiate between actor and character.

Each of the previous examples mentions the interaction that the audience could have with the performance. I believe this is extremely important with these styles of theatre, for without audience reaction the effectiveness of the performance may not be evaluated and re- structured. Thus, the production may change with each performance, due to relevance to/for the audience.

This is further defined by John McGrath (1989, p.116)

The theatre, particularly if it is as close to its audience as I think it should be, will feed you back more than it takes. An ongoing, trusting relationship with an audience, any live audience I suppose, but particularly a popular audience, will give strength and courage, and new ways of seeing things, and a fresh imagination, and endless facts and information, and a constantly developing, tested-out theoretical level, and a whole lot of human kindness, generosity and solidarity, to writer and theatre company alike.

This was further demonstrated from the reaction to the production of Lost and Found, by audience members wishing to discuss their own reactions and experiences with us. This demonstrated to everyone involved with the production that many people are affected by adoption and that there are many different emotions and stories to tell, which I believe was the initial concept of the whole production.

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I also met Linda Gorman, who is a relinquishing mother and shared her story with me, and she has an organisation called Missing Link on the Gold Coast that helps people with their adoption search, and she will be assisting me with mine – all good things come to those who wait! Therefore, I know this process has been very cathartic for myself in allowing people to see my story and other people’s reactions to the issue of adoption.

Another area of observation commented on by many audience members (due to the fact that it is not necessary in actor centred theatre) was the minimalist set. They said that when they first walked in to the theatre the performance space looked really boring – all black with no set, except for rostra and that they didn’t think the show was going to be very interesting. After the performance they noted that they now knew the reason for the minimal set – because the performances were so strong the audience didn’t need any set that would distract them from the performers.

Conclusion Lost and Found challenged many people’s ideas and values surrounding family, relationships, personal choices, abortion, adoption, rape, religion, the medical profession, the justice system and politics. The show supported the struggle for people involved with the issue of adoption to control their own destiny, and provided the community with questions about how and why a group of people had been dominated previously by society and the outcomes of that domination. One audience member, who had given up a child for adoption at the age of fourteen, was encouraged after seeing the performance to initiate the search for her child, and by the end of the play’s season had already obtained non-identifying information

Many people write positively about the adoptees’ search as a means of finding self autonomy, but these people also have an obligation to give warning of the dangers, inherent in the process of self-discovery - for example, the emotional rollercoaster one may travel - whether it be as part of an adoptees’ search or the learning process involved within the development of a production through group devising. In finding out more, one is always challenged. Hopefully always, the challenge leads to greater self-identity and self-knowledge.

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MAKING THEATRE/ CREATING POSSIBILITIES: A COMPARISON OF PRACTICES UTILISED IN A REGIONAL THEATRE COMPANY WITH THOSE IN A UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENT By Michael Coe

I preface this paper with a brief resume to indicate to the conference the footing I have in both camps, professional theatre and the academy.

My professional career commenced in 1978 as an actor with ‘Bread and Circus’, a community theatre company based in Wollongong, NSW. Following this brief foray into the world of the paid actor, I undertook training in design and acting at the then School and since Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. I became a member of Actors Equity in 1981 as a Variety Artist, which seems a tautology, and was seconded to work with Theatre South Company, a Regional Theatre company based in Wollongong in the Illawarra in 1982. From 1982 I continued in the capacities of director, designer, actor, stage manager, production manager, sometimes lighting and sound designer, scenic artist and general theatre technician in regional theatre, until 1997, when I commenced a lectureship in theatre craft at The Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash University in Melbourne.

This paper only ‘compares practices’ in that it outlines two different methodologies of creating a piece of theatre, one, in a regional company prior to 1996, and two, in a university in 1998. The practices of regional companies are based on my own work, primarily with Theatre South Company and the productions undertaken there and in the university, the work I devised and directed with third year students, The Decameron Project. The two methodologies I found so different as to suggest that they were mutually exclusive, that they could not transfer environments. It was this thinking that shaped the generation of the project, that professional methodologies would not work in the university environment. The search for alternative process’ led to the creation of, for me at least, a new perspective on theatre; its possibilities as a device of communication; and the deliberate manipulation of the aesthetic. Finally, by circuitous routes, I conclude as many have, that it all is merely a matter of degree. No pun intended. The realm of the profession and academia have much to offer each other and now is the time to act.

In 1998 it became my lot to teach into a course labelled DTS 3800 (Drama and Theatre Studies 3rd year subject). The subject was to realise a performance, “in most cases utilising a dramatic text”, with a process involving “the conceptualising, rehearsing and performing the theatre work”, a seemingly straight-forward task. Well, if your creative thinking as a practitioner had not yet tuned in to academia it may seem a straightforward task of text based rehearsal. One simply had to find the right text. My thinking was entrenched by my theatre life up to that point that had only embraced a particular vocational methodology, that would seem to have been standard fare for all regional companies in NSW, at least those with which I had worked.1 The process is to take a director, a text and a dramaturge add a design team and enter into a rehearsal room with actors, stir from two to four weeks dependent upon the length of

1 From 1982 until 1996, I worked for or in conjunction with through joint productions; Theatre South (Wollongong); Riverina Theatre Company (Wagga Wagga); Hunter Valley Theatre Company (NewCastle); New England Theatre Company (Armidale); Q Theatre (Penrith); and one regional company in South Australia, Harvest Theatre Company.

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performance desired and open your season - then repeat up to twelve times a year. Of course twelve productions in a year was the absolute zenith of our production output, and I may add that our funding from various sources did not cover all of those ventures, however I digress.

The sheer volume of work of course demands that each practitioner be thoroughly conversant with his or her field, there is simply no time for protracted debate particularly on points of style. Regarding DTS 3800, this was my first departure from, for me, normal practice; my students were more conversant with ideas of theatre than practice and exhibited them with varying degrees of performance prowess. To add to this uneven playing field, none had the remotest notion of technical theatre at all. Safe to say, this was not going to be the simple case of “let’s put on a show!”, particularly if the process was to have any pedagogic value at all. Perhaps the greatest pragmatic constraint was, however, the number of students involved and the gender balance, of the twenty-three enrolled, four were male. Not a disposition that enables you to pick a great number of scripts with which to work. I also had to be cautious of awarding roles, which may seem to favour particular individuals, which meant trying to find a text with balanced performance possibilities. To those of you who teach into similar courses, this must seem rather basic, but it was certainly very new ground for me.

To sound a more positive note, what did these challenges prescribe? The students while not in receipt of vocational style actor training, did have the distinct advantage that they all had some knowledge of performance making. By their third year, they had, if they were Bachelors of Arts or Performing Arts, come to terms theoretically with the elements that comprise a performance. They knew where the blocks should fit, it was simply, that they were not that polished at the actual doing. While they could discuss how an actor may prepare a role, or should I say the construction of a character from a text, they did not have the skills to establish or maintain a character from a given text. What a great number of them could do however, was to create ‘persona’s’; by this I mean entities other than themselves which they could use to perform. To clarify, I mean that in all likelihood, when asked to present a character from an extant text, they would actually force a set range of characteristics upon the character rather than realising them from the text. This was and is simply a lack of those skills and techniques of the actor. The security the students felt in the performance of ‘characters’ of their own devising in combination with the other challenges mentioned, led me to the distinct conclusion, that making a performance piece would be better than attempting to find one. In summation though, the positive attributes were the students understanding of genre and style; and their energy in performance.

I had for a number of months been discussing Giovanni Boccaccio’s, The Decameron with colleagues, this fourteenth century novella, contains one hundred tales rich in performance possibilities; so as the dramatic text for a point of departure, it seemed ideal.

I presented to the students various tales and asked them to create performance pieces based upon them by incorporating a number of genres of presentation. For example, we may see a tale told in the genre of a ‘soap opera’, a cartoon, a ‘Shakespearian’ mode, or a lecture. The performance texts would only be based on the tales, and would in some way concern morality or civic duty, but it was imperative that they be entertaining.

And so with a sudden rush of blood to the head from my blundering through the library, research had never been so much fun, I came up with the notion that I may attempt to

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replicate the form of the novella2 in a theatrical presentation. I hear you gasp in awe, what daring. Really, what it was, was a reaction against the text of a performance of The Decameron, I had unearthed from the State Theatre Company of South Australia, via the NIDA library. It didn’t do anything, I mean it was fairly standard middle class narrative theatre, no offence, but not, you know, earthmoving, well not for me. In my new guise as an academic, I thought there just had to be more?

Yes, I would include in my performance some of the characteristics not only of novella form but Performance Art, thankyou Marvin Carlson.3 I would juxtapose the performed tales of the students, with real time comments by members of the community, along with singing, dancing, live to air and pre-recorded film, eating and drinking. In this way I would not only entertain, I hoped, but make a point; and all for just $12, or $8 concession! With the book just a further $15, but again I digress! Proceeds to The Smith Family….Sorry. This is where it gets interesting and I would like to make a point that the second paragraph alluded to. All this would not have been possible in the world of regional theatre that I momentarily left behind in 1997.

In the years until 1997, Theatre South produced a great number of new works, which were all of an exceedingly high standard, and I do not say that simply because of my own involvement and I dare say that Australian theatre owes Des Davis and Faye Montogomery and the other members of Theatre South a great debt for the fostering of new Australian writing, acting and directing talent. The work was though, with minor exceptions such as Kath Thomson’s “And Tonight we anchor in Twofold Bay”, safe, appealing to the middle class and text based narrative, which was determined primarily by the audience base of the company and the collusion of the funding bodies.

In the university environment, I really don’t have to worry about alienating either funding bodies or my audience base, in fact it is a probable expectation. I can experiment with subject and style and not be crushed if a project falls over, though of course it concerns me. Regional theatre companies do not have that security, the margins for economic success are so small, that the manoeuvring room of content and style is reduced to a minimum. To me this signals a stagnation in the enterprise possibilities of regional theatre in Australia, not simply for possibilities of economic, but more importantly artistic, success. Now of course regional theatre has had its share of success in both of these measures, but there would seem to me to be no evolution.

The Decameron Project finally had the commitment of over thirty participants, economically not feasible for a regional company where the wages bill without infrastructure costs would be in excess of twelve thousand dollars per week. Thirteen weeks of workshop/rehearsal, again untenable at one hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars for the performer wages. Most regional companies have an absolute cast size of eight, they simply cannot afford more.

They are prepared for a rehearsal time of from two to six weeks, as an incredible luxury, in which to generate not only pieces of museum theatre, but new works that are exhausting in their demands; all the while maintaining good box office receipts for their continued existence.

2 Clements, Robert J and Gibaldi, Joseph (1977) Anatomy of the Novella, New York University Press. 3 Carlson Marvin, (1996) Performance, A Critical Introduction, Routledge.

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Pre-production time is cut to the bone, and creative development is a sometime thing, largely unpaid and indeed largely at cost to the theatre company or to the individual in time and effort. New style is not introduced because the learning of it is prohibited by the brevity of the rehearsal period. Professional actors working with regional companies are the graduates of institutions that comprehensively address performance skills, but do not prepare the actor for input into the shaping of performance other than from a character driven base.

This accords with the notion that re-training of the actor would have to occur in the rehearsal room for input into work encompassing new performance aesthetics; this re-training can not happen, again due to constraints of time. It follows then, that if new work is restricted to this kind of economic rationalisation, that our theatrical output is going to be somewhat impoverished in its scope. Our style will tend to the safe self-replication, and our subject matter be not too confronting.

There are a number of points to consider at this juncture. We could perhaps look at actor training in vocational institutions to include a broader spectrum of subjects in an effort to utilise their talents more comprehensively in the rehearsal room. Two things mitigate against this; one is the time spent in education would be incredible; and two, in the end perhaps the work the actor does best is act. The theorising about the aesthetic and content is nominally reserved to the director and design team, but in a professional world where the time possible for this is unpaid or reduced to a ridiculously short period, it is unlikely that there would be any continuous investigation toward new style particularly. The idea that funding bodies should fund artists in conjunction with, or regional companies themselves, for more development work would be nice but may not ultimately be possible in our brave new economic environment.

How to move forward? The obvious answer I think is for universities, particularly those centres involved in the study of theatre, to ally themselves comprehensively with professional companies. The investigations of style, content and purpose, and the creation of performance text are the meat of the academy. The academy has the time and the desire to pursue these, and other subjects, to performative outcomes; the professional theatre industry has the resources for production. Should there not be a marriage? I began by deeming that to undertake a project such as The Decameron with a regional company would be untenable. There have been changes however both to funding and to the thrust of regional companies' policy, that may now make such partnerships likely. Theatre South now seeks not only to perform pieces about the community in which it is based, but to involve the community more explicitly in the venture of theatre making. While retaining professional practitioners for performance, members of the community may be involved in the research of material, or have some writing or performative input where their skills are highly particular; a case in point is a collaboration with the Italian community in the latter part of 1999, where primary cultural research by community members and performance by a group of Italian musicians will form part of the creation of a theatrical event.

My colleagues at The Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies and my self have proposed two projects for consideration by the directorate of Theatre South for inclusion in the 2000 season and beyond. One is the continuation of The Decameron idea; and the other is the investigation of the cultural history of the Tilba district of New South Wales. In the former case an existing structure already established by research and workshop performances could be developed in the short term by theatre professionals for the performative element; and local guest speakers would be included. This type of theatre presentation is embedded firmly in the

79 Industrial Relations community and returns theatre more explicitly to one of its functions, that of a public forum. In the latter case an ARC Small Grant will hopefully supply research material stemming from interaction with the Tilba Anglo-Celtic and the Yuin indigenous communities.

Both of these projects have performative and written outcomes that subscribe to both performance as practice and the creation of performance as practice, involving the necessity of scholarly investigation. It is anticipated that other grants may then be possible, SPIRT, an Australia Council Development, or a New Work grant for a distinct collaborative performance outcome.

Perhaps it is time to see the two realms of the profession and the academy as departments in the theatre making experience.

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SELLING OURSELVES SHORT?: REFLECTIONS UPON THE AUSTRALIAN COMMODITY MUSICAL By Clay Djubal

Ladies and gentlemen it gives me great pleasure to present to you the world premiere of Clay Djubal’s Australasian Drama Studies Conference Paper: The Musical.

"The Commodity Musical Song" (Words and music: Clay Djubal)

[Sung] As a genre is it not true The musical attracts the widest range Of patrons to the theatre That’s why it’s rarely made too strange Aussie musicals I’ve found Have been attempted, yes it’s true But I would argue here today Very few conform at all to...

Commodity musicals They give the best $$$ return A product for the popular Something we are yet to learn

[Spoken] This paper will propose that there exists a criteria of factors - including traditions, expectations and structural principles, which determines the musical as distinct from other forms of musical theatre. It will be argued, too, that the connotations emanating from these criteria are firmly positioned in the minds of the popular culture. Thus to simply add music to a dramatic narrative or piece of theatre, for example, does not always constitute a musical. One hypothesis will be that in continuing to present works as musicals that fail to significantly satisfy the criteria, the music theatre industry continually reinforces a perception among the popular culture that Australian musicals are inferior.

Commodity musicals A spectacle with dance and song It’s said they’re simple things to write So why have we always gotten them wrong

The commodity musical Not just a play with music The commodity musical More than a play with music... 1

The commodity musical.... more than a play with music as the opening song goes. While some have rudely suggested that musicals are much less than plays with music, it is not my intention to argue here today the relative merits of musical and non-musical forms.

1 C.R Djubal. Have Guitar Will Travel. All Rights Reserved.

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Rather, what I am concerned with is the relationship between the production and the consumption of the commodity musical, and the implications which stem from the production of other forms of music theatre under the label “musical.” The research I have been conducting over the past fourteen months or so as part of my Ph.D dissertation is an attempt to answer, in part, the frequently raised question - “why has this country systematically failed over the past seventy or so years to write and compose the ‘great’ Australian musical.’ My thesis is primarily directed towards an historical and textual analysis of the development of Australian librettos - an area which also incorporates an analysis of the techniques used to allow a transition between dialogue and the musical element - a key component in a musical’s ability to sustain dramatic unity.

The reflections in this paper, although influenced by my academic research, are also to a large extent informed by my many years spent outside the world of theatre and the Academe - a period when in terms of the theatre industry I was very much one of the popular culture. My concern then is directed towards the confusion that seems to exist between what the public (or to be more precise, the popular culture) understands a musical to be, and the huge variety of forms produced under the label - the musical. At the centre of this issue lies the question - to what extent has the misappropriation of the term “musical” helped subvert the public’s perception of Australian commodity musicals. Of equal importance, too, is the issue of the public’s support or lack of support for non-commodity music theatre. Could it be argued, for instance, that the various Australian non-commodity musical forms suffer negatively in comparison to foreign musicals when the expectations the term musical implies are not fulfilled. My questions also invite some contemplation on the role that theatre historians, theatre critics and the Academe have played in this confusion. Has there been any attempt to communicate or reflect upon the issue, or has the confusion been aided and abetted through either dis-information or conversely through a lack of interest.

I should point out that the term "commodity" identifies a specific type of musical, and its use is very much the result of an assimilation of popular culture theory into what was originally intended to be a structural research project. The need to adopt cultural perspectives became increasingly necessary the more I realised that the process of dramatic structure and creativity in a popular theatrical form cannot be fully understood without a simultaneous analysis of the effects and influences of the culture in which it is produced. It also saved me the trouble of arguing over the definition of concepts such as “the popular” and what constitutes “popular theatre.” Instead, my thesis defines its parameters as being the production of commodity musicals rather than popular musicals. Although the term "commercial" could just as easily be applied to musicals that model the Broadway/American genre, its usage invariably implies a social process rather than a physical object. The definition of commodity, on the other hand, indicates a product or an article of trade. The point at which they meet, however, is in the ideology of producing maximum profit potential.

The commodity musical is first and foremost made for profit, and is therefore created with the intention of appealing to the widest market - this being commonly assigned the label of popular culture. It is intended that my thesis will present a criteria of elements which are traditionally associated with the commodity musical, and by this I mean that these elements are in fact the cornerstones of expectations which have been imbued into the popular culture’s collective consciousness over much of the past decade. Although this criteria is being continually defined and reflected upon, there is little reason to suspect that the final composition will not include the following factors relating to production approaches.

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Commodity musicals, I would argue, are:

- star vehicles. - they employ large casts/ensembles. - they operate on significant budgets, including large advertising campaigns. - there is a national tour intent (in the Australian context). - they incorporate extensive production values. - the productions are presented in a large and traditional musical venues. - the music is of a contemporary nature. - the musical accompaniment (supplied through a large orchestra or electric band) can deliver a fully extended musical range of expression and dynamics.

In order to more readily distinguish those works which are identified or promoted as musicals but which are not commodity musicals in the sense I have just outlined, I have coined the term “community musical.” A community musical is invariably one which is one aimed at a target audience - the regular theatre-going community being one particularly dominant group. Other such groups include, too, the gay community, women's groups, demographic communities, youth groups, schools, tertiary students etc. The content of the community musical is often, but not always, more politically and socially orientated, and with less commercial overtones. Where the commodity and community musical most often and obviously differ, however, is not surprisingly in their production approaches and production values. Apart from large-scale festival-style (amateur) community organised productions, non-commodity musicals are seldom able to cast more than perhaps a dozen performers. The musical accompaniment is also likely to be small (incorporating small ensembles), while single stage sets and/or or simple stage designs allow the costs of mounting these shows to be reduced in line with the expected box-office returns. The “musicals” of Dorothy Hewitt (Man From Muckinupin and Pandora’s Cross), Jimmy Chi () Nick Enright and Terrence Clarke (Venetian Twins and Summer Rain) or Peter Pinne and Don Battye (Caroline and It Happened in Tanjablanca) are examples of what could be described as medium-scale community musicals. At the far end of extreme are works to which the term musical has been applied, but which bare little if any resemblance to the expectations associated with the American musical. These typically utilise only a small cast (such Songs my Mother Didn't Teach Me, by Peter Batey and John Mulder), and sometimes even as few as one performer (as in Anthony Crowley's The Journey Girl).

The musical accompaniments are also commonly of a similar size - duos, solo piano or guitar, for example. Occasionally, too, there are “musicals” which contain a small (or very small) proportion of song and dance – such as occurs in Linda Aaronson’s Dinkum Assorted, unconvincingly billed on the front cover of the Currency Press edition as the “all female, all singing and dancing musical.”

1. DEFINING THE MUSICAL

The problematics in actually attempting to define the “musical” genre in terms of structure and principles of form are somewhat overwhelming. As you are no doubt aware, the production of popular culture art and entertainment, can be seen to be continually skirmishing around the generic borders - hybridising, as the music theatre has always done, the eclectic reserve of forms, traditions and structures available from the contemporary and the past.

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In reflecting upon the commodity musical as a product of popular culture production, for example, it is impossible not to view the processes of its production and consumption as being anything other those of contradiction, complexity and fluidity.

The fact of the matter is, if we were able to define the musical - nut out its precise generic qualities, establish its traditional structures and elements, and reduce it to a formula or set of rigid conventions - then it would eventually cease to be desired as a product of popular culture. This is what happened on Broadway during the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s, a period when the form stagnated and brought forth the loud lament - "the musical is dead."

Essentially my early attempts to formulate a “musical” definition continued to be thwarted by the existence of works, which strayed outside the conventions. It was at the point of utter frustration that I happened to re-read Robyn Archer’s 1983 Australasian Drama Studies article. I should make it clear, however, that I strenuously disagree with most of what she argues in the paper. Archer does provide, on the other hand, a thought-provoking concept involving not a musical definition, but rather the connotations, which emerge from the term musical. She writes:

The connotations of the label ‘the musical’ are quite precise. Even though we are all now familiar with recognised or newly-invented hybrid titles and forms such as ‘music theatre,’ ‘musical theatre,’ ‘a play with music,’ or ‘rock musical,’ we have a very distinct reaction to just plain ‘the musical.’ 2

The significance of this definition is that rather than considering the musical in terms of a product - including its formal structure, content and production approaches - it might now be better perceived in terms of its consumption. In this sense, as Archer points out, the term musical stands out as a “beacon of recognition.” 3 Further to this I would argue that musicals are not simply the sum of their parts, but also the connotations which stem from their sum.

Thus, just as all of you I suspect, haven’t been fooled by my attempt to promote this conference presentation as a musical, so within the general public there are very clear expectations and indeed desires concerning a musical. These expectations and desires, however, are not ones formulated after scholarly research or industry debate. Rather they have been formed as a result of tradition, historical precedent, personal experience and cultural exchange that operates at the level of the everyday. So, it might well be argued that a commodity musical is less about pure form and structure than it is about being a product providing relevance, pleasure and meanings. Thus as a commodity product the musical's commercial reality can be said to be intimately connected to the consumer by the very real need to fulfil expectations.

2. INDUSTRY PRODUCTION AND IDEOLOGY VERSUS THE MUSICAL'S CONNOTATIONS

In considering the production of Australian commodity music theatre it is fair to say that local attempts to model works on established foreign music theatre forms have historically attracted a very high proportion of negative criticism. My research into the development of Australian comic opera and early musical comedy libretto’s suggests that the frequency of media criticisms prior to 1930 would have provided,

2 Archer, Robyn. “The Politics of the Musical”. Australasian Drama Studies 1.2 (1983):33 3 Ibid

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for instance, a quite negative public perception of local librettists and their ability to observe established principles of form. Unfortunately it is difficult to establish to what extent these early local librettos were the results of either their author’s ignorance of form, lack of ability, or perhaps attempts to establish new indigenous forms.

What is certain, however, is that the opportunities to develop local librettos on the professional stage, or in rehearsals, were few and far between. Indeed they had very few of the opportunities their foreign counterparts invariably had. It is little wonder that this catch-22 situation led to the assumption by leading producers such as J.C Williamson that local works lacked “painstakingly careful construction.” Williamson himself noted that aspiring Australian dramatists and librettists too frequently overlooked the practical considerations, a situation he described as seeming as “if it wanted two men to write an Australian play, one to create it, and another to put it into shape for the stage.” 4

It can be argued that Williamson’s philosophy - that the function of theatre is to first entertain - is not a highly respected one within the Australian theatre industry, or indeed within the Academe. Rather it is more generally preferred that theatre should expand its social function beyond that of mere entertainment. One of the most vitriolic attacks on the musical as entertainment is the 1983 Robyn Archer paper, in which she insists that the musical is an “absurdity” and “a politically very dangerous genre. “As distraction it is… dangerous,” writes Archer, “Ultimately it can be viewed only as the self-indulgent artistic activity of those whose social conscience is still not guilty enough.” Quoting Brecht, Ms Archer elaborates on the danger of “harmless fun.” The musical's role, she argues, should not be entertainment but a forum for educating those of us who have forgotten how to think clearly about our lives. 5

This rather extreme, though not isolated position, highlights the radical difference in the way the musical is perceived by a portion of the industry whose interests lay outside those of the popular culture. And it is this difference in perception that is perhaps the most significant problem to have influenced the development of Australian commodity musicals. Although they been hindered at almost every step of the way - whether through the approaches of the creative teams or through outside influences, I would argue that it was the denial of commercial theatre and foreign theatrical models during the 1970s theatre movement which unfortunately denied a legacy of theoretical and industrial practice for Australian commodity musicals. Theatre during this period became intent on political activism, social education and nationalism, and despite a yearning to create popular theatre, was in fact frequently inward looking and marginal. The attempt to forge a distinct Australian identity through the theatre was, as John Romeril admitted in an interview late last year, in one sense an attempt to stake a claim over a very Australianised soil, [and to] reclaim a history and a culture that was fast fading away. [It failed] to take on board the actual developments which everywhere were occurring.’6 In hindsight it seems that for many in the new theatre movement there was also a firm desire to pull the popular culture into line with the new consciousness. It is clear from research into the processes of popular culture undertaken during the past decade or so that this is virtually impossible to achieve.

The ideology of the 1970s theatre movement, then, was in a sense quite opposite to the desires, needs and relevance of the popular culture. For popular culture rejects didacticism, discipline, the radical, the revolutionary; refuses attempts at closure and absolutes, and eyes

4 Dicker, Ian JCW: A Short Biography of James Cassius Williamson Sydney: Elizabeth Tudor, 1974 p22 5 Archer, Robyn. Pp33-34 6 Galloway, Paul. “The Human Factor”. Brisbane News 11-17 Nov 1998: 31

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with suspicion any opposition to, or ignoring of, the everyday - and individual relevance. For a commodity to be accepted by the popular culture it must, says John Fiske, “also bear the interests of the people... it can be developed only from within [and] cannot be imposed from without or above.” 7

In terms of establishing a new drama (and a new Australian voice), theatricality, performance experimentation, and the devaluing of formal dramatic organisation became the central motivations. Little of this philosophy is inherent to the practice and production of commodity/popular culture theatre, on the other hand. As Fiske further points out, echoing Pierre Bourdieau’s belief that radical art is bourgeois and therefore lies outside the bounds of popular taste:

Popular Culture is progressive, not revolutionary. Radical art forms that oppose or ignore the structures of domination can never be popular because they cannot offer points of pertinence to the everyday life of the [ordinary] people... [and hence] the political effectivity of radical art is limited by inability to be relevant to the everyday life of the people.8

Thus for a text or a product to be accepted by the popular culture, for it to become a commodity product it must lay at the interface of everyday relevance, and it must function according to social norms of pleasure, morality and ordinariness.

3. THE TERM MUSICAL AS EASY LABELLING OPTION OR MARKETING PLOY

One other aspect that bares mentioning at this point is the response I often get when I reflect upon the perceived failure of Australian musicals to match the standards and forms of foreign musicals. This response invariably argues that most Australian musicals have not been failed attempts at modelling the American genre, but rather that they are the results of a national desire to create localised forms of musical theatre. My response is usually twofold. First I agree that indeed, over the past seventy years or so we have only rarely attempted to create commodity musicals in the American Musical tradition. The second response is to ask - "if we have been creating something else, some other form of music theatre, then why not call it something else!” It is this issue which continues to haunt me. For why would we continue to adopt such a connotative term as a means of marketing theatrical works which are so obviously incomparable with the dominant form, which seldom conform to the musical’s criteria of connotative elements, and which vary so much in comparison to other local works being labelled a musical?

Is it simply the result of laziness on the part of the industry, the critics and the Academe - an easy labelling option - which may or may not be the result of years of journalistic tradition? If we consider the history of drama criticism over the past seventy years there is little doubt that the bulk has come from non-scholarly sources. The answer to this hypothesis, however, can only be one piece of the puzzle, for it is true that there are still many Australian music theatre works have not been marketed, or inferred as musicals. Musical drama, play with music, musical monologue are just some of the terms applied to the many and varied community musicals surveyed. Which still leaves us with the issue of why sub-genre categorisation is so haphazard and unregulated.

7 Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture New York: Routledge 1995: 23. 8 Ibid p161

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Interestingly it is the notion of the imperativeness of the musical to give satisfaction which lights up the suspicious side of my nature. Could it be plausible to suggest that the term “musical” - with its ability to connote pleasure, excitement, expectation fulfilment and value for money, spectacle and theatrical entertainment etc, is an opportunity to get more bums on seats than might otherwise be expected? And hence, can a reference to musical imply something beyond the average theatrical experience - does it suggest a high possibility of guaranteed satisfaction - where other terms like play with music or musical play still leave the consumer unsure of the value he or she may or may not get?

4. IMPLICATIONS

Having managed to raise more questions than answers so far, perhaps we should continue the trend. What might be the implications for the future of Australian musicals or music theatre when, on one hand the industry continues to present works under the label musical, while on the other hand so many of these do not provide the expectations, pleasures, relevance and meanings traditionally understood by the public. Is it reasonable to expect - with so many other entertainment options available, and often at much less expense - that the popular culture will support music theatre productions when they don’t offer the musical’s expectations?

Speaking from past personal experience, I admit that I was for more than three-quarters of my life one of the huge number of people for whom the theatre held almost no relevance. The few times I did attend the theatre between leaving school in 1976 and returning to education some seven years ago, left me feeling that I didn’t get value for money. Those plays I attended failed to make a satisfactory trade. They didn't provide me with any sense of pleasure or any real desire to see more. Perhaps back then I was just unlucky, or even ignorant of the greater opportunities awaiting me in other theatrical endeavours. While my memory and objectivity on this particular matter unfortunately fails me, as is the case with the vast majority of the popular culture, the end result was that in terms of the entertainment marketplace I felt my interests were better served elsewhere. I certainly didn't feel I owed the theatre anything. And in the end I just couldn’t care less. I just stopped going.

Of course I'm here today more confident - not totally - in the possibilities of theatre. But I feel that until the industry - at all levels - is able to address the problem of appealing to a greater portion of the popular culture - and not relying on its regular supporters, then the popular culture will continue to be lost to the theatre's opportunities. Its interesting to note that in less than eighty years this country has seen the theatre fall from its number one position as the popular culture's preferred entertainment option to somewhere way below staying home with the washing up and bad television. To me it seems that music theatre, and particularly the commodity musical, is the most viable option for changing perceptions and actions. The commodity musical, despite its ephemeral and non-intellectual nature is the line that keeps the popular culture people attached to the theatre. What perturbs me, however, is (as you might have guessed) the frequency of the disregard for popular culture logic and discrimination. Today’s consumers are increasingly able to judge the possible worth (satisfaction potential versus financial outlay) of each product and subsequent offerings. They can do this either through independently influenced discrimination (this being reviews, word of mouth, advertising, previous productions if a revival etc), as well as through personal experience (attending a production, which then forms the basis of an assessment for future attendance/non-attendance of productions from the same company or theatre etc). Both

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avenues are essential components in the marketplace exchange, and the responses made by each consumer are largely made up of combinations of economic, relevance, entertainment and aesthetic value-judgements.

As I head towards the conclusion of this paper I ask that for a few moments you put aside your academic hat, or your industry practitioner hat (or both if you’re truly blessed), and think not like the experts we may well be, but like ordinary run-of-the-mill consumers. What do you do when you are faced with product purchasing decisions - and I'm not just referring to theatre ticket purchases - it could be anything from a sandwich, to a CD to a car? Don't we all tend to add up the sum of our knowledge about the product, why it is we may want it, and perhaps why it is we need it (these not necessarily being the same thing)? We may also question whether or not it is affordable. And what if there are other brand names or models out there in the market - how do we go about choosing which brand or model we want? Do we make comparisons, look for alternatives, or impulse buy? Do we always buy Australian, no matter what the quality? How often do we as consumers stick to a recognised brand, or to products we are familiar with?

What do we do when faced with the reality of a product that we are unhappy with, that didn’t match our expectations, that wasn’t as pleasurable as we were led to believe or wanted it to be?

These questions are all ones we face as consumers in our every day world, and although the responses may well be different for each of us - the actual processes of consumption are not so dissimilar. But if we now put back on our respective hats - as theatre academics and industry practitioners our choices and decision making processes in the world of theatre are now very different to those whose knowledge and experience of theatre are limited or even close to non-existent. Indeed we are likely to attend or approach the theatre in much the same way as members of the police force attend or approach crime scenes - with knowledge, actions and abilities borne of experience. How often are we guilty of forgetting the fact that non-theatre people aren't always ready, or for that matter aren't able, to see the things we see in the theatre. That they may not understand concepts of a type we understand, or appreciate the things that we may wish them to appreciate. But what we should never under-estimate or seek to deny, however, is the right of consumers to reject our products if they’re not relevant, if they don’t fulfil promised expectations, or if they’re not up to the standard expected of that product. Neither can we expect the consumer to purchase our theatrical product because they’ll learn something, because its good for them, because it’s locally-produced, or because its for a good cause. How many of us here today can say that we practice such habits with all other products in our everyday life. If we were to - if we were, that is, to make consumption decisions based on other people's desires, pleasures, social relevance and meanings, then wouldn’t we as individual consumers be selling ourselves short?

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PERFORMING FROM THE ACADEMY: THEORY AND REVITALISING CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE THEATRE By Peter Eckersall

This paper will investigate possibilities for connections between academic theory and performance practice. The site of this investigation will be Japanese contemporary theatre (angura), although I am interested in both the specificity of this site of investigation and its possibilities as a model for reflecting on a more general set of problems. Thus, while talking about Japan, I am also interested in a politics of theatre culture in general and some of the problems and challenges that we face in theorising and practising contemporary theatre, especially performances in the avant-garde or experimental mode. Specifically, I want to argue for a project that might offer spaces from which theatre and it’s discourses might reclaim notions of oppositonality and discover new paths of resistance to punitive and neo- conservative ideological forces and corporatist modes of enculturation. In plain terms: can we bring theatre back from its main-stage existence as a kind of yuppie virus; the titillating and fetishistic ‘industry’ of vicarious living for an aging, precious and wealthy audience? Thus, to bring a local or at least bilateral perspective to the paper, although differing in tone, in form and in context, rigid forms of cultural essentialism may well be equally binding modalities operating in and on the present day cultural landscapes of Japan and Australia. The question is how can theatre address this?

Angura has been the dominant mode of new theatrical expression since the 1960s. My paper will review the history of the movement, briefly commenting on angura's problematic relationship with theories of subjectivity and selfhood discourse in its first phase. I shall then point to the probable appropriation and commodification of angura by establishment culture during the 1980s, a trend that undermined the possibilities for angura to continue to work in a radical, oppostional or culturally interrogative mode.

Finally, if an historical method and political analysis of state and society allow scholars to identify such trends in angura performance culture, then the reverse is also evident in 1990s Japan. Recent performances demonstrate a gradual acquaintance with theory and collaborations with theorists that have opened spaces for a new radical theatre project in the 1990s. Analysis of work by Gekidan Kaitaisha, Daisan Erotica and others will demonstrate a shift in cultural politics away from the idea that imagination alone could be the site of cultural liberation and towards an understanding of theories of power. Such theatre can intervene in and subvert dominant constructs of Japanese social reality and unlike the 60s liberation ethos is less able to be appropriated by mainstream cultural institutions.

The paper will therefore conclude that in breaking down theory-practice divides, theatre can find renewal and escape from an apparent elite marginality and political conservatism.

The foundational Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s.

I will begin my main discussion with a brief account of The foundational Japanese avant- garde of the 1960s. The progressive or utopian angura ideal is expressed in writing by the influential theatre critic Senda Akihiko who has described the ‘voyage of contemporary Japanese theatre’ as a “journey” to the “new world”.

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Thus he writes: “despite everything (the angura theatre) manage(d) to cross over to a ‘new world’–through new dramatic structures, fresh acting skills, a changing sense of theatrical space, and new varieties of dramatic troupes” (1997: 1). While less utopian in outlook, Nishidô Kôjin's theorisation of an “angura paradigm” (1987) nevertheless confirms the likely success of first wave angura in establishing performance modes that radically challenged Japanese theatre culture and cultural norms in general. The sixties angura was indeed “productive not only in terms of theatre experiments in language but also … supported a wide discursive space surrounding and permeating those performative practices” (see Uchino 1999).

At the same time–even during the phase of angura’s most expansionary outlook–we should remain cognisant of critical assessments of sixties culture that suggest a powerful sense of limitation and bordering around the sphere of radical activity thus limiting the effective power of such theatre to perform political and cultural critique. It has been argued both inside theatre circles and in respect of the often interrelated but broader politico-cultural domain that by the 1970s progressive intellectuals “withdrew into their bourgeois daily lives” and oppositional movements in Japan were effaced and dismantled in the face of economic expansion, consumerism and the eventual emergence of the bubble economy during the 1980s (Miyoshi 1991: 154, see also Uchino 1999).1 The effect was to limit the range of oppositional cultures and their impact on Japanese society as a whole. By 1991, tumultuous and painful events of the sixties radical era had become so effectively de-historicised and commodified as nostalgia that I was able to view a television commercial campaign for beer (from memory Asahi) featuring graphic black and white footage of violent student protests depicted as whimsical remembrances of two middle-aged salarymen as they shared a drink after work. Thus, a key performative image of the radical imagination was sensationally re-inscribed with a fundamentally corporatist and consensual ideology.

Much has been written about the sixties and Japanese culture and much more needs to be written if we are to heed Terry Eagleton’s warning that late capitalist societies have shifted from contesting radical ideas towards attempting their extermination (1990: 7). But my focus here is to identify how the closures and containments enacted upon the political avant-garde have become–for a group of 1990s generation angura theatre artists–a source of inspiration and a way out of cultural entropy.

The bubble theatre as an endless present If the sixties theatre can be read as culturally dynamic in a progressive sense then the decline of angura in the 1980s is the source of present day radical theatre’s discontent. The popularisation of angura in the 1980s–or what I term the bubble theatre–can be read as constituting an ideological effacement of radical discourse. Instead one can see the normalisation of dominant political values in bubble theatre as it enacts a neo-conservative view of Japan as ceaseless and enduring, what H.D. Harootunian calls a “national poetics” and an “endless present”.2

In one respect the idea of an endless present relates to an ‘end of history’ scenario whereby aesthetic productions are removed from a sense of historicity and/or sociopolitical context, in the same manner that radical political images can serve the interests of advertisers above.

1 Uchino states that this was also true of theatrical commentary and debate (1999). 2 The term has been applied in relation to Japanese theatre by Bill Marotti (1997), Uchino Tradishi (1999) and others (eg Eckersall 1999. Forthcoming).

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In another respect it refers to political and economic relations whereby America’s modernising view of Japan as an emerging East Asian capitalist enterprise was transmuted into Japan’s own self image as unique and unchanging. Harootunian suggests that consensual political norms in Japan have grown hand-in-hand with late capitalism and are based in the appeal to “uninterrupted continuity, and an endless present derived from exceptionalist experience” (1993: 200). Possibilities for difference are subsequently erased by the “constant reminders of enduring cultural values”–or (what Harootunian calls) a “national poetics”–that attest to the “ideological force of continuity and value integration” (1993: 216). For Uchino, such a ‘national poetics’ has become a “dooming power” in Japanese theatre that “would reduce all to essentialisms” (Uchino 1999). In both readings of the term, the endless present represents containment and is thus a border that contains within the repetitious limits and norms of Japanese culture. As I shall argue, consensual politics and racio-essentialist notions of self are identified as constituting a formidable enduring power order in Japan. To paraphrase Miyoshi Masao, this is a place where there are no explicit rules of conduct but Japanese people nevertheless understand explicitly what to do and how to behave (1991: 172).

In the limited space available two brief examples might suffice to demonstrate how the bubble theatre reinforces such closure.

Hirata Oriza’s creation of a hyper-naturalistic so-called “quiet theatre” (Shizukana engeki) depicts the banal ebbs and flows of everyday life. Typically his plays have no formal beginning nor conclusive ending, one is left with the impression that the piece will go on in perpetuity. Hirata’s dramaturgy may be described as playing-out the minute details of a non- confrontational, repetitious and ‘typically polite Japanese’ everyday. Although Hasabe Hiroshi has recently argued that the quiet theatre reflects a yearning for nature in the face of social breakdown (1998) it is hard not to read this genre as a form of national poetics. Most explicitly this is evident in the almost prozac-like consensual euphoria of its characters. Any possibility for conflict or social debate is deflected by the warm of embrace of commonplace and repetitious social interaction. The great popularity of quite theatre seems not to lie in any possible degree of irony but in the nostalgic recognition of ones own familiar and unchanging territory. Moreover, Hirata’s stated position that “theatre is just theatre” diminishes the possibilities for an ironic or critical gesture in his theatre. Thus, quiet theatre can be said to avoid the possibility of a deconstructive and radical function, instead it presents a seamless everyday that appears natural and immutable. While a cultural border of sorts might be recognised in the work, there is no tension with this fact. Rather this is home (uchi), a ceaseless and unchanging present that is Japan’s social norm.

Noda Hideki’s Yume no Yuminsha company, was the most popular angura-style theatre ever, and much has written about it so I will be brief here (eg. Rolf 1992, Hasabe 1993, Uchino 1996).

My reading is that Yume no Yuminsha successfully repackaged angura's typically fractured and dream-like dramaturgy and its pop art/neo-classical mise en scène as a pure theatre of speed and a cartoon world of kawaii-cute sensibilities. As Hasabe writes “Noda Hideki is speed” (1993: 477) and thus his theatre is open to critique as postmodern hypereality. The manic energy and aesthetic frenzy of Noda’s theatre mirrors the spectacular dizzying spiral of bubble capitalism where everything is fluid and transient on the surface.

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But as many argue in reference to postmodernism in society this belies a substratum of increased commercialisation, commodification of arts and the dominance of late capitalism in all cultural spheres (see Eagleton 1996). What becomes apparent in this intensely merchandised and ludic pastiche are the processes by which capitalism has become the normative practice of Japan and commodity fetish an enduring construct of Japanese identity. As Senda laments: “the relentless logic of capitalism has unified us all” (1997:10).

These examples lead me to argue that the bubble theatre enacts containment. In Hirata’s theatre a consensual and superficially de-politicised norm is naturalised, in Noda’s theatre angura style has been removed from historical context and refigured as mass entertainment. We can only conclude that the two dominant strands of bubble theatre promote the idea of Japan as an endless present. For individuals and groups in Japan who cannot find representation in this schema the choice is disappearance on the one hand, or more productivity, rear-guard action on the other. The paper will now continue with a discussion of how resistance to the construct of Japan as an endless present might be evident in a return of radical theatre in the 1990s.

Performing theory in the theatre of the 1990s What might be termed the performance of theory, in the angura theatre of the 1990s, can be seen in the work of three companies discussed below, Gekidan Kaitaisha, Daisan Erotica, and Dumb Type.

Gekidan Kaitaisha In this dance/performance-art based company (literally meaning the Theatre of Deconstruction), the body is the site of a critical investigation of consensual and self regulating borders of Japanese identity. To cite Kaitaisha’s leader Shimizu Shinjin, the company seeks to expose “a sense of coercion that has not been made clear (but nevertheless is) the way that Japanese society has worked until now” (1996).

Time does not permit a detailed account of the evolving politicisation of Kaitaisha’s theatricality, although we should briefly note the non-exclusory membership policy of this company, their cooperative group philosophy and their beginnings as a fringe underground company working in site specific outdoor environments.

(In early Kaitaisha performances–events that were stopped once they became popular and categorised as spectacle by the fashion conscious theatre industry–bodies in space and bodies moving through space, of actors and viewers, were under investigation while the performance moved from place to place over many hours.)

While one cannot simply categorise this work in political terms, Shimizu had begun to collaborate with cultural theorists and Kaitaisha’s later indoor work has exhibited an understanding of the body as a culturally inscribed surface. In the words of feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz: “the body becomes a book of instruction, a moral lesson to be learned” and “a medium, on which power operates and through which it functions” (1994: 151, 146). Here we might arrive at Kaitaisha’s understanding of the “political body” in Japan’s cultural space (See Uchino 1999).

Kaitaisha’s 1997 work Tokyo Ghetto: Hard Core presented some startling images of the body as site of cultural inscription and ideological coercion.

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The piece began with a long repetitious scene in which a man slapped a woman’s back repeatedly, then transferred the slapping to his own body, before falling to ground exhausted. He was picked up by the woman and the slapping began again. Both actors were trapped in repetitious cycles of complicit and emotionally disconnected assault on the self and other. In other scenes a group of people began random movements and gradually arrived at identically conforming and lifeless patterns, an actor was repeatedly frisked by another before reaching a stage at which she automatically frisked herself and panoptically interrogated her own body for concealed abnormality. A man sung the words ‘All Power’ over and over to the increasing volume of an anarcho-punk sound track accompaniment. The sentiments of the song promising personal power were shown to be totalising in their intensity. An auditory assault drowned out the horse voice of the actor whose autonomy was shown to be futile and defeated by exhaustion. Tokyo Ghetto was a controversial and extremely provocative work depicting the relentlessly escalating tendency towards physical instruction and ideological sameness.

Daisan Erotica

If Gekidan Kaitaisha theorises the micro-intensities of body as cultural sign in performance, then Daisan Erotica’s epic theatre model casts a marco-critical eye across Japanese history, society and economy.

Kawamura Takeshi, the founder and artistic director of Daisan Erotica depicts Japan as “fake culture and surface euphoria layered over deep-seated problems” (Kawamura 1998b). In a probable reference to the Aum Supreme Truth Sect’s gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995 Kawamura observes that: “what is considered normal has become increasingly grotesque” (Kawamura 1996). Although the company has been in existence since 1980 and was known during the bubble era for science fiction narratives and gothic manga-style performance, their recent work has explored the euphoric as apocalyptic to the extent that people are characterised as “zombie-like” (kaibutsu), not able to intervene–and therefore trapped within–the borders of an ever increasing dystopic social reality. Such borders are dealt with in Daisan Erotica’s work as both unifying and totalitarian in the sense that they encourage a culture of consumption as constituting a widely experienced social euphoria and exclusive in their disenfranchisement of sectors of society, through unemployment, class, gender, ethnicity, and the like. Unlike quiet theatre, which even a radical reading can only conclude performs a kind of sleepy zombie-like warmth, Kawamura’s theatre suggest that consensual behaviour is monstrous and social aberration has consequently become the norm.

The company’s 1996 production of Obsession Sight depicted the ruinous landscape of a post- apocalyptic ‘barter-town’, its actual material existence was ensured through video images of the shanty-towns that have grown-up around Shinjuku Station, Ueno Park and other places where homeless and an unemployed people have gathered in increasing numbers. A band of rebel soldiers called the Kanto Army (Kanto being the Tokyo region) served as an ever changing signifier of Japanese power. Sometimes depicted as pre-war soldiers, sometimes as armed street gangs, sometimes as doomsday cultists and sometimes as corporate warriors, their centrality worked to conjoin pre-war military nationalism with postwar corporate nationalism–in other words dominant and commonplace identity constructs in Japan that share a common cult-like euphoria hiding what is in reality an abnormal and violent dystopic grotesque.

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Through short fast-paced scenes and an aggressively confronting mise en scène, Obsession Sight depicted the Kanto Army in various seedy but commonplace scenes of Tokyo life. In the penultimate image all the violent theatricalisation of city life was apocalyptically blown away by a divine wind; large industrial fans that wiped the stage clear of actors and scenery. In the final scene the play returned to its first image, of a single cardboard box shelter inhabited by a homeless man. Enter a young school girl–an image that encompasses uniformity, innocence and (ab)normality. A body emerged from the shelter wrapped in bandages, perhaps signifying an inadequate but nevertheless hopeful recuperation of Japan. The piece concluded, however, when the girl dispassionately shot dead the abject body, thus suggesting that Japan remains trapped in a cycle of violence. Above the image of the dead figure was projected one of the many sur-title and video images that were blended into this production. The title read: “The City in our Time”.

For Kawamura, Japan remains a pseudo-euphoric, cult-like society that has seen the transformation from military dystopia only to arrive at an equally self destructive corporatist one.

Dumb Type In drawing attention to the contrasting examples of the political avant-garde in Japan we have overlooked other companies and events that might sit between the macro-cultural perspective of history and the micro intensity of the body. Among others I will briefly highlight Dumb Type, whose work is well known outside of Japan and is concerned with the notion of borders that surround Japanese identity in a technologically laden world. The irony being here that as borders disappear, in what Dumb Type have theorised as a ‘borderless world’, more work must be done to erase borders of gender, sexuality and identity that arise or remain. “The new world order (equals) new world border” is how Koyamada Toru describes some of the political thinking of the group (1997). An inscription of the body is performed in pH where the actors are continually scanned, their bodies projected upon as they perform within a theatre transformed into a huge photocopy machine.

S/N, however, investigates the creative possibilities of new ways of communicating, expressing love, desire, sadness and so on. As Furuhashi Teiji dared to suggest the times demand “an evolution in humanity”.

Conclusion My purpose has been to document the existence of–and creative potential for–a radical theatre culture in Japan, thus to counter narratives that would have us believe that Japanese culture, and that component that constitutes theatrical activity, has been reduced completely to essentialisms.

While the Japanese economy enters the global domain (to cite Rob Wilson) Japan is “trapped in the postmodern predicament of re-essentailizing nationalism and positing cultural otherness as a symbolic defence against global homogenisation” (1993: 337). A contradiction of sorts but one that hasn’t weakened the resolve of power elites to silence otherness inside Japan. The outward looking aspect of sixties angura has consequently shifted to either supporting the status quo as in the case of the bubble theatre or–if it is to be a radical force–it must develop and theorise in performance–an understanding of closure.

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In the argument for a return of the radical in Japanese theatre, two issues are perhaps most pertinent:

i) The exposure of borders, cultural restrictions and mass enculturation through theoretically deconstructive theatrical work. ii) A possible shift from critical reflection to pro-activism, (that is the expression or advocacy of alternatives).

The above examples illustrate how recent theatre has been able to achieve the first objective. The second is perhaps less clear although related to the first. The deconstructive and historicist practices of each post-bubble company above, give rise to the centrality of theatre as a political subject. At the same time none of these groups propose an alternative ideology. In fact coming at the late edge of angura these artists are suspicious of the ease by which first generation artists proclaimed new left politics as the way forward. We have seen how easily such provocations were silenced by their appropriation or commodification as nostalgia (as one might experience in Kara Jurô’s tent theatre). To ensure the ongoing project of theatre as a political subject, we might subsequently conclude that the most effective strategy lies in the exposure of borders; what Adorno terms: “to call things by their name”. In Japan this is to identify how present day culture can be read as consensual ideology or an endless present.

References Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (1993). ‘The Culture Industry: enlightenment as mass deception’. In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During. London & NY: Routledge, pp. 29-43. Eagleton, Terry (1996). The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. (1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990. Eckersall, Peter (1999) (forthcoming Kaitaisha paper). Grosz, Elizabeth (1994). Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Harootunian, H.D. (1993). ‘America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan’. In Japan in the World. Edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian . Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 196-221. Hasebe, Hiroshi (1993). ‘The City of Vertigo: Noda Hideki and the Theatre of Speed’. In Teihon: Noda Hideki to Yume no Yuminsha. Edited by Noda Hideki and Hasabe Hiroshi. Tokyo: Kashu Shobô Shinsha. ------(1998). Nusumareta riaru: 90s Nendai engeki wa kataru (The stolen real, Talking about theatre in the 90s). Tokyo: Kabushiki-gaisha Asupekuto. Kawamura, Takeshi (1996). Interview with author. ------(1998). Interview with author. Koyamada, Toru (1997). Interview with author. Marotti, William (1997). ‘Butoh no Mondaisei to Honshitsu Shugi Wana’. (The Problematics of Butoh and the Essentialist Trap), Shiataa.Aatsu. No. 8, pp. 88-96. Miyoshi, Masao (1991). Off Centre: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Nishidô, Kôjin (1987). Engeki Shisô no Boken. Tokyo: Ronsosha. Rolf, Robert (1992). ‘Japanese Theatre from the 1980s: The Ludic Conspiracy’, Modern Drama. Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 127-36. Senda, Akihiko (1997). The Voyage of Contemporary Japanese Theatre. Translated by J. Thomas Rimer. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Shimizu, Shinjin (1996). Interview with author.

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Uchino, Tadashi (1996). Merodorama no Gyakushû: Shiengeki no 80 Nendai. Tokyo: Keisô Shôbô. ------(1999). ‘Deconstructing “Japaneseness”: Towards Articulating Locality and Hybridity in Contemporary Japanese Performance’. In Disorientations: Cultural Praxis in Theatre. Asia, Pacific, Australia. Edited by Rachel Fensham and Peter Eckersall. Melbourne: Monash University. Wilson, Rob 1993. ‘Theory’s Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South Korea and Japan’. In Japan in the World. Edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian . Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 316-37.

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FROM PARIS WITH LOVE: THE LECOQ INFLUENCE ON GEORGE OGILVIE’S DIRECTING By Lynn Everett

In an interview on the Arts Today radio program earlier this year, George Ogilvie was asked about the influence of his Lecoq training on his work as a director. He replied:

I think you have to talk about Lecoq’s influence through his students. I was with Lecoq in the 1960s, so I was one of the first Australians at the studio and when I returned to Australia in 1965, of course no-one had yet heard of Lecoq. But gradually through my work as director of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the South Australian Theatre Company as well as workshops with the Australian Performance Group, Lecoq’s [...] practice for the actor began to take hold. Of course, with Lecoq being my mentor, and he always has been, he influenced virtually everything we did.1

George Ogilvie speaks here of one of the key relationships at work in any theatre industry: the relationship between pedagogy and practice, between theatre training and theatre making. In this paper I would like to explore that relationship within the particular context of the links and ruptures between George Ogilvie’s training at the Lecoq school and his directorial practice in Australian theatre. I would like to propose that theatre-making in Australia has benefited from Ogilvie’s practical application of Lecoq’s pedagogical principles. The material for this paper comes from my PhD research into the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre.

Although the curriculum at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq has changed to some extent over the years, certain features of the pedagogy have remained stable points of reference. I have been able to identify four key elements or features of the pedagogy which serve as useful criteria for analysing the relationship between George Ogilvie’s Lecoq training and his directorial practice. I would like to briefly describe these four features of the pedagogy before discussing how these elements have manifested in Ogilvie’s directing.

The first key element of the pedagogy is its physical approach to performance training. The school is primarily concerned with the physical expressivity of the student. It aims to develop a deep understanding of the body in itself, the body in space and the body in relation. Lecoq uses various means to achieve this, including, movement classes, exercises in breath, rhythm and dramatic focus, analysis of movement and mask work.

Masks are used extensively in the course as a means of training the physical body of the student. Of particular importance is the neutral mask. The neutral mask has three primary objectives. Firstly, to eliminate personal physical habits. Secondly, to expand the corporeal possibilities available to the student. Thirdly, to enable the student to achieve a state of physical openness and availability, encouraging spontaneous movement that is free from preconceptions or expectations.

Lecoq’s approach to theatre training thus follows complimentary processes of refining and expanding the physical attitudes of the student. It aims to develop an economy and precision of gesture; a wide range of physical expression and a disposition of physical spontaneity. The second key element of the Lecoq training is its emphasis on creation.

1 Martin Potrus interviewing George Ogilvie, 3 February 1999. Transcript in author’s posession.

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A large portion of the training is allocated to the autocours or do-it-yourself section of the course. Here students are presented with a theme or provocation at the beginning of each week and are asked to work in groups to prepare a piece which is performed for the class at the end of the week. Thus Lecoq engages with the student as actor-creator, rather than actor- interpreter.

Many Australian graduates have cited the autocours as one of the most valuable sections of the course. Students develop an ability to devise dramatic material from a simple theme or other imaginative stimuli such as art or poetry. They also learn the value of ensemble creation and performance and of working to a strict deadline. In addition, the presentation of their pieces to fellow students acts auto-didactically, whereby students learn what ‘works’ theatrically and what does not most forcibly from their experience of performing to others. Students also learn from the criticisms levelled at their creations by their instructors. Such criticisms, not only challenge students to create work of an exceedingly high standard but also develop a sense of theatrical efficacy and a critical eye for detail.

The third key element in the pedagogy is the use of improvisation. Although Lecoq has increasingly incorporated more scripted material into the curriculum, there would have been little work with script in the period that Ogilvie studied at the school. Indeed, the study of script still remains a very minor section of the course. Elsewhere, improvisation is exclusively employed: as the teaching method in all acting classes, and as the devising strategy and performance medium for all pieces created and presented by students.

An important aspect of improvisation is the involvement of ‘le jeu’ - the game, play, the pleasure of performance. It is the vital energy that is passed like a ball between performers on stage. But ‘le jeu ‘ is not only an ingredient necessary to the creation of light-hearted theatre. It is an ingredient as necessary to tragedy as to comedy. It is the vital spark which enlivens the dramatic moment and rescues it from becoming simply an exercise in technique.

The fourth significant feature of the pedagogy is the variety of performance styles taught at the school. These include larval mask, expressive mask, character mask, pantomime blanche, melodrama, Greek tragedy, bouffon, clown and commedia dell’arte. For Lecoq, style works in relation to the neutral and the economical. Style is created by the manner in which the neutral and the economical are altered and distorted. Style is also ‘un esprit de jeu’: ‘a way of playing, a sense of play, a kind of playfulness’.2 Thus, instead of serving as museum pieces, the study of different styles serves as a reference point for inspiration and creation. Instruction in the rudiments of style provides students with examples of theatrical form, from which they can create their own dramatic works.

A physical approach, devised material, improvisation and a variety of performance styles. George Ogilvie has been influenced to some extent by all of these key elements of the Lecoq pedagogy. There are, of course, some aspects of the Lecoq training which are more foregrounded in Ogilvie’s theatrical practice than others.

Ogilvie’s directorial methods have been most strongly influenced, for example, by the first element of the Lecoq pedagogy: a physical approach to performance training. Using Lecoq’s principles of the body in itself, the body in space and the body in relation, Ogilvie has developed an approach to working with script, which is physically based.

2 Front and Yarrow, Improvisation in Drama (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1990) p65.

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Rather than focusing on the vocal, emotional or psychological qualities of performance, Ogilvie begins with the actor’s physical body: in its relation to character, in its relation to script, in its relation to space, and in its relation to other bodies in space. As Ogilvie explains:

Instead of sitting down and reading the play, which I never do, I would read a scene and then we’d talk about the characters and then I’d get the actors up on the floor and start them using themselves physically in terms of the characters and finding physically what the characters were like [...] So that my feeling is always that we do not construct a character simply through text, but that we construct a character not only with the text but with physical work at the same time, to find how physically it comes about, how clearly it can come about by a physical action as opposed to a word. And for the actors then to find out: how still does that word require me to be or can I move with that word and does that make more? [...] So I think that’s probably the way I work with almost every script that I do.3

One aspect of Lecoq’s physical approach which, Ogilvie has not employed to any large extent in his rehearsal process is the neutral mask. This is an interesting departure from his Lecoq training, especially considering the hallowed position which, the neutral mask occupies in the Lecoq regime. Ogilvie claims that while he ‘adores’ neutral mask he has not often used it simply because he didn’t have access to any masks (although he did have a set at one point but they were stolen). Ogilvie is not alone in his reluctance to use the neutral mask as a rehearsal tool. For, although many Lecoq graduates in Australia have used the neutral mask pedagogically, few have employed it as a directorial aid.

But Lecoq graduates are adept improvisers. And without access to neutral masks Ogilvie has discovered other methods of achieving similar objectives to those of the neutral mask work. For instance, he has found that meditational principles are useful in terms of preparing actors for a role. Although Ogilvie considers this a departure from his Lecoq training, his meditational approach parallels the objectives of the neutral mask work in two ways. Firstly, in that it aims to create a clean slate on which to build character and secondly, in that it aims to create in the actor an emotional state free of preconceptions, judgment or expectation.4

The second key element of the Lecoq pedagogy, which I have identified is its focus on the creation of performance material by students. This aspect of the training has had little influence on George Ogilvie’s directing. Unlike the majority of Lecoq graduates working in Australia, Ogilvie’s career has been almost exclusively focused on written scripts rather than devised productions. The only devised pieces he has produced were with the MTC and the Australian Ballet shortly after his return to Australia in 1965. Ogilvie has always been more interested in working with what he calls ‘the classic text’ and he has consequently focused his energies on applying the principles he learned in France to working with scripted material.

As I have mentioned, the study of scripted material is a low priority for Lecoq, Regardless of this, Ogilvie found that his training at the Lecoq school was tremendously useful as a director of scripted plays and he had little difficulty in applying the principles he had learned. He says:

3 Telephone interview with George Ogilvie, 19 September 1998. Audio tape and transcript in author’s posession. 4 Ibid

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When I did my first Shakespeare coming back I thought ‘Oh God! Well here we go, it’s text isn’t it? How can I use any of Lecoq’s work?’ And I began to realise that you can and so it slowly infiltrated in. It was like coming from another direction but finding that the other direction could be inserted almost immediately.5

Thus the skills Ogilvie learned in the autocours section of his Lecoq training were equally applicable to a script as to a devised piece. As I have noted, the creation and performance of dramatic pieces develops in the Lecoq graduate a critical eye for detail and an ability to construct character and mis-en-scène.

The third key element in the Lecoq pedagogy is improvisation and ‘le jeu’. Ogilvie’s focus on scripted material necessarily excludes the use of improvisation as a performance medium or as a strategy for devising performance material. But Ogilvie has used improvisation extensively as a rehearsal tool. He uses it, for example, to help the actors develop their roles by inviting them to ‘play’, to improvise, explore and experiment physically with their characters. Also in a spirit of play, he would ask the actors to bring into rehearsals pieces of clothing which they thought might be suitable costume for their character. Although these costumes would not necessarily be what the actors would ultimately don for the production, they had the opportunity to rehearse in the clothes they had chosen, exploring and developing character through playing with costume.

As well as these unstructured improvisations, Ogilvie has also used in rehearsals clowning improvisations and improvisations with the comic half-mask, particularly the latter because, he says,

I find comic mask is the best improvisation I’ve ever discovered because improvisation itself is a very scary thing for many actors. Some actors have a talent for it, but many actors don’t have any talent for it at all, and in fact they fear it tremendously. But with the comic mask, where you’re asking the actors to build, almost silently a character and then produce the sound of the character, well then they find that much less frightening and really enjoy it.6

Ogilvie has thus found improvisation as a useful technique, not only for discovering character, but also for freeing up his actors physically and emotionally, developing in them an ability to respond intuitively and spontaneously even while working within the constraints of the script.

The fourth element of the Lecoq approach is the teaching of a variety of performance styles. When Ogilvie trained at the Lecoq school, the range of styles studied by students was noticeably smaller. In my interview with him, Ogilvie speaks only of studying commedia dell’arte, the role of the chorus on stage and clown. But the impact of having studied these styles is certainly apparent in his productions.

Commedia dell’arte, for instance, is a performance style Ogilvie has often used in his directing. During the early years with the MTC, for example, Ogilvie trained the actors in the commedia dell’arte masks for a production of Servant of Two Masters. He also used comic half-masks for the MTC’s production of The Inspector General.

For the opening production of the Adelaide Festival Centre Playhouse, Ogilvie chose to

5 Ibid 6 Ibid

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mount Leon Katz’s commedia dell’arte scenario The Three Cuckolds. Peter Ward writes that Ogilvie’s production, in true commedia style, used “masks and tumbles, sleights-of-hand and grand, mannered theatrical deceptions”.7 Even Ogilvie’s direction of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors at the South Australian Theatre Company displayed no small touch of the commedia, with Mary Armitage describing it as “a sort of restrained Tudor commedia dell’arte”.8

Armitage was also struck by the ensemble work of the actors, saying that the performances were “so finely correlated that it seems invidious to single out individual players”.9 Tight ensemble work has been noted elsewhere as a feature of Ogilvie’s productions, and it is no doubt his training in chorus work which is in part responsible for his ability to create a harmonious collective.

In terms of clowning, Ogilvie has certainly injected aspects of this performance style into a number of his productions (he has been described, for example, as a director who “excels in stylish comedy”),10 But Ogilvie has also used clowning for rehearsal purposes. He says:

I would quite often stop a rehearsal and do a clown session with everyone. Not because I wanted the actors to be funny, but because I wanted them to understand what it is to share, and clowning is an amazing exercise for actors to find out how to share things. For example: if a clown has a hat and he’s very proud of that hat and the other clown wants that hat, then there has to be a sharing here, because if the actor with the hat refuses to give the other clown the hat, then the play dies. So he’s got to find a way of giving the hat to the other person. And it’s exactly the same way when it comes to a classical text: actors have to listen to each other and give each other certain things in order for their words to come alive. And to me, this is where Lecoq is magic and where I’ve used everything that he ever said in terms of my own work ever since.11

The influence which Lecoq has had on George Ogilvie’s directing, and the influence which George Ogilvie’s directing has had on Australian theatre cannot, I think, be overstated. Davison has written that “Ogilvie’s training as a mime artist [...] contributed immensely to the development of [...] the Melbourne Theatre Company and the South Australian Theatre Company” and that “his work with every other major Australian company has impacted greatly upon two generations of playwrights, directors and actors.12

The Lecoq influence can certainly be felt in Ogilvie’s application of style and his use of improvisation as a rehearsal tool. But it is felt most forcibly in his physical approach to theatre making.

Ogilvie has commented that the Lecoq school ‘suited his physical nature’, adding that he thinks Australians are, in general, very physical people. He says:

If you go to any drama school in Australia you’ll probably find the voice teachers are

7 Ward, P A Singular Act: Twenty-Five Years of the State Theatre Company of South Australia (South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1992) p65. 8 Ibid 9 Ibid 10 Clark, J Companion to Theatre in Australia (Philip Parsons general editor Currency Press: Sydney 1995) p194. 11 Telephone interview with George Ogilvie, 19 September 1998. Audio tape and transcript in author’s posession. 12 Davidson, R companion to Theatre in Australia (Philip Parsons general editor Currency Press: Sydney 1995) p413

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the ones with most complaints, because we are highly physical. So when I came back to Australia, the highly physical nature of Lecoq’s work suited Australians down to the ground and of course there’s been a flood of people go to Lecoq since then. So it has developed. It’s developed because of Lecoq and because of our own physical nature.13

If we can agree with Ogilvie that Australians are in fact ‘very physical people’, then it is perhaps not surprising that many Australians have been, and continue to be, so receptive to Lecoq’s physical approach to performance training. Indeed, not only receptive to Lecoq’s approach, but certainly to other physically oriented training regimes, such as Suzuki and Butoh. In many ways the Lecoq school was to Australian theatre in the 1970s what Suzuki and Butoh are in the 1990s. That is, a means of transforming a theatre industry that has been based on what called ‘a kind of Englishness’,14 into one based on some kind of Australianness, with everything that that word might entail. For this, the Australian theatre industry may well feel like saying, as Philippe Gaulier did upon Lecoq’s death in January this year, “We needed him so much. Bravo Jacques and thank you”.15

13 Telephone interview with George Ogilvie, 19 September 1998. Audio tape and transcript in author’s posession. 14 Companion to Theatre in Australia (Philip Parsons general editor Currency Press: Sydney 1995) p23. 15 Newsletter from the Ecole Philippe Gaulier, January 1999.

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WHEN A GIRL FROM COMMUNITY ARTS MEETS A BOY FROM LAS VEGAS INC - SOME OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY ISSUES IN THE TETU CASE By Richard Fotheringham

This paper was given at a session on industrial safety in the arts at the Australasian Drama Studies Association Conference at the Academy of Arts, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, on Tuesday 6 July 1999.

In the last eighteen months two young performers I know personally have both been injured, one seriously, while rehearsing with the Brisbane-based company Rock N'Roll Circus. More recently, there has been extensive publicity concerning the deaths of stuntman Collin Dragsbaek near Mildura in Victoria during the filming of the climactic scene of the feature film Love Serenade, and of stunt performer Trevor Welsh during a training session in Melbourne. There seems to date to have been less publicity about the recent death closer to home of a third stuntman, John Raaen, who fell from Tennyson Power House at Yeerongpilly on 18 November last year (1998), perhaps because to my knowledge the coronial inquiry into that fatality has not yet handed down its findings. If we add to this the list of incidents resulting in serious injury which have occurred in creating theatre, film, and television throughout Australia, it adds up to what I'd regard as a matter of significant concern. However I only want to comment in detail in this short paper on one live entertainment case, and simply draw from it a few observations about ways in which it might have been avoided.

We know that circus acts and other sideshow or stunt entertainments have always carried with them significant levels of risk. However skills such as those required for high wire, trapeze, and other traditional circus acts evolved over the centuries their own safety practices which passed orally through the apprenticeship system from one generation to the next, and were backed up by tight extended family companies who closely monitored one another's safety. Many of these customs have been lost in the creation of new kinds of acrobatic circuses, physical theatre companies, and other kinds of entertainments where the artists get their training not from a traditional craft apprenticeship background but from schools, universities and academies. Such training institutions will need to teach the artists of tomorrow essential safety procedures which they must insist on before beginning to rehearse or perform their act if the number of serious accidents and deaths is to be reduced.

The example I want to use by way of illustration is that of Heather Tetu, the Flying Fruit Fly trained and then Circus Oz artist who in 1992 was contracted with her partner Matthew Hughes to perform a trapeze act in a large commercial show Jewel of the Orient Express at the Conrad Jupiters, Casino on the Gold Coast. On 12 December that year, during the 113th performance, the equipment supporting Heather Tetu failed and she fell some 9 metres, causing her serious injury and ending her career.

The Tetu case came before the Supreme Court of Queensland late last year and judgment was given two months ago, on 21 April. During the proceedings the three defendants: James Thane Pty Ltd, Conrad International Hotels Corporation, and Jupiters Limited; together with what was then called the Workers' Compensation Board of Queensland (now WorkCover), settled on an award of damages of $1.3m to Heather Tetu and a smaller amount to Matthew Hughes.

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That judgment is currently under appeal but the matters appealed concern only the extent to which each of the three defendants and the third party (the Workers' Compensation Board) are liable for payment of the award of damages. The facts in the judgment concerning the accident are not in dispute and I have relied on them in the account here of what occurred. The conclusions I draw are my own.

The following diagram is schematic only. I have not inspected the site and I don't know for example exactly where the winch was located, although the judgment does mention,that the was not in a position where he could easily see the exact point at which the wire had to be stopped after Ms Tetu had been lifted sufficiently to reach the point where her act commenced. Basically what happened was that the overpowerful winch used to lift Tetu overran the point at which it was supposed to stop, apparently because the safety limit switch had been deactivated as it had been causing a loud noise when it engaged. The fly equipment began to buckle and the wire came close to its breaking strain, but before either of these failed one of the swages (clamped joins) in the wire separated. The swages had been incorrectly clamped by hand, a technique used only for flying very light props, scenery etc.

[Speak to the diagram explaining theflaws in the design, construction, and operation of the system. The main issues are summarised in dotpointform below the diagram.]

STAGE AUDITORIUM

Improvised Fly Grid Properly Installed Incorrect size & type of ferrules Equipment Wire: too thin; replaced without telling artists

Joins hand clamped (should be machine)

Automatic Safety Limited Switch Deactivated

Licenced Unlicenced Winch – 7 times too powerful Rigger Rigger/operator

 Ratio of wire strength/winch strength should be 10 (was 0.06)  Winch should be only slightly stronger than required ( was x 7)  Joining system should be stronger than wire (& not hand-clamped)  System designed should be approved and registered (it wasn't)  System should be inspected after installation (it wasn't)  Operators must be licensed (they weren't)

As you can see, these finding don't show at least some of the various participants in a very favourable light. However I am not here to attribute blame, but to make three simple points

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which I think are to some extent independent of the specific facts of the case but which if acted upon might help to prevent such accidents occurring in the future.

1. The first point is summarised by the title of my paper: what happens when a trusting comunity artist from of the coroner's comments in the published report into the Victorian stuntmen's deaths: "the safety, but they aren't going to write them into contracts unless the artist or their agent or manager insists.

Recommendation: all artists, while they are still training, should be made aware of how contracts are negotiated, be made to realise that they should engage support staff to handle their safety needs, and be provided with draft clausesfor insertion into contracts before signing.

2. The second point is that, just because it is in the contract, don't assume it will be there when you arrive.

Recommendation: All artists or their representatives should be taught to ask to see:

2.1 The Certificate of Compliance for any piece of equipment, set, or other construction which the artist will be asked to use, perform on, in, around or under, or in any way interact with;

2.2 A current trade licencefor any rigger, electrician, or other technician who has set up or is operating or supervising the operation of any such equipment or activity.

3. The third and final point is more complex: it is that while the old craft practices and conventions used to help to prevent accidents, in some cases they can now cause them. The major example in the Tetu case is the still active convention at the casino theatre (and at most formal venues) based on the division of responsibility between the stage manager and the front of house manager. The very names (stage, FOH) reflect the fact that for most of the last 300 years or so of theatre history in the West performances did take place predominantly on the stage and audiences kept to their seats. There has long been a clear division of responsibility between looking after a working performance space, and managing an audience space. Different skills and trades and training and systems of management are required, and so powerful is this convention that even today in many theatres there are rituals of exclusion - stage managers stay behind the proscenium arch line and FOH managers don't go on the stage. There are also itualised "transfers of authority": if the stage manager needs to come into the auditorium, or the FOH manager on to the stage, then they have to ask formal permission and are accompanied for the entire time they are required to remain in the alien territory.

(A personal aside may illustrate this: when I worked as an usher at the Albery Theatre in London's West End in 1974-75, the theatre manager came up on to the stage at the half-hour to check that we were all at our doors. Each night she came from front of house down a side aisle and waited on the steps from the auditorium up to the stage for the stage manager to come and escort her to centre stage for this call over, and escort her back to the steps.)

Nowadays however performance areas (and sometimes audience areas) are much more flexibly defined, but venue management structures and trade demarcation rules still operate on the old conventions. In the case of the situation at Jupiter's Casino auditorium in 1992, the decision to stage the trapeze act above the audience meant that the staff who rigged and operated the equipment used to lift Heather Tetu were not qualified riggers but front of house

105 Industrial Relations technical staff. (Three years after the accident the two men principally involved in setting up and running the Tetu act obtained their rigger's licenses, but at the time it simply wasn't though necessary for kind of duties they would be required to undertake.) The director's decision to relocate the act in the auditorium meant that the entire setup had to be improvised in a space that was never meant to accommodate it, by staff who were not then trained to do so. This also meant redesigning the act in a new and unfamiliar way: in previous stagings a winch had not been necessary as Tetu had been able to climb up to the grid and appeared from above, lowering herself onto the equipment.

Ironically, on the stage was a qualified rigger (and properly designed and installed fly equipment). But possibly because of some professional coolness between the two groups of technicians, or simply because of the traditional demarcation, the licensed rigger stayed on the stage and had nothing to do with the setting up of the act. What followed was a sorry sequence of supervisors not asking the right questions or asking them of the wrong person, or not asking them at all on the assumption that qualified personnel were supervising and running the performances. They weren't, and the only wonder is that it got to performance 113 before the inevitable happened.

It's hard to formulate a recommendation for this third condition of performance, since it involves much bigger questions than those of artist contracts and checking safety and competency requirements. Presumably what will need to happen is that stage directors should be required to indicate in advance any planned major use of non-traditional spaces as part of a performance. On the basis of this, a meeting between front of house and stage senior staff, with union and/or artist representatives present, should negotiate for that particular show what staff have what responsibilities in what areas, and how demarcations are to be resolved and necessary authority maintained and transferred. It is no longer good enough to rely on the conventions associated with crossing the proscenium line.

SOURCES

Heather Jane Tetu and Matthew Hughes v James Thane Pty Ltd, Conrad International Hotels Corporation, Jupiters Limited, and Workers' Compensation Board of Queensland, unreported, Supreme Court of Queensland, Atkinson J, 21 April 1999.

State Coroner Victoria. Deaths During Stunt Fall During Film Sequences and Practice. Inquests into the Deaths of Collin Dragsbaek and Trevor Welsh. Melbourne: State Coroner's Office, 6 May 1999.

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“ALL THE WORLD’S A RESEARCH STAGE AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN PRACTITIONERS MERELY PARADIGMS OF REFLEXIVE DISCOURSE” By Mike Foster

Intelligent Alternative theatre infers a continuous reflective/reflexive component in its theatre making process. In Australia several groups claim a research prerogative as central to their work. On the one hand variously named ‘performance studies’ centres attached to academic institutions exist primarily, it would seem, to experiment with new forms often focussing on critical analysis of single issues, specific textual considerations and theoretical paradigms. Essential to their process is a continual, rigorous and scholarly analysis of all aspects of their theatre making. These groups would appear to fit comfortably into the research as performance/performance as research model.

On the other hand are professional, community based, alternative, non-mainstream theatres whose research usually is less theoretically driven being grounded firmly in the practice, the real world of attracting audiences, maintaining funding and addressing the needs of target or client communities while attempting to advance their art form. This genuine grounded theory/ action research paradigm is elemental, I will argue to the theatre making praxis of most significant non-mainstream theatre companies.

The focus question of this paper is: How does the practice implement rigorous reflection and analysis? I am able to phrase the question using ‘how’ rather than ‘If or Does’ your company implement… due to evidence collected which points clearly to the assertion that such rigorous analysis is one of the features which distinguishes the praxis of Radical Group Theatre from the mainstream. I have little evidence to disprove the claim that the mainstream companies rarely, if ever, engage in genuinely reflective practice? Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

As part of my doctoral studies I have sought responses to this and other questions in an attempt to define the practice of what I have termed Radical Group Theatre in Australia since 1975.

Groups and individuals interviewed included Sidetrack Contemporary performance Troupe (Don Mamouney), Legs on the Wall (Deborah Batton, Gavin Robins), Urban Theatre Projects (John Bayliss), Graham Pitts (Writer), Lyn Coleman (Melbourne Workers Theatre), Mandy Grinblatt (Melbourne Women’s Circus), Liz Jones (La Mama), Meg and Stefo Nantsou (Zeal Theatre) Tim Coldwell & Mike Finch (Circus Oz) and Neil Cameron (Neil Cameron Productions). Measured against these responses are the collected opinions of notable academics Alison Richards, Richard Murphett, Geoffrey Milne and John Preston. My own reflective commentary attempts to find intersections between practice and theory; process and product and the academy and field The study is incomplete as further field work is needed to obtain an accurate analysis of the academic/research based ‘Centres’ and the mainstream. In addition other historical and theoretical pathways still require considerable exploration before I’m ready to generalise or attempt to connect the many theoretical fragments which inform the field I am investigating.

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The paper aims to describe and analyse the various evaluative methods used by these companies proposing the tentative position that: the benefits derived from ongoing rigorous reflection and analysis are observable in the work of the non-mainstream companies. Furthermore because most of these companies have in-built structures to insure regular rigorous analysis they are not only working at the ‘cutting edge’ but are creating the new edges which result in innovative intelligent exciting and relevant theatre. Dare I say paradigm the mainstream may do well to copy!!

To begin Alison Richards agues that the basis of reflection in theatre is trust. Her clear implication is that this trust is negotiated and facilitated in non-mainstream companies by “developing a mutual code of understanding between performer and audience”.1 Both parties need to agree on the criteria for evaluation of both process and product. The process of setting criteria is quite often structured as part of the companies working environment. Alison said that “Structure is not an impediment to creativity but there is a need to constantly revisit the structures”2 she goes on to say that “the most exciting theatre comes when power structures are being invented along with the work”.3

For the audience this mutual code of understanding usually requires the audiences to ask questions of themselves, of the form presented, in short, to do some of the work. With the artists also engaged in constant questioning we have the possibility of creating an ongoing dialectic between audience and artist the very distinguishing feature that both Don Mamouney and Graham Pitts argue as an essential distinguishing feature of that field “Formerly known as” Community Theatre.

We also have according to Alison Richards, an “alteration to the horizon of choices where things taken for granted may be questioned “And “we should be able, having “Imagined a new place to stand”, to theorise: if you’re clear where you’re standing.”4 So here is a very interesting starting point for the development of a grounded theory to drive the practice. Maybe?

So what about the mainstream I asked: Do they establish such a relationship with audiences? “Well no they (the mainstream) don’t ask questions because they know it all already, In the mainstream the code of understanding is set and it's not mutual”.5 Without exception all the people I interviewed agreed more or less exactly with this view of Alison’s. Is this an accurate perception? Or Are they all just bitter old revolutionaries who couldn’t get jobs in Mainstream Theatre?

Well, I know that Don Mamouney isn’t. (Well he is still a bitter old revolutionary But…. Certainly one of the most influential and respected directors in Australia, always controversial to the point of provoking open hostility in some quarters, nonetheless a very significant practitioner and a deeply reflective and articulate director. He has refused jobs in the mainstream! Mamouney “cant imagine theatre making process without continuous reflection” he sees this process as the means to establish “how we relate to the world”.6

1 Interview with the author April 27 1999. 2 Interview with the author April 27 1999. 3 Interview with the author April 27 1999. 4 Ibid 5 Ibid 6 Interview with author April 14 1999.

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Essential to Mamouney and Sidetrack is the development of an intimate knowledge of their target community. This is facilitated by the constant questioning referred to above and a forms the basis of a style which uses theatre to build communities theatre that suits the community. Where a company or ensemble has a training element to their structure the analysis is on- going and rigorous the questions are always What are we doing? and why are we doing this? and Who are we doing this for? As an example Don cites a recent project “The Wound” a show which took $25 000 in the first 3 weeks at the box office but was “analysed as a flop…. Consultation with target audiences writers and other artists developed a new way of structuring the show for its next phase. All the talk confirmed what I already knew he said, that the show had to change and because of the reflection and analysis it did!”7

Its hardly surprising that Graham Pitts, perhaps Australia’s most prolific and constantly employed community theatre writer would agree with Don Mamouney. As co-founders of Sidetrack theatre they share the same vision 15 years on; to Pitts it “is unthinkable that non- mainstream practitioners would not analyse”.8 He too saw the development of a dialectic with the audience as an integral aspect of the practice. As a highly respected writer with many contacts in the mainstream he argues that they (the Mainstream) tend to deal in absolutes, universals. In answer to the constant question Why do you do it? The mainstream’s answer according to Pitts is “because its how we make our living!” In terms of the field in general, Graham feels its time for practitioners to extend their analysis and to refrain from “re- inventing the wheel” and develop an accessible, fresh, theory to inform the work. He believes that such a theory would be grafted onto the remnants of the Marxist core philosophy, which he argues still drives most of the companies and individuals working in what he still calls community theatre in Australia.

A company which has developed evaluative and analytical structures which answer both Mamouney and Pitt’s call for dialectic and accessibility is Melbourne WORKERS THEATRE. Primarily political and united by a common agenda which drives process, product and management MWT have instituted structures which enshrine these principles in an inclusive model of worker participation at all levels. Perhaps the most spectacular of these structures is the Annual weekend retreat where the board of directors, artists and the advisory group (the trade Union Connection) meet to discuss, evaluate, plan implementation of policy and develop future directions of the company. This strategy is supported by a board which is continually active in all aspects of company management, which keeps the work relevant to the founding aims yet constantly questions in order to keep the work fresh and at the cutting edge. The wide range of views helps retain the feeling of ownership, which former actor with the company Steve Payne, Graham Pitts and Alison Richards all argue is still a distinguishing feature of the company.

A similarly bonding, common agenda drives the Women’s Circus and has done so since its inception in 1991. The companies aims paraphrased are to reaffirm women’s control over their bodies by building self esteem through physical and performance work while creating a safe non-competitive work environment.9 The Women’s circus have evolved a highly structured yet flexible system for planning, problem solving and evaluation of process, politics and artistic worth. Similar to MWT they have an advisory group, their ‘Big Sisters’, women with experience in law, funding, circus, publicity, theatre and politics.

7 Ibid 8 Interview with author April 23 1999. 9 Womens Circus Mission Statement 1997

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This group is relied on for advice, support, ideas and information. The rest of the structure is shaped like this:

Four times a year all active members of the Circus meet. Here they exchange information share skills and discuss major policy changes. This is the A Group.

The B Groups represent the specialist areas within the circus. Childcare, training, newsletter and so on. Representatives from these groups meet regularly each month to report and discuss allocation of resources, ideas relevant to the aims and objectives and forward planning these meetings constitute the C group, the policy making Group. All meetings and proceedings are transparent with minutes posted publicly so all are informed. The 4th group, group D comprises workshop co-ordinator, administrator, and artistic director and is responsible for the day to day operations of the company. They are financially accountable to the membership and the board of the Footscray Community arts centre.

At the Women’s Circus, Like many of the companies I visited, the politics is of the grassroots variety, the evaluation and analysis practical, the reflection genuine and inclusive.

Is this evaluation and reflection rigorous in the academic sense of the word? Are the contributors widely read and articulate in the vagaries of complex theoretical paradigms? In many cases they are not however the model of “reflexive dynamism”10 which drives these and other companies to a continuous action research model is relevant, dynamic, organic, accessible, and ultimately aimed at advancing the art form. Is this not what rigorous reflection and analysis should be doing?

An equally inclusive model (of management at least) is found at La Mama. La Mama, arguably the mother of all non-mainstream theatre in this country privileges analysis and evaluation according to Artistic Director Liz Jones via the creation of a “receptive, open and Communicative workplace”.11 In addition various formal structures are in place where artistic and managerial staff plus management committee members and volunteers meet regularly to discuss and plan all aspects of the company’s operations. La Mama’s company structure is different of course, as they are not a production house. Rather they perceive their role as one of encouragement and nurturing of new work. Due to the fact that many of the people who constitute the various levels of membership are long term, there has been created here a “Corporate memory”12 a shared vision which helps La Mama retain its relevance a fact supported according to Liz by consistently healthy box office.

This shared vision, corporate memory has suggested a factor which I have called the second generation factor. Created mainly in situations where companies have existed for a long term, and equally importantly, where company members have been trained in the atmosphere of constant questioning and evaluation. The case often occurs where original, long term or founding directors leave a company and unlike the situation in the mainstream, the company moves forward driven by the same vision, adapted perhaps, modified to suit new communities but fundamentally in tact. In the mainstream the ‘vision’ frequently changes with the board elections or a change of Artistic director. Also when administration, marketing and box office take precedence over creative process the work loses its edge and occasionally companies collapse. Or are radically weakened Witness Magpie, Hunter valley Theatre Co. On the other

10 Foster MA, Thesis 1994. 11 Interview with the author April 23 1999. 12 Ibid

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hand where the company philosophy has been consistently communicated and shaped over a number of years those companies continue to function, indeed grow and develop in new and exciting directions, 2Til 5 Youth Theatre, Shopfront, Contact , Circus Oz, UTP, Deckchair, and many others?

Occasionally this second-generation factor becomes transferable to other performance contexts or changed employment situations. In terms of other performance contexts the example of Urban Theatre Projects is particularly interesting. Founded in 1981, there are some important differences between Death Defying Theatre, and today’s company, but the philosophy of the group - “to make theatre for people who don’t usually go to the theatre”13 has remained constant throughout its history. In its early years DDT was a group of performance artists taking their work into the streets, a political, community based physical theatre company. “The recent decision to change the name to UTP recognises that the group has moved towards collaborative community theatre”.14 Today’s UTP productions are inspired by and performed by and with the ethnically diverse communities of Western Sydney. Two issues are significant here Firstly, the changes in emphasis, demographic and geographical base were made as a result of intensive research which revealed that “strong community networks in the west of Sydney appeared to have the energy and resources and interest to support a local company.” Reid 97 p51

Secondly as Manager Harley Stumm Notes “Cutting the cloth to suit the wearer” Reid 97 p51, has led UTP into the modern subcultures of rap and hip hop but also to traditional artforms of the largely non-English speaking background communities it works with. This aligns exactly with Don Mamouney’s need to gain intimate knowledge of the target audience and again, involves a process of constant questioning, sometimes motivated by crisis -survival mentality but nonetheless results in a propagation and growth of a shared vision. And often the creation of new hybrid forms. Always as a result of an ongoing and rigorous analysis.

The second-generation factor has another interesting manifestation at UTP. The current Artistic Director John Bayliss was co-founder and long term member of Sydney Front the ground breaking Contemporary Performance Company established in 1986. The shared vision of that company, inspired by Grotowski was identified by a group directorial process, which created a laboratory environment. Such an approach in which analysis and reflection are pivotal to the methodology has been carried over to UTP.

Implicit in this process is the notion that all learn directly from each others’ expertise an example of the benefits of a reflective, analytical practice. The contexts are fundamentally different however certain aspects of directorial and managerial style have found a new home; the shared vision remains. An example of how the constant questioning further benefits the work was cited by John Bayliss when referring to the post show evaluation of “Speed ST” Dec 1998. The company discovered while attempting to assess categories for “ideal levels of community involvement”15 that Speed St. while attracting critical acclaim and a high level of community curiosity tended to “impose the company’s Good Idea onto the community”.16 The ramifications of this analysis were implemented into the planning and development of their next project in Bankstown.

13 Reid M, 1997 Not A Puppet: Stories from the frontier of Community Cultural Development. Australia Council p51. 14 Ibid p51 15 Interview with author April 13 1999. 16 Ibid

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In another manifestation the “shared vision” resulting from constant questioning can be found at Circus Oz. Certainly Australia’s most successful non-mainstream theatre company, Circus Oz founding member Tim Coldwell claims that “if the vision is sound, the product will follow”.17 The founding vision of “A belief that to address major sociopolitical issues in a popular theatre form could be entertaining challenging and sustaining as a career path”.18

Circus Oz have helped redefine circus in Australia by celebrating difference that they claim is essence of their process and their politics, the two are inseparable. In terms of rigorous analysis their’s is literally a riggers analysis because as Tim Coldwell says “you don’t have to suspend disbelief in our theatre if you fall you get hurt so you better make sure the rig is sound”.19 Theory is not much help if a knot slips or a bolt shears. Tim acknowledges that “much of what appears intentional is in fact almost always the result of differences in ideas in ambitions often -Accidental. There are no rules to anarchy, learn from anything and everything” 20So any theory applied to Circus Oz better be as grounded as the tent pegs have to be.

The new Artistic Director Mike Finch is aware of this having started out at Circus Oz in 1992 as a work experience trainee. Mike is currently analysing and evaluating the philosophy, process and structure of Circus Oz with the aim of codifying, for the first time how all these aspects combine to redefine physical theatre form in Australia. The results of this research and development will be observed with interest as Circus Oz swings. Tumbles and throws itself into the next century. So even this company who for many years have eschewed research, theory and other academic pursuits engages in a constant questioning and re- evaluation of its shared vision.

An aspect of process probably unique to circus is the part that notions of family play in the day to day operations and to some extent the creative process of the companies. Here the second-generation factor referred to above is prominent; shared vision is passed down the generations. I am not suggesting that working circus families are engaged in rigorous analytical reflection in any formal sense in terms of this paper. However, genuine learning is a daily occurrence and this learning shapes the performances, which are created. Constant questioning of techniques and analysis of audience responses impacts directly on the shows as they develop. In Circus the feedback from audiences is personal and immediate enabling performers to ‘self monitor all aspects of the act. By Living together, on the road certain aspects of the family feel of the circus are enjoyed or endured by TIE companies and I guess rock bands and to some extent youth theatres. Group members come to know each other intimately and so develop the ability to “speak the same language”.21 According to Stefo Nantsou, this factor as much as any other is the reason that Zeal process functions so efficiently. They work very quickly in their theatre making usually taking a new show from concept development to preview performance in two weeks.

Audience response analysis also has a different function in most TIE companies. In Zeal’s case they always preview a show in advance of a touring season and often implement changes made by target audience members as well as educational authorities who are their employers. I wonder how this would work in the mainstream? A fascinating, maybe unique application of the second-generation factor is found in Zeal’s process. As a Company with a relatively long

17 Interview with the author April 27 1999. 18 Program Notes circus Oz 1999. 19 Interview with author April 27 1999. 20 Ibid. 21 Interview April 30 1999.

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history (10years) and a fairly small turnover of performers, all of whom remain in contact with the company. Zeal often invited ex members and other long term associates like myself for example, to see shows before they tour or even in mid season. As known and respected peers whose memories of the Zeal process have been internalised these views are welcomed and quite regularly acted upon. Together these two forms of audience response analysis are taken on board by zeal and effect all aspects of their theatre making. This is a little like the corporate memory referred to by Liz Jones earlier.

Neil Cameron often has a team up to 100 professional and volunteer artists working on a single production, making him more entrepreneur and producer than director. There are similarities in Neil’s reflective and analytic practices to those of Zeal and Circus Oz. His is a structured sharing of experiences always held immediately after the performances with all participants .His technique borrowed perhaps unintentionally, from drama therapy and consciousness- raising workshop approaches, is a gentle expression of the highs and lows experienced . What worked? What didn’t? What they would do differently next time and so on. At this stage he doesn’t allow discussion or conversation rather an exchange of statements. This emphasis on the positive immediately following the performance is an important aspect of Neil’s process as he says “nothing is to be gained from making people feel bad”.22

Later the permanent troupe meet and interrogate the entire process and product in detail. Here every one is free to speak their mind with the only rule “that blame not be laid”23. Neil, Cameron claims he learns something new with every project and its not hard to believe, having participated directly in such follow up sessions I have noticed that the learning curve for all involved can be profound. And next time armed with new knowledge his particular artform will move forward, enhanced and challenged. Added to this, practitioners such as Cameron are always reflecting, always searching for new ways to express and are gradually developing a common language to talk about this process.

So what is the link to the academy? What role do we play in the reflective and analytical practices of theatre in Australia?

In the first place most of us would agree with Richard Murphett when he says that “Training is implicit in good theatre so analysis and reflection, as an integral aspect of training, will be continuous and should be rigorous”24

He cites his experience with the Mill Theatre where he was Artistic Director where “Talking and writing about our purposes both social and artistic focussed usually on the questions Are we advancing the art form? and How do we do that?”25

He refers to Barthes heuristic models of reflection as found in “Reflections on Photography” where the act of writing is at the heart of the model. The academy, Murphett argues, has a duty to train such reflective and reflexive practitioners.

Grounded theory and other qualitative research methodologies, which include training in such writing, for example, as the exegesis and ficto critical discourse, must lead to advances in the

22 Interview March 29 1999. 23 Ibid. 24 Interview April 29 1999. 25 Ibid

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art form. We should be introducing concepts and techniques like Dialogic, Inferential, Contextual, Comparative, Interpretive, Eclectic; Hybridity. Above all regardless of how familiar our students become with the jargon, we should be training them in the practice of constant questioning, And I think we are; That’s what is happening at VCA, It's happening at Nepean, it's happening in the Performance studies centres. It certainly happens at Griffith Gold Coast. New qualitative methodologies relevant to the field, in Australia are being encouraged I’m certain by many ADSA members. In this regard since 1992 Alison Richard’s and Bill Dunstone’s committee, who developed ADSA’S position paper on performance as research deserves great credit. Someone now needs to research the extent to which recent graduates of all our institutions have utilised the lessons we have attempted to teach. I’ll bet the ones employed or self-employed even unemployed, in the non-mainstream, are doing it as we speak. The ones in the mainstream I guess don’t need to!

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CAREER TRAJECTORIES: LAUNCHING THEATRE TRAINEES FROM TASMANIA By Peter Hammond

I’m going to speak to you today about The Launceston Federal Country Club Casino Theatrical Development Award. I’m glad that’s out of the way. Centre Stage Theatre Company conducts a unique apprenticeship system that has launched several successful theatre careers during its 10 years of operation. Centre Stage has an autonomous Board but is administered from the Centre for Performing Arts at the University of Tasmania in Launceston. It is in the fortunate position of having the local casino provide the basic salary for an awardee, while the university covers the on costs. Support from the casino is not entirely altruistic as they receive considerable media exposure for their generosity. The chosen person and is offered the financial stability to work in a variety of theatre-related capacities for 12 months while consolidating their craft.

This paper focuses on the way the Awardee’s occupational-identity changes while with the Centre. The corollary being, how this experience also provides the bridge between undergraduate studies and the profession. For it is the change in perception of identity, that gives each awardee the fuel for their successful career trajectories. Sharon Mast, in her book: Stages of Identity: A Study of Actors, details occupational identity as: ‘a process of socialisation… [when] the individual comes to adopt those skills and values which indicate appropriate role performance.’ It is this perception of identity that plays an essential role in the success (or otherwise) of the awardee.

With each of the awardees, I conducted a two-hour end of year interview, which resulted in five case studies. This qualitative research used the same set of questions but stressed the conversational aspect and encouraged the interviewee’s to elaborate in their own terms. Lengthy interviewing gives each respondent the opportunity to subjectively structure their own reality and interpretation of their experience. This sort of epistemological study is also a useful framework for examining the Centre Stage organisation. The interview questions revolved around the classifications of actor identity in Brian Bates’ The Way of the Actor. Using a series of metaphors, the actors were asked to identify which statement most accurately describes their perception of self as performer. The metaphors are: Which statement(s) most accurately describes your perception of self as performer? A guardian of wisdom, such as shaman or mystic. A person with the ability to transform themselves in public performance from their normal self into somebody or something else. A god or animal, ancient ancestor or representation of a spirit. A person on a path of self-discovery. A person seeking refuge from themselves in the different personas of their roles. A person who uses acting as a method of healing self. A person who acts as it essentially gives sustenance for one’s narcissism. A person who acts because of a love of fantasy worlds. A person who acts for reinforcement that you do not find elsewhere. An Enquirer ever seeking concentrated truths. An intuitive creative psychologist. A person seeking approval and applause.

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The one who brings life to the script and brings the script to life. Any other description you may prefer? (Brian Bates: The Way of the Actor.) I called upon these transcripts for the observations made in this paper but I will use pseudonyms when referring to each interviewee. The success of the apprenticeship scheme is evident through those who have gone before. Their continuity of employment (or self- employment) hinges on their ability to form a strong and unique occupational identity. A career path proving successful due to its chameleon-like qualities in recreating itself. Before giving detail of how the awardee’s occupational-identity changes, I’ll offer some background as to the requirements of the job.

So, how is this awardee selected? Centre Stage Artistic Director commences selection during third year of the Bachelor of Performing Arts (although once the awardee was selected from a prior year group) and is based on several criteria:

 The primary criteria being Performance ability, as they are usually cast in 2 or 3 main- stage productions per year;  Combined organisational and aesthetic skills;  Academic achievement during the previous 3 years;  A capacity for self-evaluation, which facilitates work in the non-supervised areas of the drama department,  In addition, most importantly, the potential for developing a sustained career path.

During their employment with the Centre, they are encouraged to undertake a variety of roles, all of which feed in to their perception of occupational identity. While consolidating work methods and broadening their skills base, they begin to see themselves as professionals. They have opportunities to work:

 As performer - with productions cast around the awardee’s abilities and potential. They are all given performance challenges it is believed they can all achieve. The cast compliment is usually an imported professional, actors from the local community or graduates who have remained in the state. Therefore, their exposure to more experienced or senior actors can be substantial,  As director - with fully fledged director’s responsibilities (although this is not a foreign role as 3rd year students are all required to assume complete responsibility for production of a one-act play. But for the first time, this young director would have the entire department’s resources at their disposal),  As Assistant Director to a Centre Stage director, which is a Master-apprentice relationship,  As public relations figurehead, responsible for the publicity and marketing of the Centre Stage season,  As FOH manager (when not working directly on a production.),  As adviser for undergraduate rehearsals: offering aesthetic judgements,  As an audience of one, when invited to closed Dress Runs,  In addition, occasionally as Theatre Reviewer for local magazines and radio arts programs.  All these roles and associated tasks equip the awardees with a broad range of vocational and multifaceted survival skills. Employability increases beyond the year of reliable income.

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Today they are working as performers, writers, video documentary makers, theatre administrators and several have gone on to further theatre studies in Australia or overseas. It is in the undergraduate years that Occupational-identity begins to form, and continues to be modified throughout a worker’s career, for it does not cease with formal training. Student’s values and interests are acutely modified as they become absorbed in the subcultural identity of the drama school. According to Sharon Mast: ‘… the symbolic process of reality and identity construction is nowhere as evident as in the case of the dramatic student actor… The drama school (as an organisation), modify their members’ self-identities… The institutional culture of the drama department imparts its worldview (or system of meanings) to undergraduates. Subscribing to that culture influences both self-identity and action choices.’

As an awareness of identity and one’s relationship to the occupation begins to flower in first year, students view the awardee as one who stands apart and is granted special privileges. They frequently take morning warm-up sessions or assist in rehearsal. In this associate lecturer role, the awardee is sometimes viewed as less than the artist-in-residence and more as a taskmaster is. The more the first years understand the individual, and the departmental culture, the more they defer to the position as one that carries elevated status.

Second year students view the new recipient as one with special performance powers as they now realise that this person, they used to see socially as a senior student, is granted opportunities to work along side imported actors. The awardee is now seen as one who has moved outside the student body. They also begin to realise the gamut of other tasks associated with the position. They start to see the job. The identification is no longer as student but rather as one who has moved over into the role of the employed. Viewed as someone special, they are elevated to untouchable status, or as an object of envy. But the role carries many work- related demands and it is more than just a case of them being able to play the ‘star’, as the working day rarely ceases with rehearsal. As with staff, the usual administrative duties need addressing. (Due to administrative complications, the apprentice is employed as an Associate Lecturer.)

Mid-course most students begin to recognise the opportunities offered the awardee. They also recognise the hefty responsibilities the person is forced to carry. The awardee’s status amongst the first and second years may fluctuate but as the more experienced students begin to look to the uncertainties of life beyond study, for many, the apprenticeship becomes desirable. The awardee is elevated to a point of envy. For the awardee, this can cause repercussions of alienation. When asked how being centre of attention has affected them, the awardees invariably responded positively. Of course, they loved it. Why not? Nevertheless, all were affected by criticism, both negative and positive, that came with being centre of attention. The implicit resentment contained in the jibe: ‘… aren’t we good enough for you anymore’, was remembered because John felt an insecurity of identity. Moving from graduate to employee was a position between two worlds. He said: ‘it was a bit isolating - like being caught between. You’re no longer a student but you’re not quite a lecturer – neither student nor staff’. The recipients felt they needed to prove themselves, to show their metal, before they would have the necessary distancing to be unaffected by negative comments. These damaging wisecracks reveal more about the undergraduates limited understanding of the job requirements, than a genuine mistrust. However, the comment also implies a perceived change of identity of a person who, only a few months earlier, was perceived as colleague and held position within the group identity.

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This change in status puts at risk the previously known self: the stability of being part of the student body. Any attention accorded the ‘favoured’ student is necessarily status enhancing, as irrespective of their attitude towards the awardee; the majority of undergraduates attend their performances.

In third year, when moving towards completion of their course, there is always considerable speculation as to who will be selected. Graduands become filled with worry and self-doubt concerning imminent employment/unemployment. As most theatre educators would agree, hopes and desires at the completion of their degree are invariably at odds with the realities of professional opportunities.

Many graduates conscientiously and religiously maintain the occupational identity of ‘actor’ for many years despite the sparsity of employment. For the awardee, however, instead of becoming ‘lodged’ or committed to linear paths of career action, the graduates identify with (in Sharon Mast’s terminology) a ‘free-floating’ or potentially changeable pattern of employment opportunities. The awardees now see themselves performing in essentially the same roles as other theatre workers and actively engaged in contributing to a broad range of work-related activities. Occupational identity of theatre worker is affirmed as the awardee identifies with belonging to a profession. As Julia said: ‘I think the biggest thing I learned from Centre Stage, is that this is a medium that can reach people. For me the industry has been demystified.’

The change in status from student to colleague; from graduate to employee, can be demanding of the awardee.

The undergraduate invariably has so many course demands that socialising with non-school friends becomes a rarity and consequently the broader community is frequently seen as an alien world. For the awardee however, interaction with the broader community, on many levels and in differing capacities, facilitates a more gregarious social identity. For the first time in some years, the favoured one begins to include extensive social contact with non- students. This involves a resocialisation not only of professional network but also of the student’s fundamental values. John was excited to find that: ‘on an external, social, level people wanted to discuss my performances and how rehearsals are going. It was a lot easier, I must admit, to go to Theatre North functions and talk to people there than talk to people within the University – they just didn’t want to talk.’ (Theatre North is the local entrepreneurial company).

This resocialisation process begins early in the year with a grand launch at the casino (which Joanne called ‘a bit of a smoochee breakfast while being on TV’). Here the newly appointed is inundated with media attention and this begins a whirlwind of personal and public demands. Their perceived social status within the broader community is elevated. They now have access to essential personnel within the Tasmanian theatre network. For a year the awardee is a VIP, albeit within a remote geographical (and artistic?) context where TV and print media coverage is easier to come by than in a larger city. However, the degree of community scrutiny is also problematic. All interviewees had difficulty being the centre of attention. All commented similarly to Joanne, who said: ‘Everyone’s watching. Suddenly I had a new persona plonked on me, and a title and I didn’t feel like that. I couldn’t cope with

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that.’ John added: ‘it really felt like the whole world is watching you, wondering; are going to bow under pressure and become a nervous wreck?’

The biggest gain, for most of the awardees, is the boost to personal confidence. Confidence enhances professional competence. Joanne stated ‘you come away with quite a boost in confidence. And it’s on-going, isn’t it? You learn all these skills as a student. Then you are chosen, recognised and people want to work with you. I mean after that you are really left with this feeling of YES! You know: right, I can get on with creating my career.’

The change in awardee’s self-perception correspondingly changes the staff’s perception of the awardee; according to what capacity they are serving. Generally, there is an assumed quantum leap in their knowledge. Several interviewees commented similarly, but Joanne summed it up with ‘there is a presumption that I, all of a sudden, knew everything and was left to my own devices’. Referring to this oversight Julia said: ‘It is just that after you have been a student, and you are being really instructed, then all of a sudden you don’t get any more instruction. You are expected to know. One minute a student, the next you’re expected to be a professional.’

This dilemma is continuously addressed through the degree of supervision. However, the degree to which various directors can relinquish control obviously varies.

Within the year, the awardee would experience working alongside at least three directors who have different work methods. Most directors are at odds as to what degree of power sharing will occur within any production. Some directors are inclined to share authentic decision- making with the company. The reverse is also true; in that, individuals differ in the quantity and limitations of power they wish to be given by the director. John stated that one director offered: ‘more [of] an external exploration with my character… an external visual director… while the other [director] was… after the deeper psychological aspect - probing the deeper positions, thoughts and feelings of the characters.’ Some directors tell, others suggest alternatives, while others work through a questioning approach. Irrespective of directorial strategies, the exposure to such a variety of directing methodologies, within the power-sharing continuum, prepares the participant for the flexibility of working processes required in employment contexts.

For one awardee however, the lack of a cohesive approach in directorial methods was a major source of discontentment for her year with the Centre. Julia admitted that her individual and perhaps rigid approach to her roles resulted in an undoubted confusion in working methods. She said: ‘…it frightened me. I didn’t really want to adapt, I tried to [stay with] the same kind of thinking that would work for me. I was so used to doing things one way and then it just got to the point where I lost my way of doing things.’

Frameworks of supervision can also vary from year to year. Some appointees received job descriptions commensurate with a novice while for others it is assumed they will pick it up as they go along. In interview, most were critical about the lack of feedback in general: on their dramatic roles and on their management skills.

As Centre Stage only produce small cast projects the awardee is invariably thrown in with only a few actors, all of whom would have considerably more experience. The learning in the rehearsal room is perceived as being accelerated through association and direct tutoring from the experienced and frequently senior actors. Centre Stage have a policy of not using

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undergraduates. Increased interdependence of actors in a small cast develops valuable skills. For Joanne the learning from another cast member was of paramount importance. She said: ‘there was absolute risk on stage... The ability to keep in one’s mind what you did in rehearsal but take it to another level between actors [during performance]. The risk you share in moments together, in understandings or connecting and that was the most memorable thing of my year actually.’ It is this form of profound interplay, which Sharon Mast identifies as: ‘the important component in the construction of self-identity and social reality.’ It is how the trainee interprets these intense occupational situations that Sharon Mast believes directs an individual’s assessment of [career] goals and choice of goal-directed behaviour. For all interviewees these forms of performance interplay were an important occasions.

After three years of basic training and then a year of intense consolidation, four out of five interviewees stated that the experience was very beneficial and positive. However, for the fifth participant, Julie, the year was personally disastrous.

After several privileged and well-resourced productions, she confessed that: ‘Every character I’ve portrayed this year has been a home breaker’. Her prescribed objective roles, the character roles, were possibly confused with her personal, subjective roles. Her self-image diminished to a point where personal confidence and identity were under threat by the types of roles she was required to play. After a year of being unhappy and introspective, Julie admitting that: ‘I didn’t really listen to what anybody was teaching me. So then suddenly I’ve got to a classroom or to take a rehearsal and, A: I wasn’t really sure of the way I worked myself, and B: I’ve never really listened, so I thought what am I doing here? You know, I thought that this was a bit of a shame. I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s more detrimental to the students, than anything.’ This loss of perceived competence was in contrast to her behaviour as undergraduate. For three years, Julie presented an identity commensurate with all the required criteria for success.

Julie’s unhappy situation resulted from a loss of contact with her occupational-identity. Through this loss, there was a diminution of personal identity. What remained was a feeling of lack of control over her life.

Although there has been this one qualifying unhappy awardee the remainder have moved on to take their rightful part in the Australian theatre industry. Their multifaceted work regime is a solid grounding from which they propel into a potentially liberated work-life.

The benefits gained by the awardees, the university and the community, which it serves, have been tested over the years. Through the multiplicity of duties undertaken by the awardees, the Centre can maintain a consistent yearly repertoire. The University gains focus and status from the community and the awardees have a solid foundation upon which they can draw in the future. The enhancement of personal confidence, social status, flexibility of working processes, and the heightened perception of career possibilities, all serve to strengthen their occupational identity as theatre workers.

Jenny finished her year with the reflection that: ‘it felt more comfortable working with professionals, in some ways. It felt more like work, compared with student productions. Students come in so many forms. Lazy ones, intent ones. Students also bring vitality and a willingness to try all sorts of things. But when you work with professionals, they are generally people who really want to work in the industry. There’s a lot less bullshit. It felt like, thank goodness, this is where I want to be’.

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The aspiration to perform maybe the initial career goal of the awardee but once ensconced the doors of opportunity open to invite exploration of alternative theatre-related enterprises. Jenny realised that: ‘ I can now travel and use my craft as a means of working overseas. Whereas that had never entered my head before.’ Indeed, after working at the Edinburgh Festival, Jenny wrote and staged a one-woman show based on her experiences as a single woman travelling through Europe. Joanne, however, realised that: ‘working as an artist changes your life in terms of how you relate to people. You are somebody who passes knowledge on, in a deeper sense, to other people.’

As Hippocrates said: ‘The life so short, the craft so long to learn’.

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CAREERING INTO COMEDY: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF INDUSTRY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PERFORMANCE CAREER By Barbara Joseph

By way of introduction I would like to reiterate the opening statement of my abstract and suggest that standup comedy is a performance form that doesn't fit comfortably in 'theatre' or 'industry', and in some ways sits uneasily within the parameters of this particular conference. For a standup comedian there is no formal training available, nor any recognized place to practice the craft. The comedian's apprenticeship is self-created and their art refined with little or no mentorship of any kind. Nevertheless an industry is developing around standup comedy, and at the same time the academy is offering opportunities to study standup within the parameters of performance studies. Since their inception across the last twenty years, comedy studies have tended to focus on literary, psychological, or philosophical readings. Comedy has been employed in support of arguments of culture, race, and gender politics, of postmodernism and theoretical debate, rather than the performance form itself being the subject of focussed and detailed study.1 At this point in time as industry takes a more prominent role within the Arts and Culture of Western society, examination of the role of industry within this populist form deserves exploration.

Comedy as 'industry' is an area where Arts funding has typically been unavailable. While small theatre companies disappear from our cultural landscape and larger organizations are financially squeezed, the comedy rooms continue to draw audiences and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival increases its box office every year. The term 'industry' as it has been applied during this conference is not that of the world of comedy. Comedy rooms and promoters have largely worked independently of funding bodies and have built up business through the promotion of comedy and comedians across radio and television networks, including free-to-air, cable, and community stations.

The paths to a comedy career are as various as the comedians taking them. In Melbourne there are a number of small comedy rooms, usually in the back bar of a pub in the inner urban area, where try-outs (or open mic nights, or amateur nights, call them what you will) are run. Most often the comedian gets their start in this environment and the process is similar in other parts of the world - London, New York and points in-between. If the devastating effect of a lukewarm response to their first-ever gig isn't enough to give them second thoughts, they will return to these venues and continue to work for nothing in front of a sometimes merciful, sometimes heartless crowd until the next step in the process. This involves collation of the best 'bits' from their tryout sessions to develop a strong set routine of at least fifteen minutes of material. Then follows the move from amateur to 'Professional' - in the sense of being paid for the work. Payment in the early stages is often barely enough to cover travel and expenses.

1 A number of titles have examined standup comedy in disciplines other than performance studies including: Auslander, Philip “Comedy about the Failure of Comedy: Stamd-up Comedy and Postmodernism” in Janelle Reinhelt and Joseph Roach (eds) Critical Theory and Performance Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992, 20 1, Koziski, Stephanie “The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist: intentioanal Culture Critic” Journal of Popular Culture 18.2, Fall 1984; Schulman, Norma “The House that Black Built”, Journal of Popular Film and Television 22.3, Fall 1994; Pershing Linda, “There’s a Joker in the Menstral Hut: A Performance Analysis of Comedian Kate Clinton”.

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Given enough time on the circuit (and this element is not to be underestimated), this fifteen minute set can then be transported from room to room as the comic works their way up from opener, to second bracket, to third bracket, to MC, all the while developing their style as a performer, adding to their material, and learning on-the job how to work an audience.

Because the Australian live comedy circuit is relatively small in a localized sense, and very large in a geographic sense, other media need to be considered by the performer in order to expand career opportunities. All comics on the circuit are aware that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is routinely strip-mined by Artist Services, Token Productions, Foster Gracie and numerous other producers and production houses who are searching for their next meal ticket, many geared towards producing a television 'product'. We all know how notoriously conservative television is and yet it consistently pursues performers and a performance style that is popularly (though not always accurately) considered the most anarchic, daring and dangerous.

To facilitate the transition from live gigs on the local circuit into television or radio, industry will often record live performances at the venues. Yet the presence of cameras or radio recording facilities in the live venue, places the performer under pressure to mediate their performance for the agent, producer or industry person who may be watching. Often the industry issues direct instructions to performers to keep their material clean (no swearing) and to be mindful of the wider audience. This places unfair and unrealistic pressure on the performer, who in the first instance is contracted to provide a show for the (present) paying audience. The implication is that for shot at a ‘real' career in comedy, they must accommodate the unseen audience, the extra viewer.

What exactly is there for the academic to study about live performance when it is being delivered with a view to becoming a mediated performance? And firstly, what do I mean by mediation?

On the theoretical plane we encounter the Derridean mediation of speech, the philosophical concept that says all iteration and speech is mediated by the body, there is no 'pure moment' of exchange possible.2 A useful notion, however one that catapults us through a number of other possible stages rather too suddenly.

At the performative level, the comedian is conscious of the performance at all times, and indeed must remain so to be any good at it. They cannot lose themselves in an emotional, historical, 'elsewhere' moment in the way of an actor working with a script. The performance event for the comedian is the moment, completely in the present, of interaction with that particular live audience, in that particular room, on that particular night. Naturally they are trying to recreate something like a performance they have given before, but rarely are the dynamics similar enough to claim any definitive re-creation. Their 'script' (spoken words, 'material') may be the same, their gestures may be the same, but the relationship between audience and performer, a specific and integral part of each and every performance, has a different dynamic at every performance. Unable to hide behind any semblance of a fourth wall, the comedian must learn their audience over, every performance of every night.

2 Copeland, Roger “The Presence of Meditation”, The Drama Review 34.4 (T128), Winter 1990, 29.

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Part of the process of setting up the performance involves the performer being not only conscious, but acutely aware of who is in the room, that is, the live audience, producer or agent up the back, the video or television camera off to one side, or a radio recording being made in the back comer. It is a foolhardy comedian who leaps up on stage without any idea of who is in the room.

The audience, however that may be constituted, is as much a part of the performance at standup comedy shows as the performer. It is common to hear comedians talking after a gig about the audience and how well or poorly they played their part. An informal discussion with Melbourne comedians highlighted the importance of building the audience/performer dynamic afresh for each and every show. They mentioned their concerns over a city comedy club offering a lower rate for a second show in 's smaller room if the comic has already performed in the main room on the same night. The venue management's argument is that as employers they have already met the Equity minimum for the evening and should be able to extract the relative number of hour's performance out of the comedian. The problem with this argument, as the comedian's point out, is that the performer is not presenting to the same audience, but instead must learn the other room over as they would for any new performance. Rather than repeating a performance, they are remaking the performance.

During a show the performer mediates on a physical, visceral level, constantly monitoring the performance as they are developing it: physically, gesturally, and vocally. There may be a script of some kind, but allowance is made, and must be made, for improvisation, for response to audience members, be they hecklers or supporters, or for unexpected events associated with the venue. This level of mediation is refined through experience with a live audience. I once watched a comedian persist with his act while the entire audience was distracted by a fluorescent light which had fallen from the ceiling onto the pool table, fortuitously right on his punchline. But inexperience and nerves caused him to let a fantastic comic opportunity go to waste. A more seasoned and confident performer would have undoubtedly incorporated this event into the performance, however briefly.

Then of course there is the electronic mediation of the performance - the recording made for radio or television, the brass ring of a comedy career. A vitally important part of the performance consists of the abovementioned (and sometimes invisible) dialogue with the audience, which is virtually impossible to reconstruct on radio and television. Even the importation of a 'live' studio audience or the 'live in the studio' interview is a misrepresentation of 'liveness'. A performance intended for television audience can never be truly 'live' as has been well theorized elsewhere.

The studio audience brought into the sound stage is there to prompt the performer into delivering a performance big enough to carry past them and through the camera into our lounge rooms. But with the number of technological considerations to be taken into account, the spontaneity, the improvisation, the energy is not only missing from the performance, but couldn't be transmitted if it were there. The effect of the change of media alters the performance not only through a falsely constructed audience/performer dynamic, but also through its effects on the performer themselves.

'Working the room' for a televised performance requires a different set of performance skills. Television performance is bound by strict time limits, by camera angles, by ad breaks and myriad technical issues.

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The comedian is usually told where to stand and the spot is marked on the studio floor with tape. There is approximatelv twentv to thirty feet from the performer to the audience, between the two are a bank of cameras and several crew members, who may or may not be interested in the performance, but are more likely to be concerned with doing their job. Off to one side is the 'host' if the comic is on a variety-style show who also may or may not be interested in the performance. The instructions are to wait for the introduction, walk out to the spot marked, look down the barrel of the camera but don't ignore the studio audience, get straight into the routine and not to run over time. There is no opportunity to establish a rapport with the audience, to sketch out the comic persona and work towards the best material. The audience the performance is intended for are not the people in the studio seated twenty feet away, but 'the folks at home' who may have ducked out to make a cup of tea at the ad break.

Comments from comedians who performed on the ABC series The Smallest Room in the House suggest it was a difficult performance environment. The painted backdrop on the set implied a large audience, but in actual fact there were usually, at most, a dozen or so people present in the studio. To perform at their best the comics were required to 'act' as though they were in a large, live comedy venue.

Lano & Woodley have recently completed a second series of their sketch show for the ABC. Their style of slapstick and buffoonery works well in a large room and many of their best comic routines have grown out of stage moments where the performance was pushed further each night. To transfer this to camera was a complex transition. Their unique mayhem had to be contained within the frame of the camera lens with the high energy driving the performance maintained for several takes. While Lano & Woodley thoroughly rehearse their sketches and routines, the ABC saw fit to bring director Bob Spiers3 out from England to work with the pair and ensure the success of the transition from stage to small screen.

Russell Gilbert had trouble with the television medium when he first went to air in the Russell Gilbert show on Channel Nine. A dynamic live performer who has an extraordinary ability to 'work a room' and construct a strong audience/performer relationship, Gilbert took some weeks to learn to shift the focus of his performance during his opening act from the studio audience onto the camera.

This highlights some of the effects of an industry that is based in a different medium and may present a gloomy view of the effects on live performance, but is it necessarily all one-way traffic? One positive effect of the developing industry in Australia, which has been expanding since the 1980's, is that there is more comedy happening in more places than before. A less desirable effect is that much of what is being done is being tailored towards a specific goal - a television or radio executive rather than a live audience, and consequently live performance is suffering. Performance risks are being avoided, performers are inhibited by the intrusion of electronic media at their gigs,4 and the range of acceptable performance styles has been reduced to a narrow set of possibilities. It has become more and more difficult for performers to experiment in front of a live audience as audience expectations are shaped by television images, and performers and industry respond to those expectations when producing and making comedy. Given the relatively small and widely dispersed population of Australia, the developing comedy industry must, for purely practical reasons, encompass all forms of media. It is

3 Bob Spiers is a British Television comedy director whose credits include, among a number of other successes, Absolutely Fabulous, and French and Saunders. 4 Scott-Norman, Fiona, “Carrying on the Funny Business” The Age Saturday 8 May 1999 p16.

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However there is hope on the horizon. As if to prove there is more to industry than five minute spots on In Melbourne Tonight, a travelling comedy show, Road Show, was developed out of this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival in which a number of standup comedians took their festival shows on tour around country Australia.

It is worth mentioning that although this sounds like a worthy 'industry' initiative, it should be noted that this event was sponsored by Playing Australia, a Federal Government arts program, in conjunction with the Victorian Arts Council5 and that the 'industry' to which this paper refers did not play a major part in its development.

The effects of these various 'mediations' of performer and industry, while impacting, do not negate the study of standup comedy as live performance. There are a number of areas that can be broken down for closer examination. The academy has thus far tended to focus primarily on psychological, philosophical, and anthropological studies of comedy, using it in support of argument outside of performance studies. But I would suggest that there are some useful categories available that warrant further investigation.

The performance As with all performance studies there is the difficulty of deciding which performance to examine. Do we concentrate one performance in minute detail, or look across a spectrum of performances, each unique in time, place and audience dynamic in a way that differs from more traditionally understood theatre practice? While theatre generally, though not by any means always, is performed in the same venue for a period of time, with a similar set of events leading up to each evening's performance, standup comedy is a highly volatile performance mode. Tonight the comic is on the bill at the Star and Garter Hotel in South Melbourne with twelve other performers. There is a private function being held at the same time, and the publican wants to encourage these punters back into his venue, so he's offered them discount prices to the comedy show. Tomorrow its out to Upwey Football Club annual fundraiser to perform with two other comics and the MC is a mate of the guy who organized the gig (he may or may not be any good at it). Next month is the premier of the show the comedian is planning to put into the comedy festival. If successful the festival show will run for a season of three weeks and will hopefully be seen by producers, publicists and someone from Artist Services. Out of these diverse options it is clear that the study of any one performance is surrounded with complex issues of context. And ought we, for the purposes of examination, consider television performance as 'live'?

The performer If we are to focus on the performer, what exactly are we studying? Are we interested in who they are as a person? Are we interested in their personal life, in what brought them into comedy, in how much their material is based on their 'real life' experiences? Do we follow them around noting their every move, their moments of 'unfunniness', watch how they do the shopping and create comedy

5 Ibid, 16.

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material from everyday events? Does study of the performer constitute a type of voyeurism, celebrity worship, where the self has become the performance and that is what is offered up for public examination? Or do we, like unauthorized biographers, root around asking questions of those who would be famous by association, only too happy to answer them for the chance to be quoted in a Ph.D. thesis (thereby gaining the appearance of intellectual credibility as well as reflected glory)? There are a number of obvious risks in pursuing this methodology and to examine the performer in isolation from the performance leans towards a psychological examination.

The persona In my previous ADSA paper ('Gendered Comedy: "You're Standing in It", ADSA 1998) outlined the idea of the comic persona as a distinct performance tool that comedians develop in the process of becoming comedy performers. The persona is neither the 'self of the performer nor mask of character as an actor might wear, but sits somewhere in between, an aspect of the performer, enlarged and refined for public consumption. My suggestion then and now, is that the development of the persona is constrained by the physical body of the performer, with other influencing factors impacting, such as personality, temperament, speech patterns, accent, etc. To study this aspect alone in the examination of comedy as a performance, while useful in degree, limits the discussion to the characteristics of the individual comedian, and leads the academic towards theoretical considerations of the body as cultural symbol. Which tells us a lot about culture, but not much about comedy or the performance of comedy.

The material Analysis of the content of the performance very quickly begins to look like a literary analysis, or even a psychological profile of the writer. Jokes and routines can be examined in fine detail and the patterns analyzed for structure, rhythm and 'humour content' (a rather nebulous term). As comedians, in Australia at least, tend to write their own material, it could be suggested that along with the development of the persona outlined, a comedian's material is closely aligned with their particular world view. Again, the study of the material in isolation may lead the academic to categorization of joke structure, and analysis of linguistic patterns effective in comedy, or notions of the psychological makeup of comedians, but misses the performance as an event in itself.

The social or cultural environment the performer works in Like the range of performances and venues offered above suggest, the social or cultural environment a performer works in shapes the material, the persona, and the performance. To illustrate with what we may consider an extreme example, Peter Saleh, an Egyptian comedian resident in Sydney, straddles the border between a traditional Muslim culture and an Australian upbringing. In Geoff Bartlett's recent publication, Comedians in the Mist, he tells of a performance he was talked into giving for the Australian-Arabic Doctors' Association where for the first 20 minutes had the audience in the palm of his hand.

They identified with and enjoyed the cultural references he was making (he had just returned from a trip to Egypt), but in the last minutes he made a joke about the President, Hosni Mubarak, which brought stunned silence, followed by outrage, and an audience walkout.6

6 Peter Saleh’s joke went along the lines of “The Thing you notice in Egypt are these huge photos of the President, Hosni Mubarak… He may be a politician, but lets face it he’s no make model”. See Geoff Bartlett’s interview in Bartlett, Geoff Comedians in the Mist: The Serious Business of Being Funny in Australia Sydney: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999 pp173- 81.

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Saleh is no doubt grateful he was in Australia when he said it, as the response to a top Egyptian comic who made a minor sexual innuendo during a performance in Egypt was arrest and a year in jail. As Saleh says, "When you "die" [a comedic death] in Saudi Arabia, they carry you off in pieces".7

A more local distinction would perhaps be that of the corporate comedian who will tailor a performance to suit the intended audience, very conscious of the fact that the hirer is paying for a product and expects a return on their investment. Campbell McComas will work for up to four months researching a character and an organization in preparation for a corporate comedy performance, and his constant employment and over-full diary suggest this is a particularly effective way to approach the work.

The comic style Are there discrete 'styles' within standup comedy or are the theatrical categorisations of slapstick, standup, character piece, skit, musical parody and so forth, a legacy of the vaudeville era, the only tools for classification we have available? Well so far I haven't uncovered a catalogue of variations within standup in particular, and while not impossible, it may be difficult to do. If, as I suggest, the persona is a primary performance tool, then it is likely that the performance styles are as various as the personas presenting them. That is not to suggest that this might not be an area for future investigation. Whereas once the vaudeville bill had on it a number of acts of varying kinds, as did the television variety shows that followed, today's standup circuit seems somewhat impoverished by the lack of variation in comic styles.

Conclusion However we conceive of a comedy industry, or of the study of comedy within the Academy, it is nonetheless important that the supremacy of the solo performer in the spotlight with the microphone, taking control of the audience and driving the performance, be examined as a cultural manifestation beyond that of, for example, a 'masculinist tradition' with Cixous' female 'speaking subject' challenging culturally dominant images by taking her place in the spotlight. It may be possible to make finer distinctions in the study of the performance itself, and tease out new theoretical territory.

Rather than standup, comedy being used to support arguments of anthropology, feminism, postmodernism, social interaction, political minorities, psychology, et al., it might be possible to move toward theories of performance that have a more direct relationship to the performance form itself. Rather than the academic being restricted to overlaying cultural, literary, or performance criticism from some other source, approaching comedy through performance studies may present the possibility of examining the performance form as a discrete area of study; no longer a subset of popular culture, but a form as dynamic and relevant as dance, circus, or theatre.

7 Peter Saleh in Bartlett, Geoff Comedians in the Mist: The Funny Business of Being Funny in Australia Sydney: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999 p177.

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THE ETHICAL POLICE ... CLASSIFYING ARTISTIC PRACTICE UNDER HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION By Debra MacAuslane

By the simple act of inviting theatre audiences into my performance as research experiments, I would like to say from the beginning that I have full acceptance that my artistic practice comes under the scrutiny of a university research ethics committee. The research, which I will talk about later, was finally approved by an ethics committee in 1998, and I was commended by them for tackling what is considered to be a difficult research area. Within this paper, I’m going to tell you about my experience and fall out as a result of negotiating with an ethics committee, but more importantly, I will be asking you to consider what implications lay ahead for the artist as researcher. First, allow me to indulge you in a short parable.

Does anyone remember Gene Autry? Gene was an honest man who lived by a code. He played cowboys in Hollywood fictions and captured the spirit of doing good by his fellow man, so much so that the name Gene Autry has became synonymous with how America liked and probably still likes to perceive itself.

Take a look at the ethics of Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code (which appeared in a 1998 edition of Sky magazine, an in-flight publication put out by the American air carrier Delta Airlines. As you can see, Gene shoots straight from the hip.

 The cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.  He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.  He must always tell the truth.  He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.  He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.  He must help people in distress.  He must be a good worker.  He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits.  He must respect women, parents, and his nation’s laws.  The Cowboy is a patriot.

Now I’m not about to argue with Gene Autry but if we can draw a simple analogy to the principles behind Gene’s Cowboy code, we can see that behind every research which deals with living, sentient beings, a foundation of ethical practice and conduct is an obligation.

But how far can we stretch this expectation of adhering strictly to codes of ethical practice within the fluid and evolving environment of performance making? Is this really possible?

Gene Autry operates in cowboy fictions in which his cowboy code is framed conveniently within a parable for morality and allows Gene to win every time before riding proudly into the sunset.

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However, what would happen if we put Gene Autry and his cowboy code into another fiction like the first scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where real life in the 90’s is heightened but where the darker details of life are more grittily exposed? How would Mr Autry deal first up with desperate characters like Honey Bunny and Pumpkin and their particular blend of social strata and childhood issues?

The burning question is: how can anyone stick so close to a strict code of ethics in the face of an unknown reality (the full psychological and emotional profile of Honey Bunny and Pumpkin) and indeed a very uncertain future for anyone who may find themselves facing a similar situation.

Yes siree, how would the black and white code of Gene Autry act in such grey circumstances? What number in his code would he draw upon in order to contain the situation?

The challenge of Gene’s cowboy code trying to operate in the absurd, uncertain and unpredictable world of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is a metaphor for the ethical code of practice in which I am obligated to adhere to in my PhD research.

My research into new theatre form deals in a fictional context but one which is uncertain, imilar if you like to the unpredictable nature which courses through Pulp Fiction. In my fiction, however, uncertain and unpredictable possibilities from real life are invited through the theatre audience, who are invited to play themselves within the fiction. And as life rarely lives up to expectations, so it is hard to function precisely within a preordained code of practice, ethical considerations included.

The research, titled F(r)ictional Encounters With Audiences ... Towards a Tribo-Phenomenal Theatre is trying to untangle ways of bringing audiences into the centre of theatre performance and allowing them to disrupt the world of fiction with their own realities.

Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code is for the most part morally and ethically sound but I would like to propose that only in the fictional world can we possibly live up to and follow precisely the moral and ethical structures that we lay down for ourselves. Yes, we can try, but in relation to the unknown and unpredictable world of making artistic practice in a research environment, I wonder to what effect.

I was brought up short in the early months of my PhD research and ordered to meet approval for on-going research from the University Research Ethics Committee here at QUT. It was a process of approval, which lasted six months.

In 1997, I submitted a research proposal to investigate and experiment with theatre form which would place audiences at the centre of performance.

Tribo Phenomenal Theatre or TPT would be developed as an attempt to intensify the audience-performance relationship by making a direct investment in the importance of audiences as valuable contributors and participants within the theatre experience.

The broader potential of TPT, however, remains unknown and this has something to do with the unpredictable nature of interactive form generally. Essentially, I have focussed on the links between audience confrontation and creativity within

130 Industrial Relations the theatrical space. I am exploring what happens when theatre audiences become integral to a performance and like actors undergo physical, bodily experiences of conflict, obstacle and personal challenge.

A working definition of A Tribo-Phenomenal Theatre is thus defined as a friction driven environment, in which audiences can assert their presence and become performers to play out extraordinary experiences within the framework of a fictional model of reality.

Tribo is a technical term and denotes two surfaces rubbing against each other to create friction and phenomenal means as perceptible by the senses or through immediate experience, notable, remarkable; extra-ordinary, exceptional. To a point, the research takes on board Edmund Husserl’s claim as well that phenomena (as created within a TPT event) can be studied subjectively only.

Audience interaction is not a new idea, but more often is avoided by theatre practitioners than practised because of problems relating to audience management. I acknowledged that this was an area of ethical concern, which would be addressed as my research evolved.

However, after reading my research proposal an alarm was raised. A response from the University Research Degrees Committee in August 1997 included an order for me to seek further approval for on-going research from the University Research Ethics Committee. I was promptly sent an Application for Approval to Undertake Research Involving HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION.

(OHP - UREC APPLICATION FORM)

Perhaps it was my use of language to describe a proposed Tribo-Phenomenal Theatre (a place of friction); a practice which would refer to the interactive frameworks of sport and war.

But why the classification ‘HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION’?

A question on the research proposal proforma requires all researchers to declare whether their research involves ‘human experimentation.’ I left mine empty.

At the time, myself, my supervisor and others did not think for one moment that my research would fall within this category. It was simply thought that ‘human experimentation’ was the concern of human research within the Sciences only.

How wrong we were. (OHP - UREC Application Form)

I did not know at the time, but I was a pioneer becoming the first postgraduate researcher in performance studies at QUT to be tested for ethical clearance. I was to be judged against a set of guidelines set down in 1992 by the National Health and Medical Research Council Statement on Human Experimentation and Supplementary Notes. The guidelines are based on a set of proposed international guidelines set down by the World Health Organisation and the Council for International Organisations of Medical Sciences.

Needless to say, at the time I thought my world as a researcher had stopped altogether.

Here is a list of who sits on the ethics committee at QUT (since renamed the University

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Human Research Ethics Committee) as recent as May 1999.

(OHP - list of UHREC members, 1999)

In 1997, not only was I was being considered within the ranks of ‘HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION’ but like a cowboy the said ethics committee were giving me until sundown at the end of the week to submit the application, explain why my research was worthwhile and how I intended to operate within an ethical framework. But the reality was not black and white. There were no simple yes and no questions. And the kind of people asking, as you can see from the list, were not bad guys either.

What followed was six months of paperwork, vetting, double vetting, signatures, submissions, resubmissions and waiting.

The end result, my research was and still remains classified under ‘human experimentation’.

I do acknowledge that a form of ‘human experimentation’ is occurring. And yes, I have questions and goals, but no, I don’t know what impact my experiments potentially will have on unsuspecting theatre audiences.

The ethics application form for human experimentation approval of course does not ask that question directly but it’s how you are expected to answer the question about how you will conduct your research which persuades a direction towards defining and locking down a certain field or level of expectation.

I believe I was hard wired already with a level of self-censorship and a sense of ethical practice before I undertook my research. I don’t recall ever having a guilty conscience about my practice but somehow I think I have developed one.

And never ever did I have aspirations of becoming a Dr Debra Frankenstein, not that the Ethics Committee ever gave me that impression, it’s just that classification of ‘human experimentation’. The effect is subliminal and I would argue from a personal perspective as an arts practitioner it is inhibiting also.

Should we therefore begin by considering the wording of ‘human experimentation’ and the connotations it carries for performance-based research and researchers?

Call me a sensitive artist, but in order to research and develop an artistic practice effectively and with confidence there are questions of an ethical nature which need to be addressed in dealing kindly with researchers as well.

Therefore I have some questions of my own as I try to come to terms with the impact of the ethical police upon my research and myself. Although I can’t say that the experience has been oppressive but nonetheless, it has crept into how my art practice is being shaped.

By this, I mean that I have consciously become a member of the ethical police myself and as a result I’m probably harder on myself now than what the ethics committee ever consciously intended. For example, during 1998, my focus was split because of concerns about building in ethical considerations into my scripts for artistic practice. In trying to reconcile the two areas I went

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through a distinct phase of writer’s block sorting out priorities. The sense of freedom I would normally allow myself as an artist I began to deny.

But I proceeded.

In an effort to be a responsible researcher, I endeavoured to meet a code, an approved plan of practice, which I had helped to set up. And in order to finish my research tenure I proceeded knowing that I would maintain and must ensure that I follow this plan of conduct.

My point is: should we assume that performance-based researchers like myself can function fully as artists under this kind of scrutiny and self-censorship?

I do not have conclusions to offer but I do see this as a problem and propose further research to tackle the issue and define more clearly how ethical considerations and ethical approval are arrived at in performance-based research.

In total, my files reveal about 10 items of correspondence which to date have passed between myself and the University Research Ethics committee. Business includes 12 monthly reports, requests for further clarification of the purpose of research, questions and explanations relating to research methodology, even requests for rewrites of my research participant consent form and participant information package. Heck, they even picked me up on my grammar in one correspondence and so they should. But that also meant holding back approval. It’s a hard life out there on the prairie. Picture it, my first experimental phase scheduled six months in advance, theatre space booked and a cast of actors priming for the occasion. Showdown was only three weeks away! Dr Frankenstein, stop right where you are.

For now, I just want to get on with my research but my conscience always pricks and more acutely since the tag of human experimentation was applied. Again, I believe it is a spectre which affects the way my artistic practice is developing. I’ve spent a great deal of time preparing consent information packages and generally explaining my methodology, which is essential, but an important component of my research towards developing and presenting an exemplary performance practice as part of my thesis. I am not for one moment suggesting that other researchers would be affected in the same way, but personally I am struck often by a conflict of interests. Are other researchers faced with a similar dilemma?

I have proceeded knowing that I helped set up certain ethical guidelines for my own research and I’m still finding it difficult to conflate the two areas of art making and ethical research practice.

I proceed with this arrangement but always knowing that if I want to change guidelines, I have to go back to the University Human Research Ethics Committee and face another process of submission and approval.

Again, it is a niggling factor that in all this I have only myself to blame for the ethical guidelines I now function within.

So what of the final artistic practice in a case like this? My performance as research outcome? What of the quality? Ethical practice considerations are very important to my research, as I’ve stated.

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But was or is art meant to be developed in this way? That is, trying to create art practice but consciously worrying whether one’s research will be closed down, or worse still, not considered worthwhile.

Research and art practice both come with social responsibility. Certainly, critics, peers and audiences will let you know, positively or negatively, if you have triggered their sensibilities.

But should the construction of art as research be forced along such rigid guidelines? Certainly, there are reasons to be rigorous and to appropriately put up fences where necessary. But where is there freedom for expression within this? Is there freedom?

Gary Watson (1989:97-98) in his essay ‘Free Agency’ claims that a concept of freedom is not easy to define and we are deluded if we believe the familiar view of freedom that “a person is free to the extent that he is able to do or get what he wants”.

Do we take this quote then to mean that freedom and the desire to build an artistic practice is limited?

By suggesting the ancient concept that the human soul is torn between reason and appetite, Watson offers us a place possibly where ethics, artistic practice and research might happily co-exist, if we accept reason as a positive part of the art making process that is. Plato, Watson says, believed that reason was a desire for good and therefore a source of motivation, but the philosopher Hume, he adds, did not see reason as a source of motivation but as crucial player in the deliberation of desire.

So what comes first? Desire or reason? What is important? Questions still remain. Desire, I would argue, still needs to be maintained, therefore motivation is still an important part of any project, be it research, art, or art as research.

And in the field of performance as research, we still must deliberate how much reason is required and continue to ask who controls this deliberation? Indeed, can free expression within the realities of artistic practice be entirely possible within an ethical framework? This remains a problem.

As artists and researchers, we must allow for the unknown and be given permission to be reflexive practitioners and researchers. This principle of reflexivity to new and unknown information is intrinsic to my chosen research methodology. I have selected to pursue Performance as Research as the central component of my doctoral thesis, but it is a Participatory Action Research methodology, a social form of enquiry, which allows me to develop and rigorously monitor the development of my final artistic practice.

What I’m trying to say is that reasoning already is built into the fibre of my research methodology, as it acknowledges the importance of all research participants (particularly audiences) as they engage within the process of helping to develop, understand and define a Tribo-Phenomenal Theatre. Considerations of an ethical nature are by no means treated in a token fashion within this research methodology because it also allows participants to objectify their experiences and thus take responsibility for making meaning of their experiences. As research theorist Jennifer Gore says, the word action in research implies research, which aims for knowledge and “knowledge, which can help to control power.”

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All participant empowerment aside, there is still an uneasy juncture between the evolving and organic nature of artistic practice and ethical guidelines. How do we facilitate the level of growth and investment required within the artistic process itself? After all, these elements are an important part of any artistic development and particularly in the nature of making live performance. It is a living concern and not something that we can harness.

Perhaps this researcher needs to strongly embrace the emancipatory philosophy inherent in her methodology. After all, she is a participant of this research as well, participating as a writer and director and therefore should prioritise highly her right to reflect truthfully and respond in accordance to the emerging profile of her research design and evolving artistic practice.

Though there is one final worry, will she manage to reach the frontiers of her research into Tribo-Phenomenal Theatre after stopping so often to explain.

What would Gene Autry say? Probably, he would draw on Cowboy Codes numbers 2, 3 and 6 and firmly recommend: never go back on your word, or a trust confided in you, always tell the truth, and help people in distress.

(OHP - Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code)

REFERENCES

Gore, J. (1991). On Silent Regulation:Emacipatory action research in preservice teacher education. In ‘Point and Counterpoint, Action Research: Issues for the Next Decade’ (McTaggart, R. Ed). Curriculum Perspectives,Vol. 11. No. 4. October 1991. Australian Curriculum Studies Association: Canberra.

Sky (1998). ‘Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code’ (August Issue). Delta Airlines: Monroe, LA.

Watson, G. (Ed). (1989). Free Will. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Oxford University Press: New York.

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THE ACADEMY AS SEEDING GROUND FOR PERFORMANCE AS RESEARCH By Jacqueline Martin

The aim of this paper is to investigate how Performance as Research can be used to consolidate links between industry and academy. It endeavors to illustrate how and in what way the resources, which abound at the Academy, can be utilized to develop a new work or a new interpretation of a work. This is turn satisfies the criteria for Performance as Research as defined by ADSA (1995) in that the performance in question is concerned with two issues of importance for scholarly debate, namely performance in an intercultural context, and finding ways of making classical texts relevant today.

This Performance as Research project is designed to fall into ADSA's Category A for the following reasons. It includes the development of a new translation and adaptation of an existing text, namely Swedish dramatist, August Strindberg's Miss Julie, which will be made available, together with notes and other items of documentation, for commercial distribution and publication following a rehearsal period leading to performance in a public venue for the purpose of peer review. Its explorations into a new style of performance will demonstrate new insights into existing knowledge. It will represent the culmination of two year's sustained work and be presented to the field of discourse in a widely accessible professional form of documentation.

The journey which this piece of work is intended to travel, demonstrates the suitability of the Performance as Research model for linking academy and industry, as it reveals how the theoretical discourses of post-colonialism and interculturalism can take into account the pragmatics of production, as much as investigating how the professional theatre should be concerned with the politics of representation. The academy can utilize its expertise through the contribution of its academic specialists in the theory and practice of the theatrical arts, and industry can be revitalized with productions of a contemporary nature. The following excursus will hopefully demonstrate how.

Miss Julie - A Post-colonial Challenge Whilst other ethnic groups in the country have been readily assimilated into the multicultural mix which signifies Australia today, and their ethnic traditions have been lovingly protected, such is not the case with the Australian Aboriginal, whose land, language and ceremonies have been consistently destroyed. They were encouraged to abandon their own religious beliefs in favor of a European model in the early 1800's, as this statement by Governor Gawler in 1835 indicates: " Black men. We wish to make you happy. But you cannot be happy unless you imitate white men. Build huts, wear clothes and be useful ... you cannot be happy unless you love God ... Love white men ... Learn to speak English. If any white man injure you, tell the Protector and he will do you justice" (Broome, 1982).

The contemporary efforts by federal governments to bring about reconciliation with the Aboriginals have had a determining influence on my decision to undertake a new translation of Strindberg's Miss Julie (18 8 8) and to read it through a post-colonial and intercultural lens, whereby the predominating themes of the play - power struggle, domination and class struggle, translate to culture clash and discrimination, and as a result dispel many of the myths which the anti - assimilationists still hold dear.

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I approached the Miss Julie project armed with a knowledge of the Swedish language and society and many years of being exposed to wonderful performances of Strindberg's plays in Sweden, in particular to a very daring production of Miss Julie by The New Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen in 1992, where the conventional naturalistic playing style was abandoned for a more pantomimic, unsentimental, anti-naturalistic one which explored ritual - both sexual and the ritual of death, confin-ning the director, Staffan Holm's disbelief in psychological realism (Nordic Theatre Studies, vol.6., pp. I - 10).

Before getting started, I shared these ideas about performance style and my intention to do a new translation transposing the play to an Australian setting, with director, Mark Radvan, who expressed a desire to work further with the idea. This prompted us to make an application for a grant from QUT's newly released funding scheme for Creative Works. We were successful, and each of us set about with our particular site for research as a result - me with my translation and adaptation, and Mark with his experimentation with performance style and movement. The money secured the services of two actors and a choreographer for an intense rehearsal period. This work in progress will be demonstrated in a workshop during the ADSA conference.

In attempting a new translation which adapts the play to an outback Australian setting in 1888, many changes have had to be made with details, however I do not believe these destroy the structure of the play nor its plot. The major impact is in the overall theme, which attributes the character's motivation to one of heritage, contrary to Strindberg's multifarious concerns with the dialectics of social climbing and falling, higher and lower, better and worse, gender issues and domination, all of which he outlines in The Author's Preface to Miss Julie (Meyer, 1964).

In order to interrogate some of the dramaturgical requirements for transposing the action from Sweden to Australia, so that the new transcription would recontextualise Strindberg's social critique and make the themes more accessible to an Australian audience, a research assistant, Bella Sipthorp, who had a demonstrated interest in Aboriginal issues as well as physical theatre, was engaged from the 3rd year BA Drama studies cohort. She was able to focus on this work as a special project in a unit for her degree - Applied Research Methodologies. This was a mutually beneficial endeavor, as it gave me a discussion partner who did some necessary archival research and helped her to engage with current research, which she hoped she would be able to follow in all its stages, even into rehearsal.

Bella's report concerned two specific areas of investigation, racial interaction and environmental conditions in Australia 1888. This necessitated research into the conditions of colonial life in the Darling Downs, its flora and fauna of the region, housing structure and floor layout, period music, clothing etc. This was not such a difficult area to research as that of racial relations, for the prime reason that the Aboriginals of this time could not participate in Western concepts of written communication and are, as a result, denied the facility of a written documentation of their history. Therefore gaining insight into an Aboriginal perspective impedes the formulation of an impartial view of racial relations in the Darling Downs of 1888.

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As far as inter-culturalism is concerned, the cultural banner of Australians included two distinct cultural entities - and European settlers - each with their own social customs, dance, music, myth and cultural indenties. Sipthorp's findings the text aligns Strindberg's class struggle with the racial tensions of colonial Australia. Thus the focus of the research is the relations between Indigenous and Imperial Australia during the 1800's. Within this context, the script functions as an inter-cultural event, providing a cultural exchange in an historical Australian setting." (Sipthorp, 1998).

The major change in the structure of the text is that of the role of Jean, who to emphasize the themes outlined above, becomes a half-cast Aboriginal, called Jack. The housekeeper, Christine, becomes an Aboriginal housekeeper, whom Jack has singled out as his future spouse. Although the Count never actually appears on stage, he becomes in this adaptation, a Captain, retired from military service in the Crimean War (1853-56) when England was under the reign of Queen Victoria, and who eventually purchases a considerable parcel of land in the Darling Downs area of Queensland, not far west of the capital, Brisbane. This decision was based on the fact that there was a large Aboriginal mission in this area at the time the play was set, as outlined in Aboriginal Australians (Broome, 1982:3 5).

Missionaries realized that the older generations of Aborigines had an impermeable bond with their traditions, land and spiritual beliefs, so they focussed instead on converting their children. The strategy employed was to segregate the children from their tribes in dormitories. This was achieved by threatening withdrawal of rations, upon which the Aborigines had become increasingly dependent (Broome, 1982:105). The children were taught some reading, writing and religion until the age 14, when they joined the adults and began working at the mission. Certainly it supports Christine's religious fervour as being a by-product of an early missionary establishment. The dormitory routine failed to completely sever the ties of the children from traditional life, but it succeeded in limiting the depth of richness of their traditional knowledge. Dormitory children were left in limbo between the depth of richness of their history and their colonised future; between Aboriginal culture and European culture. I wanted to emphasize this duality in the new adaptation. In the transcribed text this notion is implicit in the opening scene, where Jack and Christine are torn between the European cultural festivities and their own traditional heritage.

The Setting The action of the play is carried out in a large kitchen of an Australian station outside Toowoomba in 1888. For the white employees it is the eve of the celebrations dealing with the end of the sheering, and for the indigenous workers, a night of a Bora, where according to tradition, a young man is going to be initiated into manhood.

In having a duality of celebrations replace the original Midsummer Eve ones, I wanted to emphasize the clash between the cultures - on the one hand the Anglo Saxon, with fiddles playing and people dancing the Schottische, whilst on the other the evocative droning sound of the didgeridoo calling the indigenous people to the Bora. The irony of the Bora being a ceremony about initiation into manhood on the night that Miss Julie seduces Jack, is an attempt to emphasize the misuse of power, which she exerts over him, and on a larger more iconic level, which all whites exert over blacks. In the Ballet scene, this tugging of the traditions between black and white is given further emphasis with the blend of music traditions.

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For local authenticity, other flora and fauna have had to replace the Swedish original. For example, on the kitchen table stands a large vase of fragrant wattle, whilst the bird which is beheaded, becomes in this adaptation a Budgerigar. Other places have had to replace the European cities and places names in the original.

In planning their escape to start a hotel in an exotic setting, Jack tries to lure Miss Julie to Sydney, the most exotic and cosmopolitan city in Australia at the time. Just as a point of interest, the distance they would have been forced to travel, by train and steam boat, would have taken days, not so far removed from the original journey to Switzerland, and the landscape in Sydney a much more temperate climate than the outback one where they live.

Our research has dispelled many of the myths concerned with black people marrying, in this instance our concern was with Jack and Christine being 'betrothed' as in the original text and according to the white tradition. A photograph from the time of a number of Aboriginal women, dressed in Victorian style, with high collars and hair pulled back, posing with their children on their laps and their white husbands in the background is evidence of the prevalence of the institution of marriage - albeit inter-racial marriage. Our research has shown that church weddings between Aboriginals were not uncommon at the time of the play, probably as an offshoot of the strict religious training at the missions. Christine's strong ties to religion are a 'dominant' according to a semiotic reading of the play (Fischer-Lichte, 1992:218-253).

The ultimate climax of the play is to show the black man, Jack, telling the white woman, Miss Julie, that she has degraded herself to the point of no return, indicating that there is only one way for her to go now, as he offers her the razor and indicates the outside door to the kitchen at the end of the play. On a symbolic level, this is an invitation to the black communities of this country to turn the balance of power from being directed against them, to one of supremacy for them, although one would not encourage violence in its execution.

Language This juxtapositioning is further enhanced through the use of fluent Imperial English by the Aboriginal characters. The use of language within post-colonial literature usually functions to subvert Imperial representation. In most cases this means a rejection or corruption of the Imperial language. By gaining fluent command of the English language and using this skill to increase his social standing, Jack is capable of undermining the basis of colonial rule.

Colonial enterprise operated on the premise that the Aborigines were inferior to the Europeans. However, the data analyzed proves that Indigenous Australians of colonised Australia, quickly gained command of the English language. In the 1830's Reverend James Gunther made this statement concerning the Aborigines:

Their intellectual faculties are by no means so inferior as is generally supposed; their mind is quite capable of culture; of this I have many decisive proofs ... at least the young men and boys very soon acquire and speak the English language correctly and fluently. You can draw out their minds so as to reflect and reason (cited in Broome, 1982:30).

Thus, the use of fluent English in the play by the Aboriginal characters serves to undermine the basis of Imperial rule, by revealing the fallacies upon which colonial enterprise is constructed.

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The fact that Jack not only speaks English but also the language of the elite European class, French, places him above this acceptance of the noble savage mastering white man's culture. Jack is different, he is superior because he speaks a number of languages. He has therefore special qualities.

Playing Style Although the Author's Preface to Miss Julie established the foundations of the new naturalistic theatre, it is our intent in staging this post-colonial version to experiment with a proven new way of approaching the dialogue and action in order to stylize it.

Using the Whelan tape method, whereby the actors' dialogue is progressively taped and retaped in order to free them up from the cumbersome 'text-in-hand' approach, we are keen to find an elevated style which will bring home the topical nature of the piece more readily. Just as Strindberg was searching for a new way to replace the old traditions in staging this play, we plan on doing the same thing with this production - by finding an alternative style to naturalism.

The reason for so doing so was outlined in the first stage of the Droiect. where we addressed the difficulty oo developing a ‘rich’ dimension of physicalisation - one that would appeal to a broad cross-section of audiences, especially younger audiences, whose upbringing and culture is generally thought to privilege the 'visual' more highly than the verbal. Two actors who took the parts of Miss Julie and Jack worked daily, together with choreographer, Graham Watson, and director, Mark Radvan, in developing a rehearsal training vocabulary over a 'Period of three weeks. These sessions were recorded weekly with all parties involved and discussions ensued I lie aim has been to develop an actor s movement typology - working towards a movement classification to be called MAGI, an acronym for Movement, Action, Gesture, and Image, which permits each of the categories to be addressed separately and hopefully will relate movement to an overall theory of the actor's creative process. The author was present as dramaturge/translator.

This reworking of Miss Julie has already aroused considerable interest in Sweden resulting in a chapter being included in the 14th publication of articles published by the Strindberg Society (Martin,1999) which present an international perspective of Strindberg's works as interpreted today in both the East and the West. Many of the authors have adapted the story line of the plays to integrate more with conflicts and socio/political problems existing in their own countries and to make them relevant.

Stage Two Taking advantage of the QUT Creative Works in the Arts and Design Grant scheme, we have made another application for developing this project further. Now that the ground work on a new approach to physicalisation has been explored successfully in Stage One, we are keen to develop new rehearsal processes focusing on developing heightened physicalisation. The outcome of this will be an 'in-house' work-in progress showing to La Boite and the Queensland Performing Arts Trust (through its Merivale Program) in the hope that it is picked up for a fully professional performance of the new translation and post-colonial adaptation of Miss Julie. The envisaged time for initial rehearsal is seven weeks and the proposed professional rehearsal time three weeks.

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Even the rehearsal techniques are designed to take advantage of the Performance as Research methodology. These will be modelled on Action Research, which combines practice grounded in critical reflection. The rehearsal period will be documented thoroughly as will the final performance, audience reception and peer review.

Performance Research Takes Centre Stage In 1996 a new peer reviewed arts journal was launched, (Performance Research, A Journal of Performing Arts) dedicated to promoting a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas, making connections between theatre, dance, music, performance forms, commission critical essays and interviews as well as primary source material from artists. It is seeking new ways of addressing established practice and encouraging critical thinking around areas of new work that are often marginalised or neglected. Whilst publishing principally scholarly writing, it also profiles forms of text and documentation which take account of the dynamic relationship between performance and its representation on the page.

Performance Research is focused on crossing the boundaries between academic and artistic practice and dedicated to reflecting on, analysing and developing performance research. Its readership is intended to embrace practitioners, critics and academics interested in the exchange between current performance practice and research. Not that this is the only recent journal concerned with the dynamic relationship between performance and its representation on the page, but the fact that it is in English, whilst not only focusing on English performance issues, but attempting to embrace European trends as well, it is doing much to contextualise the entire phenomenon of Performance as Research, and thereby legitimize it

The editorial committee and advisory board read like a who's who of contemporary performance, but the most striking aspect of the journal is the way it utilizes visual aspects of the performance in question. This is a j ournal of the 90's and one which is accessible to both academics and industry workers.

Extending the Meaning of Research in the Creative Arts By way of contrast, in Australia all the main funding organizations have had difficulty in trying to evaluate the nature of creative arts research. According to the DEETYA publication, Research in the Creative Arts (Nov. 1997:34) the major funding bodies DEETYA and the ARC have retained conventional definitions of research which have tended to marginalise the creative arts effectively excluding a wide range of creative work produced within universities.

One thing which this document does manage to do, however, is to sort out the claims of the 'warring' parties - research about the arts and research in the arts - by clearly differentiating between the following categories: Conventional Research; Research Equivalence; and the much feared Professional Practice. Whilst it is not difficult to define what Conventional Research is, the problem area is in the nexus between research and professional practice.

Another issue which has 'muddied' the argument is that many artists claim that what they are involved in is research because they are involved in 'experimentation', whilst what they are really doing should be regarded as professional development rather than research. For this reason a checklist has been developed for music by Vella and de Haan, but which has been modified to cover other forms of performance based research (DEETYA, 1997, Research in the Creative Arts, 42). This provides examples of the kinds of questions that might be asked in order to make clear distinctions in each of the eight definitional categories:

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 Advancement or extension of knowledge  New discoveries  Innovative ideas, techniques, technologies  Solutions to problems  Refinements or reinterpretations of methods, techniques, existing knowledge  Conceptual advances  Constructive critiques and synthesis  New means of dissemination

In attempting to deal with the above issues ADSA has relegated to CHAUTSI, the organizing body consisting of all heads of theatre studies institutions, the task of developing procedures for the refereeing of performance works by theatre academics in order to "redress this imbalance and provide a system-wide validation of the creative publications of theatre studies staff. CHAUTSI is committed to publication of citations as an official (and public) acknowledgement of the standing of the already published creative works."

Conclusion

The Academy is an obvious seeding ground for conducting research into performance and it really has the ways and means to consolidate links with Industry. In an academy, such as QUT's Academy of the Arts there is a wealth of expertise in a number of artistic areas - Drama, Music, Dance, Communication Design and Visual Arts. This makes the Academy unique in terms of the availability of multi-skilling both practically and theoretically, in a regional, national and international context.

It is not the intention of the Academy to compete with Industry, but rather to utilize its resources to bring new knowledge and debate to Industry through the means of Performance as Research. In the past, universities have been restricted in their endeavors to secure funding to conduct any research into performance of a practical nature, beyond those restrictions imposed by granting bodies such as the ARC with their insistence on academic results in the form of books, chapters in books and referred articles. It is very seldom that the Australia Council funds university creative works projects, there being so many deserving and proven groups who depend upon their support for their continued work.

As universities are increasingly being rewarded for their performance across a number of areas, securing funding for Creative Works and Scholarship in the Professions is now regarded most favorably and encouraged and has made a huge difference to university thinking in terms of what is an acceptable form of research. This has changed the way academics regard their own involvement in the Industry. They are now encouraged to forge links between the Academy and Industry, not by using their students, but by fully utilizing the resources and expertise which a seeding ground such as an Academy of the Arts can provide. It must be equally obvious to Industry that such partnerships should be encouraged.

The resent climate indicates that the whole area of what constitutes performance research is being questioned at a number of levels, not the least in the Academy itself, where the borders between professional practice and research seem to be weakening. It is therefore more crucial than ever that we look again at the ADSA policy statement prepared by Alison Richards of Deaken University in 1995, and the role which research and practice in

142 Industrial Relations theatre/drama/performance studies occupies in Theatre Departments in tertiary institutions as well as the 1997 DEETYA publication on Research in the Creative Arts. In these days of dwindling funding to the theatre companies, basic research into the nature and quality of the professional theatre is negligible; whilst the Academy is dedicated to advancing the art form and is frustrated that the theatrical climate around them is not attaining the high standards of performance which they know contemporary 'overseas' companies are dictating. This is a stalemate situation. Because of cut backs and the need to maintain existing subscriptions, theatre companies seem to be forced to adopt a restrained and conventional policy in setting up their repertoire for any performance season. Whilst not wanting to sound like an elitist, the result is often conventional, safe and unchallenging. The work which is daring to advance the art form comes from the 'fringe' from those university educated visionists who have the temerity to question the status quo and who have the training and skills to do so. In the city of Brisbane this is more than obvious. It should be pointed out here that the research policy at the Academy of the Arts at QUT is focussed on the relationship which theory has to performance. It informs all the teaching in our undergraduate programs and is more sharply defined in our Honours and postgraduate degrees.

Whilst it is a well-known fact that the support system for culture is different in many countries, and whilst we acknowledge that globally funding for the arts has been dwindling, perhaps in Australia we have been negligent in exploring our existing conditions so that we can utilize what we do to maximum advantage. It is therefore up to both the Academy and Industry to discover new ways of forming meaningful links which will ultimately be of benefit to both, such as the approach outlined in this paper - the Academy as Seeding Ground for Performance as Research. It is a challenge which neither party can afford to ignore.

References

Broome (1982) Aboriginal Australian.- Black Response to White Dominance, Sydney, (p.27).

Fischer-Lichte, E., (1992) The Semiotics of Theatre, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis (218-253).

Gough, R., (ed.) (1996) Performance Research, A Journal of Performing Arts, Routledge, London

Martin, J., (1998) Miss Julie. Translated and adapted from the original text by August Strindberg (unpublished manuscript).

Martin, J., (1999) "Fr6ken Julie - en postkononial utmaning," in Strindbergiana, Strindbergsdllskapet, Stockholm (163-168).

Richards, A., (1995) "Performance as Research/Research by Means of Performance," A Discussion paper prepared by Alison Richards for the ADSA

Performance as Research Subcommittee.

Sauter. W., Martin, J., and Arntzen, K-O, (1993) "Reflections on Miss Julie: The New

Scandinavian Experimental Theatre's Miss Julie in Copenhagen, 1992," in Theatre Research International, vol. 18, Special Issue, Nordic Theatre Studies, Oxford University Press,

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(3 -10). Sipthorpe, B., (1998) "Miss Julie Deported. Creating a Colonial Context for the Transcription of Miss Julie," (unpublished essay, Theatre Studies, Academy of Arts, Drama, QUT).

Strand, D., (ed.) (1997) "Research in the Creative Arts," DEETYA, Canberra.

Strindberg, A., (1964) "Author's Preface to Miss Julie," in (M.Meyer trans.) The Plays of Strindberg, vol. 1, Vintage Books, USA

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TOWARDS A REFLEXIVE SOCIOLOGY OF THEATRE PRODUCTION By Ian Maxwell

Introduction In this paper, picking up this Conference’s concern with links between the academy and the industry, I will be discussing a paradigm for the analysis of rehearsal processes under development at the Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, where I teach. The paper will be a case study of a project conducted for our undergraduate students in late 1996; a project that went horribly wrong, but went horribly wrong for reasons that were entirely constituted by the nature of the field of theatrical production in Australia in the late 1990s, and which highlighted the relationship between ‘industry’ and ‘academy’. The experience of working through and analysing the break-down of the project has led me to teach a new unit of study, in which this field, and the relationship of both the academy in general, and of individual teachers, such as myself, to and within the field of theatre-making are themselves constituted as an object of analysis.

The paper will be in two parts: the first, a reflection on methodology, focussing on the constitution of the object of rehearsal analysis, and, following from that, on the relationship between the academy and performance practice. Second, I will turn to the case study, in the course of which one pedagogic intention—the analysis of rehearsal process—as the result of a moment of crisis, turned into another—the analysis of the field within which rehearsal takes place.

1. Reflexivity A brief flurry of debate between Gay McAuley and Glenn D’Cruz in the pages of Australasian Drama Studies has focussed upon questions of just what it is to look at performance—or, more specifically, rehearsal processes, as practice; a focus that is otherwise relatively absent from that journal, as both these writers have politely implied.1

One of the main bones of contention between McAuley and d’Cruz concerns the question of ‘reflexivity’, that catch-cry of post-modernism, and the implications of this notion for the conduct of research into performance. For d’Cruz, ‘reflexivity’ involves addressing one’s analytical practice to one’s own performative practice. D’Cruz claims that McAuley (1995) implies that “a self-reflexive interrogation of one’s ‘creative’ work is not a legitimate practice”, and, citing Mark Minchinton’s exemplary Deleuzian phenomenology, argues to the contrary that

[s]ome of the more exciting work within our disciplinary domain is being conducted by academics who take their professional theatre work as their object of analysis (1996:165)

Now, that I can’t find any such implication in McAuley’s response is an issue that I will leave aside for now.

1 Glenn d’Cruz ‘From theatre to performance: constituting the discipline of performance studies in the Australian academy’, Australasian Drama Studies 26, (April 1995): 36-52; Gay McAuley ‘Performance studies in the Australian academy: A reply’, Australasian Drama Studies 27 (October 1995): 151-2. Glenn d’Cruz ‘Performance Studies: an open letter to Gay McAuley’, Australasian Drama Studies 28, (April 1996): 165-6

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McAuley does, however, pick up on a different inflection of the idea of reflexivity, drawn from the writings of post-modernist ethnographers, prominent among them James Clifford and George Marcus (c1984), to argue for a writing of performance (and rehearsal) analysis, which reflexively recognises the limits of its own objectivity, stressing the intervention of the ‘I’ of the writer in the selection and organisation of the material being described. McAuley’s paradigm, then, involves the performance-process analyst as ethnographer, not reflexively analysing their own practice, as d’Cruz would have it, but analysing someone else’s practice while reflexively acknowledging the distortions attending to that paradigm: the mediating presence of the analyst in the rehearsal, for example, the selective attention of the analyst as observer, and the limits of writing.

2. The Centre for Performance Studies paradigm. As preparation for periods spent observing rehearsal processes ‘in the field’, The Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney contracts professional actors, directors, designers and stage management to conduct extended rehearsals, attended by undergraduate students. The rehearsals are videotaped, a log-book kept, recording topics of rehearsal discussion, the focus of particular rehearsal sessions and so on, and various other pieces of ‘documentation’ collected (stage manager’s notes, annotated scripts, dramaturgical materials such as notes, pictures, references circulated within the rehearsal). The professional theatre makers engaged in the production do not operate pedagogically: their responsibility is only to their rehearsal. Academics contextualise the rehearsal, ‘sit in’ on it and subsequently debrief, teach from and discuss it with the students. The preparation for the projects includes a lecture series and workshops in which students are introduced to principles of rehearsal, acting, and the materials of theatre.

In a strict sense, there are considerable methodological difficulties with this model. The presence of what is often a large viewing gallery of students necessarily impacts upon the rehearsal, both positively and negatively. For example, practitioners report that they feel like they have been ‘performing a rehearsal’ rather than simply ‘rehearsing’. In the project that I will draw upon throughout this paper, when the director moved the rehearsal ‘onto the floor’, he discovered that the actors were orienting their bodies towards the gallery, and decided to completely reverse an earlier design decision about the shape of the stage they were working on. On the other hand, I would want to argue from the experience of working as a dramaturg during ‘around the table’ rehearsals during this same project that the presence of the students while not completely receding from my consciousness, certainly became backgrounded as we became more and more involved in discussion and debate. In other words, the presence of the students certainly had an effect, but certainly does not necessarily render the whole exercise as ‘not a rehearsal’.2

An attempt is made to embark upon a project which has a ‘life’ beyond the Performance Studies studio, although this cannot always be the case: it is undeniable that when the rehearsal does not have a life beyond the fortnight of ‘the project’, a certain urgency and sense of purpose (and these are, it could be argued, defining features of any rehearsal) are absent. However, on balance, these projects do provide an introduction to professional practice.

2 Further, no small part of the intention of allowing second year students rehearsal sessions is to prepare them for subsequent secondments and attachments to professional productions. In a sense, these projects are orientation exercises, helping students to understand what they might expect to see as they embark upon higher-degree research “in the field”.

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(In subsequent work, students are encouraged to develop the observational, documentation and ethnographic skills to which they have been introduced in these ‘artificial’ projects and to apply them to professional productions to which they may be seconded ‘in the field’, where their presence takes on, more explicitly, the form of participant observer).

Through the observation of what Susan Letzer Cole calls ‘the hidden realm’ of rehearsal, we can discern the thousands of minute details upon which the process of preparing performance turns: the subtle play of position as various participants mark out their respective territories; the body language and direction of glances that determines the flow of conversation; the possibility of offering up contributions in rehearsal; the institutional positioning of voices and bodies that regulates the flow of information, but which is also traversed by the play of personal differences, trusts, respects and so on.

We can listen to the jokes, the anecdotes, the sharing of experience. We can watch the subtle movement of actors into and out of character, the embodiments of the muddy, in-between territory that lies between ‘self’ and ‘character’, the shifts between third person and first person modes of reference to ‘character’. We can watch the organisation of theatrical, dramatic and architectural space, and of the conceptual space within which informal protocols for the negotiation, resolution, deferral or avoidance of arguments takes place.

But we can’t really follow the actors or the director or the stage manager home. We can’t record every transaction that takes place; we can’t listen to every conversation over a beer or glass of wine after rehearsals, or over cigarettes in the breaks in rehearsal. We can’t demand access to those moments when a director decides that he or she would rather work alone with a particular actor who is not ‘finding it’. We cannot share every moment of realisation: the actor poring over her script on the bus, suddenly putting a couple of clues together, or waking up in the middle of the night declaiming their lines in an American accent.

Nor would we want to, necessarily: leaving aside the ethical issues (and there are plenty), we don’t have to completely pull the watch apart to understand how it works.

But it was some of these understandings and realisations that lead us to invite practitioners to address our students. In preparing the ground for the students’ ethnographic experience of the rehearsal room, we wanted to present the ‘human’, lived, embodied dimension of theatre as practice. We wanted students to start to realise what it was to be an actor, a playwright, a director, reviewer or agent, in Sydney, in the late 1990s. By way of preparing students for the experience of observing rehearsal process, we invited a number of ‘practitioners’ to address undergraduate students. The intention was to introduce students to what I called the Realpolitik of theatre practice.

From my own experience, I knew that the kinds of theoretical ideas that circulate in academic theatre and drama departments are rarely invoked in mainstream theatre rehearsals; actors don’t sit around rehearsal tables discussing semiotics, or any of the other analytical tools which we find useful for describing performances. They are more likely to invoke a previous production when discussing acting styles or the practicalities of rehearsal than they are to cite Stanislavsky.

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Actors share and circulate skills learnt in practice, from previous directors, or from their training, or recent classes, often through the medium of anecdotes (Potts, 1995) and jokes, and often without consciously considering what they are doing. Style, conventions, ideas circulate, are disseminated, tried out, rejected in practice, as potential solutions to day to day problems in rehearsal.

The lectures took the form of guided question and answer sessions; interviews, in which academic staff would encourage the guests to talk about their training, their working rhythms, their understanding of how ‘the industry’ worked. We asked them how much money they earned, how much commission their agents took, how they got jobs, what else they did to support themselves and their families; why they kept at it, how they maintained their skills, and so on. In our other classes, we stressed that this phenomenological, lived world of the actor, the designer, the director, the critic, the agent and so on was a determining factor in the construction of the performed product; that an understanding of the processes of rehearsal that fails to account for this dimension is necessarily an incomplete account of that process.

That these material circumstances have a material effect upon performance. We argued that the student would have to somehow take factors like these into account when thinking through what rehearsal is.

One of the main things to emerge from these guest lectures was the emphasis placed on that set of practices colloquially known as ‘networking’, or, more commonly, ‘schmoozing’. Every practitioner addressing our students stressed the importance of mixing with the right people, attending the right opening nights, functions etc, being seen by the right directors, agents, ‘literary agents’ and so on. Primarily, of course, schmoozing is a means to an end: given the relative scarcity of work, actors, directors, writers, designers tend to find themselves in a buyer’s market, and need to hustle. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, the associations formed in these informal, semi-institutionalised scenes contribute both constructively and counter-productively to the work that gets done in rehearsal rooms and that is seen on stage.

And of course, through this attempt to set up for our students an ethnographic reflexivity, we had started teaching theatre sociology.

In turning now to the case-study project, I want to illustrate a shift into a different order of reflexivity—one theorised by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, work with which I had been involved in the course of writing my PhD: a phenomenological ethnography of Hip Hop culture in Sydney. First, I’ll sketch in some of Bourdieu’s ideas, which will inform my account and discussion of the project.

3. Bourdieu’s Reflexive sociology Bourdieu exhorts the social scientist to continually turn the tools of their own science upon their own practice. Note that this reflexivity is not to be what Woolgar (1988: 14) calls the

‘interpretivist skepticism’ that fuels the ‘textual reflexiveness’ advocated by those anthropologists who have recently grown infatuated with the hermeneutic process of cultural interpretation in the field and the (re)making of reality through ethnographic inscription (Wacquant 14).

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The target here is, of course, the James Clifford-George Marcus ‘school’. For Bourdieu, reflexivity is not achieved through engaging in reflections on fieldwork, nor through the use of the first person, but by

subjecting the position of the observer to the same critical analysis as that of the constructed object at hand (Barnard 1990: 75)

….thereby avoiding the “narcissistic or uncritical . . . cul de sac that ethnographers and theorists of ethnography have created for themselves” (Barnard 58, 75).

In simple terms, Bourdieu is suggesting a radical decomposition of the starkly drawn line between observer and observed. Further, he is suggesting that any process of analysis must recognise that the observer and observed each occupy the same field, a term central to the Bourdieuan project.

In Bourdieu, a field is a set of historical, objective relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power or capital:

a field is a patterned system of objective forces . . . a relational configuration endowed with a specific gravity which it imposes on all the objects and agents which enter in it. In the manner of a prism, it refracts external forces according to its internal structure (Wacquant 17)

A field needs to be examined in its specificity, in terms of the logics and structures that constitute its ‘relational configuration’. Further, ‘society’ is not a seamless, integrated totality, but an “ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of ‘play’ that cannot be collapsed under an overall societal logic” (Wacquant 17). These ‘relatively autonomous spheres’, or fields, are located within the ‘field of power’, a meta-field which determines the exchange economy of cultural capital between various fields.

Within each field, Bourdieu argues, can be discerned sets of historical relations “deposited” in the form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation and action. He calls these relations the habitus, glossed as “a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) an, in particular, a disposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination(Bourdieu 1977a: 214). It is also a strategy-generating principle, “enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations” (1977a: 72). The habitus is historically constituted, institutionally grounded and socially variable; the “score over and against which”, Wacquant suggests, “the individual lives their own melody”. Habitus and field only function, then, in relation to each other.

In the account that follows, I construe the academy and practice as ‘relatively autonomous fields’; the process of bringing the latter ‘into’ the former, however, their mutual imbrication in a ‘metafield’ of power was thrown into focus in a way that forced me to question my role in the process, my relationship to both fields, and the nature of, and the limits to, the analysis of rehearsal. Additionally, this mode of analysis requires an attention to relational configurations ‘deposited’ (and I’m aware of the limitations of this metaphor) as habituses, which is where things get interesting for the analyst.

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4. The Judith project, Centre for Performance Studies 1996 The project conducted for the second and third year undergraduates in 1996 involved the rehearsal Howard Barker’s: Judith: A Parting From the Body.

The project was to be directed by Patrick Nolan, a 30 year old director who had studied with the Centre as an undergraduate, and had subsequently completed the post-graduate diploma in directing offered by the National Institute of Dramatic Art. (Now, at this point, my paper will digress top become a quasi-biographical case-study of an early-career mainstage director working in Sydney theatre in the mid-1990s).

As a young freelance director, Patrick had followed what has recently become the quasi- institutionalised career path. He attracted the attention of the city’s premier theatrical agents, Linstead’s, who specialise in representing directors and designers.

He moved and shook, and over a period of years became acquainted on at least nodding basis with every director, administrator, producer and (seemingly) actor in town. His work in theatre proceeded in a number of places.

First, extended periods of assistant directing in major state theatre companies, positions which, since the early 1990s, had been budgeted for by those companies: a new director could expect a living wage while he or she watched, and often helped work on big-budget professional productions.

Second, self-funded and co-operative productions mounted in small theatre spaces. Co-op productions might occasionally attract a small amount of Australia Council funding, but only if the work to be presented was written by an Australian author. Self-funded productions involve the raising of sufficient capital to cover theatre rental (mightily expensive, even for small theatres), publicity (vital if the production is to cover its weekly overheads), rehearsal space, design budgets and so on. Added to this is the pressure of either working a part-time job to pay the rent, or, as more frequently happens, registering for unemployment benefits. In both these kinds of shows, the cast and crew receive no guaranteed minimum wage, but split shares of box office, once overheads are covered.

Third, Patrick had worked for a drama department at another university, mounting productions with undergraduate students. A handy way to earn a decent wage for a couple of months, but not necessarily very good preparation for working with professional actors, the pedagogical framing of the exercise and working with untrained student actors demanding a completely different set of skills on the director’s part.

Fourth, Patrick had produced, acted in, and promoted short films. Fifth, he took any job that he could find, doing virtually anything, to simply pay the rent. On any given day, Patrick could be at one of five or six telephone numbers, depending upon whether he was doing some video work for a documentary he was producing, or selling books and postcards at the Museum gift shop.

Finally, Patrick was actively engaged in pitching ideas to artistic directors around town. Any given week would see him working up a project, perhaps with a designer or a couple of actor friends, and making an appointment with the Head of the Australian Opera, or the director of a state theatre company. These meetings tended to result in Patrick receiving invitations to

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opening nights, even to whole seasons, but not actually being offered a job. So Patrick saw a whole lot of theatre, read even more, and developed a passion for opera recordings.

In the month leading up to his preparatory work on the project, one of the directors to whom Patrick had pitched a production concept was John Bell, of the Bell Shakespeare Company.

Patrick’s pitch, developed with a designer, had included in addition to an argument about pertinence etc, a drawn-up design concept and casting outlines: altogether about 10 days’ work. Finally, Patrick is also one of my closest friends, and had told me that he had promised himself that if he was not earning a living from directing by the time he was 30, he would give it away.3

When we were casting around for a director for the 1996 project, he was not our first choice, and nor did I, out of sensitivity for my own institutional position, push his name. It was only when he was recommended to the acting Head of the Centre by an experienced, respected actor who was approached for the project, with whom Patrick had worked as an assistant on a Sydney Theatre Company production, that his name started to firm up on our prospective list of directors.

In the way in these things happen (and what a lot there is to think about in this!), Patrick got the gig. He was asked to submit a number of plays as potential projects, being encouraged to think about a project which would have a life beyond the two weeks of rehearsal that we could budget for him. The size of the budget also operated as a constraint: we could basically afford a cast of three, plus a stage manager. Patrick settled upon Judith, which he had already directed as his graduating production at NIDA. A short play (about 75 minutes), Patrick also thought that it was conceivable that a two week rehearsal period would see the production well-developed. Over a period of three weeks, Patrick approached artistic directors around town to see if anyone would be interested in mounting what would, after all, be a cheap production of Judith in 1997—with two weeks’ worth of rehearsal paid for already, conceivably, a full production could be mounted with only a couple of weeks more work.

He scoured “Showcast” and approached high profile actors to participate, with a view to making this prospective production a bankable proposition.

Kim Spinks, the Centre’s Project Coordinator, was the producer, approaching agents, offering parts and negotiating contracts. All three actors engaged for the project had worked for the Centre before, in projects directed by . Rex had worked on the majority of the early projects conducted by the Centre in the 1980s, and the studio in which the Centre now conducts workshops was named after him, following his death in 1991. So, for these actors, there was a familiarity with and respect for the endeavours of the Centre, through the figure of Rex. Patrick knew two of the actors personally, but it is reasonable to assume that Patrick’s involvement alone would necessarily have swayed them to be involved in the project.

The three actors cast were Robert Menzies, Gillian Jones and Deborah Kennedy. All three were considerably older than Patrick, with several years of experience. All three were engaged with other productions at the time, Robert in an STC production of Arthur Miller’s

3 It is probably appropriate to note, in the spirit of the reflexivity I am evoking throughout this paper, that no small part of my interest in telling this story (and thinking through its implications for the shape of contemporary theatre work) is that Patrick’s path is one that I myself might have taken, had I not been seduced away from insecurity, penury and the associated habitus of theatre by the (relative) security and professional rewards of the academic life; this may sound glib, but is not intended to be: the adage that one is only as good as one’s last how bites hard, and the theatre world has a short memory.

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Broken Glass, Deborah in The Ensemble’s production of No Names, No Pack Drill, and Gillian in Company Bis production of The Alchemist. This was important for the Centre, as it enabled us to convincingly argue that the students would be watching top-line, professional work practice. It also meant that we could only conduct four days of rehearsal a week, as the actors would be required for Wednesday matinees. All three were happy to take the two weeks of work, although at least one of them had expressed their exhaustion.

Patrick had high hopes for the project. In two weeks, he was confident, he would be able to invite artistic directors, agents and other significant figures along for a showing, with a view to on-selling the project. Now, of course, I am in this picture. A junior academic, completing my PhD, employed by the centre on a short contract, eager to continue working there. We had constructed a semester’s work for 150 second and third year students around this project: the students’ analyses would constitute their major assessment task for the year. Students who received good marks would be able to advance into Honours options and perhaps, eventually, post-graduate study. For the Centre, launching a second year course for the first time, and in the context of crippling funding cuts, the project was the first involving such a large number of students: it was important that it proceed well. The project was shot through with these trajectories of desire; in the actors’ argot, there was much at stake.

And so far, because of my involvement in the field of which I am writing, I have been able to offer a very close account of events.

Now things will start to get harder. More names will be named, more trajectories of desire mapped out. I will report on events as I experienced with them.

5. The break-down. The first day of rehearsal was marvellous. The actors were enthusiastic, the early readings went well, and discussion in the subsequent sessions unit-ing the text proceeded directly to the heart of the issues in the play. By 4.30, Patrick dismissed the actors, the students left, and he and I drove to Bondi Beach for a walk. Patrick was excited. “We’ll be up on the floor tomorrow” he told me, and we discussed this moment of rehearsal watershed together, ankle deep in the early spring surf. I went home, and Patrick went out for dinner. That evening, I remarked to my partner (a theatre designer) that things appeared to have gone well. While we were talking, the phone rang. Genevieve answered and found herself talking to John Bell, of the Bell Shakespeare Company. Genevieve and John knew each other: she had designed the very successful premiere production of his daughter Hilary’s play Wolf Lullaby at the Stables Theatre six months beforehand, and had been the designer with whom Patrick had presented a production model to John a month beforehand. John wanted Patrick’s telephone number (Pat had just moved). Genevieve passed the number on, and we speculated that perhaps John was going to offer Patrick some work.

At 10.45 that night, our phone rang again. It was Patrick. He had just come home, and found two messages from John Bell on his answering machine, asking Patrick to call him urgently. Patrick told me that John sounded highly agitated. Now, Patrick, years before, had enjoyed a serious relationship with John’s other daughter, the actor Lucy Bell. Patrick’s immediate assumption was that something had happened to her. But no . . . John had called because of a rehearsal crisis.

Bell had invited Steve Berkoff to direct a production for the Bell Company’s 1996 season. Berkoff had decided to do Coriolanus, a production of which he had recently directed in

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London. Casting (around Bell in the eponymous role), had been conducted principally by video, and by Berkoff on a couple of flying visits to Australia. Rehearsals had just entered their second week, and things were not, apparently, working out with one of the female leads. In fact, so poorly were things working out, that Berkoff had sacked her.

Gillian Jones had auditioned for the part, and John was wondering whether Patrick would be willing to release her from the Judith project in order for her to start rehearsals with the Bell company two days hence. Patrick (Patrick told me) responded by saying that it wasn’t his decision, that Gillian was contracted to the Centre for Performance Studies, and that there were over 150 students whose semester’s work had to be taken into consideration. Bell explained that he had already spoken with Gillian, and that she had expressed her desire to join the Coriolanus company. Patrick felt that he was not being asked, but being presented with a fait accompli. And further, how could he expect, he asked me, to work with an actor who wanted to be somewhere else?

By the time that a couple of frenzied calls had been made between Patrick, Jones and Bell, Patrick and I decided that it was too late to do anything, and that we’d contact the rest of the Project’s staff early the next morning (neither of us had a contact sheet with telephone numbers, and anyway, we reasoned, why disturb everyone’s sleep?).

The following morning, the acting head of the Centre was dragged from his sick bed, the project director (furious for not having been called the night before), Patrick and I met early, and started to piece things together. Kim suddenly understood, she said, why Gillian’s agent had been so elusive the day before . . . perhaps events had been in train already. Patrick loaded up the “Showcast” CD Rom and started recasting while the academic staff settled on a strategy for dealing with the 80 studetns scheduled to attend a rehearsal which clearly was not going to happen.

Kim and Patrick telephoned the other two actors to brief them on the situation. Robert had already left home, and arrived at 9:15 only to be sent home again (later that day, front of house staff at the Opera House called a lightning strike, and his evening performance was also cancelled). When the first group of twenty students arrived, Tim, Patrick, Kim and I talked through the situation, with Tim mapping out the various genealogies on a whiteboard. We recorded this session, only to find out later that the videorecorder had not registered any imput at all, here, instead, is a copy of one of our student’s notes (OH). By 10:30, Patrick had recast the role of Judith, and had gone home to rethink rehearsal strategies for the six remaining days of the project.

Rehearsals resumed on the following Thursday, with a new Judith (Kris McQuade), starting from a first reading. Puzzled students, many of whom had never entered a rehearsal room before, peiced events together, and harassed academic staff argued that what the students were witnessing was in fact, real; that our little slice of theatre academia was suddenly being thrust, willy nilly, into the unforgiving Realpolitik of the ‘theatre industry’. The Centre did not receive a letter, phone call, fax or any other form of contact from the actor in question, from John Bell, from the actor’s agent. The Bell Company’s producer did call, seeking Patrick’s home address. A few days later, Patrick received two tickets for the opening night performance of Coriolanus and a handwritten, matey note from John, on company stationary, thanking him for helping him out of a ‘tight spot’.

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Wrap-up So where does that all get us? In the wash up, I actually felt that we had taught our students far more about the material circumstances of making theatre than we could have hoped: a genuine insight into the how of theatre-making in contemporary Australia; the field of which had been revealed in its Realpolitik glory: constituted by a tight web of names, reputations, favours owed, institutional clout, personal histories and genealogies.

As the events I have described unfolded, it became apparent that the complexity of the phenomena in which we were (unwittingly) becoming imbricated denied any neat constitution of theatre practice as a iscrete ‘industry’(the metaphor of choice for this conference); and that our understanding of the rehearsal process itself was somehow incomplete without our giving due consideration to these phenomena. The vicissitudes that we were encountering were revealing, in the first instance, of relationship between the academy and the field, raising for us all kinds of questions about our position as producers, our obligations as educators, weighed up against our desire not to enforce contracts and risk alienating practitioners, and so on. But further, I found myself arguing to the students (as Tim here sketched out the chain of events and web of relationships on the whiteboard) that this ‘crisis’ needed to be understood not as absolutely exceptional, as aberrant, nor as epiphenomenal, but, as the real ‘hidden world’ of rehearsal; for better or worse, and as anyone who works in theatre knows, as constitutive of the field of theatre as practice itself.

References Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic, J.D. Wacquant 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Clifford, James and George E Marcus (eds) c1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, University of California Press.

1995 – “From theatre to performance: constituting the discipline of performance studies in the Australia Academy” Australasian Drama Studies No 26: 36-52.

1996 – “Appendix: An Open Letter to Gay McAuley” Australasian Drama Studies No 28:165-167, Macauley Gay

1995a – “Towards a Ethnography of Rehearsal” Paper read at IFRT/FIRT Conference in Montreal

1995b – “Drama, Theatre, Performance: the changing research paradigm” in Creative Investigations: Redefining Research in the Arts and Humanities (Papers from the 1995 Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar.

1996 – “Theatre Practice and Critical Theory” in Australasian Drama Studies No 28: 140- 145, Minchinton, Mark

1994 – “I am God I was not God I am a Clown of God” in Writings on Dance 11/12: Thinking Bodies: 58-71. Potts, Christina Marion

1995 – What Empty Space? Text and Space in the Australian Mainstream Rehearsal Process Thesis (M Phil) Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney, 1996.

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THE ACTOR AND THE SPECTATOR IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE PRACTICE By Gay McAuley

My title refers to contemporary theatre and that is indeed the subject of this paper, but I would like to begin with some historical reflections. These have perhaps been triggered by the approaching end of the twentieth century, which has led me to cast my mind back to that other fin de siècle and the crisis that afflicted the theatre at the beginning of this century, for it is through a reading of that crisis that I wish to comment on the situation of the theatre today.

By any standards it must be acknowledged that this has been a century of vibrant achievement in the theatre. From the first decade, marked by predictions of the imminent demise of theatre as an artform, there arose across Europe numerous companies, groups and inspired individuals driven by the desire to rethink the way theatre was being made, and the social purposes it was serving. The generation of Stanislavski, Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia, and Jacques Copeau invented a new artist, the director, and a new artistic function, the mise en scène, and this new artist has come to dominate production in today's theatre to such an extent that it is the director who exercises the dominant authorial function. The theatre of the last 25 years or so has been dubbed "director's theatre" in recognition of this fact and, indeed, the directors of this period have produced an enormous body of wonderful work.

In addition to the brilliant productions they have created, the postwar directors and those of the early part of the century have reflected profoundly on their work and they have written and published these reflections. The result is that there has been more serious theoretical reflection by theatre artists published this century than in the past three centuries put together. In the case of artists like Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia or Antonin Artaud, it is even the case that their achievement and their influence lies more in the profundity of their thinking, expressed in theoretical and polemical essays, than in the theatrical productions they managed to realise. Anyone who is tempted to discount the importance of this writing should ask themselves if Stanislavski would have had anything like the influence he has had if he had never written An Actor Prepares, Creating a Role and Building a Character.

Another factor contributing to this century's achievements in the theatre is the provision of public funding. In the second half of the century in most western countries, governments have taken on varying levels of responsibility for the arts, including theatre, thus replacing the church and aristocratic patrons of earlier centuries, and establishing boards, councils and panels to enable them to provide this support without appearing to exercise overt political control. Government funding which is, interestingly, always more generously provided by communist regimes than by the free market economic rationalists, is a crucial element in the "director's theatre" I have described.

The crusading generation of the early decades of the century thought that actor training was as important as creating new work and many of them set up their own schools and teaching programmes. The development and institutionalisation of actor training is another achievement of this century and, although it cannot be said that actors have yet acquired the status in society that their skill and their dedication deserve, their art is taken a great deal more seriously than it was a hundred years ago.

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Intertwined with these developments is another signal achievement of the twentieth century: the acceptance into the academy of theatre as object of study, the development of theatre studies as a scholarly discipline in its own right, no longer merely a peripheral domain in the study of literature.

So, if so much has been achieved, why do I begin my paper with a reminder about the dire predictions for the future of theatre with which this century began? In part, because the very things I have singled out as achievements also have a problematic aspect and in part because I want to query the cheerful acceptance by so many, including apparently the organisers of this conference, that theatre is an industry. It would be foolish to deny that the theatre of our time exists within a market economy, nor that this has been increasingly the case since the first public theatres were established 400 years ago. It is, however, essential to ask what is at risk when the values of the marketplace and the terminology of commodi- fication are utilised unquestioningly by those responsible for training actors, by those who make theatre in the state subsidised companies, and even by scholars whose task it is to preserve and pass on accumulated knowledge about the practice of theatre.

For Jacques Copeau and the others, struggling in the early years of the century to rescue the theatre from what they saw as its terminal decadence, theatre was an art, not an industry. "Art" was the rallying call that linked Stanislavski, Gordon Craig, Copeau, Appia and so many others in Europe and led them to reinvent the way theatre was made. "Industrialisation" was the term Copeau used to convey all that was wrong with the theatre, the actors, the audiences and critics of his day. The manifesto with which he launched the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier takes a magnificent polemical swipe at the forces he saw as undermining the basis of the art form, and it bears re-reading today with an eye to the situation prevailing in our own theatres, and I mean those subsidised by the state as well as those run for commercial profit:

A cynical and uncontrolled industrialisation is destroying the theatre in France and discouraging educated and sensitive audiences; most of the Paris theatres are now controlled by a handful of entertainers in the pay of ruthless money men; everywhere, even where respect for the great traditions should salvage some restraint, is the same spirit of showmanship and materialism, the same crassness; everywhere puffery, excess and extravagant display are battening on an art form that is dying under their onslaught but no-one seems to notice; everywhere there is self interest, disorder, lack of rigour, ignorance, stupidity and contempt for creativity; more and more, the work produced is trivial and empty but the critics are acquiescent and public taste is led increasingly astray: this is the cause of our outrage, and this is what is driving us to take action.1

The task of the self appointed reformers of the first decades of this century was to counter industrialisation, commercialism and the commodification of the theatre with claims of art. They did this as much by looking back to the great practitioners of the past as forward to the theatre they dreamed of producing.

1 Jacques copeau, “Un essai de renovation dramatique: le Theatre du Vieux colombier, NRF, September 1913 (reprinted in Registres I, Paris, Gallimard, 1974 p20 (my translation).

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The names of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Calderon, Racine and Molière (writers certainly, but writers who were also involved in the staging of their works) were frequently invoked as sanction for what was being proposed but also because, for Copeau in particular, finding a way to stage the great works of the past was also the way to transform the corrupt and debased theatre of his day into an instrument capable of attracting great artists in the future.

In the rhetoric of the time, words like renewal, rebirth, renovation and even renaissance were used frequently, indicating clearly that the new theatre that people aspired to create was seen not as a rupture with the past but as reconnecting with a great tradition that had been lost through the machinations of those who would exploit theatre as an industry.

A major difference between the situation prevailing in the early years of the century and that confronting us now concerns attitudes to the theatre of the past. Terms like "a great tradition" have become suspect and we have seen a generation of theatrical innovation based, as Michel Vinaver puts it, on "a collective ex nihilo invention". In Vinaver's assessment of the achievements and failures of French postwar theatre, published in 1991, he points to the paradigm shift that occurred around 1968 in France and many other places and the radical rejection of the social project that motivated the reformers of the early part of the century and, with it, the whole tradition of text based theatre. For the seventies generation, as Vinaver describes it:

theatre must be a radical questioning of reality 'here and now'; it must be risky, exploratory and experimental, and plunge into the unknown; it must cut itself loose from traditional culture, perceived as an instrument of alienation and oppression - and therefore from the text.2

Vinaver is writing from the perspective of a playwright and his lucid analysis points to some dangers inherent in the current dominance of the director in theatre making and the marginalisation of the playwright but he also perceives the overriding importance of the social project that theatre represents. If theatre has lost or rejected its mission of elevating public taste and uniting people in support of shared moral values, then what is it doing? Vinaver again:

What replaces it [the public mission] is artistic achievement as measured by the representatives of the state, who distribute the funds, and who in turn are conditioned in their judgement by the critics, by the mediatic resonance of the productions, and by public attendance. These factors are all interrelated, more and more tied to phenomena of fashion, more and more distinct from any clear artistic or social aim.3

Vinaver's critique bears usefully on what has been happening in Australia in recent years, where the state subsidised theatre companies seem increasingly to be trapped in a kind of conveyor belt of production which has no justification outside itself, and which can be sold in terms of fashion and life style, and where conservative governments resort to populist resentment of elites in order to avoid adequate funding of artists.

2 Michel Vinaver, “Decentralisation as chiaroscuro” (Paper given at Birmingham University in 1990), in New Theatre Quarterly, No 25, February 1991, p71. 3 Ibid p71.

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I take Vinaver's point about the marginalisation of the playwright for it seems to me that theatre is at its best when the two strong voices, playwright and director, are in productive tension with each other, when neither has silenced the other, when the wealth of expressivity provided by actors and imaginative design of space, light, etc. is allied with the expressivity of language. But my diagnosis of what is wrong with the theatre at this end of the twentieth century looks rather to the condition of the actor and grounds this in reflections on the social project that theatre represents or that theatre makers create for themselves.

This century has seen the massive development of film and television, which has broken the nexus, that had always existed between theatre and drama. Film and television have become the major modes of delivery for drama, and they have ensured that in the second half of the twentieth century more people experience more dramatic fiction more frequently and more regularly than at any other time in history. This has certainly led to an erosion of live theatre's popular appeal and a concomitant reduction in its attractiveness to the money men, but it has also brought into clearer focus just what it is that is special about the theatre. At its deepest level, theatre is essentially a communicative act occurring between live performers and live spectators, gathered together in a given space. This act may involve the performance of scripted drama, linear narrative, mimesis, enactment and all the rest of it, but as physical theatre and many varieties of postmodern performance have shown, it may problematise or even reject all these elements. What is crucial to theatre is the fact that it is live, and the dynamic partners whose interaction brings it into being are actors and spectators. It is between these two that whatever happens happens, and the fact that this is undocumented, unrecorded, always displaced by the material traces that our society reveres (written texts, buildings, things), does not mean that it does not happen, just that it is difficult to deal with. The health and vibrancy of a theatre culture depends on what happens to what I have called the primary couple, and it is my contention that neither are being well nurtured in the theatre of this fin de siècle.

The actor's life has always been precarious and this has not really changed in the twentieth century notwithstanding the availability of work through film, television and commercials, the development of academy-based actor training, and the existence of the dole. There is great wealth for a small number of Hollywood stars, but most actors earn a lamentable annual income that puts them way below the poverty line. The conference theme tempts me to go on in this vein, but I think there are even more fundamental matters to be discussed that go to the heart of how our society regards the work of the actor, how actors are encouraged to regard themselves, and how they are treated within the institutions of theatre.

The actor is increasingly disempowered, not only in the commercial domain of the mega- musical, but also in the production line system of the state subsidised theatre companies, and in "director's theatre" where the creative agency is that of the director and the actors' function is to serve that vision.

In the mega-musical, the work travels from country to country as a kind of readymade, and the individual performers hired in any particular location have to fit in the mould established in every particular by others. While the fashion for these spectacular productions has ensured that vitally needed infrastructure has been maintained and developed, the fact remains that the mega-musical works against one of the central strengths of traditional theatre which is that any production involves reworking, rethinking and reactualising the texts on which it is based.

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As far as the subsidised theatre is concerned, in the prevailing production system actors are hired for the production, not even for the season; they are required to work within a strict framework in which the set is a given, already designed before rehearsals begin, and rehearsals are geared to getting the work on in the minimum time. To ask for an unscheduled extra week is unthinkable, a scandal.

When directors have unfettered power to control the process, however, the actor's lot may not be greatly improved. In the work of people like Wilson and Foreman, for example, the actor frequently functions as a minor element in a totality that is pictorial as much as theatrical, and task based performance often seems to reduce the actor to a kind of automaton.

The primary question emerging from these three examples concerns the depth of the actor's role in the creative process, the extent to which the actor's creative contribution is sought, and acknowledged when it does occur. Theatre is necessarily a collaborative art form which involves many different artists, working in different media, pooling ideas, gaining inspiration from other people's ideas or even half formed suggestions, depending on luck and happy accidents as much as on the conscious, guiding will of the director even though he/she will be credited with the achievement. Western societies have difficulty recognising collective, collaborative work as art, and even more difficulty attributing authorship and rights over such work. The law regards actors as interpreters and not as creators, so they cannot claim any intellectual property rights over their performance. This dismissal of actors' creativity, however, can equally be found within the theatre profession: a well known designer, talking about the creative process involved in the mega musical, claimed that the "creative people" were the director, the composer, the choreographer and the designer. When pressed, he specifically excluded the performers as being part of the creative team.

The dominant position of film and television has, over the course of the century, gradually come to impact upon the nature of the actor's work and on how it is valorised even within the theatre. Film actors come to the shoot ready to perform the fragment required as often as necessary, as early or as late in the day and after as many delays as may occur. The idea of rehearsing for many weeks and developing the character in relation to the characters emerging from the work of the other actors, belongs to theatre practice, but this practice is increasingly under threat due to the dominance of film and television and their characteristic work practices. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about the kind of actor who is valued in film and television, and a major factor in this is the ability to produce a performance quickly, without fuss, whenever required. I was recently told of the attitude of the make up crew on a major film who felt that a man who could sit and chat to them, then go onto the set and immediately shoot a scene, was a good actor, whereas one who needed time to collect his thoughts and focus himself for the performance, was "pretentious". I was struck by this little story because it shows that, even within the "industry", participants have little appreciation of the actor's work process and what is involved in creating a role. It is true that this story concerns a film set, but I think it is symptomatic of a much more widespread misunderstanding of what actors need in order to create deeply felt and deeply explored work. If the managers of subsidised theatre companies and the funding bodies consider that 4 weeks is adequate rehearsal time for even the most complex work and 6 weeks is luxury and if no- one is pressing for substantially longer, then we are getting the theatre we deserve.

I have not left myself very much time to talk about the spectator but I see problems in both mainstream and avant garde or experimental performance practice.

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Mainstream theatre practice, whether commercial or publicly funded, treats the spectator in much the same way and, indeed, the same theatre venues are frequently used by these different companies. The spectators sit in the dark, responding to the performance with a kind of genteel silence, and the architecture of many modern theatres and many of those that were remodelled in the postwar period precludes movement around the auditorium. The social experience of going to the theatre is greatly reduced from what it was in the 18th or the 19th century, for while the sight lines have been improved, the spectators cannot see each other and are frequently wedged into long rows of seats without aisles, so that they are virtually immobile. It is not surprising that the energy level in the typical theatre auditorium is rather low, and I am struck by the fact that whenever schoolchildren are present in any numbers at a performance (in NSW this is usually a Shakespeare or some other text on the HSC syllabus), they are ferociously suppressed by all the spectators present. Spectators thus collude in the training of other spectators and to experience a highly energised audience these days one probably has to go to a rock concert or a football grand final.

In the alternative theatre scene, although much effort has gone into shaking spectators out of their lethargy, there is another problem that is much harder to define. Audiences for such performance are still, thirty years down the track, very small and, unlike dance, alternative theatre does not seem to have penetrated the mainstream to any significant extent. An extensive analysis is required to deal adequately with this issue, but one factor is certainly the impact of postmodern thinking which has been a dominant influence in the performance making of this period. The retreat from fiction and linear narrative, the emphasis on doing rather than acting, the valorisation of reality over mimesis constitute a massive rupture with theatre's traditional mode of operation. It is my contention that the spectators' role in the performance experience has been substantially impoverished, notwithstanding the fact that they may be physically involved in a variety of ways.

Theatre has traditionally been a mode of story telling through mimesis, but the mimesis was always qualified by the fact that the audience was perfectly aware that the actor was acting and was not in reality the character. This dual awareness is a powerful part of the spectator's pleasure and it relates to the psychic mechanism Freud designated as denegation (Verneinung, not to be confused with denial or Verleugnung).4 Denegation is the divided consciousness that permits a repressed idea to return in relative safety to consciousness. Freud described the function of this mechanism, which in his patients was usually revealed through dreams, but it was Octave Mannoni (a French psychoanalyst, writing in the late 1960s) who pointed out the connection to theatre, ironically at the very time that avant garde theatre practitioners were rejecting the practices that made possible such spectatorial experiences.

It is no coincidence that throughout history it is the duality that produces denegation that has constantly been foregrounded in the theatre's own practices as well as in ancillary forms that reveal how theatre is being conceptualised and experienced. I am thinking of such things as the Greek vase paintings showing the actor contemplating his mask, a popular theme in 5th century Athens, but also more obviously of the prevalence of plots that turn on mistaken identity, disguise, pretence and deception, and the popularity of the theme of the play within the play.

4 I deal with this idea in more detail in the chapter on the spectator in my book, Space in Performance, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1999, pp252-5.

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In these ways theatre plays dangerously with the mechanism that makes the whole experience possible, revealing and instantly reasserting the lie, and the recurrence of such play in so many periods and cultures suggests that practitioners have recognised it as a fundamental resource of theatre, a constant source of fascination and a profound part of the spectators' pleasure. If spectators find that happenings, physical performance, multimedia events etc. are somewhat thin fare, attractive on the surface but ultimately lacking in emotional substance, it is perhaps because, in throwing out story, character and mimesis, performance makers are denying spectators the scope for play with denegation that theatre has traditionally offered.

To conclude, let me say that although I think the theatre has serious problems at this end of the century, I do see signs of hope. Particularly in the number of actor based ensembles that are establishing themselves and finding ways to produce work, and in the fact that these groups seem to be attempting to reconnect with works from the past, and to recognise the power of a strong story and strong characters. Maybe the success of Cloudstreet can be seen as a straw in the wind here, for if the only alternative to the public service production line of the state subsidised theatres is either the imported package deal of the mega musical or the abstract formalism of performance and multimedia, spectators will still flock to the cinema for their emotional sustenance, and we will be at risk of losing the most valuable thing that live theatre has to offer.

Henri Lefebvre claimed in the The Production of Space in 1974 that "any revolutionary project today, whether utopian or realistic, must, if it is to avoid hopeless banality, make the reappropriation of the body, in association with the reappropriation of space, into a non- negotiable part of its agenda".5 It is evident that the skilled and docile bodies delivered by training institutions to the casting agents and entrepreneurs, and the passive bodies of spectators schooled in the polite attention required for mainstream theatre are not what Lefebvre has in mind. It is also evident that any social project that dares to call itself revolutionary is a long way from the subscription seasons run by our subsidised theatre companies. Nevertheless it is also evident that live performance provides one of the few sites left in our controlled and over-mediated cyber society where the demands of such a project can be explored. Our task as academics and educators is to work together with theatre artists to ensure that the demands of the industry do not render the theatre incapable of tackling the most potent social challenge it has ever faced.

5 Henri Lefabvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford Blackwell, 1991, pp166-7 (originally published in French in 1974).

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REGIONAL PERFORMING ARTS CENTRES AND COMMUNITY PRODUCTIONS: THE AMATEUR/PROFESSIONAL NEXUS AT THE BUNBURY REGIONAL ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE By Robyn McCarron

Introduction Regional Australian cities and towns have long regarded the establishment of a performing arts centre as one of the markers of city status and cultural achievement. Capital works expenditure comes from government and other sources, but operational funding is rarely factored into planning. This is the case for the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre in Bunbury, Western Australia which has had to grapple with the realities of providing a professionalised theatre venue in a climate of economic restraint and maintaining the strong community links that were responsible for its inception at the same time. During its ten year existence the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre has been central to major changes in the social and cultural life of the city including urban design programs that have seen a lively cultural and tourist inner-city precinct emerge from an industrial port.

This paper examines the nexus between the professional concerns of the management of the Centre to ensure its economic viability, and the strongly expressed desire of the community for the centre to actively support community performing arts. The creative outcome of this interaction has been a series of ‘community productions’ done in collaboration with local performing arts organisations or individuals. These productions have been major successes in terms of audience appeal. However the demand for a highly polished ‘professional’ outcome can lead to perceptual differences between the largely amateur/volunteer cast and crew, and the professional technical and managerial staff. This paper considers the function of the amateur/volunteer within the organisation and the perceived differences between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’

Background The Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre was the culmination of many attempts to obtain a large, purpose-built performance space for the city. The final push to achieve this century- long dream was led by several prominent citizens and was linked with state government planning which, through the then South West Development Authority, was undertaking major urban planning for the city centre. A substantial portion of the building costs of the centre was raised through public donations and corporate sponsorship. This degree of community participation could not be ignored and, to this end both state and local governments matched the community funds and subsequently, a stand-alone theatre was built. The local government authority, the Bunbury City Council, was vested with its management and upkeep.

This high degree of community ‘ownership’ of the building was further strengthened by a ‘Friends of the Theatre’ scheme which now has a membership base of about 700, of whom approximately 200 provide all front-of-house labour for the centre.

Thus, from its inception, the functioning of the Centre has relied upon donations of firstly, capital and secondly, labour by a large number of citizens.

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There are some tangible rewards for these donations of time and labour, such as reduced ticket prices, early access to subscription series, the chance to see shows free of charge or invitations to special events. Other less tangible rewards would be socialising, a sense of being a good citizen, a patron and/or supporter of the arts.

For the first five years of the Centre’s existence it mainly relied on imported shows. Local performance groups discovered that the 800 seat capacity and the associated costs of hiring the venue made it prohibitively expensive. Subsequently there was a sense of disillusionment and expressions of concern about the Centre’s role. The community expected access to and participation in the centre but the city council increasingly wanted a Centre that could run without subsidy. The infrastructure costs, particularly professional salaries for management, marketing and technical services, meant that heavily subsidised rates for local performance groups could not be made available. Donors of capital and labour began to wonder what they had contributed to.

In a conference paper discussing the increasing pressure on community facilities to ‘pay their way’ under policies of economic rationalism and corporatisation, Deborah Mills (1997, p.11) states that “the same story applies to performing arts centres. Prices go up. Local groups are forced out. Commercial product suffers a downturn. Dark nights increase. Losses increase. There is talk of closure.” In 1997 the Bunbury City Council instigated a major review of the Centre to establish whether more cost-effective ways could be found for its management. Included in this review was a suggestion that the venue could be sold or leased to a commercial operator. This perceived threat to the community ownership was met by a groundswell of community opposition to suggestions of selling the venue or ‘outsourcing’ Centre management, not the least because a significant proportion of the original funding of the building, as previously stated, was through community donations. Ironically, the city council was about to commence its cultural planning processes and the position of the Centre in the cultural, social and economic life of the community was amply demonstrated at this point. Equally ironically, in the same year the 700 strong ‘Friends of the Theatre’ received state and national recognition as an example of an outstanding volunteer organisation.

The board of management, a volunteer group itself, threw itself into the task of affirming the Centre’s central community role and, through an intensive period of strategic and financial planning, managed to refocus the organisation. In all data collected through this period, the importance of community participation in the whole life of the centre was reiterated. Further, the community expressed the view that out-sourcing the management would relegate community participation almost solely to that of audience. The board of management warned the City Council that this would lead to many ‘dark nights at the theatre’.

Performance and participation A series of parallel though related developments have occurred. Local schools realised the possibilities of using the Centre for major performance events as they were guaranteed of (family) audiences to fill the space. The increased participation of young people in music, dance and theatre arts activities within schools and through private teachers or youth theatre groups has been a feature of the past ten years.

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Participation by at least three high schools in major performance events such as the National Rock Eisteddfod has increased interest in contemporary dance to the extent that regional schools now hold a dance festival at the Centre each year which is a sell-out event and, though not competitive, inspires audience reactions similar to a sporting event or rock eisteddfod. This and other schools-based events have raised the Centre’s profile among young people in the community who regard performing in the Centre as a good thing to do. In addition to the performance opportunities, this has meant that there is a growing number of young people acquiring technical experience in a professionalised theatre space as, typically, the schools provide their own student backstage crew, stage managers and sound and lighting technicians who perform their roles alongside the professionals employed by the theatre. In fact I suspect there would be many young people in the community who mainly know the Centre because of their active participation onstage or backstage. They are less inclined to participate as audiences.

Prior to the advent of the Centre the city had three amateur performing arts organisations: a repertory club founded in the 40s, a musical theatre group founded in the 60s and a youth theatre group founded in the 80s. Both the repertory and musical theatre groups own small theatre venues. Since the Centre has been built at least two other groups have emerged – an opera company and a contemporary theatre group. Arguably there are more groups and, in fact, through developing some community productions with individual directors rather than with organisations, the Centre has become a de facto production house, a role which challenges its definition of itself and which potentially challenges the viability of the performing arts organisations within the community. The fact that the community provided casts, crews, musicians and audiences for three large cast musicals and a major drama production within a three month period commencing in March, 1999 indicates the high level of participation in the performing arts in the community. This intensity of activity also foregrounds some of the tensions within the amateur/professional nexus.

Community theatre The radical community-theatre movement of the 1970s and 80s largely left Bunbury untouched. There has never been an understanding or acceptance of the developmental nature of such projects. Where attempts have been made, for example by employing a director from the metropolis to coordinate and direct an innovative project, the success has been mixed. The community has reluctantly participated in such projects, which came perilously close to not meeting their stated (high-minded) objectives. Neither has there emerged any one charismatic local individual who has led his/her supporters in the direction of experimentation, innovation or radical action, at least in the theatre. But this is not to say that charismatic, inspired, hard-working individuals are not working in the performing arts in this community. Where most lead and inspire is within the range of performance which could be termed ‘entertainment’ with its emphasis on the utopias offered by musical comedy and light operas, light classical music, popular music and contemporary dance. Where drama and social comment are attempted, their worthiness is established by strong links with the school curricula thus ensuring full houses of (possibly coerced) young people.

Thus community theatre in Bunbury is firmly placed within the mainstream where it enjoys widespread support across age, gender and class.

The similarity between commercial theatre and traditional amateur theatre in terms of repertoire and audience has been noted by Fotheringham (1997).

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And, arguably, amateur theatres in Australia are more typically community theatres because they serve the needs of their communities and have been sustained by their communities for generations.

Within the Centre a policy has evolved to stage at least two ‘community productions’ each year. These are underwritten by the Centre, and any profit is split with the participating performance group or, in the case of individual directors, the profit is retained by the Centre. The Centre commits itself to sustaining any losses, though none have occurred to date. These two productions are not the only community productions, which take place within the theatre. Other groups perform on a hire basis and sustain whatever profits/losses are made.

Community productions The remainder of this paper will focus on the amateur/professional interaction within the Centre-funded community productions. The current board of management considers the community productions important to the Centre because firstly, they are a public demonstration of community participation and support. Secondly, they attract large audiences and, since all production costs including staff salaries and capital costs are factored into the budget for each production, they are significant factors in keeping the Centre funded and open. That is, they are necessary for the Centre’s survival. Thirdly they offer amateur actors and actants (Barr, 1998, p.11) the chance to perform within a prestigious venue to (usually) large, appreciative audiences and with professional technical support.

The attraction of the Centre is such that auditions for these productions are well attended, attracting a range of volunteers whose formal training in performance can range from none at all to high levels of professional training. There is a general understanding that actors will not be financially rewarded for their labour although other key personnel such as directors, designers, producers and musicians are usually paid a set fee either in acknowledgment of their professional skills or the extraordinary amounts of time spent on the overall coordination of the project. The regular technical staff of the Centre are paid their usual salaries. Occasionally a professional director or (very rarely) a professional performer is used. In these cases award wages and conditions would be met.

Whilst the payment of salaries to Centre staff is generally accepted by the volunteer cast and crew, the payment of fees to certain of their number can be misinterpreted. Though regular amateur performers are accustomed to the long hours of rehearsal, the strain placed on relationships at home and work and the discipline involved, other newer performers have no idea about the costs and time involved in putting together such productions. They wonder where all the money goes and who benefits from it. As they are exhorted to try harder and to aim for a ‘professional’ performance they may also resent being taken for granted as an unpaid labour force.

Many volunteers do not understand arts funding processes and the limitations on the expenditure of the funds. For example, a recent Centre production of No Sugar by Jack Davis attracted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) funding which was to be used to offset certain pre-arranged production costs. Some of the participants were puzzled that these funds could not be more generally distributed, and, in fact, found the whole voluntary nature of the process difficult to accept when the project more closely represented work and not recreation.

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Much of this misunderstanding can be prevented if all participants in a project are given an initial briefing on the way in which the project is structured and funded, including an overview of the function of the Centre as a community resource. Staff at the Centre have grappled with the dynamics of the community productions which place demands on the Centre which are quite unlike those experienced when it is simply a hire-only facility to external users. Staff have noted that decision making is difficult when there is a lack of broadly based knowledge about the functions of a professional venue and a lack of experience in budgeting for large productions. Further, used to working to deadlines and to the conventions of the theatre, staff are sometimes bemused by what they would perceive as a ‘lack of self-discipline’ in backstage behaviour or interactions between actors, crew and director. They find themselves having to mediate in emotional situations which they would normally consider outside their professional brief. But the reality is that these occasional situations are well-known within amateur theatre as weary volunteers are pushed to their limits.

Staff at the Centre have realised that there is a need for professional technical input early in the planning stages of the production as it is apparent that the demands of preparing a production for Centre have sometimes overwhelmed the volunteer production teams. The budget of a recent musical blew out when the elaborate set, on hire from His Majesty’s, Perth, proved too large for the Centre stage and modifications which necessitated paid labour had to be made. As the Centre has no storage facilities, adequate workshop or rehearsal space all rehearsals and construction have to take place off site, which means alternative spaces have to be hired. This highlights the lack of foresight in the original planning of the building. As the Centre was funded through a community fund-raising campaign the design was kept modest, which, in retrospect, was a false economy as the management is frustrated by the lack of flexibility within the building. It is a single use facility. In this respect the community was perhaps too enterprising as some years later the state government fully funded entertainment centres in Mandurah and Kalgoorlie including more flexible spaces enabling the buildings to be used for rehearsals, conventions, exhibitions and, in the case of Mandurah, an additional workshop theatre space which became a base for a youth theatre group.

The use of the term ‘professional’ as a marker of quality rather than as a descriptor of organisational or industrial practice is common within amateur performance and reception. Audience members make comments such as ‘it’s really professional isn’t it?’ On the other hand, some, clearly not understanding the community basis of these projects, comment on their lack of ‘professionalism’. The word also usually inserts itself into local press reviews. Casts are exhorted to ‘be professional’ or individuals may be subjected to censure because they behaved ‘unprofessionally’. The irony is that they can never be professional as the conditions of their labour are entirely different to that of an actor or actant who makes a living from theatre work. For many amateurs the experience is as much social as it is about performance. And when rehearsals reach the point where tempers are fraying because of sheer exhaustion, the only means of keeping the group together is through appeals to ‘a common goal’, ‘team spirit’ or ‘being (like a) professional’.

The level of expectation for a ‘professional’ production has increased with each community production. As the projects become more ambitious with larger casts and technical requirements, the costs increase and are reflected in ticket prices. The question has to be asked. Can the Centre reasonably expect the public to pay ‘professional’ prices for amateur performance? If yes, how can the Centre possibly maintain ‘quality control’ when the whole project is based on voluntary labour? What rewards can be offered for ‘excellence’?

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And how much can you expect of volunteers in terms of number and frequency of performances and, as has been the case for most of these productions, tours to other venues. Are the thrill of performance, the citation on a curriculum vitae and an after show cast party reward enough? Given the fact that these productions have always managed to achieve the large casts required, perhaps it is. However, one suspects that the dynamics of the arrangement need to be carefully managed to ensure that the ‘feel good’ factor remains sufficient reward for labour for, as soon as actors and actants suspect they are being taken for granted as part of a revenue raising operation, then cracks may appear.

Conclusion Is the Centre a de facto performing arts group in competition with other groups and thus eroding their traditional support base or is this increased activity generally raising the participation rates and standards of performance in the community? Until 1998, all community productions at the Centre were done in conjunction with an existing performing arts group within the community. However, in 1998, after being approached by an individual director, the Centre undertook a production of its own. There have been two more since. This has been of benefit to directors who can now approach the Centre with proposals for projects rather than having to persuade one of the existing groups to undertake their project. This has been a way of circumventing the politics of amateur groups. However, the impact has been felt on some of the older performance groups who are now competing with a Centre which can afford to mount glossier, ‘more professional’ productions drawn from the same repertoire of light musicals and operas.

What community need does the Centre serve by developing local productions? Why not leave it to the existing groups within the community? The greater resources of the Centre, particularly in terms of marketing, mean that local performance can be promoted to a wider, regional audience. It means that the community has access to productions they otherwise would never see unless they travel to the city or interstate as these productions require large casts and are beyond the means of state or commercial companies. There is no professional or pro-am company outside Perth in Western Australia. Our regional cities are considerably smaller than their counterparts in eastern Australia which themselves struggle to support professional community or regional theatre companies. The resources of APACA (Australian Performing Arts Centres Association) and Circuitwest, its Western Australian branch, mean that the Centre is well represented in bidding for professional touring productions and there is a steady flow of commercial and subsidised product through the Centre.

Petersen (1991, p.5) comments that “history has shown that one of the characteristics of professionalism is owning some territory and keeping out intruders, including ‘the community’”.

In the case of the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre, the community has proved remarkably resilient in its determination to utilise the Centre for its own performance purposes. Kiernander, at the 1996 Re-Siting Theatre Conference, talked about the community development role of activities such as community productions where “communal forms of theatre, dance and music blend, integrate themselves into the fabric; and become a predominant binding force” (p.14) The communal nature of the community production is the reward for the amateur/volunteer participant. Apart from participating in a sporting team or being part of a voluntary organisation such as an emergency service, amateur or community theatre is one of the few occasions where individuals in our increasingly privatised, technological society can gain a powerful sense of belonging and community identity.

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That this is acknowledged by a prestige community venue such as the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre through the staging of community productions is highly desirable. However, the voluntary contribution by the individual must not be taken for granted.

References Barr, R. L. (1998) Rooms with a view: the stages of community in the modern theatre. Ann Arbor: Uni. of Michigan Press.

Fotheringham, R. (1997) Cultural policy and regional theatre. In Jennifer Webb (ed) Resiting theatre: approaches to regional theatre development. Conference proceedings. Central Queensland University, Rockhampton. 6 & 7 February, 1996.

Kiernander, Adrian (1997) Pizza et Circenses. In Jennifer Webb (ed) Resiting theatre: approaches to regional theatre development. Conference proceedings. Central Queensland University, Rockhampton. 6 & 7 February, 1996.

Mills, Deborah (1997 The role of arts and cultural development in changing times. Paper given at the Regional arts and cultural development conference, Busselton, WA. 30 Oct – 2 Nov.

Petersen, Alan (1991) Community arts and cultural democracy. Occasional paper # 1. A kick up the arts series. Community Arts Network WA (Inc)

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RUINS AND VESTIGES By Andrew McNamara

If I had to hazard a guess, I would suggest that today most people in the arts only resort to general appeals to the concept of culture when they are forced to-that is, when applying for a grant or a funding application. Only then, in the most pragmatic of circumstances, does one require some broad, maybe even universal, legitimatising criterion. Yet, much as one is forced to come up with such a criterion, I would again postulate wildly and say that a common response is that any such definition, as much as it forced out by the circumstance, is in itself forced. One cannot make broad claims about improving mankind, of adding to the universal creative spirit, of promoting the cultivation of the human soul, and still keep a straight face.

This does not mean, however, that people everywhere are giving up on art. What is interesting about this situation is its twofold dimension. Everywhere writers, artists, critics, companies and curators feel the old verities of cultural legitimacy are slipping away and that they can no longer be defended with confidence. At the same time, people engage in art in ever-greater numbers and feel they can get on with things (making art, producing drama, composing and performing) without the aid of any overriding principles of legitimation.

This can become a major difficulty, though, when the State itself fails to recognise the justification for culture, but also retreats from funding the arts-except of course when it does so in the name of cultur tourism or such a vague adjunct of socio-economic development. What happens when the state withdraws from the idea of culture? This proposition has been examined by Bill Readings in his book, The University in Ruins.1 Readings is primarily discussing the plight of contemporary universities-to arts and humanities in particular-where the effects of this withdrawal from the idea of culture is felt most starkly. His analysis does, however, throw up intriguing questions for contem- porary art. The traditional ideas that generated and drove the university as a concept have all fallen into disrepair. The university as an institution, Readings argues, is "no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as a producer, protector and inculcator of an idea of national culture". This role has diminished along with the relative decline of the nation-state as a constituent element of the capitalist economy.2 The two are linked-the university no longer reproduces a national culture because the nation-state itself declines in significance as the "prime instance of the reproduction of capital around the world". In short, there's nothing to reproduce. As a consequence, both the university and culture have a more tenuous relation to the public sphere.3

The key story of Readings's book is one of how liberal education has lost its organising centre, the idea of culture as its object, both as its origin and goal.4 The modem university has had three organizing ideas: the Kantian concept of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and today the techno-bureaucrat notion of excellence.5 For Fichte, and many of the German Idealists, the university attempted to inculcate the faculty of critical judement. We should not be tempted to look back on this with rosecoloured glasses through this critical capacity had its own imposed limited for its ideological orientation was the nation-state. Culture, at once,

1 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Harvard University Press, 1996. Page references to this appear in the text. 2 Ibid, p44. 3 Ibid, p91. 4 Ibid, p10 5 Ibid, p14

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That this should happen in Germany is, of course, implicit with the emergence of German nationhood. Under the rubric of culture, the University is assigned the dual talik of research and teaching, respectively the production and inculcation of national self-knowledge. As such, it becomes the institution charged with watching over the spiritual life of the people of the rational state, recording ethnic tradition and statist rationality. The University, in other words, is identified as the institution that will give reason to the common life of the people, while preserving their traditions and avoiding the bloody, destructive example of the French Revolution. This, I argue, is the decisieve role accorded to the modern university to the present.

Literature, of course, was accorded a central role here and the tradition of national literature enabled students to learn “what is to be French, or English, or German.

These conceptions had been decisive, that is, until the present. The present is different. Where you find the de-legitimation of culture, you find universities reworking their identity as they attempt to become transnational beueaucratic corporations. In other words, the university aligns itself along the model of the corporation; it begins to refer to students as customers and trumpets its “client services”; its key figure is the administrator; and its generalised logic is that of accountability. Readings capture this mood wonderfully well: “University mission statements, like their publicity brochures, share two distinctive features nowadays. On the one hand, they all claim that theirs is a unique educational institution. On the other hand, they all go on to describe this uniqueness in exactly the same way”.

This one, same way is the one way street of accountability – the university must pursue excellence. The term is its new rhetorical catch-cry, “excellence”. The intriguing aspect of the accountability is that it has general applicability, which is good for the managerial class, but is it empty. Value equates solely with efficiency, accountability purely with accounting. The task of inculcating critical judgement is pass. The universities around the world herald the value of excellence, yet it is an empty criterion. It flattens all considerations into one standard. As Readings asks acutely: “How long does it take to become educated? The standard can apply whatever way one wishes to apply the model of accountability:

… excellence is not a fixed standard of judgement but a qualifier whose meaning is fixed in relation to something else. An excellence boat is not excellent by the same criteria as an excellent plane. Nor is the employment of the term ‘excellence’ limited to academic disciplines within the University. For instance, Jonathan culler has informed me that the Cornell University Parking Services recently received an award for “excellence in parking”. What is meant was that they had achieved a remarkable level of efficiency in restricting motor vehicle access. As he pointed out, excellence could just as well have meant making people’s lives easier by increasing the number of parking spaces available to faculty. The issue here is not the merits of either option but the fact that excellence can function equally well as an evaluative criterion on either side of the issue of what constitutes “excellence in parking”, because excellence has not content to call its own.

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Whether it is a matter of increasing the number of cars on campus (in the interests of employee efficiency – fewer minutes wasted in walking) or decreasing the number of cars (in the interest of the environment), is indifferent; the efforts of parking officials can be described in terms of excellence in both instances. Its very lack of reference allows excellence to function as a principle of translatability between radically different idioms: parking services and research grants can each be excellent, and their excellence is not dependent on any specific qualities or effects that they share.

We could label this the “car-park” model of assessment, in which apples and oranges are equated, as a boat or a plane, and each can be “excellent” whether there is more or less of them, or one or the other. “Excellence” today is a corporatist catchword, but it is becoming a thoroughly pervasive mode of evaluation. Readings argue, by contrast, that the truly complicated questions are philosophical in nature and the means that they “are systematically incapable of producing cognitive certainly or definitive answers. Such questions will necessarily give rise to further debate, for they are radically at odds with the logic of quantification”. These are questions of the order of: how long does it take to become educated? Is quantity the best measure of the significance of library holdings? Is knowledge simply to be reproduced from the warehouse, or is it something to be produced in teaching? And while we’re on it, we could ask whether the conjoining of art and politics leads to fresh insight into the politics of the political or to another moralism in the name of”politics”.

What have Readings's arguments about universities today to do with contemporary art? After all, in contemporary art it would be no great shock to say that culture no longer embodies the ideals of the state. If Readings is correct, however, then the state has nothing at stake in the idea of culture today. Yet, of course, various state institutions play a major role in producing contemporary art in its many guises: Perspecta, the Biennales, the Asia-Pacific Triennal-all are reviews and surveys that aim to define what is contemporary art practice. Reading provides no specific insight into this paradox, but his analysis does provide interesting challenges in the face of the decline of culture as a regulatory or communal ideal. Readings refuses the solace of nostalgia; he also avoids petty recrimination about the plight of the contemporary university and doom about the fate of culture. He is not blind to the limitations of the university as an institution in its past. In fact, it is the awareness of these limitations that proves instructive today.

Readings argues for an "institutional pragmatism"-he wishes to "make an argument for the tactical of the space of the University, while recognizing that space as a historical anachronism".6 Following Samuel Weber's work on institutions, he states that we should not seek the comfort of either the notion of "the perfect institution" or the ideal hope of "the potential absence of all institutions".7 He is not so pragmatic though as to accept the corporatist model of "excellence", but instead insists upon the 66 philosophical separation of the notions of accountability and accounting. To dwell in the ruins of old regulatory ideals requires inventive responses because the conceptual space of culture and of the university is now rather empty. Today it is filled only by an empty criterion, "excellence", which has content-as Readings is continually reminding-it is neither true nor false, neither ignorant or conscious.8

6 Ibid, p18. 7 Ibid, p225 n8. 8 Ibid, p13.

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As a counter to excellence, Readings proposes "thought". Now this proposal should not automatically be limited to the university-it can apply, and serve as a category of validation for art and cultural activity as well. In fact, this might alert us to where art and pure ("mis-" or "unguided") research possess their strongest affinities. For the category of thought is as equally self-reflexive and as empty as excellence. Yet thought takes itself as a question without resorting to economic validation. It conforts more to an economy of waste than to the restricted economy of calculation. It is therefore open to the non-calculable; it is a non-productive labour that only shows up on the balance sheets precisely as waste.9

How is it possible to think in a university in which culture is no longer a regulatory ideal? How to thin art without culture? How is it possible to evade the criterion of the calculable without falling back on the old ideas of legitimation of the university as well as art and culture? It would seem to leave one hanging in a kind of limbo or an impossible trajectory.

For Readings, this is where inventiveness, and critical vigilance become a permanent condition- it is akin to what Walter Benjamin characterised as taking the "state of emergency" to be a rule rather than the exception. The process of de-referentialisation that is occurring today opens up new spaces and breaks down existing structures of defence against thought. There are, however, no guidebooks to making the right decision or the right judgement. Dwelling in the ruins means trying to do what one can, while leaving space "for what we cannot envisage to emerge". There are no teleologies that can guarantee or justify what one does.

Two critical ramifications stem from this conclusion. First, one cannot claim the whole system, nor try to embody it. The prized presumptions of embodiment always presume some pure and transparent embodiment of the ideal one might wish to uphold. Issues of representation and reproduction come to the fore in this climate. In terms of what is to be reproduced, excellence, is an empty criterion that only seeks the reproduction of the system, the system without an idea. When one poses traditional question such as: What, for example, does the university represent? Who represents it? What figure? The answer can only be that no one, no entity, no idea embodies that space. Today one must endeavour to make things happen within the possibilities of a system, yet without saying that such events are the true, real meaning of the system.

Second, Readings insists upon the value of dissensus over that of consensus. The aspiration for unity a harmony often amounts to a tacit, though coercive, convergence that disavows what is different to the norm. Dissensus recognises an intractable social bond, a dependency upon others rather than emancipation.10 It amounts to the recognition of difference without identity and the disputation of position without end. We need, for example, to think interdisciplinarity apart from the goals of mutual convergence.

From these ruminations interesting questions emerge: what does the contemporary art survey exhibition held in the name of "art and politics" seek to represent? I am thinking here of the 1999 "Perspecta" in Sydney under the auspices of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Do its institutional imperatives primarily work to replicate itselP. These questions can only be posed in advance as criteria to examine the effectiveness of the survey's own self-defining catch-phrase. More importantly, Readings's book prompts some further questioning of the political in art today.

9 Ibid, p175. 10 Ibid, p190.

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For example, the claim of the other is held to be one of the most incisive political questions in contemporary art. Claims of alterity refer to a privileged marginality-that is, what is marginal to a presumed normative centre, some postulated status quo. Yet it is no longer that evident what this could be in contemporary art itself. It is rather a nomina term, a hypothetical centre, where one does not actually exist. The success, and legacy, of the avantgarde has been to dismantle such a normative centre such as an academy. What is left in its wake is something very similar to dissensus and an economy of waste. Moves to recuperation today are not simply found in the nostalgia for the academic, but also in the contemporary embodiment of alterity. I is discovered in the attempt to claim the marginal, to inhabit a secure politics. This is secured in figur that embody alterity and marginality to operate once more as pure transgressive figures. This is the position of guaranteed politics.

By contrast, how does one manage cultural waste? Distraction might serve as its Janus-faced emblem. A distracted activity is oriented around unforeseen connections; it is not conducive to function. It is, however, easily lost to idle entertainment and "lifestyle". As Eric Michaels commented a while back: lifestyles are "assemblages of commodified symbols, operating in concert as packages that can be bought, sold, traded, or lost". He contrasts "lifestyle" with culture "a learned, inherited tradition"; something "your parents and grandparents taught you [which] didn't offer much choice about membership".11 Membership of the club, "contemporary art", is similarly administered through the gateways of biennial or triennial reviews, but it does not form a tradition (this is not to say that there ar no legacies and heritages which are pivotal to contemporary practice). It is our vivid testimony to the dissensus in contemporary art: we can pose questions about Perspecta's priorities, choices, exclusions, etc., and these are never fully answered, or answerable.

With and without a tradition, a distracted practice might amount to something barbed, something oblique, not readily consumed. It seeks connections distractedly. The unforeseen does not fall from the clouds, or emerge from pure, avantgarde invention; it comes with no guarantees, it cannot deliver a wondrous emancipation. It seeks instead the unforeseen, and yet to be acknowledged, in the tradition of triumphs and catastrophes we call the past.

11 Eric Michels, “For a Culture Future”, Bad Aboriginal Art, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1994, pp120-1.

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MANAGERIALISM MEETS DIONYSOS THEATRE AND CIVIC ORDER By Paul Monaghan

I want to begin my talk with a rhetorical quiz - I say rhetorical because if you do yell out the right answer it will spoil my punch line. You have to guess who is being referred to by X in the following quote (which I have adapted very slightly):

“The underlying messages of X’s system are efficiency, professionalism, management by experts, social order...all this is to take place in a society balanced by...leadership and market forces.”

Any one of a number of our most enlightened federal leaders might come to mind, though if you are from Victoria like me, you are likely to guess that X refers to our beloved state leader, and if you are in the business of applying for arts funding in Victoria, you may even guess more specifically, with great justification, that X refers to Arts Victoria, the state government’s arts funding Department. And indirectly you would indeed be absolutely right.

However, in this particular instance, the quote from John Raulston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilisation [1997:27] refers to . And I would like to propose that there is an underlying connection between that earlier leader with an edifice complex, contemporary corporatism, and arts funding on the one hand (quagmired as it is in managerialism and a Performance Management structure), and citizenship, Greek theatre, and the absence of an arts industry, on the other. Oh, and bread. I’ll come to the bread bit later.

In this paper I’m going to explore these connections, drawing on my recent experience (using that word in its tortuous sense) running a theatre company and venue for five years in Melbourne (i.e. Theatreworks in St Kilda), and my experience (using that word in its mostly vicarious sense) of ancient Greek theatre, both as an academic, a sometimes practitioner and an audience member. In examining these connections I will be exploring the balance of, and the tension and state of suspension, between a number of oppositions, such as order and disorder, concreteness and fluidity, predicability and unpredictability, industry and system. Towards the end of the paper I will be suggesting that the situation we find ourselves in at the end of the century does not have to be tolerated, that we do not in the end need to enter into the transactions on the menu (to use Adorno’s phrase), and on the terms offered. And at the very end I will be offering you an opportunity to participate in a Bacchic orgy - well, one suitable to a conference on Industrial Relations at least - so stay with me.

Let me start with some comments on managerialism and the Performance Management structure, as experienced in what is called the arts industry. As practiced by governments all over Australia, and in particular in Victoria, where the private sector has been extensively used as a role model, managerialism invokes the perfectly sensible notion of accountability for public money. Only I doubt very much that the government of Victoria at least, ever thinks of the money as actually belonging to the public. Under the Performance Management structure, the client (whether a government department, or agency, arts company or business entity), has to establish ahead of time what it wants to do, how it will do it, how much it will need to fund it, and how it will measure and evaluate its performance. Financial accountability is of course, and properly, taken for granted.

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Should the government agree to, it then allocates the applicant enough money to do what you’ve applied to do. Well, that’s the idea anyway. In the arts, the situation is a long way from the idea in this respect. Your service agreement is designed to guarantee that you will do what you say you will do, and may build in penalties for failure to do so. Of course in the “shady” dealings between government and the private sector (I say “shady” but you know of course what I really mean) these service agreements and their supposed penalties are used to keep as much information as possible about the use of “public” money from the public themselves. Such information is called “commercial in confidence material”. But never mind, we don’t need to know this information because the government will smack their botties if they are naughty. Trust them.

Here’s how it works at Arts Victoria (when I say Arts Victoria, I mean the entity as a whole; there are some very good people there, but less and less, as the good ones leave in droves; and I trust that other government arts funding bodies around the country are similar in quality if not degree; the Australia Council has certainly moved in this direction). The arts company seeking annual or triennial funding - project funding is slightly less involved - is increasingly required to set itself up as a business enterprise, which upon receiving funding enters into a contract with the government. The company is called a client, and has a client manager at Arts Vic. As a business, you are required to have a Vision and Mission, Goals and Objectives, timelines, person responsible, and so on. I’m sure these notions are not new to many here, but you may be unaware of the extent to which these structures dominate the arts company in the 90’s. The Goals and Objectives are transferred into your contract with Arts Vic, and form the basis of the Performance Indicators with which you must justify your continued allocation of funds. Sounds perfectly sensible perhaps. Let’s see.

Although the titles vary slightly amongst different users, the Performance Management structure contains a series of levels which increase in concreteness and measurability from the broad and ill defined to extremely concrete. The broadest level of Vision usually contains those adjectives which have been somewhat meaninglessly turned into nouns, like excellence, innovation and accessibility, and so general as to be applicable to the arts, engineering, the finance sector or whatever - perhaps not benignly so. Goals, the next level, are slightly more specific but not very measurable, being those targets on the horizon of your orb of influence which you would like to move towards because you believe they will help to achieve you Vision. Objectives sit in the middle strata, being the reasonably concrete “WHAT” you will do, in a system where you have some measure of control over your actions and the results of those actions (that’s the idea, anyway); they must be measurable and have a definite time frame to them. This is the dangerous level: it can get you in very hot water or sacked if you’re not careful. The Latin origin of the word is interesting: obicio,-ere,-ieci, obiectum primarily refers to something put in front of you to get in your way. The next two levels are Strategies and very specific Actions. And if you turned off during that description, think what it’s like to spend all day every day for months on end immersed in it.

The Annual Grant application, which must respond Arts Victoria’s policy statement called Arts 21, must now contain the following:

1. Corporate Plan, containing Executive Summary, Vision and Mission, Principles and Values, Industry Analysis, Goals and Objectives for three years, Activity Descriptions (I used to joke that this section would contain one sentence: “Write this Plan, fill in your questionaries, write your Reports”. I joked but did not laugh).

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The Corporate Plan also contained Performance Indicators, and Three Year Financial Plan (as if there might be some validity in such a document for a small theatre company with an interest in the community, in Victoria).

2. The Annual Business Plan, detailing all your Goals and Objectives, Strategies and Actions, time frames, and so on, in great detail for the year ahead, and including of course your detailed Activity Descriptions (see entry in Corporate Plan)

3. The Corporate Governance Plan is a beauty, containing Recruitment and Induction Processes for new Board members, Composition and role of sub-committees, Board Performance and assessment process, Personnel, Staff recruitment and assessment procedures, evidence of adherence to various legislated governance policies, etc etc etc, and best of all, a detailed Risk Management Plan (and its not acceptable to say, “Shut the doors and get another job”). Here you are asked to rate numerically (of course) the risks for your company and how you will deal with them if they occur. For example “what if the media don’t like you” to which I couldn’t stop myself from writing “LET THEM EAT CAKE!”

4. The Annual Marketing Plan is self explanatory and even more tedious.

5. Response to ARTS 21: this is where you write: “I VOMITED, NOW GIVE ME THE FUCKING MONEY !”

So there, on the table is the Theatreworks 1999 Grant application: 70 odd pages of corporate suck job, as required, for a staff of two and a miserable grant of $85,000.

The Performance Management structure as I and many others like me have experienced it, with its attendant Performance Contracts and Indicators, apart from the very real result that it leaves no time to do what you are actually there to do, constrains arts practice into an ever tightening paradigm of concrete and meaningless numerals. This inadequate system is really all about numbers – simple numbers, in a standard format that can be compared to other simple numbers in identical standard formats, which can then be transferred and summarised in the funding body’s annual report with the underlying message: vote for this government!

All this might be laughed if it stood alone, but of course it doesn’t. Remember Saul’s quote regarding Mussolini from the beginning of my paper. Performance Management is a clear example of corporatism at work. In “The Unconscious Civilisation”, Saul describes corporatism as an ideology in which:

“The technocracy has developed an argument that now dominates our society according to which “management” equals “doing” in the sense that “doing” equals “making”[1997:7] in which, “Our actions are only related to tiny, narrow bands of specialist information, usually based on a false idea of measurement rather than upon any knowledge - that is, understanding - of the larger picture” [1997:5]

“Truth” in a corporatist society, he argues, is not in the world, it is in the measurements made by professionals” [1997:9]

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In order to understand what kind of society we live in, says Saul, we need to ask the basic question: where is the source of legitimacy? [1997:32]

The answer for the late 20th Century in the West is clear. It lies in groups and corporations, in corporate structures and hierarchies. Corporatism is an ideology, says Saul, which claims rationality as its central quality [1997:2], where the citizen is reduced to the state of a subject or serf (or a client of government), and exists as a function rather than an individual [1997:34].

“The human is thus reduced to a measurable value, like a machine or a piece of property. We know that real expressions of individualism are not only discouraged, but punished. The active, outspoken citizen is unlikely to have a successful professional career” [1997:34]

Managerialism is so focused on rational, strategic choices and goals that democratic processes are considered an annoyance. Hence the prevalence of “commercial in confidence material”. In a recent episode of Background Briefing on ABC Radio National, entitled The Consultocracy, David Osborne, author of Re-Inventing Government” stated that:

“Rational, strategic choices are almost the opposite of the political process” with apparently no sense of irony.

An alternative legitimacy can be found in the individual citizenry acting as a whole, a legitimacy, which requires participation rather than acquiescence. Which leads me naturally to the second section of my paper, in which I will examine the relation between Theatre and Civic Order in Ancient Greece in the 5th Century BC.

There are a number of things to keep in mind when we speak about Greek theatre. Firstly, like their citizenship, the theatre was an entirely male affair: there are no women on the Greek stage, only male constructs of something other than themselves; there are certainly no women involved in making or performing Greek theatre, and almost certainly no women in the audience. Where that leaves us is another paper - or seven - but we certainly can’t forget it. Secondly, like anyone who talks about Greek theatre, I base my observations on the best scholarly and theatrical methods, which end where a leap of conjecture takes off. The fragmentary nature of the evidence demands such a leap, but I am a cautious athlete. And thirdly, the period of the big adventure in Greek or rather Athenian theatre, is synonymous with the period of radical democracy, a fact most noteworthy in the context of this paper.

One of the most striking features of the performing arts paradigm in Greece was the place of theatre in the public life of the polis, and the way the Greeks balanced order and disorder, solidity and fluidity in both.

The annual seven-day City Dionysia Festival was one of only two or three significant occasions per year when theatrical performances could be experienced. Over three to four days, depending on what part of the fifth century we focus on, four or five plays were staged per day: three tragedies and a spoof by a single playwright, on each of the first three days, followed by a single day of five comedies by five different comic playwrights. It is noteworthy in comparison to our own situation, that in any one year in this period, there might be only 30 - 40 single performances of theatre.

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At each performance in the City Dionysia it is estimated that around 50% of the male population of Athens might attend (around 15,000 - 17,000) - not a bad house. This figure along with plenty of other evidence suggests that in Athens, theatre was considered a most important part of public life. Clearly, something was working well.

The production of theatre was paid for partly by the citizens’ common treasury, and partly by a wealthy individual, whose aristocratic ancestry might be somewhat attenuated and of course put to good service for the common good by his funding of the chorus. I will return to this a little later, but its important to note here that there was no industry or profession at this stage.

The events on the first three days of the City Dionysia festival, on which there were no theatrical performances, and the events which immediately preceded the commencement of performances on the 4th day, are important to my theme here. The preceding days were filled with events which celebrated the city of Athens, and payed homage to Dionysos, the god of theatre and other disorienting activities, in whose honour the festival was held and in whose theatre the performances took place. On the day that performances commenced, several events of importance set the theatrical experience in an interesting context. I don’t want to go into great detail here, but these events included the following:

• the ritual slaughtering of a pig, whose carcass was paraded around the orchestra before an expectant audience (a terrific practice by the way, I recommend we reintroduce it especially into our major arts centres), • the grand entry into the theatre of the ten Generals (equivalent perhaps to Stormin’ Norman and his Desert Storm troops, or the entire Australian Defence Department), followed by the male orphans of citizen men who had fallen in battle, and who came of age that year, and would soon take the place of their fathers in the phalanx. These orphans were honoured guests in the whole festival. • the parade around the orchestra, and counting of the annual tributes paid to Athens by her “subject allies”, in full view of the polis and the many foreign guests.

So the glory and power of Athens is being displayed here. And what is most striking, the 15,000 or so men were all sitting in very neat and orderly rows in the theatron, according to their local city units or tribes which Kleisthenes had foistered on them at the end of the 6th Century. Every citizen belonged to one of these totally contrived ten tribes, which were subdivided into smaller demes. And they all sat in these units like in Primary school: Warratah over there, Wattle here, Kangaroo there. This is civic order personified. Not even Mussolini could have achieved that.

But what happens when the tragedies and comedies begin? What sort of experience were the citizens letting themselves in for as they sat in their ordered rows?

My perception of Greek theatre is very strongly one of a play between order and disorder, civilisation and bestiality, boundaries and fluidity, both inside the theatre space as well as between the theatre and its setting in the life of the polis. Greek Tragedy, I believe, gave its audience a semi-vicarious experience of the fluidity and unpredictability of life, where the membrane surrounding the civilised order is seen to be thin and porous. At any unexpected moment the pores of the known universe might suddenly open wide, and our orderly world, or at least our sense of an orderly world, may be disastrously ruptured by the intrusion of destructive or bestial or divine forces from beyond or indeed from within.

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Kossovo might happen any time. What opens up these pores might be unknown, just “the way things are”, the result perhaps of some non-human and inexplicable force which might be referred to by a divine name, or it might seem to be set off by a human miscalculation of some kind, or even by a human trait which we continue to find most admirable even after the rupture has been brought on.

This experience of rupture is captured very nicely in a recent film, The Truman Show. In the wholly constructed and apparently safe world that Truman inhabits (which is in reality a TV set though of course Truman has no idea of this), he enters the lift at work one morning, just as he does without change every morning, every working day, every year. But this morning is suddenly radically different, as the back of the lift is open, and through the other side lies an incomprehensible other world which he has never know to exist before now. It is in fact a crew room for the TV show he doesn’t know he is in, and has been all his life. This sudden revelation of another dimension appears to me rather similar to what often happens in Greek Tragedy. Actions and events which have hitherto seemed to participate coherently in the world as it is known, is revealed at a major turning point to in fact form part of a different pattern, which includes this other dimension. It is a newly perceived but pre-existing pattern - like the pattern which leaps up at you from a 3D art picture if you stare at it for long enough with your eyes wide. It’s this pattern which I think Aristotle refers to in his use of the word “praxis”, a word which in ancient Greek carries the meaning not simply of “an action” but a series of inter-related actions which include their end result. This “life-like” praxis is, in his scheme, the material of the theatrical rendering, or mimesis. “Imitation” is such a poor translation I think.

In Aristophanic comedy, those leaders of the polis and their activities, most critical to the survival of the polis, are held up to ridicule, at a time when Athens was engaged in a fight for its life with Sparta, which it eventually lost, along with its democracy and its theatre’s most creative life.

So a tension is set up between the structured and stable picture of Athenian citizens in their rows of civic order, in a setting imbued with the strength and stability of Athenian legitimacy in Greece, and the tenuous, unpredictable, unstable nature of life. Life, which by some mysterious process seems, at moments of human clarity, to have self-organised. It was the theatre, in Greece in the 5th century, that played the key role in making an experience of this tension available to be included in the world view of its citizens.

Dionysos, the god of theatre, embodies this tension between opposites. To experience Dionysos is to experience the ever changing suspension between poles, the dissolution of boundaries, neither one nor the other, neither male nor female. He is mask and illusion, radical self-disorientation and uncertainty as experienced through a fluidity of identity and drunkenness. He is duality and indefinability, something that can only be experienced and not thought. He can certainly not be measured!

He is the god of theatre because he embodies (insubstantially of course) what is particular to theatre, not a point, a numeral or a commodity, not some thing but a tension between things, between script and actor, present and not present, real and not real, performance and audience. Theatre is a living entity (well, sometimes) which exists only in movement, like electricity. And Dionysos is everything that Managerialism and Performance Management cannot hope to measure and will not tolerate. Theatre is a moment of activity in the dangerous and smiling eyes of Dionysos.

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I had intended at this point to make some observations regarding the relevance of Chaos theory to the questions of theatre, the arts as a system rather than an industry, and civic order. Time does not permit, but I intend pursuing these connections in the future. I suggest it is fertile ground for research.

Einstein wrote:

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”

I put that on the front of my Corporate Plan. It made no difference though, I didn’t get any more money. Managerialism is obsessed with order, rationality, markets, money, predicability, measurements, achieving quotas, achieving goals within the set time frame, buying and selling, economic viability, ticking it off, getting there. Dionysos is the concept which shows us that there is no “there”, only an “inbetween”, a tension, an ambivalence. The Managers, with their Performance Management structure, seem to be entrenched at present, enjoying their simple formulas, their funding-friendly, vote-attracting reports.

But Saul offers some hope:

“The reaction of sophisticated elites, when confronted by their own failure to lead society, is almost invariably the same. They set about building a wall between themselves and reality by creating an artificial sense of well-being on the inside. The French aristocracy, gentry and business leadership were never more satisfied with themselves than in the few decades before their collapse during the French Revolution”

You might notice the similarity between the shape of this phenomenon and what happens in Greek Tragedy, Roman Comedy, and the Road Runner cartoon. The protagonist is led to the edge of a cliff, knowingly or not, and is either pushed over or leaps of their own volition. In the case of Roman comedy and the Coyote from the Road Runner cartoon, its when he (it is always a he in this case) believes himself to be at the height of his achievement, that he realises there is in fact no ground whatsoever beneath him. That he is suspended in mid air over a thousand foot ravine. Like Oedipus, though, it’s only when the schmuck knows he is hovering with no ground below him, that he actually falls to the ground with a splat. . It gives a new sense to the Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know Thyself”.

So we need to keep telling adherents to this foul religion that they are fundamentally on the wrong track. Who knows what awaits them.

With the quote from Einstein in mind, perhaps the Greek theatre has something else to offer us here. Theatre as a profession did not exist in the fifth century when almost all the great works that have survived were written and performed.

Aeshylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and their actors, choruses and associated practitioners were indeed paid a small amount for their work. But the theatre profession developed in the 4th century, as did all those magnificent stone theatres that most of us have always associated with the notion of Greek theatre. In the 5th century when the great works were actually created, there were much more modest theatres with wooden seats, and an orchestra that the latest archaeological research suggests was rectangular and not circular at all - which I find rather challenges our image of Greek theatre.

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The same phenomenon, where the huge theatres postdate the really creative periods in history, holds true for , Japan I’m told, and I would love to hear of any other instances. I wonder what this suggests for our own state arts centres?

It’s only at the end of the 5th century, with the democratic experiment largely extinguished, and we can say “the big adventure is over, long live the building!” that the acting profession takes off. And what has survived from this period? Only boring old Menander, harmless and slightly amusing entertainment for the conservative aristocracy whose time had come round again at last, Menander the ancient sitcom.

Perhaps it is in the very notion of theatre as an industry and a profession, that our real problems lie. What if we took a leaf out of the Greek book and said - no more. No industry, no profession. No performance indicators. No manipulation and economic regulation by government or commercial industry. No funding applications, no arts beaurocrats.

What would we be left with. ? Well, we have the Greek example, and others through history, and even our own history, to tell us that the creation of great art is in no way predicated on the existence of an arts industry. The latter is not a pre-requisite for the former. I certainly don’t deny the good that arts funding has been responsible for over the past few decades in Australia, and I have personally benefited. But perhaps its time to move on.

I’m not suggesting there is a simple, concrete answer. If I did, that would probably negate most of what I have said in this paper. And I often think, if there is an answer, the question is unlikely to be important. I don’t know, of course. Socrates. But we do not need to enter into the transaction with managerialism on the terms that are presently on the menu. As another speaker pointed out the other day, to be successful within the system is to duplicate the system. What corporatist managerialism is offering theatre is unpalatable.

I do have a thought about where to take this. It’s just an idea, not staggering, unlikely to be original, perhaps a small beginning. Perhaps not. Its an idea that came into my head from the toes up, towards the end of my five years at Theatreworks, as my letters to Arts Victoria grew more and more strident and as I fought harder to keep my bile from projectile spilling out into their newly renovated foyer with multimedia presentation of their achievements, and as my Client Manager pointed out to my Board the circles she had drawn around my “rather unhelpful” comments - I was becoming a BAD BOY! Its an idea formed in the shadow of their systematic reduction of all artists and practitioners to clients who need managers, produce-creators who need to show how deserving they are to be allowed to leap onto the production line, happily to be rolled into a potential export unit before packaging and squeezing into their latest funding-friendly, vote catching, obscenely expensive Annual Report, with VOTE LIBERAL scratched subliminally beneath every glossy colour photo of art in a bow-tie, just like it is on every Victorian numberplate.

The idea is called simply the Actor’s Bread Shop, the ABS, with the added irony of being potentially mistaken for the Australian Bureau of Statistics. First, gather your collaborators together. Piss off the funding. Make bread, make really nice bread, and nice coffee of course, in the mornings. Work on a roster system with a committed group- anyone letting down the team by not turning up at 4am, they’re out. Build up the business. That’s how you make your living. Make art upstairs in the afternoons. When you’re ready, invite some people to come and look. Eventually, run a season. People pay a small amount to get in, to help with the minimal production costs. No paid advertising. No career. No profession.

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No industry. And a strong engagement with and participation in the life of the community. It’s a suggestion.

I’d like to finish by describing a scenario I sometimes picture in my mind when I think about the meeting of Managerialism and Dionysos. What better play to draw on at the end of the 20th century than one written at the turn of the 5th century as the big adventure was turning into a building. I refer of course to Euripides’ Bacchae. This is the conference-appropriate orgy I promised earlier.

My scenario begins: Our Client Manager, let’s call her Penthea (her mother is from Sparta), has heard disturbing reports of outdoor events where the established paradigm is being distorted. She reads the sign posted at the edge of the forest:

“If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise; today’s the day the managers have their picnic”. No signature.

Hmmm. No mention of picnics in the Client Contract, must investigate. Quite hungry anyway. But lo, the managers have gathered in the middle of the forest, something is afoot. Their belts have been loosened, calculators have been thrown to the ground. Slogans are pinned to trees with questions like “Can 2 + 2 = 5?”.. Business Plans ripped to shreds, Corporate Governance Plans fuelling a raging fire in the centre, the expensive covers of Annual Marketing Plans containing instead lewd pictures, Adorno, Mandelbrot Sets and weather forecasts. Everyone is drinking - fluids, defecating dried up little Indicators, copulating: new connections are appearing everywhere. Suddenly a shriek rings out. The Client Manager, Penthea has climbed a Tree with huge roots, and is tracing all their actions back to the Service Contract, calling for accountability. Oh my twelve gods, the managers are pulling at the tree trunk, they want to shake her out but the poor fool is hanging on for dear salary. “We’ll take away your funding!” she shrieks. But the managers are past it. They have tasted the fire of the fluid, there is no turning back now. Unable to loosen the grasp of Penthea, the toughest of Client Managers with ten years experience (she of course started her career in a small theatre company), the crazed managers are yanking the tree from the dirt, pulling at the roots, shouting Adorno! Adorno! Evohe! They’ve got the Client Manager now, they’re going to tear her apart, limb from limb. One puts his foot into the armpit and pulls the arm from its socket, all bloody and ragged, and hurls it into the fire. Another takes a leg and twists it round and round until it comes off. They grab at every limb, urging their collaboratos to PARTICIPATE, TEAR! RIP! ENJOY YOURSELVES! Another, I think it could be me, grabs Penthea’s chin, and hair, and rips the bloody skull from the neck, impales it on an Arts Victoria promotional banner, and together they run in a pack out of the forest into the city streets shouting:

“THIS IS ART! THIS IS ART! AND WE DON’T WANT ANY FUNDING FOR IT!” By the way, that scenario is copyright. Thankyou.

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DIALOGUING THE BODIES By Mark Radvan

I’m a director, who because I was interested in working with young people got drawn into actor training fifteen years ago, and I’ve been there ever since. As a consequence a large part of my experience working with actors has been in the hotbed of acting training.

Within this heated pressure cooker I’ve not only had the opportunity, indeed the privilege to explore the directing of a wide range of dramatic literature from Shakespeare and Chekhov through to Gow and Nowra, but also to explore theatre-making in all kinds of different and interesting ways.

In my own case I came into directing thinking I must know most things that could be known about theatre, having swum vigorously in the small pond of student theatre at Sydney University. My fellow students after all included Michael Gow and Neil Armfield, and I had graduated with an Honours degree in English Literature with an emphasis on Dramatic Literature.

A year in the postgraduate Directors Course at NIDA a few years later, of course filled in the few gaps that remained. By the time I started to realise that I in fact knew nothing whatsoever about theatre, it was too late to stop and like many others I just had to pretend like fury while I tried to work out how to manage my Ignorance. By great good fortune I found myself being schooled by Jennifer Blocksidge, the most wonderful female mentor, who pretended she was working for me as a Voice Tutor, but was in fact all the time managing my educational recovery.

Ignorance like Forgetfulness (one of my other failings) is both a curse and a blessing. The blessing part of it is that once it has thoroughly infected you, it is impossible to take anything for granted any more, and so even the smallest theatrical assignment has to be turned into an investigation into the act of theatre.

It’s one of these investigations into the act of theatre that I want to report on today: A Creative Development Project funded by a very modest grant generously provided by QUT.

This project’s aim was the investigation of physicalisation techniques suitable for classic scripts, and which would produced heightened physical and visual language that would help illuminate rather than compete with the written text.

The text I had chosen was Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which offered the right kind of classical status, an interesting psychological density, and all with the economy of a small cast. I had tried to get Arts Queensland, the State funding body, interested in the project for two years prior, but each time the application had been rejected. But you learn a lot about application writing when you have to keep rewriting.

Jacqueline Martin was going to do a new translation. However, after the grant application was finally successful, and not through Arts Qld, but through a Creative Arts Fund established by QUT, she hit upon the idea of simultaneously adapting the story into an Australian setting, exactly contemporary to Strindberg’s story, but half a world away. She’ll be telling you that story herself this afternoon.

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We had two Murri actors in mind for a production, but one signed up for an extensive Schools tour, and the other got famous and moved to Sydney. So for the creative development project I cast a non-Murri actor into the role of Jean, a very fine local actor named Paul Denny, who had the physical courage and imagination I was looking for.

The part of Julie was investigated by Caroline Dunphy, a graduate from QUT who had joined Jacqui Carroll’s Suzuki based company Frank, with whom she has been training for a couple of years. Both she and I were interested in finding a ‘bridge’ between the style training of Suzuki and the more ordinary demands of mainstream naturalism.

I have to start off with a declaration of Ignorance here, because I enter this investigative field through the doorway of Practice rather than the doorway of Erudition. I’m certainly not an expert on Movement, but as a director I am in the business of the choreography of meaning, and this inevitably involves of course the movement of bodies, voices and ideas.

I don’t know how it may be for others, but even under the convenient label of Reflective Practitioner I experience a very uneasy tension between the demands of Practice and the need to conform to the more intellectual demands of the Research ethos of the academic world.

My personal artistic needs are prejudiced more towards the improvement of my own practice, than the enlargement of an existing field of knowledge.

So it has been an education in itself to surrender finally to the demands of a formal methodology, particularly when it comes to day by day documentation, a task that until recently I would have found too onerous, indeed too tedious, to even consider contemplating.

However last year one of my part time evening students put me on to the creativity work of Julia Cameron. In putting her writing principles to work over the year, when it came to keeping a rehearsal diary, I not only found it a joy to write, but it actually served as a creative tool in its own right. But that’s another story.

The idea for the project grew out of my discontent. Why did student actors find it so hard to move expressively and naturally? Why is so much of contemporary mainstream theatre acting so anaemic? Why was I so bored with my own productions?

In grappling with these problems I co-formulated a theory of creativity with a friend of mine, a fellow practitioner – Anthony Simcoe, which we call Entry Point Theory, and which is the subject of a book I wish I had by now completed. It owes something to Carl Jung, and something to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a little bit to Howard Gardner, and a bit more to the American director William Ball, and goes something like this:

When two actors work together the possibility exists for them to stimulate in each other, or between each other, a Creative or Flow State.

This state is characterised by an ease with which dramatic problems are understood, and potential solutions are generated, and by the way that the actors almost effortlessly traverse the entire gamut of expressiveness; Physical/Vocal, Emotional, Psychological, and Sensory. Within this Expanded Creative State it is possible for moments of Great Acting to be brought into being.

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In the beginning...

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Anthony and I characterise Great Acting as being: Dynamic, Reactive, Interesting, Specific, Holistic, Relaxed and Revelatory.

This dynamic and highly desirable Creative Flow State is accessed or provoked through Five distinct doorways or Entry Points:

These are: the Physical/Vocal, the Emotional, the Logical/Psychological, the Sensory and the Intuitionary (if such a word exists) or Lateral Entry Point.

Whole systems of actor training have clustered around each of these entry points. But in so far as each one of them believes it holds the only passport directly into acting, none of them are very efficient. This is because a) they teach acting as if it was merely the execution of craft, and b) they assume that every student is equally capable of making effective use of the particular technique they teach.

What this new model does is to put technique, craft, creativity and creative difference, and acting back into an explicit and proper relationship with each other.

Individual actors all have their preferred entry points into the Creative Flow, and their insecure entry points. Some actors find psychological analysis very stimulating to their creativity. Others do not, and prefer to focus on emotional issues. Physical Entry Point actors feel useless until they can get on to the floor and start moving the role.

Sensory Entry point Actors need a prop, or an item of costume, while Intuitionary Entry Point actors need to work in the sort of creative milieu talked about by Keith Johnstone.

It’s a feature of much of the culture of actor training that it becomes controlled or dominated by a teacher who is a specialist for one of the Entry Points, often to the detriment of the others.

Psychological Entry Point Teachers are sometimes intolerant of Sensory Point techniques, stigmatising a prop or a costume as a crutch for a lazy actor. Intuitionary Entry Point Actors are fairly scornful of Psychological Entry Point technique, and so on.

An early goal of the director sensitive to these issues is to discover in rehearsals the preferred entry point of each actor, and to attempt to stimulate each of those points in the act of directing, in order to move everyone working together into a shared Creative Flow State.

Once established, the goal of the director and the actors in rehearsals is to sustain and surf that Flow State wherever it leads. The longer we can keep the actors in this shared Flow State, the more Great Acting is released.

It takes a while for actors to adjust to this kind of orientation. All their training and previous experience leads them along the straight lines of the Logic of Craft and the Logic of Text Analysis. Staying on the twisting track of the Creative Impulse is difficult, disconcerting, and one finds one is always falling off it. However once the commitment has been made to work in this way by the whole group, it is immensely liberating and productive.

This is necessarily an oversimplification of the Theory. I introduce it because it forms the over arching part of the conceptual framework for this physicalisation investigation.

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First Stage – the Flow is ignited, but only at a mental/verbal level

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I started off with this framework because my personal prejudice was to see inadequate physicalisation as a problem of creativity rather than as a problem of physical competency.

The backstory to that prejudice is that I had seen talented movement specialists over the years come in to work with acting students, specialists in Mime, Dance, Alexander, Feldenkreis, Suzuki, Neutral Mask etc etc. Not one of them, as far as I could see helped those students to act better, or even to act more interestingly at a physical level, once they came back to realistic scripts, despite some excellent results achieved in classroom movement demonstrations.

So I thought, if it is not a problem of craft, perhaps it is a problem of Creativity.

I went into the project with another related prejudice, or assumption. I thought that I was looking for techniques that would be essentially improvisatory. That is, they would draw on the actor’s current skill base. Such techniques would have the advantages of being ‘easy’, of being easily communicable, and would therefore be cheap.

Working with Graeme Watson as a movement specialist on this project was to quickly open my eyes to the naivety of this position. Graeme has an interesting background, having trained both as a dancer and to some extent as an actor with Brian Syron in Sydney. His work as a choreographer for just about every company in Australia, would I imagine be well known.

I had asked Graeme to join the project in order to further test and develop the Tape Technique, a rehearsal technique I had first started using in 1996. Tape Technique work was my starting point in the Physicalisation work and as such was to form a central plank in my methodology.

Tape Technique if you haven’t come across it before, was developed by an American Acting teacher named Jeremy Whelan, and works like this:

The actors record their scene on to audio tape. They then get up and move into the space. The tape is played back, and they then move to the tape. In so doing they make all kinds of physical discoveries that will affect the reading of the text. So they sit down again and re- record, informed by the discoveries and deepening their emotional involvement. Then back on their feet to explore the movement.

Actors like working this way, despite some initial resistance to the strangeness of it. Essentially they can pour all their creativity first of all into the verbal and emotional, and then into the physical and emotional. The awkward stage of rehearsals when the actors are trapped behind their hand held scripts is completely by passed.

I also came into the project with three videotapes that looked interesting. One featured early work of Grotowski, another early work of Eugenio Barba, and the third was of some rare footage of a Meyerhold production, as well as a reconstruction of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics.

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CREATIVE FLOW

Intermediate Stage

- The actors are in dialogue verbally and emotionally - at this stage the acting still looks and sounds ordinary

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At a practical level then, with a new text in our hands, we had: a movement specialist who brought with him exercises and approaches to contribute towards the development of a movement program;

we had the Tape Technique; and we had some other exercises connected to Entry Point Theory that I was interested in developing.

I’d like to deal with each of these key features, but given the shortness of time, I’ll focus on the movement work, particularly on Graeme’s contribution, and on its connection with an Entry Point approach to Creativity.

Going through the notes I took through the project, there are three Key words that stand out, that for me characterised the essence of Graeme’s approach to this work.

These words are: Gravity, Rhythm, and Kinaesthetic Awareness

Starting with Gravity: Graeme likes to conceptualise all Movement as being a dialogue between the body and gravity. (With Gravity always having the last word) When we raise an arm, we defy gravity, when we fall we surrender to gravity.

Each culture can be said to have a specific attitude to Gravity. Western European culture focuses on the Ascending – trying to defy gravity, African culture focuses on the Descending – connecting with the earth, and Asian culture could be said to hover like a floating cloud, midway between earth and sky.

These are essentially poetic generalisations, but they help us by giving us a starting point for decoding individual, cultural and social differences in movement attitudes.

A number of exercises were worked through each day then, that specifically focused on relearning movement as a dialogue with gravity.

The Second Key Word is Rhythm.

A striking aspect of Graeme’s Movement work is that he teaches Rhythms rather than specific choreographed movement skills. Rhythms of course help to develop coordination, and certainly a lack of rhythm diminishes expressiveness.

Graeme teaches rhythm through teaching movement sequences, but what’s interesting is that he is not concerned with how accurately you carry out the sequence, as long as you get the rhythm right. In fact he keeps changing the sequence so that you can’t get too good at it, because then you would be focussing on the skill sequence rather than the rhythm.

These sequences are comprised of what he calls Genesis Movements. These are mechanically simple movements that in a sort of seed form, form the base for all other movements however large or complex.

If you saw The Karate Kid you’ll know what I mean. The kid has to polish cars, but what he learns is that the action of polishing is the Genesis movement for a whole repertoire of Karate moves, which become very simple when they organically grow out of their simpler origin.

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CREATIVE FLOW

Dialoguing the Bodies

- The bodies are engaged in a dialogue from which the brain/mind is excluded. - The physical rhythms are different – no longer generated by the text but by the proximity and intentionality of the Other body.

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Each of these moves is taught within a pattern of rhythms.

Rhythm is essentially free of content, whereas a movement sequence has a fixed content. A rhythm is thus like a grammar, whereas individual movements are like a vocabulary. It was the grammar that Graeme wanted to develop and enlarge rather than the vocabulary.

If you give the body a specific vocabulary, it tends to want to perform that vocabulary. (Eg. a Suzuki trained actor stands out a mile, because the body keeps wanting to perform the language it has learnt.)

But an empty grammar sucks in and uses signs and movements as it needs them, from whatever context it is working in.

And Rhythm flexes Emotion. By that I mean that Rhythm has the power to evoke emotion in both spectator and performer. Rhythm whether physical or vocal creates emotional responses that can transcend the literal emotional content of the words.

These non-verbal emotions and emotional nuances which can only be explored and expressed through the body and through its rhythms are a rich resource for the theatre to rejuvenate its tired emotional naturalistically derived batteries.

This is an emotional domain that dance more successfully inhabits, because the gestation of this emotional territory begins in the body.

This is illustrated in an extract from my rehearsal diary, and refers to a Gesture Exercise that Graham took the actors through every day for at least a week.

In this exercise one actor performs a gesture on the body of the other. The other responds by repeating that gesture back to them. This repeats, until the second actor now adds a second gesture into the interchange. The two gestures are now repeated by each actor, until the First Actor adds a third gesture, and so on. After five or six gestures have been linked into an expressive sequence, they are gradually subtracted, until the exercise finishes back in the stillness with which it began. You can do this exercise in silence, or you can do it to music.

Thus there is a kind of Body Conversation being set up by the actors. What happens is that at first these are often abstract, even unnatural gestures, but over time (and maybe over days of performing the exercise) the actors start to find, to tune into, the Physical/Emotional responses created by the gestures. Not only do they find themselves investing emotionally in performing the gestures, but they also find their bodies start to experience, emotionally experience, the act of receiving the gesture. Indeed their bodies start to yield to the imprint the gesture make upon them, and this in turn starts to influence the content of the next gesture they reciprocate with. Again, a real conversation starts to emerge… (a kind of) dialoguing of bodies, that can move the actor into surprising emotional terrain.

Graham make the observation, that when the bodies start to express out of themselves, the viewer (and the actor too) experiences an emotional response that seems located within, or resonates within their own body, a response that refuses to be able to be put into words. Indeed it is this determinedly Physical Emotion that Dance seeks to mould and release.

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CREATIVE FLOW

Final Stage - When the whole human being is engaged in the interaction. Moments of Great Acting become generated from this point. - The Zone of Intentionality moves from the Mind into the Body, Body/Mind separation ceases at this point.

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The Third Key Word was Kinaesthetic Awareness. This is how your body feels in the contexts of all the objects around it. Your environment, your social context. Many of the exercises Graeme sets the actors in this area have their origins in the work of Moshe Feldenkrais.

The Physicalisation or Physical Expressiveness of the Actor is limited by the degree to which the actor’s imagination inhabits his/her body. These exercises aim to abolish this limitation.

The body cannot be fully and consciously expressive if the actor is not aware of where their body is in space, or what it is doing. Eg. Actors with low KA will frequently make odd, or inappropriate, or repetitive arm or hand gestures without any awareness at the time that their body is reacting or expressing in that way. The physical Expression of the Actor’s Imagination is limited or made idiosyncratic by this lack of awareness.

As Kinaesthetic Awareness is expanded however, the Imagination of the Actor not only flows back into the body, but is transformed by its expanded experience of the body. The Key Event in this transformation process is a letting go of control by the conscious brain. The Verbal Brain as Keith Johnstone calls it. Here’s another diary extract that documents this moment:

Graham introduced more exercises today, building on those of previous days. What I find amazing about them is that none of them involve athletically difficult movements – you don’t have to do deep squats, or put your leg behind your ear. Theirs is a much more interesting difficulty involving high degrees of left, right coordination, and brain-image-body connections.

He’s teaching the body its own language, building a kind of physical grammar that the brain is incompetent to control, and indeed must get right out of the way if the body is to master it. These exercises are carried inside tight rhythmical structures that Graham enforces, even if the accuracy of the moves suffers as a result.

He explains that the physical pattern of the rhythm must be learnt and the individual moves/actions/gestures can be finessed later. Many of the sequences he teaches involve complex but playful series of gestures.

I can see how the body is learning rhythm everyday, and applying it to often everyday movements, so that in the context of the play, the actor will more readily feel their way into the underlying rhythms of actions, words and gestures.

In retrospect I think of Graeme’s work as literally liberating the body by restoring to it a physical culture through which it can express and communicate. But there’s a bit more to it than that.

This is where the Radvan/Simcoe Entry Point Theory meets the Watson Movement Work.

Where I am going is this: I want the actors to move into the Creative Flow State, and from within that State to spontaneously generate moments of Great Acting that automatically take advantage of the altered Imagination that results from the Watson Physical Work.

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So to try to achieve that, the first hour and a half to two hours of the day is spent doing Watson Physical Work. Then after the break we move into work on the text – work that is essentially improvisatory and exploratory – revolving around trying to stimulate a creative flow state between the actors and then seeing where that took us. Surfing the Flow.

We then devised exercises that facilitated the actors spontaneously integrating the benefits of the movement work into the text work.

What we then found was this:

As the Imagination flows into the body and inhabits it, it palpably and powerfully excites the body. The body starts to want to get in on the act. And what you find is that the body has its own imagination, its own stories, its own history, its own perspectives that can be drawn into inhabiting the story the text is seeking to tell, just as the mental imagination inhabits and colours that story.

Just as voices go into dialogue with each other, and just as emotions go into dialogue, so too can bodies. If they are allowed to. Mostly they are not.

This is because in our culture the body is an object. It’s a machine. It’s a biological organism. It’s a Human Genome Project. As a culture we’ll spend billions educating the mind, and almost nothing educating the body. In fact we see the body as something that must be tortured into submission, and mind must be wrenched out of it.

What is the process of schooling when you think about it? It’s a process whereby the body must be made to sit still while the mind is taught to separate itself from the body and to focus on other objects. Spontaneous physical expressiveness is punished, physical submissiveness is rewarded.

Later on when the mind returns to the body it treats it as an inferior object. An object to be disciplined and ruled by the will. The mind designs, the body executes.

It’s a kind of internal colonialism. The mind occupies and exploits the body.

But like any colonialism it must eventually fail, because it is inefficient. If my blacks are tilling my soil, and mining my gold, I may think I am rich, but how many artists, scientists, great parents and great leaders are living and dying in meaningless labour on my plantations?

How much richer the world could be if all that creative potential was being released instead of being suppressed. How much richer my own vision of human potential when I stop seeing other people as expendable machines, and myself as a lord of creation.

So it is with the body. The enemy of exciting creative physical expressiveness is obedience. The Obedient Body complete with its habits of submission can never fulfil its creative potential, it can only be an instrument of the mind.

And the mind separated from the body is itself a diminished organism, just as the plantation owner is a diminished human being, diminished and corrupted by the slavery on which he/she depends.

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But when the body is educated; educated and not disciplined, and not controlled; and when it is invited into the creative act, it brings with it its own stories and its own emotions. These rush into the world of the text, filling it out with extraordinary insight and emotion. Embodying the text with a sense of fullness that is compelling and mesmerising.

FINAL DIARY EXTRACT Then we run the scene proper. Unbelievable. Suddenly Paul ‘knows’ what to do moment by moment. Incredibly complex status transactions are all of a sudden negotiated easily. Textual and emotional nuances effortlessly flick past one after another.

I find myself totally mesmerised. Moreover, all the work of the preceding days is still available. The bodies are in dialogue, the voice is relatively free.

After lunch we focus on BREATH. The same scene is followed through, but this time I ask the actors to focus on their breathing. We start with a short exercise to warm up this awareness, and then go into the scene. Now is the moment. I’ve never seen anything like it except on film. Suddenly the characters are alive – in fact characters no longer – these are real people experiencing each other as if for the first time – their senses open, their bodies totally expressive. Suddenly the voices are different; they come from the diaphragm, the heart. They (especially Caroline) find a playfulness that is both expressive and artless. I actually believe them as people, and I’m sucked into their interactions, wanting to know more about them – what will happen? How will they react?

I can still remember the feeling of almost trembling with excitement as I watched these actors creating between each other. I suddenly understood those words of Grotowski that have haunted me for decades:

The education of an actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate his organism’s resistance to this psychic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses. (Towards A Poor Theatre: 16)

This ‘vanishing’ or ‘burning’ of the body marks the moment when the mind and the body of the actor are suddenly and completely united in an act of negotiation or communication with another human being in the same drama. We stop seeing an actor, we stop seeing a character, and instead we seem to see directly into the life of another human being, one who is living fully, dangerously even, and who is compulsively acting on impulses we would only dream of expressing.

What makes for Great Acting, because that is what it is, and therefore hopefully makes for Great Theatre is the actors’ embodiment before us of life apparently lived so fully that it not only demonstrates what life could be, but by the magic of theatre makes us for a few brief moments actually directly experience it.

And now having glimpsed this Holy Grail, the next stage is to bring it into being before an audience in a full production. We hope to do that next year.

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DESIGN FOR A FOUND SPACE - TWICE By Meredith Rogers

In May ‘98, I directed and designed a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle with 20 second and third year drama production students and an ensemble of six music students conducted by my colleague, Graeme Leak. We performed at the Carlton Court House over eight days at the end of May. By late June I was back there as designer in a professional team of five for a season of Barry Collins’ Judgement.

The three-cornered relationship between the visual field of a production; the world enacted in the spoken and performed texts; and the physical environment in which the piece is performed is complex, many layered and changing. It is the way in which the designer negotiates this relationship that I want to explore here in thinking about these two productions.

The Theatre The Carlton Court House was built in 1878. It is directly opposite the police station, built at the same time and still in service, and next door to Lygon Court, the shopping complex which replaced the Pram Factory in 1981. I have yet to discover exactly when it was decommissioned as a magistrate’s court but I have a barrister friend who remembers defending possession cases there late in the seventies. It was also the court where censorship went on trial in Victoria after nine APG actors were arrested for obscenity in the course of a performance of “Whatever Happened to Realism” in the La Mama car park in May 1970. (After their arrest, the actors were marched around the corner to the police station by members of the vice squad followed by their audience, all loudly chanting the obscenities for which the actors had been arrested.)

So the space already had some theatrical history as well as a thoroughly appropriate location when it became the venue for the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre in the late eighties. In the mid- nineties, Melbourne Writers’ Theatre installed what amounts to fixed seating unless one is very determined. At the same time the walls, previously railway yellow or local government cream, were painted the so-called heritage colour, Ox blood red. (Ox blood had been a popular alternative to black in the semi-flexible spaces which proliferated in the eighties.) In 1997, La Mama took over management of the venue though the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre remains the chief tenant.

The Court House is a classic small 19th century public building. It has a fairly impressive facade which shrinks instantly into a very poky entrance off the street. These two doors are no longer used as an entrance - instead audiences enter along a laneway between the courthouse and the pub next door and into what was once the magistrate’s chamber I presume. It is a small foyer but warm enough, with La Mama’s trademark fireplace. From here you enter the space, which is generally configured as in this diagram with a steeply raked bank of seats upholstered in a particularly unfortunate lime green. As these seats have come from a cinema they are angled in such a way that when placed flat on the rostra they tilt the body forward: so that if you are sitting at the top of the seating rostra you can feel that at any moment you will be catapulted across and down into the pit created by the steep elevation of the rake and the relative shortness of the performance space.

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This uneasy spatial relationship between audience and actor was the biggest challenge to working in the space and over the course of these two productions I have come up with several different solutions.

The Plays Each of the two plays I designed here in 98 relied heavily on the idea of a courtroom in their dramaturgy. So by a series of fairly casual or unintentional circumstances the plays and the appropriate space seemed to find each other.

In the case of The Caucasian Chalk Circle I was alarmed at the prospect of doing the first half - Grusha’s journey - in such a restricted space in spite of its symbolic appropriateness for Azdak’s story. But it would be useful and exhilarating for the students to work in an established professional venue, which was also a found and, in some senses, transformable space. Besides it was available at a rent we could afford.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle requires at least three environments which are distinct but also overlap temporally and spatially in the world of the play as much as in the performance environment.

For this production we dismantled the fixed seating and divided it into three sections. The back section which was built over the judge’s bench and incorporated the court house’s original public gallery was left where it was and became the musicians’ space. For the prologue and Grusha’s journey, the rest of the seating was moved across the space to form raked seating to the same height as the musicians’ platform opposite. This formed an end on arrangement with the back section divided horizontally between actors and musicians. The singers (there were two) moved between the levels as required. The Abashvili’s also employed this top level briefly on their way to church in the opening scene of the singers’ story.

The Prologue: Brecht wrote two different prologues, each of which tied the ancient tale to an imagined imminent future for Georgia.

We wrote several prologues of our own, attempting to draw parallels with aspects of our own circumstances in Australia. In the end we dispensed with them all. The dilemmas of our own times are not easily or lightly compared to those of a world dominated by the twin shadows of Nazism and Stalinism. Instead we used the prologue moment to introduce ourselves, the space, the objects we were using and our relation to the play. Audience, actors and musicians entered the space together; the student actors continuing to discuss approaches to the play and ways of dealing with the prologue intermingled with whatever difficulties with parking or delicious souvlakis they may have had on the way to the theatre. We also maintained a link with our rehearsal space by bringing into the theatre the desks and chairs we had begun workshops with and for the prologue the space was set up as an informal classroom.

Grusha’s Story: For The Journey Into the Northern Mountains Brecht used a huge stage, a revolve, and an unrolling Chinese screen to express the distance Grusha travels. James McCaughey in his 70s Mill Theatre Company production had used the vast expanse of the Mill’s front theatre in which Grusha could actually run a considerable distance to get away from the ironshirts.

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In contrast our space was tiny. In reference to von Appen’s Chinese screen the wall of the rostra beneath the musicians (approximately 6 feet high) was painted white and, over the course of the performance, one of the cast drew in the terrain Grusha covered in her journey. At the outset the white wall was also the repository of all the props that would be used.

The goose (Brecht’s bundle of leaves), the ironshirts’ uniforms and weapons, the doctor’s coats, the peasant woman’s shawl and the cooks apron all hung from hooks, making a fairly pleasing practical sculpture until each was removed for use - revealing more space for the artist to draw the landscape of Grusha’s journey. In front of this we used the twenty actors in constantly changing configurations to suggest a changing environment.

Azdak’s story: During interval the bottom half of the seating was moved back in front of the musicians so that Azdak’s story and the trial took place in a traverse spatial arrangement.

The band stayed in position but now there was a bank of seats in front of them and another facing across the space. In this section we also attempted to use the actual features of the space as much as possible - the doors to the antechamber and the niches in the walls. It would have been tempting to reinstate the witness stand and to uncover the judge’s bench. This was hardly practical though as the space had to serve as the city of Nukha where the last judge is hanged as a rascal and Azdak installed; the countryside through which he travels as judge; and the court house where the trial of the chalk circle takes place. The conclusion of this trial and the singer’s last words also neatly bring us all back to the theatre where we started.

I want to finish talking about The Chalk Circle and move on to Judgement but I’d like to finish with a story I told in the program - it’s about the evolution of a prop but it applies equally to space I think and has something to do with the sensuality, intimacy, practicality and primitiveness of the theatrical experience.

When we began rehearsals for the play, one of the cast said that her younger sisters played babies with a 5kg bag of rice. So that’s what we used for the baby Michael. I liked the fact that it was rice, a precious commodity, one of the world’s five essential crops. It seemed somehow “Brechtian”! But over time I became increasingly distressed that, in spite of its symbolic possibilities, our bag-of-rice baby had no head and therefore no place where a face might be for Grusha to look into.

Finally I made a rough doll shape out of calico and put the rice into that. It was better but the rice fell away from the neck and the head sagged dreadfully. I wanted the head to need support as a real baby’s would but this head was too floppy altogether. So I got some more calico and wound it over the little body, between the legs and up the back to the neck, giving him a sort of spine and some swaddling bands.

When I picked him up I couldn’t help placing his head on my shoulder and patting his bottom. He smelt good and clean and sweet - a mixture of rice and new calico: not milky and soapy like a real baby but just as irresistible in its way. I remembered Brecht’s poem about Helene Weigel’s props.

In theatre, a bag of rice can become a baby not just because we agree to believe that it is but because between us, actors and audience, we can find in it something of the essential physicality of “baby-ness”.

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This is a medium in which we can think with our senses (feelings) and feel with our intellects. And where, and I’m still not sure whether I say this in spite of or in agreement with Brecht, the sensory world and the emotions engendered there are indivisible from what we think of as thought.

Three weeks after the Chalk Circle finished the tiny Judgement team [Julian Meyrick (director), Neil Pigot (performer), John Dutton (lighting designer), Shoshannah Orenstein (Stage Manager) and me (designer)- one of each!] bumped the show into the Court House. We hadn’t been able to put the seasons back to back which was unfortunate as the Chalk Circle crew had been forced to rebuild the rake and replace the lime green seats for another show and now we had to take them all out again. But, fortunately, we were able to employ some of the students who had already performed most of this operation before.

My earliest thought about the court house space had been that there were two possible ways to deal with its immense height and its very beautiful ceiling (which I had studied fairly thoroughly on those occasions when I had found myself closer to it than I was to the actors - as often happened in the fixed configuration). For The Chalk Circle we had taken one of these options by reducing the height of the seating module/s and splitting the performance space - in this case into the relatively discrete elements of music performance and acting space. For Judgement I wanted to bring the actor’s and the audience’s eyelines together by raising the acting area as well as reducing the height of the seating rake. Since the play is, as the title suggests, a trial, we were also keen to reveal the architectural features of the court house as much as possible. This meant pulling out more of the built in rake than we had previously removed in order to reveal the carved and panelled Judge’s bench along the back wall. The seating was then set up on the opposite wall so that the audience entered the actor’s space as they came into the theatre but they did not have to traverse it as usually happens in this theatre. This may seem like a small point but given the nature of the relationship between actor/character and audience in this play it was in fact a point of essential decorum for each - accused and accusing - however these are configured, over the course of the evening. Indeed in this production, the shared space and the nature of that sharing were more than usually fraught with difficulty and important to get right.

The world of the play and the events that Vukhov describes so vividly are so appalling that, in order to make space to allow the audience to imaginatively enter that world, it was necessary to quarantine him from them. Within their shared space, boundaries were drawn between the real actor and the real audience and between the character and his judges. The raised acting space served to put Vukhov on the same level as his audience and thereby able to stare straight into their eyes but the fact that the platform was small within an apparently limitless space, made a moat between actor and audience, an interruption to their shared space. In almost any other production I would have despaired of such an interruption to the continuity between acting and audience space. But in this piece it was essential.

There is a necessary tension between what the audience see, feel, smell and hear and what they are lead to experience imaginatively through their attention to the actor playing Vukhov, and through him to the words he speaks and the images they create for the inner eye. It seemed necessary here to exaggerate that tension by making the sensory environment of the theatre space beautiful and poetic in ways which were directly opposite to the world described but which could also embody aspects of the felt universe (world of emotion) that Vukhov struggles to suppress in his relentlessly factual account.

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Where Vukhov describes an underground cell, cut from rock, “The high walls, the carpet of blood, like moss, the remains, the rows of heads...” (Collins 25)and “the vile stench” (83) we experience a warm space filled with the smell of incense in which the carpet of blood has become a river of red velvet and Vukhov - the accused -stands motionless on a small white island - speaking to us with the disciplined rigidity of his military bearing, the formality of the courtroom and the appalling, implicating intimacy of the actor to his audience; but across a chasm - a chasm which makes us safe enough to be able to listen while it underlines Vukhov’s complete severance from the state/condition of being human.

As the play progresses, we are taught by Vukhov to know the terrain of the cell in which the men were imprisoned in minute detail. The walls and the places on the wall that each of the men retreat to are utterly real to us, as is their movement in to the centre to kill and eat and their movement back out to their private places around the walls. This movement in from the walls to the centre and out again has a rhythm to it, which becomes almost organic. For this effect to take over it was necessary to make a theatrical environment which could establish itself as a place that contained the possibility of judgement, expiation and even forgiveness (the frankincense); but then for this space to fade, to become abstract and liminal,. This would let in the pulse of the sealed world that the play describes; a world in which Vukhov can view their actions as having the integrity of a single organism and we can feel that integrity and that organism in spite of our horror.

Julian and Neil made the decision that Vukhov would change his position only once in the course of the performance. I dressed him in a military greatcoat but with his feet bare like a corpse’s. Like Prometheus, he is bound on a rock or in this case it is more like an iceberg, surrounded by rivers of blood and he is utterly still. John Dutton’s lighting design enhanced this effect by defining the edges of the rostra with cold precision and letting the rest melt away into allusive coagulated shadow.

That is what we had planned anyway. When we got to the theatre the effect seemed to be in jeopardy when we discovered that the only available source of heating was two extraordinary electric radiators which hung from a lighting bar over the audience. They were effective and silent enough but they cast a warm red glowwhich spilled for miles. The blokes were momentarily for going without heating for the duration of the show but in June, in Melbourne in a stone building for a two and a half hour monologue, I persuaded them that this was unwise! In the end John was able to reduce the spill from the heaters with improvised barn doors around them so that the red glow fell only on the audience. This had the serendipitous effect of making the audience look and feel more warmly alive and Vukhov more chillingly of the living dead than ever.

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard discusses “the dialects of inside and outside”(215) “To make inside concrete and outside vast is the first task, the first problem, it would seem, of an anthropology of the imagination. But between concrete and vast, the opposition is not a true one. At the slightest touch asymmetry appears.” (215) Judgement, it seems to me illustrates quite fiercely the fact that the theatrical imagination, like the poet’s, encompasses both the task and the asymmetry with equal respect, familiarity and passion. Here the interior space is that of Vukhov’s heart or memory from which the literally interior space of the underground cell is drawn. The outside space is that of the theatre with its own set of resonances from the past and the present.

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These inside and outside spaces are all inhabited actually and imaginatively by actor and audience at the same time - almost as if the shared imagination of the occasion creates an exchange - the imagined interior of the cell becoming concrete as the walls of the theatre are imagined away in an almost infinite recession of each other.

1/7/99

Works cited

Brecht, Bertolt The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Translated by James and Tania Stern with W.H.Auden) London:Methuen 1963 Collins, Barry Judgment London:Faber 1974 Bachelard, Gaston The Poetics of Space Boston: Beacon Press 1969

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UNDERSTANDING NEW AUDIENCES: AN AUDIENCE RECEPTION STUDY OF 'NON-THEATRE GOERS' ATTENDING LA BOITE THEATRE COMPANY'S 1998 SEASON. By Rebecca Scollen

Introduction This research has rejected the experienced theatre goer as subject as has been studied in the past by those in the field (Pavis, 1985; Sauter, 1986; Gourdon, 1988; Deldime, 1990; Currathers & Mitchell, 1995; and Martin, 1995) and instead turns to those in the Brisbane community who do not regularly attend theatre productions and who vary in age, income and gender. This decision is based on an interest to understand potential audiences and discover their experiences of theatrical performance. It is anticipated that a knowledge of non-theatre goers' reactions to theatre will inform theatre companies and academia of their unique position in the arts.

As a PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology researching the field of audience reception studies, it has always been intended that the thesis be accessible and useful to the arts industry and academia. The model developed to gather and analyse audience responses to performance is tested and applied to practical situations to demonstrate its success for audience reception and development purposes. It is for this reason, I found it necessary to work with the public and collaborate with a local professional theatre company.

The La Boite Theatre audience reception study of 1998 was a successful venture. In terms of the PhD research great amounts of data was generated, positive results recorded, the methodology was proven sound, and respondents were satisfied with the process. For La Boite Theatre Company the study informed them of the attitudes of a number of non-theatre goers to their company, of their responses to each production, and also received immediate ticket sales and word of mouth promotion during the study.

The aims and objectives of the study, its methodology and some of the results will now be explained in greater detail. The relationship with La Boite Theatre Company will be outlined, along with the success of this collaborative research venture.

Pilot study of 1997 The pilot study's aim was to test the methodologies I had chosen to gather audience responses to performance in order to evaluate the worthiness or appropriateness of Sauter's (1986) model to Brisbane audiences when combined with other methodical approaches.

The pilot results demonstrated that an extended study utilising similar research methods was worthwhile because the study was very successful and produced important data for theatre companies and theatre audience research. Indirectly, it was discovered this form of data collection could be a sound method for introducing new audiences to theatre and informing them about the artform in a non-threatening way.

It seemed increased knowledge of theatre could lead to increased confidence and interest thus leading to an increase in future patronage.

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In order to test this theory and apply the methodology to a larger number of respondents I sought a theatre company that would collaborate in this research.

1998 Audience Reception Study at La Boite Theatre Company Having completed and assessed my pilot study, I approached La Boite Theatre Company in October 1997 to propose a collaborative industry research venture. La Boite Theatre Company was eager to incorporate my research skills and expertise in the field of reception studies to conduct research that would detail audiences' responses to their 1998 season of plays (February - August).1 We agreed that I would collect and analyse the responses of three groups of twelve participants and then present the results to La Boite Theatre Company in early 1999 in the form of a written report. In return La Boite Theatre Company would issue me with complimentary tickets for all group members and would provide a quiet room after each performance to conduct group interviews.

La Boite Theatre Company La Boite is a professional theatre company that can be seen to be positioned between the larger state company and smaller professional and amateur companies in Brisbane. It attempts to target all members of our community via its choices of repertoire and ticket price. The company prides itself on presenting Australian work with a number of its productions written in Queensland. This was of interest to me, because I had found with the pilot study that the two Australian productions were the most enjoyed by all participants. I felt that to take non-theatre goers to see primarily Australian work would perhaps interest them according to the pilot result. Ticket price ranges from $18 concession to $27 employed, with preview nights offering greater discounts. Ticket price appears to be positioned between the more expensive Queensland Theatre Company and the less expensive smaller professional and amateur companies in Brisbane.

La Boite Theatre Company has a commitment to developing its audience base and so was willing to collaborate in this research venture. La Boite Theatre Company is also a theatre-in- the round and so its special dynamics are conducive to audience participation and close involvement with the drama. This in itself encouraged me to work with La Boite Theatre Company as this environment is unique to Brisbane and is a wonderful space for audiences to experience theatrical performance. I felt that this theatre would be well suited to my audience reception study, as the space itself is an audience friendly space that insists that performers play to audience members directly and sometimes individually as opposed to other spaces such as the proscenium arch theatre which demands its actors play out to a crowd.

Constitution of Groups The 1998 La Boite reception study contains three groups of twelve participants. As decided by La Boite Theatre Company, the audience members consisted of 18 males and 18 females. In each group there were two of each gender in the 20s, 30-40s and 50+ age group. Breaking this down further, one of each gender in each age category was earning under $15 000 p/a and the other was earning over $15 000 p/a. All participants were non-regular theatre goers and lived in a variety of Brisbane suburbs.

1 The productions for 1998 included: The John Wayne Principle, Emma Celebrazione!, The Conjurers, Speaking in Tongues, X-Stacey and A Beautiful Life.

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Aims and Objectives of the 1998 study Aims 1. The primary aim of the project was to expose the perceptions of thirty-six non-theatre goers to La Boite Theatre Company's 1998 season.

2. To gain an understanding of the unique experiences of these members of the Brisbane community who do not regularly attend La Boite Theatre Company via the responses received through questionnaires and focus group interviews.

Objectives 1. The primary objective of this project was to arrive at a working model that can be applied by industry members or academics to successfully research and analyse audience responses by utilising the methodological and analytical innovations presented in this thesis.

2. To arrive at a better understanding of 'non-theatre going' culture in Brisbane and the circumstances which prevent theatre attendance.

3. To provide the 'non-theatre going' public with the skills for understanding/reading performance so that they will be encouraged to become theatre goers.

Methodology This research is unique because it is not interested in Brisbane theatre audience demographics and does not endeavour to seek the critical analyses of audience members to the performances they experience. Instead, the primary aim of this project was to expose the perceptions of thirty-six non-theatre goers to La Boite Theatre Company's 1998 season and to gain an understanding of members of the Brisbane community who do not regularly attend La Boite Theatre Company.

As is the case with an ethnographic inquiry, the intention of observing and interviewing a social group is not to study people necessarily, but to learn from them (Spradley, 1979:3). The aspects of performance that they choose to talk about and the ways in which they communicate their thoughts and feelings to each other, is of great interest to me. It is an undertaking that places much power in the hands of the groups under observation, and it is this emphasis that makes it unique, because the central purpose of this study, as developed from the pilot, was to better understand non-theatre goers living in Brisbane.

The endeavour to learn about non-theatre going culture and the unique views of its members inspired me to turn away from conventional retrieval methods such as, the structured questionnaire and the one to one interview, where responses are limited by the questions one asks and are produced by members in isolation. Instead the locus of the inquiry came to rely upon the focus group discussion method.

This is not to say that I have turned away from the structured questionnaire altogether as a valuable tool for data collection and validation, it simply means that a strong emphasis is placed upon the discussions and supported by questionnaires for validation of results.

The primary model utilised in the 1997 pilot study and again in the research for 1998, was directly influenced by the research of Sauter et al. (1986) and Lidstone (1996).

I have adapted and combined these two models to arrive at a methodology for gathering

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audience responses to performance. It is this same methodology that I hope to prove is a sound technique for encouraging new audiences to attend theatre by increasing their knowledge of theatre and their confidence in theatre going.

My interest in focus group discussions emerged after becoming aware of research that had taken place in Stockholm where Willmar Sauter developed his 1986 Theatre Talks model. In order to establish background information including recreational and social habits, Sauter gave participants a questionnaire to complete. Sauter then incorporated Theatre Talks as a method for retrieving the experiences of theatrical performances from small groups of audience members. In order to achieve this ambition, audiences were taken to a comfortable, and informal setting and were encouraged to talk about the performance they had seen amongst themselves; not unlike a group of friends having a coffee and chatting after a show. These open group interviews were led by a moderator to direct the conversation, so participants could respond to a particular set of questions created by Sauter for his research.

Sauter was seeking to prove his hypothesis and so needed participants to respond to set questions. I did not as I was more interested in learning from participants rather than studying them. I was seeking to discover what aspects of performance were most dominant or most important to participants thus I did not wish to present them with specific questions or topics for discussion. It was just as important to take note of the things they did not discuss as those that they did. I was not seeking to prove any hypothesis on what audiences talk about or why. The different emphases in our research ensured I needed to look to other focus group models to combine with Sauter's to arrive at a methodology that would best suit my aims and objectives. I needed a method that would allow me as researcher to listen and observe participants talking together in a group without intervention from me.

This is where John Lidstone's 1996 Synergetic Focus group model became very important for my research. The researcher/facilitator in the synergetic process, raises the overall topic for discussion (in this case audience members' responses to the performance just seen) and then encourages all members to put forward their opinions and personal experiences to the group in regards to the topic specified. From this time on the researcher sits back from the group, denies all eye contact with members, and takes notes on what is said and done throughout the discussion. It is the energy of the respondents within the group and the questions and thoughts they raise that keeps the discussion going. It is totally void of researcher comments and questions, thus it is close to a truthful response, as it is not lead by the researcher.

The desire to remain detached from the group so as not to directly influence members' thinking patterns or responses, made the synergetic model appealing for this study. Following the structure of this model, I broadly informed respondents of the topic under discussion and ensured each group member that their comments were of importance to the study and all opinions were valid.

Respondents were also asked to give an example from the performance to support the comments they raised in discussion.2 However, the physical detachment of the moderator as outlined by Lidstone (1996), was not incorporated in this study. Rather than remove myself entirely from the process, it was my belief that the discussion would flow more easily and less stressfully if I played an active listener role. In this limited

2 Group members were informed this was needed so other members could understand the points they were making. However, the primary reason for giving examples was so respondents could become confortable talking about specific aspects of performance and feel confident in expressing an informed opinion.

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leadership capacity I was seated within the circle of group members and gained eye contact with each of them.

I made this alteration to Lidstone's model because the participants involved were not experts in the field and were strangers to each other. One example of Lidstone's model in action revolves around a group of Geography teachers discussing geography. In this situation, one could assume that the researcher would be reasonably comfortable in leaving this group to its own devices as they identify themselves and each other as experts in the field that they are discussing. In the example of Sauter's study addressed earlier, the group members knew each other from work or from a social club and therefore felt comfortable with each other even though they may not have considered themselves experts in the field of theatre going or theatre making.

My group members were strangers to each other and not experts in the field of theatre going so I anticipated that they would feel insecure and possibly shy about discussing their thoughts and feelings about performances amongst themselves. The participants in my 1998 La Boite study were non-theatre goers and so did not feel they could give expert opinions on the performances they attend.

The underlying principle of the synergetic focus group model to place great responsibility upon group members to communicate with each other is upheld in my adaptation of the method. However the moderator's role is adapted to ensure members feel secure with each other.

Methods 1) A written questionnaire (About You) was given to each participant early in 1998 to gather demographic information pertaining to the participants, and their attitudes towards theatre and La Boite Theatre Company. 2) A second written questionnaire (Tonight's/Today's Performance) was issued immediately before group discussions began, and was designed for members to rate each performance and to specify aspects of the performances that aided their enjoyment and understanding of the play. 3) Tape recorded focus group interviews with a strong emphasis placed upon the participants rather than the moderator were held after performances. 4) A follow-up written questionnaire (Feedback) was given to respondents at the end of the 1998 season to discover the attitudes and opinions of group members to the performances seen, La Boite Theatre Company, and the study itself. It is here, members were asked if attitudes towards theatre and La Boite Theatre Company have changed, and if they would be willing to attend theatre performances in the future and encourage others to do the same.

5) Future contact with participants will take place at the conclusion of La Boite Theatre Company's 1999 season to discover how many participants have attended one or more of La Boite Theatre Company's productions.

Analysis This research employs qualitative analytical methods due to the qualitative nature of the data it collects.

The implementation of ethnographic analysis ensures focus is placed directly upon the groups' comments to interpret the feelings and thoughts of thirty-six individuals. Direct

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quotations are presented to show the reader exactly what members have said, to ensure the focus of the analysis is upon the focus group members and their words, rather than limiting it to the researcher's understanding of their words and intentions.

Content analysis (although quantitative) is also incorporated, to gain a perspective on the number of times certain aspects may be raised or how often members may speak, to give an overall impression of regularity and continuity within group sessions. Its purpose is to add strength to the ethnographic approach applied by giving a systematic tallying of the key topics identified in the group sessions (Morgan, 1988:64).

The structure chosen to present the data and its subsequent interpretation has been strongly influenced by the models of Knodel (1993) and Krueger (1988). Knodel offers a table containing focus group discussion guidelines, as prepared by the researcher, to label major topics, subtopics and probes (in Morgan, 1993:38). This study has appropriated the notion of the table and used it to breakdown the discussions for analysis, rather than as a tool to set guidelines for the structure of the discussion.

Knodel Major TopicsSubtopics Probes

Scollen Major Issue Main Points Examples (Scollen, 1997)

Knodel's discussion of break characteristics and control characteristics within the research design applies to this study (in Morgan, 1993:39). Knodel's model combines successfully with Krueger's model (1988) as it helps to break down the interview responses into segments to code and interpret, thus laying the path for analysis. Krueger's 'Analysis Continuum' (1988:109) begins the analysis by listing and coding the raw data, it then progresses with descriptive statements to summarise the results, and then concludes with an interpretation of these results to provide understanding. This model is applied because its structure is clear and logical, and offers a natural progression of the analysis of the data, from start to finish, for the researcher and the reader of the report. The Analysis Continuum Raw data <---> Descriptive Statements <---> Interpretation (Krueger, 1988:109)

An expose` of La Boite Theatre Company ensures the results are not presented in a vacuum. The findings are not to be considered representative of all non-theatre goers or of all theatre companies in Brisbane, but are a detailed exposition of thirty-six participants and their reactions to a specific theatre at a specific time in history. By framing my audience reception study at La Boite Theatre Company with a history of the company's repertoire, aims and policies the results will not only reflect the thoughts and feelings of thirty-six participants but will make comment on the decisions and ambitions of a professional theatre company in Brisbane. By demonstrating the importance of the study's results in relation to La Boite Theatre Company, the study acts as a model to be utilised in the future by other theatre companies needing to identify the reasons members of the community do not attend their productions and to discover what their reactions are to the companies once they are encouraged to attend.

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Results A brief summary of results is presented stemming from the post performance questionnaires, post performance focus group discussions, and the feedback questionnaire. When comparing the three groups' responses against each other, it appears that overall each group has responded to the various aspects of the productions in a very similar manner.

Post Performance Questionnaire results (brief summary) Expectation Group expectation was concerned with the quality of each production and with specific aspects of the productions that members may have read or heard about prior to attendance. There were few expectations of the storylines or the theatre company. One third to one half of the total number of group members had some expectation of what the productions would be like.

Enjoyment All six productions were enjoyed by group members (see Appendix 1). X-Stacy and The John Wayne Principle were the most enjoyable productions overall. The actors/acting and dialogue best helped group members to enjoy the productions. The actors/acting was highly enjoyed in all six productions. It seems that group members can enjoy the acting even if their enjoyment of the production is low. It also appears that for group members to enjoy a performance it is important for them to relate to the story and to the characters (see Appendix 2).

Understanding The dialogue and actors/acting best helped group members to understand the story in each of the productions. The descriptions of the stories by all groups were very similar for Emma Celebrazione!, The Conjurers and Speaking in Tongues. For the most part, the descriptions of the productions read like messages or themes rather than as a series of events. There was general consensus of the main protagonist in each production.

The description of the messages by all groups were very similar for Emma Celebrazione!, The Conjurers, and Speaking in Tongues. A pattern emerged where the responses of group members to these three productions were similar for story and message in comparison to the other three productions. This demonstrates that Emma Celebrazione!, The Conjurers, and Speaking in Tongues were simpler in their structure and easier to describe by the majority. The other three productions although fraught with a variety of responses for story and message were the most enjoyed productions. This variety of responses suggests that they may have had a multiplicity of messages and stories and that the group members identified strongly with the fiction. There was consensus amongst all groups of the genres of each production. Finally, on average all groups rated the acting style of each production as naturalistic.

Post performance group discussion results (brief summary) Story/character The story and characters were central to the discussions of all groups to all productions. The messages, the issues, the structure and time frame of the fiction, the characters' functions and motivations, and the reasons why group members could relate to the story and characters were discussed at length. For certain productions there was much consideration of title choices and the meanings of the plays' conclusions.

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The discussion of story and character follow on and develop from the short statements given by members in the post performance questionnaires. By far these two aspects of the productions were the most referred to of all elements of performance. According to the groups' responses all other aspects of the productions were there to create and support the story and the characters and so were referred to less in discussion

Actors/Acting Apart from the story and characters, the actors and the acting was consistently referred to by all groups for all productions. Every group discussion included talk about the reasons why members enjoyed the actors and the acting. Almost every group discussion included talk about the use of doubling and its effect on character portrayal. Other discussion pertaining to the actors/acting varied from group to group, production to production.

Confidence As participants became more comfortable and confident sharing their thoughts and feelings with others, and more equipped to support their ideas with examples from the performances, the group discussions became more complex and informed.

Feedback Questionnaire (some results) All participants enjoyed their involvement in the study and said they would encourage others to take part in a study such as this. Listening to others ideas and Thinking more about performances were rated very highly by all groups as the primary reasons for enjoying the discussions. These aspects were followed by high responses for Getting to know other people, Giving their opinions, and Learning about theatre. Knowing their thoughts were valued by the researcher/theatre company was also considered an important factor in discussion enjoyment.

The majority of group members believed the risk involved when attending live theatre had been lessened by their attendance at La Boite Theatre Company 1998 season. All participants except one stated they intended to attend La Boite Theatre Company's productions in the future. Almost all participants stated they intended to encourage others to attend La Boite Theatre Company's productions in the future, and had already done so throughout the study.

Over half of all groups stated they would be more likely to attend theatre productions if there were discussions afterwards. The majority of all groups felt they had a greater knowledge of theatre and were more interested in theatre after partaking in the study.

Conclusion The study demonstrated that the methodology applied successfully gathers audience responses to performance in a non-obtrusive and empowering way. Respondents feel their thoughts are valued and over time increase their knowledge of theatre performance and their confidence in theatre going. La Boite Theatre received detailed feedback on all of their productions, gained insight into the attitudes of non-theatre goers to their company, pricing, and promotions. Throughout the study respondents spoke to friends and family about the performances they attended and encouraged them to attend on many occasions. A number of people did attend as a result of that recommendation. All but one respondent stated they intended on attending La Boite Theatre Company in 1999 as they enjoyed the productions, and their part in the study.

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Although the group of thirty-six respondents, are not representative of all non-theatre goers, trends were apparent across the three groups in this study which could be indicative of thoughts of other non theatre goers if tested on larger scale.

References Carruthers, I & Mitchell, P. (1995) "Theatre East and West: Problems of Difference or Problems of Perception? (Suzuki Tadashi's Australian Macbeth, 1992)" in Asian Studies Papers - Research Series 5, Victoria: La Trobe University.

Deldime, R. (1990) 'A Psychological Approach to the Memory of the Spectator', in Sauter W. (ed.) Nordic Theatre Studies: New Directions in Theatre Research, Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, pp. 132 - 139.

Gourdon, A. (1988) 'Theatre, Audience, Perception', in Sauter, W. (ed.) Nordic Theatre Studies: Advances in Reception and Audience Research, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 27 - 35.

Knodel, J (1993) 'The design and analysis of focus group studies: A practical approach' in Morgan D.L (ed.) Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the state of the art, California: SAGE Publications pp. 35-50.

Krueger, R.A (1988) Focus groups: A Practical Guide to Applied Research, London: SAGE Publications.

Lidstone, J. (1996) 'Synergetic Focus Group Discussions: Rapid Access to Rich Data', in Gerber, R. & Williams, M. Qualitative Research in Geographical Education, Armidale: University of New England Press pp. 159 - 168.

Martin, J. & Sauter, W. (1995) Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Morgan, D. L. (1988) Focus Groups as Qualitative Research, London: SAGE Publications.

Pavis, P. (1985) 'Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire', in New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 1, pp. 208 - 212.

Sauter, W. (1986) 'Theatre Talks: Or How to Find Out What the Spectator Thinks' in Nordic Theatre Studies: Advances in Reception and Audience Research vol. 5, pp.136 -145.

Spradley, J. P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview, Philadelphia: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.

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Appendix 1 Please indicate on the scale below your level of enjoyment of the performance just seen. (1 - lowest to 10 - highest)

LEVEL OF ENJOYMENT OF 1998 PRODUCTIONS (1- lowest 10- highest) 10 9.5 9 R8.5 A8 T7.5 I7 N6.5 G6 5.5 5 4 3 2 1

TMW TMW TMW TMW TMW TMW

J W P Emma Con S I T X S ABL

There is a high level of enjoyment for all productions with scores ranging from 5.5 to 9. X-Stacy is the most enjoyed production for all groups, while The Conjurers is least enjoyed by all.

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Appendix 2

Could you relate to the story?

The John Wayne Principle Tuesday group Yes = 91% Matinee group Yes = 100% Wednesday group Yes = 75%

Emma Celebrazione! Tuesday group Yes = 91% Matinee group Yes = 90% Wednesday group Yes = 72%

The Conjurers Tuesday group Yes = 77% Matinee group Yes = 44% Wednesday group Yes = 60%

Speaking in Tongues Tuesday group Yes = 81% Matinee group Yes = 66% Wednesday group Yes = 80%

X-Stacy Tuesday group Yes = 100% Matinee group Yes = 80% Wednesday group Yes = 100%

A Beautiful Life Tuesday group Yes = 37.5% Matinee group Yes = 90% Wednesday group Yes = 80%

Group members appear to have had some difficulty relating to the story of The Conjurers and to some extent Speaking in Tongues. Many members of the Tuesday group did not relate to the story in A Beautiful Life.

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Appendix 2

Could you relate to the characters on stage?

The John Wayne Principle Tuesday group Yes = 100% Matinee group Yes = 90% Wednesday group Yes = 83%

Emma Celebrazione! Tuesday group Yes = 81% Matinee group Yes = 80% Wednesday group Yes = 100%

The Conjurers Tuesday group Yes = 77% Matinee group Yes = 66% Wednesday group Yes = 50%

Speaking in Tongues Tuesday group Yes = 81% Matinee group Yes = 66% Wednesday group Yes = 50%

X-Stacy Tuesday group Yes = 80%, 20% no answer Matinee group Yes = 80%, 20% no answer Wednesday group Yes = 100%

A Beautiful Life Tuesday group Yes = 37.5% Matinee group Yes = 80% Wednesday group Yes = 70%

Again a number of group members had some difficulty relating to the characters of The Conjurers and Speaking in Tongues, while the Tuesday group continued to have problems relating to the characters of A Beautiful Life.

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Appendix 2

The low percentages of the Tuesday group to A Beautiful Life (37% relate to story, 37% relate to character) appear to link with the low enjoyment rating of 6 (see Appendix 1) for the production (the lowest score this group has given a production). This same trend is apparent with the Matinee and Wednesday groups for The Conjurers, where they have given low scores for relating to characters and story and have given a low score for enjoyment of the production. The enjoyment of Speaking in Tongues by the Matinee and Wednesday groups is higher than The Conjurers, however, a similar trend can be seen here. The same statistic is displayed for both productions by these two groups when relating to characters, while the response is a little higher for Speaking in Tongues when relating to the story. The higher result for relation to story could be the factor that lifts the enjoyment rating above that of The Conjurers but lower than the other productions.

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PLAYING TO LEARN: DEVELOPING REFLECTIVE PRACTICE IN EMERGING ARTISTS A UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIP By Christine Sinclair

When we see more and hear more, it is not only that we lurch, if only for a moment, out of the familiar and the taken for granted but that new avenues for choosing and for action may open in our experience; we may gain a sudden sense of new beginnings, that is, we may take an initiative in the light of possibility. (Greene, 1995, p 123)

Three years is an eyeblink in the span of a lifetime. In the world of the university, however, three years marks a generation. In three years, a young untrained, aspiring student enrols, experiences, and, with any luck, learns enough to prepare to face the world at large. For a drama graduate, the world is particularly harsh, unforgiving, and unwelcoming. And for an arts graduate whose ambition is to work in the theatre industry, the scenario is even more blighted. Without the kudos and networks generated by conservatory training, they must forge their own paths, in addition to building credibility and contacts. In a conventional university setting, is it possible to provide some tangible experience or understanding for this particular cohort, which will assist them to take a place, any place in the rough and tumble of the performing arts industry?

Howard Gardner, of the Project Zero team from the Harvard School of Education, suggests that the principal components of arts education are production, reception and reflection, and for maximum efficacy, production must be the central component. (1989, p 163)

The heart of any arts-educational process must be the capacity to handle, to use, to transform different artistic symbol systems - to think with and in the materials of an artistic medium. Such processes can only occur if artistic creation remains at the cornerstone of all pedagogical effort.

In our work with undergraduates at Deakin University, my colleagues and I have been faced with the training dilemma outlined above. Our students are Arts undergraduates with the drive to work in the performing arts industry. We have constructed a course, which is responsive to this need, and we provide a range of opportunities for the students to "handle ... use.... and transform artistic symbol systems..."

We are aware however, that experience in an artistic medium is not sufficient to ensure that students are able to understand the nature of the process at hand, or indeed that they will have sufficient insight to apply what they have acquired in other contexts. This ability to regenerate artistic concepts in new settings with an appreciation of both the aesthetics and pragmatics of the new context, would seem to be a key principle in arts education designed to serve vocational and practical purposes. (Perkins & Gardner, 1989, p 129) According to Gardner, to maximse artistic learning students much learn to "effect discriminations, to perceive artistically distinctive features", in other words, "to reflect upon the arts".

there is a constant dialectic among, production, perception and reflection, with each step informing and enriching the others. (1988, pl63-164)

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This dialectic is central to the design of artistic pedagogy in the Deakin University drama program. It is highlighted in the final year of the undergraduate program with the implementation of a performance-based project, which is located in a community setting in partnership with the local theatre industry. We have formulated this project-based learning model in consideration of the following information: - Most of our students are not destined to be the mainstream theatre or film performers of their day. However, many of them will become independent performers and performance-makers, comedians, writers, community arts workers, and teachers of the arts. Our intention is to help them to survive, to generate their own opportunities, to be capable of being both practical and artistic, and to have the courage to embrace a vision, even if they're not sure how they'll achieve it.

In this paper, I intend to

• describe Sacred Sites, the project mounted at Deakin University in 1999 • outline the project-based learning model upon which Sacred Sites was built • identify the pedagogical imperatives which underpin the each component of the model • identify both strengths and shortcomings of the model in its current form, and • speculate briefly about the shape and dimensions of an ideal model for an ideal world.

Part One Sacred Sites: The Example It is February. The University is quiet. Classes are a week away. There is movement, a stirring of activity. In the dimly lit comers of the Rusden Theatre, people begin to gather. They are all in holiday mode. They chat, hug, compare most recent body piercings and hair colour. Slowly, they find a seat, and come to order. It is Day One of the 1999 Theatreworks project, for 75 students in the School of Contemporary Arts. "Welcome", we say (the team of three lecturers who will lead this project) "and hold on to your hats"

We promise them a rollercoaster ride, and paint word pictures of what the final outcome of the project might be. There will be two days of performance, it will be at Theatreworks in St. Kilda, there will be some small group events and some whole group events, and the theme will be Sacred Sites. Beyond that, prepare to begin, without knowing the end, prepare to lurch out of the familiar, prepare to take an initiative in the light of possibility. (Greene, 1995, p 123).

This project is like a structured improvisation, rather than a well-made play, or a university course for that matter. Its pedagogical strength lies in a structure, which allows students to find their own place and their own way through the obstacle race presented to them. The goals are stated but the outcome is by necessity and design, obscured. We ask the students to engage in an act of faith. If they are prepared to leap off, there is a chance that they will then go further than their imagination would have allowed them. For those students not ready or able to take on this leap of faith, there is frustration and confusion. Some students report a sense of alienation at the superficial loss of individuality. The paradox of this model in action is that as an outcome-driven project, the end is seen to dominate the means, but this is an illusion. The ultimate 'end' is student learning, not performance.

Here are some snapshots from this year's project Sacred Sites.

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Two student leaders, Danny and Natasha. Danny was involved with a small team of students whose job it was to conceive and then create a climactic event, a fire show, to be held on the beach at St. Kilda.

The team's task was to develop the concept given to them by the Artistic Director, Yoni Prior, to shape it so that it could incorporate all 75 student participants, a fire sculpture, and other theatrical elements of their choosing. They chose to work with fireballs and torches, a lantern parade, and multimedia images projected onto two huge screens that were constructed at Rusden and then assembled on St. Kilda beach. For safety reasons, they were guided and assisted by an experienced Fire show exponent, who is on staff at Rusden. The student leaders supervised the creation of the multimedia images, the making of the lanterns and torches and the design and construction of the castle sculpture which was to bum. They also negotiated with Port Phillip Council over permits, and guided all 75 participants through the rehearsals and the 'performance'.

Natasha was chosen as a student director. Her task was to work with the small group of actors assigned to her in the development of a 10 minute studio performance, using only the word "Hell" as a starting point. She was responsible for overseeing all aspects of her piece, including the script, the design, lighting and sound components, and the rehearsals and performance. She and the other student directors met with the Artistic Director, Yoni Prior, on a weekly basis to discuss directing issues, and to take on further instructions and guidance. This meeting was also her opportunity to learn from the other students directing for the very first time.

The following are some selections from the students' final written evaluations. Some are positive, some are negative, all are revealing. I use these examples here, rather than my own words, because they serve as indicators of the issues I wish to consider in the final section of this paper, where I consider the problems of the present model and the possibilities for the future.

Susan's story: The Negative Case

Susan: Barely recovered from my seven day hike along the Overland Track in the deep wilderness of Tasmania, I arrived at Rusden early Thursday morning haphazardly prepared for whatever Deakin University Dance/Drama had created to throw at me. Alas, I found myself alone, the offices relatively empty and familiar faces, sparse. I managed to corner a reluctant Arts lecturer who rapidly informed me that the Theatreworks group were to meet in the St Kilda space this morning…. I felt lost. Only I knew where I was. I craved direction yet I understood generally where I needed to be. I remained surprisingly enthusiastic despite reservations as to if and when I was to arrive at my destination. I can wholeheartedly say that the entire Theatreworks experience was prophetically summed up in my very first encounter.

I find it difficult to analyze and evaluate the Theatreworks experience. I know I have learnt an immense amount over the past semester but it all seems somewhat muddled. It is a strange sensation; it’s almost as if I feel like I have failed yet of the self-same token succeeded. Bizarre!

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Emily: Upon first glance, the Theatreworks project appears to be a vehicle through which Rusden third year students can practice their ‘group-devised’ skills, work as a large group and present an original weekend of theatre. Sure. Not a problem. I can breeze through this semester: I can work with other people; my communications skills are great; and I can finally use my love for and knowledge of musical theatre for a good cause at university! Upon reflection however, the Theatreworks project is, in almost every way, an exercise in management. This is certainly where the majority of my learning took place this semester – through group-devising, managing a huge third year cast during a whole-group event, delegating within our Cabaret sub-group, managing myself in a production role and above all, learning how to manage without being in a official ‘management’ role.

Karli: The Theatreworks project involved the process of learning how to construct a theatrical event. The 1999 project, entitled Sacred Sites included the challenge of organizing 75 students to embrace the task of theatre making and performing in various events and performances. It was an opportunity to be creative within a safe controlled environment, where guidance and knowledge support each step of the process. It is a rare opportunity to have as many resources at your fingertips. Skills required: Commitment, Organization and Time Efficiency, Improvisation, Communication, Research, Respect, Stress Management. Benefits: The Theatreworks project was an extraordinary learning experience. Challenges continued to emerge throughout the process, which presented opportunities to develop new skills. The project provided an experience of the real world. Achieving creative goals working within the boundaries and limits set by others is an example of art representing life. Life skills along with organization and management skills were learnt via the process. This was an opportunity to develop insight into your own strengths and weaknesses and observe behavior resulting in a greater understand of self, which becomes the essence of a good performer.

The most common scenario for a student participating in the Theatreworks project is that they participate in their third and/or final year of a Bachelor of Arts Degree, majoring in drama or dance. Many interesting things happen in the months that follow the conclusion of the project. Students are individually and collectively changed by their experience. Many of them are inspired to mount independent projects in their final semesters. They sign on for the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Maverick Arts or other high profile Melbourne events. Some are offered work at Theatreworks, or elsewhere, courtesy of a Theatreworks recommendation. For some students, the experience clarifies the future - "I will teach, I will act, what I really want to do is direct..."

Of course these are anecdotal accounts rather than verified data, but the reported and observed growth in confidence, practical and artistic skill, problem solving, and'peopleskills' repeats itself year after year. The model is working.

It could however, work better. There could be other applications and more flexibility in the projects developed. Fewer students could sink rather than swim.

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The key to understanding how the model works pedagogically and how it could be improved can be found in a consideration of its structure and the interrelationship between those key elements of arts education: production, reception and reflection.

Part Two -The "Theatreworks" Model This model has been designed to achieve not one single outcome, but three. There is a performance outcome (the public display of skills, both acting and production related). There is a pedagogical outcome (an acquisition of skills, insight and understanding of production, performer and the student as practitioner). Finally, there is a training outcome (training for reflective practice). It is a process which is designed to ensure that the experience leads to a reflective discourse, which then leads to what David Perkins, also from Project Zero, calls the generativity of understanding (Perkins & Gardner, 1989, p 129) Understanding is of limited value if it cannot be translated into future artistic applications. (1989, p 116).

The model can be described according to the following features: Context, Management Structures, Performance Structures, and Process and Procedures. In each section, the relationship between the structural nature of the model and the pedagogical foundations of the work are highlighted.

Context The project is mounted as a collaboration between the University's School of Contemporary Arts and a professional theatre organisation, off-campus, utilising the venue, facilities, expertise and profile of this organisation.

The School funds the event. All disciplines within the School are invited to participate. Contributions from Dance, Media, Visual Arts and Music can be accommodated in performance and exhibition although the project is traditionally driven by Drama staff and students, with up to three Third year drama and dance units dedicated to the project. There is an expectation that outreach into the community in which the event takes place will occur. This may take the form of community participation, sponsorship, stories, or access to alternative venues.

Pedagogy The involvement of a range of disciplines, all responding to the artistic brief and the thematic framework contributes to the 'angles of repose' (Taylor, 1996) ftom which students can view the work at hand. The images created by other student artists direct students towards further reflection on their own work, and challenge them to think further on it, and to deepen their responses. This works both reflectively and reflexively.

The need to communicate across artforms to other participants requires of students a good grasp of the vocabulary of their own artform, and a willingness to embrace other artistic languages devoted to a common cause, the project.

Communication skills, both discipline related and mainstream, require refinement when students find themselves in the community, seeking support, contributions and participation in some aspect of their event.

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Management Structures: Staff The project is controlled by participating staff from the drama and dance departments. Key management roles are taken on by these staff members, who work with the Manager of the professional theatre company, and the School's Technical Director to form the management team for the project. An Artistic Director is appointed from this team. All students are ultimately answerable to this person.

Staff is responsible for artistic management of all performances, practical production issues and matters of pedagogy including supervision and assessment of participants as students. In this project staff find themselves working variously as artists, mentors, facilitators, arbitrators and teachers.

By clearly identifying the Artistic Director as the central and final authority, the project mirrors some aspects of a professional community-based project. (This framework overrides the institutional structure of academic units presided over by unit chairs.)

Pedagogy The teacher models artistic practice, works as an artistic mentor, and is a facilitator of student work. Access to the teacher is the safety net where, at critical times during the process, students can seek clarification and direction.

Management Structures - Students There is a clear hierarchy of roles available to students to accommodate an enormous diversity of skills, aptitudes and experience. A small number of students are pre-selected for key management roles within the project. (Eg: Production Management, Publicity; Community Liaison; Exhibition Management; Set Design and Construction; Costume Design and Assembly.) Apart from these pre-selected roles, other students nominate for roles in all production and management areas of the project. Lecturers and theatre workers in the management team operate as mentors for the students in leadership roles.

All students also take on performance and production responsibilities. Some students are given an opportunity for artistic leadership through the direction of short plays, which fall within the performance structure.

Pedagogy Practical management skills are learned. The impetus provided b a tangible public outcome cannot be understated. Within production roles, independence, responsibility and initiative are rewarded (usually with more responsibility). Exposure to industry professionals translates into a recognition of skills which are valued be ond the university, and into the enhancement of the 'marketability'of some students. Responsibility and ownership engender confidence. Not a feature of pedagogy per se, but an invaluable ingredient in the efficacy of student learning.

Expert Input Expert professional input (beyond university and theatre company staff) is a central component in the model. The experts are enlisted for specific skills and are usually required to both model and apply their skills. Usually, they have no responsibility for project or student management. Their contribution is to create a richer and more diverse experience for students.

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Pedagogy The presence of the 'outside expert' ensures that students have the opportunity to move be and what they already know. Having access to both skills and an approach to artistry or pragmatics extends student perceptions of the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the project at hand.

Industry Partner - Theatre Professionals The function of the industry partner within the model is somewhat deceptive. The Theatre Company serves to heighten the perception of professionalism within the project, regardless of the actual input made by the company. While hands-on involvement from the professional theatre practitioners is desirable; the project is not reliant on this for its viability and credibility.

The perception of involvement, the profile and location of the theatre, and the kudos attached to working in 'partnership' provides students with the incentive to work with greater commitment and professionalism than they might generate for a project taking place in the safety of the university drama department.

Responsibility for key management roles by the staff of the Theatre Company, (for example, publicity and community liaison) does however, strengthen the model, and provides opportunities for mentoring and a 'work experience' situation for some students.

Pedagogy As with the role of the 'Outside Expert' the relationship to theatre company professionals ensures that students have the opportunity to move beyond what they already know, in the theatre world, and in the 'industry'.

Performance Structures The theme for the project staff is determined, prior to commencement. Many theatrical and non-theatrical references are sourced and provided to students, both before the semester begins, and during the project. Work is generally devised following extensive research and the provision of a performance brief, in preference to working on interpretations of text.

The event takes place over a two-day period. The work is organised around a theme that is interpreted and translated into a number of different performance events. (For example, studio performances, occurring in a conventional theatre space, 'locational' performances that occur on sites in the surrounding suburb, dance theatre on location and in the studio, and ritual theatre events, which encapsulate the themes of the weekend and involve all the participants.)

The event is thus a collection of small group events. In most instances, students, under staff guidance manage these small group events. Artistic input varies from work that is directed by students, by staff, or an 'outside expert'.

Pedagogy Management of the performance structures represent the most challenging area of pedagogy. The experience and expertise needed to execute a satisfying aesthetic product cannot be garnered during the evolution of the project itself. Existing skills can be facilitated and nurtured in the interest of heightening student ownership. Staff directed work could take students beyond existing levels of experience in performance and performance making, but at the cost of individual responsibility and ownership.

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Process/Implementation The project is designed to take place over a ten week period, commencing with a oneweek intensive prior to the start of semester. This provides students with an opportunity to immerse in the themes, issues, and practicalities of the project. In this week there is a mix of exploratory workshops, briefings, and planning meetings. By the conclusion of the intensive week, all roles are allocated, the production and performance briefs have been communicated, key personnel and the site have been introduced, and students have been initiated into a work environment clearly different from any other university-based project they have participated in previously.

The process is carefully managed to ensure that the balance between mentoring and independence shifts at the appropriate time, as students demonstrate the willingness and capacity to claim greater ownership and responsibility. Much of the work on a weekly

There are clearly identifiable points for group reporting. These are critical moments where feedback is given by staff, experts and peers. It is also a crucial component in the development of reflective practice. Students put their work forward and are required to reflect on it, evaluating its effectiveness and its responsiveness to the performance brief upon which it was based. At this point students also reflect on way in which their work can progress. They are confronted with questions and the unknown, and seek input from all available sources to inform their next step, as performers or performance makers. It is a collaborative and social endeavour.

Within the process there are also mechanisms which serve as safety nets for individual students and for the project as a whole. There are weekly briefings and meetings between key student personnel and staff. The atmosphere is professional and the intention both product driven and pedagogical. Staff model behaviour as theatre practitioners working on a major performance event. Students are required to keep workbooks - a combination journal and record of work. This provides evidence of individual endeavour, assists memory, tracks progress and reflection, and gives students a vehicle for dialogue with themselves.

The project culminates in a major debriefing session, driven by the question "If I knew then what I know now". Students are required to complete self-assessments, course evaluations and to participate in both small group discussions and a whole group forum.

The final reflective act required is a piece of critical writing to be submitted by each student as a component of their final assessment. Students have the choice of writing a critical overview of the whole project or, can focus on a key learning experience they have encountered in their j ourney through the project.

Pedagogy The structure of the preparationl rehearsal process is critical to both the practical and pedagogical outcomes. It is the safety net for the management structure. Pedagogically, it is through the milestones in the process that student learning is made explicit. The skills of reflective Practice are introduced and encouraged throughout the process.

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A student who is able to articulate the shortcomings of both their own work and the project as a whole, in their final evaluation, is in an excellent position to undertake further independent work - the generativity of their understanding is manifest.

The Project-based Learning Model Context

Project - Management Structures

Project - Performance Structures

Project - Process/ Implementation

Outcomes

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Part Three - Swimming Rather than Sinking - Towards a more inclusive model

To summarise, the Model in its current form is characterised by:

 One Project, Many Paths - the multiple roles played by both lecturers and students

 A Bridge to Possibility - the high level of student input, responsibility and commitment required - work which emphasises ensemble (It is stressed to students that the project is not a showcase for individual actors. Outstanding 'performance' in production and management areas of the project are encouraged)

 Embracing the Unknown - the public nature of the performance - the unknown nature of the outcome

 Production, Perception and Reception - the tension between the demands, aesthetic and practical, of staging work worthy of public performance, and the pedagogical imperative of student 'ownership' of the project - the role of reflective practice in generating learning

One Project, Many Paths It is clear from the student examples that participation in a major arts project such as the Theatreworks Project is a complex and difficult set of transactions for each participant. One of the greatest strengths of the model, and Theatreworks as an example of it, is its potential for difference - different paths for different students. This too is perhaps the greatest flaw in the model - there is no one set of experiences guaranteed for any student. The learning is dependent on the student's willingness firstly to engage with the framework of offerings within project, and, beyond this, on their capacity to identify opportunities which will suit them. A student who chooses not to engage, but simply to coast, is able to do so, usually arriving, uncomprehending, at the end of the project.

A Bridge to Possibility Ideally, there would be more extensive monitoring and mentoring, at a calculated distance, in the support structure of such a project. A second practical measure that could be applied to ensure greater efficacy for a greater number of students, would be a bridging program prior to entry into the project. In such a program, students would have the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the appropriate artistic skills, the vocabulary of a major arts project, student accounts and video and visual documentations of previous major projects. While such exposure would not pre-empt the range of possibilities for the project they were to embark upon, it may provide some sense of dimension and scope.

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Embracing the Unknown

The notion of the unknown outcome as a precondition for the project is significant for the experience of risk-taking, and extending students beyond known horizons. The outcome is unknown because the variables are so great, thus requiring students and staff to work on trust and build co-operative and sound artistic and management practices. The public outcome intrinsic to the project heightens this provocation to excell. The challenges become 'real' because the work is displayed in a public forum, both through the relationship with the industry partner and the final performances.

To refine the model further, this "real world" paradigm could be developed to respond to legitimate community and public contexts. The project could be in response to a formal brief, given by a community or council, for example.

Production, Perception and Reception : Towards Reflective Practice in Project -Based Learning The tension between the desire to generate student experience, ownership and responsibility and the pressure to achieve a satisfying aesthetic product is an ongoing dilemma in arts education. In its simplest form it is the process versus product debate. It is a disservice to students to allow them to display their work, out of context, in a public arena, when it lacks the necessary regard for an aesthetic framework. Therefore students must be guided towards a product which is worthy of public exhibition, irrespective of context, and yet, one that honours a rich and pedagogically sound process. As Gardner says, it is essential that practice, or production, is at the centre of the work, but arts education becomes manifest when it operates in tandem with perception and reflection. Students must not only learn to produce an artistic product, but they must also develop the skills to reflect on that practice, to act on that reflection, and to be informed and articulate practitioners.

It is in the manipulation of the three elements in the Gardner dialectic that this model has it greatest potential. Thoughtful and ongoing reflective processes - the journal, the meetings, must accompany the progress towards outcome with mentors, the responsiveness to articulated problems, and the growing ability to draw on the experiences and examples of others. While this is in place in the existing model, the further development of the tools of reflective practice would further strengthen the model. Another Project Zero researcher, Dennie Wolf, has developed the concept of the' workbook' or 'i ournal' into the 'Artist's Folio', in which all stages of the artistic work, and thinking on and about the work are recorded, and the emerging artist's work is clearly documented. (1989,ppI50-153) Such a tool could prove critical for the education of the reflective practitioner engaged in project based learning.

To conclude: A Structure for Possibility Finally, the Model for project-based learning offers a structure for possibility. Within the structure there is the opportunity for as many journeys as there are students. If the staff who are engaged to work with the students are as prepared as their students to risk of leaping off into the unknown, the structure will support them, and in the fusion of structural safety and artistic terror, new territory will open up. And for the staff and the students, new learning will be possible.

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There will, perhaps be new avenues for choosing and for action ma open in our experience; we may gain a sudden sense of new beginnings, (Greene, 1995, p 123)

Works Cited Gardner H. & Perkins D.N. (eds.) 1989 Art, Mind and Education: research from Project Zero, Urbana, University of Illinois Press.

Greene M. 1995, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change, San Francisco, Jossey- Bass.

Saxton J. & Miller J. 1999 The Research of Practice: the Practice of Research Taylor P. 1996 Researching Drama and Arts Education: Paradigms and Possibilities, London, Falmer.

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DEATH DEFYING THEATRICAL PRACTICE STAYING ALIVE AND FUNDED By Barbara-Rose Townsend

This year Death Defying Theatre is 18 years old. It does not look anything like the company it was in 1981 and it has even changed its name. Yet the company that originally formed from a group of university students has managed to adapt its structure, relocate and even fundamentally change the manner in which it practices, through two decades, while maintaining a constant source of funding. This is just one example of how theatrical practice is not solely determined by the artistic notions of the practitioners. Various constraints on theatre companies over the past twenty years in terms of cultural policy, audience demographics and funding accessibility have resulted in a number of interpretations of the traditional notion of "theatre company". Inevitably, funding plays a major role in determining practice. DDT is one such organisation that has redefined its corporate structure and working practices in accordance with the changing cultural policies and managed to continue operation while other companies have simply disappeared.

There are two pertinent moments in DDT's history at the beginning of the 1990's and then in 1997, that clearly delineate where funding policy has influenced and strongly directed artistic practice. By reading the signs of funding decisions in an intelligent and resourceful manner and being aware of the implications involved for theatre companies by these financial policies, the company was able to obtain funding earmarked for particular types of performance as well as different artistic activities. This meant that the company has moved through various incarnations and altered artistic practice to ensure its own survival.

DDT began life out of a student theatre troupe consisting of six performers and an administrator, all receiving equal pay and with equal decision-making rights. They were based out of the Community Centre in Paddington (inner city Sydney). The company derived their name from Peter Brook's concept of 'deadly theatre', the theatre that does not come alive to present its message and certainly does not entertain. The stylistic origins of the group were in commedia and they used these techniques to present lively action, song and physical street theatre in a similar way to San Francisco Mime Troupe. They performed on the festival circuit to passing audiences on the street, train stations and infrequently indoors. They also toured schools, factories, and health institutions, including rural areas. Other companies doing similar work in the late 1970's included Street Arts in Brisbane, Australian Performing Group in Melbourne and Popular Theatre Troupe. As these companies were funded for productions directed towards 'non-theatre' audiences in the street this encouraged DDT by acknowledging the possibility of survival performing this type of work.

Their work focussed on issue-based performance that would attract the general population as they went about their daily activities. Issues such as gambling, pollution, inequities in public health, conditions in prisons and media monopoly were presented with music, acrobatics and in an informative manner. This involved the agit-prop style of quick scenes with minimal props, witty songs that highlighted the injustices of an issue and performers playing many different roles. As with other agit-prop groups the important point was to get the information across effectively and in a memorable way.

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During the early 1980's within the Australia Council radical initiatives were threatening the status quo. The Community Arts Committee was campaigning for greater recognition as a serious art form.

Most of the Council was resistant to any major innovations in regard to non- traditional forms of the arts. However in 1981 Pilot Projects were established as a means to have individual Boards assisting CAC in creating community arts. Increased pressure resulted in CAC becoming a Board and gaining greater autonomy in project funding.

Alongside the Craft and Aboriginal Arts Board they managed by 1982, to initiate a major funding policy change that resulted in certain incentive programs for all Boards. These included Art and Working Life, Artists in Community and Youth Arts where artists would work with particular communities - trade unions, community centres and schools. These decisions came in the wake of Timothy Pascoe's recommendations to the Council of reintegrating art into the daily lives of people and subsidising new and innovative work. He also stressed the importance to maintain a strict adherence to the standards of excellence for all artforms, including the large, spectacular companies who had received funding previously even when quality was perhaps dubious.1 Although there was still great resistance for this change from the other Boards, projects did gain eventual support. The incentive programs were used to encourage Boards to give same value grants for projects done in conjunction with the CAB and to find non-cultural organisations (eg trade unions) to become involved in arts practices. The projects developed through this period reflected the multiplicity of arts disciplines and creativity outside the restricted notions held within the rest of the Council.2

Funds for the 1985 production of Coaltown were received from an Art and Working Life grant. The Miners' Federation acted as the agent by administering the funds to DDT for the Collinsville community theatre project. The piece was created over 3 weeks and involved researching and interviewing members of the mining community. The 6 performers transformed the thoughts and ideas into a large-scale three-part event with dramatised stories based on oral history and interviews, issue based segments, agitprop, and vaudevillian songs. This was the beginning of the move away from a general audience to a specific viewer. This resulted in their standard short physicallybased performance, perhaps 20 minutes in length, becoming a full hour and a half series of sketches based around community work This was indicative of a change in direction towards becoming a community organisation rather than a theatre company. It was primarily due to the marked funding change. Concurrent work in Victoria also funded through the Art and Working Life incentive were companies who created projects in conjunction with Trade Unions including the Melbourne Workers' Theatre and West Theatre.

After 1985 the early stages of crisis had set in where performers left after the end of their contracts thereby robbing the fledgling company of any continuity of personnel or'long term commitment to community theatre. There is not a great pool of information about what the company actually produced during this time. This appears reflective of the internal chaos and lack of commitment to the company's continual development and progress. In the course of one year there might be three different ensembles as members left or new ones joined the company. By leaving the collective and seeking employment in other areas of the arts industry, often in administration, the departing members forced those remaining to redefine

1 Timothy Pascoe “Australia Council Funding Priorities” Meanjin, Vol 42 No 2 June 1983, p265. 2 Gay Hawkins “From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts” Sydney 1993, p77.

229 Industrial Relations the company to ensure a future or else face their demise. As the company name implies however, they were defiant to the end.

Growing discontent amongst members created a splintering of DDT's original company aims - "to revive what is currently a dwindling interest in live performing arts, and to provide 3 popular entertainment to a wide cross-section of society". Some members were disgruntled at becoming welfare workers presenting workshops for communities but not performing. Other members were keen to incorporate a sense of cultural activism into their daily practice. Some radical adjustment was required if the company was to survive this uncertainty. In essence it seemed that creating a company that could be involved with cultural community development ideals and groups such as training institutions, lobby groups and ethnic communities would be the most beneficial step to take.

Paul Brown, a founding member and the writer for Coaltown, conducted a feasibility study in 1990 to investigate the validity of relocating to Western Sydney and redefining the com-pany's ethos, structure and function. Points investigated included; previous work done in the area and the potential for future projects, funding possibilities, changes in name, constitution and structure, and links to educational institutions. Both the Australia Council and the Ministry for the Arts were under pressure to fund artists working in Western Sydney. In addition there were funds from the Western Sydney Area Assistance Scheme for developmental projects in the area. Therefore the financial incentive to move was very strong.4

Gay Hawkins (1993) in her analysis of Australian community arts and cultural policy indicates the various reforms in the late 1980s placed a new emphasis on cultural development away from artistic excellence. This was evident by the replacement of the CAB with the Community Cultural Development Committee. Emphasis was also on strategic partnerships with non- cultural organisations, in particular local councils and ethnic organisations to develop the arts and use culture as a resource in tackling unemployment, urban development and improving local identity. Hawkins envisages the positive links this could create between economic, cultural and social policies to generate community empowerment. To move into theatre facilitation in the Western Sydney communities was a strategic decision.

While the company had been situated in central Sydney several projects conducted in the West had established contacts with various ethnic communities, the University of Western Sydney and the Community Arts Officers of local councils. Incorporating these community links with a new artistic direction seemed an opportune way in which to solve the crisis. The move would result in continued funds from CCDU, the Theatre Fund (even if only for projects) and WSAAS to enable the company to build on the good reputation they already had with several local groups.

The encouragement of professionals to incorporate the Western suburbs - generally known for their high levels of immigrant demographics and ethnicity, low socioeconomic position and marginalisation suffered from the cultural hegemonic order, into their artistic practice facilitated DDT'S corporate redefinition. Surprisingly no her company realised the potential of such a move or took advantage of the policy change. By reducing the core group from seven to four non-performing members (1 Artistic Director, 1 administrator and 2 project

3 Death Defying Theatre Press Release 1981. 4 A Report to the Board of DDT Feasibility Study, Paul Brown 1990.

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facilitators) DDT believed that they would refocus their attention away from the company as an artistic body and onto the communities in which the company was now situated. The board of the company would consist of representatives from Western Sydney organisations.

There would be one more non-performing member to ensure that no one particular performative style would be reflected in any company policy. DDT took advantage of the ready willing communities waiting to present their stories, by transforming itself into a facilitatory organisation. Rather than solely employing actors, musicians and writers they would involve the local community individuals and have them create the language of text for the performances in which they would present themselves to the audience. The rewriting of DDT's constitution also created a company that would reflect the community requirement of performance. DDT would operate as a professional arts body in co- ordinating and supervising each project, but not working exclusively on the artistic development of the piece.

It was hoped that there would be a greater chance to access participants from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds as well as indigenous residents in the region.

In the Arts for a Multicultural Australia policy towards the end of the 1980s, NESB artists and communities were targeted as well as companies whose work reflected multiculturalism. Since these were generally the residents of Western Sydney it again seemed logical for DDT to utilise the very communities seen by Australia Council as priority areas for the arts.5

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the change was the adaptability of the company to read the current funding policies and move with them to best take advantage in redirection of arts policy. In this case it meant an obvious swing towards community arts and the artists of the Western Sydney region. This eradicated the traditional notion of a theatre company that was funded annually for performances in traditional venues. Here was evident the need to change to become an organisation that had the resources and infrastructure to offer to enthusiastic but often poorly skilled performers or artists to assist them in creating their own community piece of work.

In the years following the move to Western Sydney, DDT's projects involved the employment of professional writers, directors or musicians, yet the majority of involvement came directly from the specific communities. These professionals were employed by DDT who had secured funds for individual projects whether they involved young migrant women and their self perceptions, Polynesian and Maori immigrants or young hip-hop artists. The funds came from the Theatre Fund of the Australia Council, the CCDU, the Literature Fund for commissions and the Arts Ministry. The increased involvement of local residents inspired tantamount commitment from local businesses to support the work involved in relevant projects. Support from local councils, health centres and the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, the Law Society and Australian Consumer Affairs was received for particular projects of significance to the donor.

By 1997 after the success of Hip Hopera DDT realised that further modifications were required for continued support from both target communities and funding bodies. The company employed John Baylis, an avant-garde performer and director who had not been a community theatre facilitator before. This was seen as a step towards merging contem-porary community practice with components of theatrical excellence. Baylis' arrival meant that the company could explode the myth that community theatre implies an amateur performance,

5 Hawkins, p79.

231 Industrial Relations and that contemporary theatre needs an elite to appreciate it. The company would, while continuing to concentrate on exciting and relevant artistic practice for Western Sydney residents, would also create performance works that would draw in a theatre-going public looking for dynamic experimental work.

DDT therefore strengthened their position to apply for and obtain Theatre Fund grants. The company also changed its name from Death Defying Theatre to Urban Theatre Projects reflecting a more contemporary form of theatre. It was no longer a circus, instead a relevant organisation developing unique projects based on the communities in the urban centre of Western Sydney. The company's core structure has reduced to only three permanent staff - the Artistic co-ordinator, the company manager and Project Development Officer who is responsible for initiating new projects with various communities, as well as maintaining networks already established.

In conjunction with the artistic aims there is the equally crucial objective to provide local artists from culturally diverse backgrounds with opportunities to build networks, find employment wherever possible, while facilitating the development of training programs. Through the use of many forms of theatrical practice the company wishes to also reflect the diverse cultures of Western Sydney, build new audiences and find sponsorship from a variety of sources both in the area and further afield. This will lead eventually to the exchange of ideas nationally and internationally and leave a distinctive mark on what constitutes Australian contemporary theatrical performance.

UTP, like it's former incarnation DDT, is still not solely reliant on traditional sources of funding in developing projects. Although they do receive both Federal funds from the Theatre Fund of the Australia Council and Community Cultural Development Funds from the Ministry of Arts in NSW, totally approximately $250,000, the company is forever seeking out other sources of income that somehow relate to the work it does.

That explains the support from other Ministries and Departments that are not traditionally known for being sympathetic to the arts. Also by utilising the local councils and the various services they provide the company has well and truly established itself in the geographical world of Western Sydney.

This year, 1999, has heralded another change in shape and direction. The last of the triennial WSAAS payments meant the company had to find alternative funding or make major budget cuts. From Casula Powerhouse - a space with office facilities, performance and rehearsal venues and access to other arts organisations - the company moved to office space in central Bankstown, thereby bringing the company back to the communities for whom it provided employment, training or entertainment opportunities. Casula was not a readily accessible location to many of the young participants particularly in the evenings or the weekends. The new Bankstown office provides a place for people to call in and discuss projects and generally build community networks. Not having a regular performance space frees the company as they focus on site-specific works in non-traditional theatre venues from suburban houses to building sites.

The Project Development Officer works to ensure continuity between participants and the projects that follow from their initial involvement with UTP. Throughout their time in Western Sydney, communities such as NESB, youth, women and indigenous have certainly become more visible and cohesive. The nurturing of artists has also meant an increase in the

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awareness of Western Sydney art whether it be music, photography, dance, video or theatre. The past three years has shown exciting work from the cross-cultural fusion of skills and people. This will be the focus for the company in future rather than only targeting single communities.

The third major change in the company since 1997 is the notion of training an ensemble. Baylis has recognised the importance of having an ensemble work together on many projects, developing skills as performers and performance makers as well as the sense of team through a united vocabulary of performance. At the moment the ensemble is still in the formative stage of planning. However there is a possible group of performers and artists consisting of various ages with ranges of experience. Initially there would be no payment provided for the performers during their training sessions but they anticipate a small fee for performance.

Has the company come full circle - back to a small performing group? UTP's manager Harley Stumm, states the ensemble is not a major focus, rather an offshoot or byproduct of community development. However there is a sense of revisiting former techniques while working in a totally new manner towards cross-cultural performance involving diverse communities. In its 18 years DDT/UTP has recreated itself to maintain relevance to current cultural and therefore funding policies as well as particular participants in cultural production. Developing a training arm, seems just one more strategy in long term commitment to community cultural development as well as its own survival. In the words of an indigenous community theatre in WA "if you have good strong links with the community, that's where you source your future writers, actors, designers and even some of your audience".6 In its current manifestation UTP has developed a strong rapport with various communities in Western Sydney and with the Project Development Officer working at maintaining these., while artistic practice continues with innovation the company is sure to be around to celebrate many more birthdays.

References Blaylock, Malcolm interviewed by Graham Ley "Subsidy, Community and 'Excellence' in Australian Theatre" New Theatre Quarterly Vol.11, No 5 Feb 1986

Brett, Judith "On Clowns and Migrant Artists" Meaniin Vol. 42, No. I March 1983

Brown, Paul "Making Coal Town" Meanjin Vol. 46, No. 4 December 1987 A Report to the Board of Death Defving Theatre Sydney 1990

Burvill, Tom "Sidetrack: Discovering the Theatricality of Community" New Theatre Quarterly Vol. 11, No. 5 Feb 1986

Connell, R.W. "Democratising Culture" Meaniin Vol. 42, No. 3 Sept 1983

Death Defying Theatre, Press Release 1981 The Really Interesting Gypsies (Video) 1984 Fully professional Touring The Riff Raffle Club (Video) Adelaide 1984 Fully Professional Touring Coaltown (Video) Sydney 1985 Fully Professional DDT A Go Go (Video) Sydney 1989 Fully Professional Blood (Video) West Sydney 1992 Community Project Going Home (Video) West Sydney 1995 Community Project

6 Reid, Mary Ann Not a Puppet: Stories from the Frontier of Community Cultural Development Australia Council CCDF, Sydney 1977, p28.

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Hip Hoi)era (Video) West Sydney 1995 Community Project Danger (CD) Sydney 1996 School Touring Project

Artistic Report 1995 Harley Stumm and Fiona Winning Report 1996 Harley Stumm

Fotheringham, Richard Community Theatre in Australia Sydney 1987

Frow, John "Class and Culture: Funding the arts" Meaniin Vol. 45, No. I March 1986

Gooch, Steve All Together Now: An Alternative View of theatre and the community London 1984

Greenwood, Ted "Is community action an essential ingredient of Community Arts?" Meanjiin Vol. 42, No. 3 Sept 1983

Grostal, Carmen and Harrison Gillian "Community Arts and its relation to multicultural arts" from Gunew, Sneja and Rizui Fazal (editors) Culture, Difference and the Arts Allen and Unwin, 1994

Hawkins, Gay "Reading Community Arts Policy: From Nimbin to the Gay Mardi Gras" from Binns, V Community and the Arts Sydney 1991

From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts Sydney 1993

Hull, Andrea "Community arts: a perspective" Meaniin Vol. 42, No. 3 Sept 1983

Kershaw, Baz The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention London 1992

Kirby, Sandy "An Historical Perspective on the Community Arts Movement" from Binns, V (Editor) Community d the Arts Sydney, 1991

Pascoe, Timothy "Australia Council Funding Priorities" M Vol. 42, No. 2 June 1983

Reid, Mary Anne Not A Puppet: Stories from the Frontier of Community Cultural Development Australia Council CCDF Sydney 1997

Interview with Harley Stumm and John Baylis Urban Theatre P Manager and Artisitc Director May 1998 Interview with Harley Stumm 25 June 1999

Urban Theatre Projects Artistic Report 1997 John Baylis and Harley Stumm Report 1998 John Baylis, Harley Stumm and Lisa Faddoul

Watt, David "Community theatre: a progress report" from Australasian Drama Studies No. 20 April 1992

"Interrogating Community: Social Welfare Versus Cultural Democracy" from Binns, V (Editor) Community and the Arts Sydney, 1991

"The Popular Theatre Troupe and Street Arts: Two Paradigms of Political Activism" from Capelin, Steve (editor) Challenging e Centre Playlab, Brisbane, 1995 and Graham Pitts "Community Theatre as Political Activism: Some Thoughts on Practice in the Australian Context" from Binns, V (Editor) Community and the Arts Sydney, 1991

West Theatre Company Vital S (Video) Melbourne 1985 Community Project

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‘THREATENING THEORY’?: TWO TRIBES By Stuart Young

Since writing the outline for this paper, I’ve realised that it is most useful to tie what I have to say to a particular example or circumstance – and so make what I have to say truly less abstract. This may seem to take me into the domain of anecdote – the sin for which practitioners are often criticised by academics – but I hope that this will enable me to open up larger issues. I shall talk specifically about the situation we experience in Auckland, which is, I suspect, rather different from that in the large Australian cities. Nevertheless, I hope it offers opportunity for some meaningful comparison and connexions.

One of the challenges in studying and teaching drama in Auckland is the remarkable, scandalous, paucity of live theatre available in the city. A city of one million people, Auckland boasts a single theatre company, the Auckland Theatre Company, which was established six years ago from the remnants of two longer-standing companies - one with two theatre spaces, the other with one. Those companies expired in the late 80s and early 90s – casualties of those heady days of ‘economic rationalism’ and of a broader social tendency: a notable indifference to theatre. The ATC is simply a production company; it has no theatre of its own. Its output is modest: it has gradually increased the number of its productions from 4 to 7 per year. Meanwhile, other productions in Auckland appear largely on an ad hoc, co- operative basis. There is one small, struggling venue which valiantly serves those productions. The more interesting local work tends to originate in Wellington, a city less than a third the size of Auckland, but which supports 3 or 4 venues operating continuously.

Attending theatre is simply an anomalous experience for many of the students I teach; you would be astonished at the number of students who don’t go – have never even been - to the theatre; and I’m talking about students studying drama! To redress this, while maintaining our commitment to staging works from the theatrical ‘margins’, in our own programme we make a point of regularly producing plays which are taught in the English Department’s larger papers. Occasionally we have also changed the syllabus of papers to include a play being performed professionally in Auckland. Thereby, we marry pedagogical objectives with tangible support for the profession. Given the fragility of theatre in the city, it seems desirable to forge links between academy and industry.

I teach a paper in contemporary British and Irish drama, so you can imagine my delight when I discovered that the first three productions of the Auckland Theatre Company’s 1999 season were to be very recent British plays. It seemed only appropriate to change the texts set for the paper to include the first two of those plays – especially since those plays were to be staged on our doorstep, in the main theatre on Auckland University’s campus. And, it seemed only proper to take further advantage of this circumstance and invite representatives of the company to come to our class to talk about one of those productions. Here was an opportunity to extend the students’ understanding of the practical exigencies of staging a particular play and, moreover, an opportunity to bridge the ‘intercultural communication gap’ between professional theatre workers and the academy that this conference posits. Here, then, theatre and theory – practice and reflection – might profitably come together. Peter Hall has said that he’s ‘always had the feeling that the coming together of the audience and the performer is one of the few opportunities in our society for a debate in live terms.’2 We

2 Peter Hall, in Judith Cook, Directors’ Theatre (London, 1974), p. 69

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would make this debate happen more literally. This we did for the ATC’s second production, David Hare’s Amy’s View, which seemed especially suitable for the exercise - an ideal vehicle for a meeting of theory and practice: the play is overtly self-reflexive and addresses the issue of the relevance of the theatre today. It features a grande dame of the theatre, Amy’s mother, Esme, an habituée of London’s West End, and it sets her on a collision course with her eventual son-in-law, Dominic, a brash, young votary of popular culture, and of cinema in particular, who considers the theatre ‘wank time’.1

Although Amy’s View is intimate in terms of its domestic setting and small cast, its action spans (some) 16 years, beginning, significantly, in 1979, the date of Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister. The period marks the ascendancy of the values of populism and unapologetic self-interest personified by Dominic. Such a broad temporal canvas is a familiar Hare strategy; the most obvious example is his play Plenty, which offers a deeply ironic view of British history from World War II until 1962. However, the ATC production of Amy’s View largely neglected to convey any sense of what Hare would probably characterise as the ‘epic’ dimension of his play. It was interesting that, when the period of the play’s action was raised in the seminar with the actors, it was clearly an aspect that had escaped their attention.

The production’s failure to represent the play’s ‘epic’ dimension was paralleled by a comparable, and more inexplicable, failure to realise meaningfully its metatheatrical aspects. Hare says of Amy’s View, ‘it aims to use all of the armory of theatre to defend theatre itself.’2 Where the stage directions are explicit, the production did pick up the cue. Indeed, the staging of the finale exceeded the effect envisaged in the text. The last act of the play is set in the dressing-room of a small, humble London theatre where Esme, dressed in a ragged costume, is preparing to go on stage in a ‘pretentious’, ‘honky little play’ by a new, young playwright.3 (It’s a far cry from her West End days.) The allusion to Lear is emphasised when Esme is joined by a young actor, wearing just a loin cloth, who looks like Poor Tom. Each pours water over the other in a somewhat baptismal ritual, and then the lights go down. In the ATC production the lights and curtain then came up as the two figures walked slowly upstage towards a mirrored wall in which we, the audience, could see our reflection. The audience’s thrill was palpable.

Esme’s journey from the boulevard theatre to her Lear-like role is charted very cleverly and wittily by Hare. The play opens - and indeed the first three acts are set in – the living-room of Esme’s house near Pangbourne in Berkshire. The room, bedecked with art, is decorated with ‘exceptional taste’ and to one side there is a large summerhouse-cum-veranda. Immediately evoked – or should be – is the world of the drawing-room drama, set in the Home Counties, which formed the staple of the English repertoire in the 40s and 50s, and which Kenneth Tynan vilified as epitomising the profound theatrical stagnation of the period: ‘a glibly codified fairy-tale world, of no more use to the student of life than a doll’s house would be to a student of town planning.’ According to Tynan, those plays were usually set ‘in a country house in . . . Berkshire.’4 The genre has continued to survive, of course, in the West End. So, in indulging in the risky business of theatrical navel-gazing and in raising the issue of the relevance of the theatre today, Hare boldly ventures to take us into territory that epitomises the most deadly of theatre.

1 David Hare, Amy’s View (London, 1997) p53. 2 Auckland Theatre Company programme note for Amy’s View. 3 Hare, pp 112, 115-16. 4 Kenneth Tynan, Curtains (New York, 1961) p86. See also p230.

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Esme’s drawing-room is presumably very much like the West End sets on which she appears. Discussing her acting, she says that she’s ‘usually best at playing genteel. With something interesting happening underneath. Layers. I play lots of layers.’6 Her speeches are peppered with a familiar series of arch and acerbic witticisms: ‘Schools didn’t teach in those days. It was considered vulgar.’7 She is predictably bitchy about her fellow thespians: Deirdre Keane can’t manage the line in the first place, let alone the bit where you think something else.’8 The persona Esme projects recalls, surely, those showy actresses Judith Bliss from Hay Fever and Irina Arkadina from The Seagull?

Ironically, apart from the finale, the ATC production eschewed the obvious cues for theatricality. The set was surprisingly heavy and dreary, even tawdry. It certainly cast no witty theatrical allusions. And Ilona Rodgers played Esme with surprising understatement. The play became essentially a chamber piece, with the emphasis on relationships, in particular the relationship between Esme and Amy; the producer’s note in the programme discusses the play solely in terms of the relationship between mother and daughter. In our seminar the actors confirmed this deliberate emphasis. So, the production became primarily a display of fine ensemble acting. Ironically, a note in the programme cites Hare effectively endorsing that approach, with a quotation from Harley Granville Barker: ‘the art of theatre is the art of acting, first, last and all the time.’9

Perversely, by reducing what Amy’s View has to say about theatre to an emphasis on the virtues of fine acting and a single spectacular effect, the ATC in effect scored an own goal in arguing the case for the theatre. A programme note asserts that Amy’s View ‘surely stands as testimony to the enduring power of the theatre over the trivialising and craven commerciality of television. . . and to the theatre’s role as a nation’s moral thermometer.’ By missing much of the self-reflexivity and therefore the rich ironies operating in the play, the production inadvertently confirmed the image of the theatre that Dominic describes: a world characterised by smugness and self-absorption, a form that is outmoded and ‘dead’.10

In my representation of the ATC I am obviously adopting a familiar stance of academic complaint and even disdain, which perhaps comes all too easily. It is a stance I also get to rehearse in my role as a theatre critic. However, my concern is not so much to indulge in critical bile, but rather to set the scene and to draw out other, more pertinent issues.

After my account of the ATC’s production of Amy’s View, you won’t be surprised to learn that our ‘intercultural exchange’ with representatives of the company only served to highlight aspects of the divide between theatre practitioners and academics. ‘Theory’ may share the same Greek root as ‘theatre’, reminding us of the allied activities of spectating and speculating. However, each group speaks a different language. I was reminded of the Drama seminars I attended as a student in England. Very occasionally practitioners would be invited. They were always articulate – after all, they were generally Cambridge graduates – but in effect two discourses were in operation. This is something of which I continue to be aware, both in my drama teaching and production work, and in my research on theatrical practice and performance in Britian and New Zealand. This was demonstrated again in our discussion with two actors from Amy’s View.

6 Hare, p16. 7 Hare, p18. 8 Hare, p24. 9 Auckland Theatre Company programme note for Amy’s View. 10 Hare, p51.

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The actors began by emphasising (in sub-Stanislavskian manner) that their approach to the play and their roles was rooted in the fundamental questions, “Who am I?” ‘What does my character want?’ It was perhaps salutary for the students to be reminded that the business of theatre-making involves addressing a series of pragmatic considerations: characters’ motivations, their entrances and exits. But if theory needs to be informed by practice, surely practice needs to be informed by theory? There was, however, little prospect of that. When a student made reference to the metatheatricality of Amy’s View, he was completely misunderstood.

The absence of more esoteric points was not a problem: it was an extremely jolly occasion. The students were utterly charmed by the guests, and enjoyed their anecdotes. Uncannily – or cannily Amy’s View actually anticipates this, although the irony went politely unnoted. In Act Two, by which time Dominic has become a celebrated ‘cultural arbiter’ with his own television show, he predicts that Esme’s appearance on his programme will amount only to ‘stories’. She’ll tell those awful theatrical stories of hers… How Perry dropped his props! How the set wobbled in Barnsley. How Deirdre can never remember her lines. If there’s one thing that puts people off theatre, it’s those meaningless stories they tell all the time.

Later Amy says of Esme, ‘She doesn’t do argument… She only does instincts’, which one might translate as ‘she doesn’t do theory, she simply tells anecdotes’. Incidentally, a further irony, which emerged was that Iiona Rodgers proved to be more ‘actressy’ in her own person than she had been on stage in the role of Esme.

When pushed, repeatedly, by a colleague of mine, to talk more specifically about their craft, the actors successfully evaded the issue. This was, I think, entirely according to the expectation of my colleague, who cites John Whiting’s observation that actors are notoriously reticent in talking about their methods. This is, of course, in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition. In Utopia and Other Places, Richard Eyre, the former director of the National Theatre in London, admires the work of three leading British actors. Appropriately, among them is Judi Dench, for whom the role of Esme was created – and Eyre directed that first production. He remarks approvingly of those three actors’ lack of any working ‘method’. Judi Dench ‘doesn’t study a part but works through a process of osmosis’ and operates almost entirely on her instincts. Eye concludes that actors are ‘rightly reluctant to intellectualise about processes that are idiosyncratic and instinctive. Subsequently he goes on to discuss Brecht, prizing Brecht’s ‘theatrical instinct’ over his ‘unpalatable mix of political ideology and artistic instruction’. According to Eyre, Brecht says ‘in the theatre there is only one inflexible rule: “The proof of the puding is in the eating”. And this is from a director who has championed the work of not only David Hare, but Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths! Meanwhile, Eyre’s successor at the National Theatre, Trevor Nunn, maintains that ‘interpretation – that’s the unimportant top layer of a production.

It is tempting, in the light of such commentaries and the experience I have outlined, to concur with Patrice Pavis when he argues that:

In the sphere of ‘boulevard’ or ‘bourgeois’ theatre, theory has almost no influence … in so far as commercial theatre hates any intellectual pretensions to theory and to doubts cast on its ideological and economics mechanisms….. dare we say that theory’s influence on this kind of theatre is no more limited than this theatre is anyway? An elitist remark, no doubt bother to theorize about a kind of theatre that gets by with

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tired and tested recipes, that only takes any interest in sociological reflection so as to find out how the market and audience tastes are developing.

However, in the context of a conference addressing the apparent contest between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in examining relations between the industry and the academy, it is important to recognise that any significant theatrical activity is underpinned by theoretical and ideological assumptions. Such theory might not be acknowledged, indeed may even be disavowed, but it exists nevertheless. The ATC might not articulate the assumptions underlying its work, but that doesn’t mean that the work isn’t informed by a distinct conception about theatre and its function in society.

A company which unabashedly directs its pitch at the upper-middle class and the middle- aged, the ATC is explicitly a purveyor of fine theatre. The glossiness of its annual brochures makes the pamphlets for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company look distinctly declasse, and the prices charged are, in New Zealand terms, exorbitant – at least 40- 50% higher than the prices charged by any other professional theatres or productions in the country. The company’s repertoire bears the enduring imprint of the colonial mentality: modern British plays, which have premiered at the National Theatre and played in the West End and on Broadway, are supplemented by revivals of the Arthur Miller, Chekhov and Cabaret. The occasional New Zealand play is usually by the boulevard playwright, Roger Hall, New Zealand’s Alan Ayckbourn or Neil Simon. In short, this is theatre redolent of the type that Amy’s View subtly parodies. Perhaps that is why the ATC production missed the ironies operating in Hare’s play?

Among other ironies to note, I want to re-emphasise that the ATC’s production, so un-alert to the self-reflexivity of Amy’s View and so unquestioning about its own processes, took place at a university. In fact, the ATC has taken up increasingly frequent residency in Auckland University’s Maidment Theatre; this year more than half of the company’s programme is scheduled to play there, for a period of some five months. Howeve, it is worth noting that the director of the Miadment, Paul Minifie, was a prominent member of both companies from which the ATC emerged.

Paul Minifie’s directorship has coincided with, and the ATC’s occupation of the Maidment Theatre stems from, a policy by which the two theatres we have on campus are now principally dedicated to commercial hire. Indeed the Maidment has become the model for the New Right re-orientation of the University. Against the representations of those of us who teach drama on campus, the second theatre – a studio theatre – was remodelled so that what had been a usefully flexible black box now has permanently fixed seating to ensure greater comfort for patrons. Access to the two university theatres has become sufficiently difficult for student drama groups that they have been driven to alternative venues – often not particularly suitable – both on and off campus.

Although these two theatres feature a wide range of productions, of plays and theatrical styles, the ATC has become the dominant presence -–the dominant image of theatre. The extent to which this is so reflected, alarmingly, in the concept for the School of Creative and Performing Arts, which the Dean of Arts is in the process of establishing at Auckland University. The ambitious project involves extending the teaching of Film & Television production, Opera, Arts Management, Dance and Theatre and Drama. I have with me – although I’m almost too embarrassed to show it to you – copies of the brochure produced for a fundraising dinner to persuade Auckland’s moneyed glitterati to subscribe to the project.

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The vision projected in the gloss and the rhetoric clearly derives from the sort of image (& ethos) of the arts projected by the ATC and its ilk.

It is significant, and again dismaying, that the Dean has identified as the flagship for the School the establishment of a relationship with The Edge, a three-auditoria avenue which hosts conferences, opera, musicals and (symphony) orchestras, and which bills itself as Auckland’s West End. Meanwhile, the Dean, who has no idea what a green room is, has never visited our department’s drama studio. He simply cannot understand that forging such a relationship with The Edge offers absolutely nothing to those who teach and study theatre and the other performing arts in the university. Of course we would be grateful that such attention is being bestowed on us – at a time when, like all universities in New Zealand, Auckland is under severe financial pressure. But, in fact the project is driven by economic imperatives – the delusion that the School will be a big money-spinner.

The Dean’s vision for his new School, encompassing the link with The Edge, and the coincidental connection between the ATC and the university have other unfortunate consequences. Theatre Studies is often accused of lacking intellectual rigour and theoretical sophistication. Such prejudices can only be confirmed when the theatre associated with the academy is itself characterised by such a lack. Furthermore, it makes it difficult for our own creative work to be taken seriously within the institution. As it is, although our university ostensibly recognises dramatic productions as legitimate research, that works is routinely devalued in comparison with conventional research publications.

So, for all the pleasures of our intercultural exchange, they give way to significant frustratins and provide cause for deeper anxiety. I am conscious that it is much easier for me to talk about this to you – at some remote – than to broach these issues in Auckland, which, when it comes to theatre, is in effect a village. It is difficult to question the nature of production – to exchange in analysis of performance and theoretical and ideological assumptions that may be identified – when this might be construed as undermining the art and discipline one wishes to promote. And, when one is trying to encourage students to experience any theatre at all, it seems self-defeating to critique austerely the theatrical practices they are seeing. So, debate is carefully controlled and kept within polite, safe perimeters.

And, as a consequence, we in the academy risk failing to fulfil our role of encouraging and facilitating searching speculation on the theatrical spectacle; we fail to extend students’ skills of analysis and reflection. This undermines our ability to expand, revise and revision the theatrical knowledge and theory that we teach. The danger is that we do not better than fulfilling the function, which Bonnie Maranca regrets, of training students for (the inadequate practices of) the ‘moribund institutions of mainstream regional theatre’.

It is perhaps appropriate to come back to the colonial moment. In Act One, Scene Six of Timberlake Wetenbaker’s Our Country’s Good “The Authorities [in the penal colony of Sydney Cove] Discuss the Merits of the Theatre’. Major Ross, who deplores the proposal that the convicts puts on a play – ‘a frippery frittering play’ – because it will lead to disorder, argues, ‘The theatre leads to threatening theory’. Oh that should be such a prospect in Auckland!

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Abstracts in alphabetical order

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Babcock, Keiryn

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Challenging Epistemologies: Aboriginality and Performance Departments"

This paper explores reasons why Aboriginal performance does not comprise a significant component of the teaching practices of most Australian Performance Academies. It contends that a certain regime of truth operates to characterise academic discourse, and that this discourse privileges Western ways of knowing. The paper outlines what currently constitutes Australian Performance Studies. It then employs Foucault's notion of subjugated knowledges to explore the current absence of Indigenous performance from the discipline. Furthermore, it suggests that if Performance departments begin to embrace Indigenous epistemologies then there exist the possibilities of aiding intercultural understanding, of providing new insights into performance, of promoting cultural continuity, of establishing relations between communities and of generating critical discourse.

------

Boughen, Shaaron QUT Academy of the Arts

"Putting Text in its Place: Bleeding-A-Part At The Seems!"

This paper connects with the performance on Tuesday 6th July in the Woodward Theatre of BLEEDING-A-PART AT THE SEEMS by Shaaron Boughen

My paper raises issues around the creation of a textscape to accompany existing movement material and discusses the process of research through performance that I have undertaken. I have been influenced by the work of Heiner Goebbels, Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt and DV8 Physical Theatre, London and am investigating the inclusion of text in the process of creating meaning. BLEEDING-A-PART is dance theatre work due for completion at the end of 1999. The dance work started with a solo in 1997, a duet in 1998 and a development period in early 1999 which created the bedding for this variation of BLEEDING-A-PART. As audience feedback has been an essential part of the creative process to date, conference participants will be invited and encouraged to contribute their responses which will be used in the next stage of the work's development.

BLEEDING-A-PART is choreographed with Brian Lucas and Avril Huddy, two of Queensland's leading dancers. The work examines the changing nature of love, desire, manipulation and obsession. The impact of early work has been described by Olivia Stewart (The Courier Mail) as "a visceral highlight constructed with a powerful simplicity conveying a dark and menacing tension"

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and Jacquie Pascoe (Dance Australia) " an impressive treatment of the politics of need, desire, gender and power portrayed with spare foreboding and raw simplicity".

My intention at this stage was to investigate the viability of creating a textscape which did not merely duplicate or reinforce the meanings in the movement. Working with a dramaturg, writer and composer, we sought instead to counterpoint the movement and textual languages to create dissonance, paradox and ambiguity. The variation of BLEEDING-A-PART prepared for performance at this conference will last approximately 30 minutes.

Avril Huddy is appearing by kind permission of Dance North, Townsville.

------Bradfield, Howard Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts

"Working Partners"

Where does "The Academy" fit in the "Industry Led Training" strategy of Government ? What challenges and solutions are available for both industry and the academy ? It may be that common ground is only possible through performance. Can the potential of partner arrangements provide working models?

The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts had made a decision to foster partner strategies thereby enriching students' programmes and better managing financial outcomes. Funding from State and Federal Arts bodies, coupled with sponsorship (in kind and fiscal), strategic alliances with local companies and the commitment to forge new and ongoing relationships with industry have led to invigorated outcomes.

The recent work of skadada - Electronic Big Top, performed at the Sydney and Perth Festivals was accomplished directly as a result of partner arrangements with the WAAPA a significant member. I will discuss the working relationships that WAAPA has developed with industry with particular reference to the performance of Electronic Big Top by skadada.

Delivery will include discussion, video interviews and video clips from the Perth Performance in February this year.

------

Bradford, Shannon The University of Texas at Austin

"On Becoming a Hybrid (or) The Perils of Practicing What I Teach"

Distinctions between research and practice have pervaded virtually every aspect of my journey toward crafting a career in performance. While I have experienced these concepts as indistinguishable, I have been told repeatedly that they are different from each other. I have been encouraged at many crossroads to preference one over the other, to specialize. My attempts to straddle the imaginary fence between being a practitioner and being an academic

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have raised key questions: How can one develop a career unhampered by restrictions? Am I complicit in creating and maintaining boundaries between the communities involved? How might I work to encourage a merging of research and practice?

This paper will examine tensions between the academic and professional communities as they impact the exchange of ideas and knowledge, with emphasis on crafting an identity within the field of performance. With material drawn from field research experience with professional theatre companies in both the USA and Australia, as well as from my experience as a director/choreographer, I will argue that the status quo distinction between research and practice results in missed opportunities for the mutual benefit of the communities concerned.

------Brown, Ian

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Showing a clean set of heels" A Performance by Lecture by E. C. (Ian) Brown

Showing a Clean Set of Heels is the second part of the performance trilogy Three to the Valley, written and performed by E.C. Brown. The trilogy is a component of a doctoral thesis investigating autobiography in performance. It is comprised of three thematically-linked solo performances of one hour's duration each. The performances are also theoretically integrated. This doctoral work relies largely on Performance as Research for its methodology. The trilogy comprises half of the full thesis, the other half being submitted as an introduction of some 15 000 words (which also contains a Performance as Research component) and a concluding exegesis of some 35 000 words.

The trilogy is being produced in collaboration with the Merivale Program of the Queensland Performing Arts Trust. The first part - Reading Patrick - will be performed at the Merivale Studio on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 8pm, whilst the final part - Live at Ric's - will be performed upstairs at Ric's Bar, Brunswick St. Mall, Fortitude Valley, on Thursday and Friday evening at 6.30pm.

------Burvill, Tom

Critical and Cultural Studies Macquarie University

"The Seagull in Surry Hills: a case study in academy-industry relations"

In January-March 1997 I undertook a production and reception study of the Company B Belvoir Street production of The Seagull directed by Neil Armfield. In addition to observation of rehearsals, interviews with cast, director, production staff etc, I conducted various forms of audience response research with groups and individuals. The 'Seagull in Surry Hills' production/reception project itself aims to trace the processes of meaning- production from the design stage through rehearsals and performance to the audience reception by groups ranging from Belvoir subscribers to NIDA students, and retired theatre

244 Industrial Relations enthusiasts in suburban U3A discussion groups. The production of meaning is contextualised as an intercultural process of Australianisation of the Russian text, following leads provided by Keir Elam's 'processual poetics' and cultural studies audience work.

Using the Seagull project as a case study the paper outlines some of what was observed and attempts to reflect on the various kinds of industrial and ethical and methodological relations which are traversed and improvised and pragmatically embodied in such processes. How does one achieve the necessary ethnographic balance between 'critical distance' and 'mutual knowledge'?

------Byrnes, Vanessa Programme Manager: Cultural and Theoretical Studies Te Kura Toi Whakaari O Aotearoa: New Zealand Drama School

"Constructing the stuff that dreams are made on: 'Bi-Cultural' processes of Investigation and Training at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School"

New Zealand theatre is embracing the challenge of what its role may be in an increasingly bi- culturally aware environment.

Within this arena, Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School is the national training facility for acting and production professionals. Dedicated to excellence in training and maintaining the high standards that the industry has come to expect, Toi Whakaari fundamentally acknowledges the Treaty of Waitangi, and as such, has an active and long-term objective to explore the significance of "bi-culturalism" for the drama profession.

The processes of "bi-cultural" investigation and training which are employed at NZ Drama School warrant scrutiny, because they are simultaneously difficult and beneficial processes. The "bi-cultural" constructions of ethno-centric, academic, pragmatic, physical, theoretical and creative discourses within the training will be discussed with view to highlighting the proven and potential benefits of training practitioners in such ways.

This session considers the question of how practical training and theatre-making benefits from an awareness and employment of identity and performance.

------Casey, Maryrose

Department of Theatre and Drama La Trobe University

"Interrogating Australian Theatre History"

Who benefits when theatre histories valorise some practitioners and their contributions at the expense of others ?

The critical record, in both academic and popular media forms, has extraordinary power in discussions of an ephemeral art form such as theatre, especially in a country like Australia

245 Industrial Relations where publication is limited. Current historiographical practice, research methodologies and interpretative procedures have challenged many received orthodoxies. This ongoing process requires a re-evaluation of those materials upon which our assumptions are based. By not revisiting the history of critical reception, questioning stated 'truths' about previous productions, we maintain a past subjectivity within the present.

In Australian theatre history of the last 30 years one voice is constantly valorised. It's often a bit of a yobbo carrying a can of beer or lately a glass of Chardonnay, a bit left wing, definitely male and Anglo-Celtic. He was there at the beginning of the New Wave with the Pram, and Nimrod. He proves there is an Australian voice. He is the Australian voice. He is heavily represented in every mainstage season, either as he was then or as he is now. The constant reinforcement of this version of the Australian theatre artist, as actor, writer or director, and this version of the history of Australian theatre practice denies the other voices that were instrumental in the creation and practice of Australian theatre both then and now. This paper will examine some of the problematic issues related to the task of interrogating the myths and reinstating the contributions, traditions and history of other voices.

------

Coe, Michael

The Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University

"Making Theatre / Creating Possibilities: a comparison of practices utilised in a regional theatre company and those of a university environment"

On graduation from The University of Wollongong's School of Creative Arts in 1983, I took a position with Theatre South, the Regional Theatre company of the Illawarra. Until 1996 I worked for the company in various modes: actor, director, designer, lighting designer, stage manager and (by default) production manager.

The company created many new pieces of theatre, premiered new overseas works, performed other extant contemporary Australian works and toured extensively all over Australia, particularly with our Theatre for Young People program; and never during that time did we engage with rigorous reflection and analysis for we were far too busy making theatre!

While our work had (and the company continues to have) an impressive quality and energy, the company did not engage with any new ways of interpreting theatre practice. The major reasons for this deficit in adventure are those continuing economic problems in combination with a small and conservative audience base. As an exploration of performance methodology since renewing theatre study, I would like to discuss The Decameron Project, a work devised by myself in concert with students of The Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash. I will outline the project's exploration of form, style and content and the reasons it could not have been undertaken by a regional theatre company with a traditionalist approach to theatre making; and reason why such professional companies should benefit from a relationship with academy.

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------

Copeman, Peter and Wissler, Rod

Queensland University of Technology

"Having Your Cake and Eating It Too ? Towards an Industrially Responsive, Academically Rigorous Performance-As-Research Paradigm"

The authors will draw on their performance-as-research experiences in the QUT Academy of the Arts with the stage adaptation of Brian Castro's After China (Peter Copeman as writer, Rod Wissler as dramaturg, director and producer) to propose a paradigm of performance as research which aims for:

- Professional public performance outcomes of new work via university-based development processes more extensive and elaborate than those usually available in purely professional contexts, thus diminishing some of the risk usually associated with professional productions of innovative projects, and

- Methodological rigour, based on action research methods developed from participant observer ethnography, which meets university-level research expectations, and may thus have the potential to straddle the continuum between theatre studies and professional practice, and to engender and consolidate mutually beneficial links between industry and academy.

------Cottrell, Sharon

Theatre Studies Griffith University Gold Coast

"An examination of a journey from ethno-drama to professional standard group devised theatre"

The focus of this paper is to outline the practical and pragmatic questions involved in producing theatre as a performance in a tertiary institution.

Initially I will outline the examination of my journey of research-based discovery from the Ethno-Drama process through to Verbatim Theatre; Oral History and Documentary Techniques; and Playbuilding - to the final product, a professional standard theatre production based on the Group Devised theatre process.

This is based on research into these types of theatre practices and from previous experience with both ethno-drama and group devising processes. A primary aim is to establish the relationship between these styles and the relevance to present day community theatre practices, particularly focusing on my recent production of Lost and Found: The Adoption Triangle. This was a group devised performance with second year theatre students studying

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Stagecraft, a subject in the theatre major within the School of Arts at Griffith University - Gold Coast Campus.

The primary aim of this paper is to present the process involved within the development of the production and reflect on the practical work used within a tertiary institution. Through this I will outline the educational/learning process as it happened; limitations of such a production; the research skills; acting theory involved and how this affected the students involved in the production.

------

Djubal, Clay

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Selling Ourselves Short? Reflections Upon the Australian Commodity Musical"

One question that has risen frequently in regard to the Australian theatre industry is "why haven't we been able to write the 'smash-hit' Australian musical?" This paper will explore one area which motivates my current post-graduate research into Australian commodity musicals - that of the implications which stem from the misappropriation of the term "musical" - implications which may well continue to play a part in subverting or negating positive perceptions of local commodity musicals by the Australian popular culture.

The application of a cultural studies perspective to industry practice suggests that any form of music theatre which is promoted as "a musical", invites comparison by Australian popular culture to the historic traditions and generic expectations formed in relation to the dominant form - the American musical. Should theatrical productions which utilise music as a dramatic element, however - including tribute shows, plays, and theatre which has its points of relevance located in the ideology and tastes of a sub-culture - be considered "musicals", or should they instead be allocated sub-genre nomenclature? This paper will question the use of "musical" as a marketing strategy which attempts to appeal to potential consumers through a connotative process. Does it in fact layer a carpet of suppression over attempts to create and produce Australian musicals to rival the success of foreign-written productions? And to what extent have academics and critics either helped or confused the public's and industry's understanding of the musical?

------Dunn, Lowanna

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Who's Talking to Whom: Theatres, Teachers' Notes and Young Audiences"

This paper will critically examine the role of teachers' notes as a pivotal link that connects young schools audiences to the industry and the performance event. It will examine some recent examples of teachers' notes to consider how they assist young audiences in accessing productions, and what the stakeholders want from the notes in creating this access. The key

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players in this three way intersection include the commissioning theatre body, the teacher/artist writing the notes, and the young people themselves. Several questions are raised through this examination including: who are the teachers' notes attempting to serve, who do they serve, what is the role of this type of formal pedagogy in the theatre event and how does it help young people understand the theatre industry and its product?

------Eckersall, Peter

School of Studies in Creative Arts Victorian College of the Arts

"Performing from the Academy: Theory and revitalising contemporary Japanese Theatre"

This paper will investigate possibilities for connections between academic theory and performance practice. The site of this investigation will be Japanese contemporary theatre (angura), although I am interested in both the specificity of this site of investigation and its possibilities as a model for reflecting on a more general set of problems.

Angura has been the dominant mode of new theatrical expression since the 1960s. The paper will review the history of the movement, briefly commenting on angura's problematic relationship with theories of subjectivity and selfhood discourse in its first phase. I shall point to the probable appropriation and commodification of angura by establishment culture during the 1980s, a trend that undermined the possibilities for angura to continue to work in a radical and culturally interrogative mode.

If an historical method and political analysis of state and society allow scholars to identify such trends in angura performance culture, then the reverse is also evident in 1990s Japan. Recent performances demonstrate a gradual acquaintance with theory and collaborations with theorists that have opened a space for a new radical theatre project in the 1990s. Analysis of work by Gekidan Kaitaisha, Daisan Erotica and others will demonstrate a shift in cultural politics away from the idea that imagination alone could be the site of cultural liberation and towards an understanding of theories of power. Such theory can intervene in and subvert dominant constructs of Japanese social reality and unlike the 60s liberation ethos is less able to be appropriated by mainstream cultural institutions.

The paper will therefore conclude that in breaking down theory-practice divides, theatre can find renewal and escape from an apparent elite marginality and political conservatism.

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------Everett, Lynn

Department of Theatre Studies University of New England

"From Paris with Love: The Lecoq Influence on George Ogilvie's Directing"

The Ecole Jacques Lecoq is an international theatre school in Paris that was founded by Lecoq in 1956 and has been under his direction since its inception until his death in January 1999. Primarily concerned with the movement of the body in space, the Lecoq pedagogy is physically based.

The school's central aim is 'the search for a Theatre of Creation' and this is reflected in the curriculum by the large portion of work which is allocated to the creation of dramatic pieces by students for solo or group performance. Improvisation is employed heuristically as both the performance medium for all student devised pieces and as the teaching method in all acting classes. By these means, students study a variety of new and traditional theatrical styles including melodrama, pantomime blanche, Greek tragedy, commedia dell'arte, bouffon and clown. These theatrical forms are used to engender new creative works.

The Lecoq school has had a significant impact on Australian theatre. Since 1965, there have been approximately fifty Lecoq graduates who have lived and worked in Australia as actors, directors and teachers across many areas of the theatre industry from mainstream to fringe, street theatre, festival theatre, community theatre, television, documentary and feature film.

In this paper I would like to focus on the work of one of these Lecoq graduates: director, George Ogilvie. I will discuss how Ogilvie's training at the Lecoq school has influenced, informed and supported his professional performance practices, indicating how theatre- making in Australia has benefited from the practical application of Lecoq's rigorous and creative training regime.

The material for this paper is derived from my Ph.D. research into the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre.

------Fensham, Rachel

Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies Monash University

"Secret Actors' Business - commerce and the sacred in live theatre documentation"

This paper will present findings about the use of video archives in theatre and performance research in the United States and Britain by the theatre industry. It will compare these structures with current projects underway in Australia to store and document dance through video and film. Returning to the field of theatre studies, it will sketch the current policies of

250 Industrial Relations various theatre companies and in particular the role of Actors Equity (MEAA) in policing the representation of actors in video documentation.

In conclusion, I will argue that the industry of Australian actors still regards performance in the theatre as 'secret business' in terms of the law, a discourse which collides notions of protecting the sacred with exploitation for commercial gain in curiously ambivalent ways. In protecting their performances, actors do not gain further power over their images rather they remain increasingly vulnerable to the power of the market to determine the construction of contemporary theatre. Instead of holding on to some pre-modern conception of their magical powers, Australian actors need to negotiate agreements of collective ownership and public access to the recordings of their work if they are to survive.

------Fitzpatrick, Tim

Centre for Performance Studies University of Sydney

"Ignoring the Elizabethan Theatre Industry: Implications for Theatre History and Performance Studies"

Academic researchers have been slow to explore in depth and examine the ramifications of the practical aspects of Elizabethan Theatre production. This was a highly organised industry, with companies performing on a daily basis and turning over plays in a rapid repertory system very different to our twentieth-century practice. It is significant that we know much more about the work and production processes of the London printing houses than we do of the playhouses and the acting companies, and this imbalance has led to a particular slant on textual editing and on our understanding of the import of textual features. I will argue by example that the texts themselves throw not inconsiderable light on such playhouse practices, offering us insights not only into the performance conditions in which the playwrights expected their work to be seen, but also into the constraints upon the processes which would generate these performances. I suggest that in addition this attitude to professional practice both reflects and conditions attitudes among scholars to contemporary professional work, and that much more scholarly attention needs to be given to professional theatre production processes, both mainstream and alternative.

------Foster, Mike

Theatre Studies, Griffith University Gold Coast

"All the world's a research stage and all the men and women practitioners merely paradigms of reflexive discourse"

Intelligent Alternative theatre implies a continuous reflective/reflexive component in the theatre making process. In Australia several groups claim a research prerogative as central to their work. On the one hand variously named 'performance studies' centres attached to academic institutions exist solely it would seem, to experiment with new forms. Essential to

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their process is a continual, rigorous and scholarly analysis of all aspects of their theatre making.

On the other hand are professional, community based, alternative, non-mainstream theatres whose research usually is less theoretically driven being grounded firmly in the practice, the real world of attracting audiences and maintaining funding while attempting to advance their art form. This genuine grounded theory/action research paradigm is elemental, I will argue, to the theatre making praxis of most significant non-mainstream theatre companies.

The focus question of this paper is "How does your practice benefit from rigorous reflection and analysis?"

As part of my doctoral studies I have sought responses to this and other questions in an attempt to define the practice of what I have termed Radical Group Theatre in Australia since 1975. Groups and individuals interviewed include Sidetrack Theatre, Legs on the Wall, Urban Theatre Projects, N. Y. I. D., Melbourne Workers' Theatre, Melbourne Women's Circus, Zeal Theatre, Neil Cameron Productions.

------Fotheringham, Richard

English Department

"Comedy is a funny business: some notes on surveying performance laughter" This paper draws on a survey undertaken during Cracka Theatre Troupe's production of Schoolies! for year 12 students in July 1998. It uses as raw material audience reactions (laughs, groans, and other audible/visible reactions noted during different performances across a two-week season), and speculates as to why different audiences react differently. In theorising this issue the paper considers Klaus Jensen's distinction between interpretative communities and interpretative repertoires, and suggests that we also need to think of audiences as performers, bringing to the theatre event pre-learnt communal behaviour (as a performing community) and learning and performing a repertoire of appropriate (or inappropriate) reactions. The paper will conclude with some practical suggestions on what the crucial factors are which enable or hinder consistency of communication and reaction.

------Fotheringham, Richard

English Department University of Queensland

"When a Girl from Community Arts Meets a Boy from Las Vegas Inc" Some occupational safety issues in the Tetu case

This short paper considers the recent judgment in the Supreme Court of Queensland concerning Heather Tetu, the former Circus Oz performer who was tragically injured while performing in a commercial show at Jupiter's Casino on the Gold Coast. The undisputed facts in the case show that serious problems arose, and could well arise again, if current stage

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management and stagecraft practices are not significantly revised. I also look at training which should be given to all acrobatic, circus, and physical theatre performers in questions they should ask and documentation they should seek before agreeing to work in performances that require them to rely on technical equipment and technical expertise.

------Garner, James

Drama Department University of Newcastle

"Technology and Human Agency in the Theatre"

The increasing use of computers in the creative process has raised questions concerning their appropriate role, and has led to some resistance to their presence on the part of creative artists and theatre workers. If the set or lighting designer's tools can be important participants in the creative process, does this imply 'machine creativity' depriving humans of agency? This is a debate concerning the nature of human thought as much as that of computers.

Resistance to the use of computers in art arises partly from the prosaic image of them as adding or accounting machines. Computers have always dealt with deterministic processes, leading to the fear of sterility in any artistic endeavour heavily influenced by them. Creativity is usually considered the essence of that which is not mechanical. Yet creative acts have been seen by some as mechanical and having their explanation in the workings of the brain.

What we are really seeing is transferred agency from humans to computers via the programming and operating processes. The operator is the sole agent in the creative process - the program is a utilitarian object which aids visualization, speeds up the design process and helps communicate ideas to others. Even if the user finds that the program suggests design techniques that would not have occurred otherwise, this too is a transfer of agency from the programmer, not the computer. As directors, set designers and lighting designers contribute to a production design using theatrical design tools such as Stager, the program is acting to facilitate a confluence of creative agency between human beings. It provides none of its own. Much resistance could be alleviated if it is made clear that no contrary claims of computer creativity are being made.

Finally, computer programs can assist the collaborative nature of theatre, by facilitating communication of ideas between the stage designer and the director, or the director and the actors.

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------Gration, Steve

Freelance Director, Actor, Writer

Theatre Studies, Griffith University Gold Coast

"An exploration of training and development possibilities for actors and the creation of original work by actors in the context of the professional industry and training institutions"

This paper focuses on audition and rehearsal structures which provide opportunities for performers to continue training and development as a natural process and the role of directors in this process.

I will reflect on personal experiences as a tutor at training institutions and as a professional actor, director and writer. I will explore the function of "teaching-artists" in supporting and celebrating individual artists' potentials and their power within an ensemble atmosphere.

I will draw upon Eastern and Western performance histories to illustrate the close relationship between training and professional practises. These practises are often ignored by training institutions and major performing arts organisations and thus their politics of representation are often suspect.

I will promote 16 starting points for the creation of original or independent works which may inspire artists-in-training and professionals to create their own work rather than waiting to be "cast in a play". And finally, I will examine the elements and popular appeal of live sporting and musical events which may be applied to the performing arts in an effort to win new audiences.

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Hammond, Peter

Centre for Performing Arts University of Tasmania

"Career Trajectories: launching theatre trainees from Tasmania"

Most theatre workers are sustained in their aspirations for employment more by optimism and vision than frequency of opportunity. In a profession where the notion of ensemble training has given way to utilitarian and limited-term contracts, performers frequently lack the opportunity for on-going learning experiences within a supportive and familiar context. In previous eras this was provided by the sense of continuity of employment. In the 1990s their desired career paths are intercepted and frustrated by multifarious economic and social factors.

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Centre Stage, the on-campus Theatre Company of the University of Tasmania, conducts a unique apprenticeship system that has successfully launched several theatre careers over its 10 years of operation. The training program equips awardees with a broad range of vocational and multifaceted survival skills. Such skills secure them a foothold in the profession and save them from the dispiriting realities offered by external agencies.

Drawing on 5 case studies of interview transcripts, this paper plots the early careers of Centre Stage awardees, their reflections upon the apprenticeship scheme, their preparedness for the profession, a dissection of the program itself and benefits gained by the university, the community which it serves and ultimately the awardee. The examination reveals illuminating perceptions about the training system and the way it provides the link between undergraduate studies and the profession.

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Haseman, Brad

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Lepage, Le World and Le Festival Industry: The Seven Streams of the River Ota's Relations with Industry and Art"

After a visit to Hiroshima, Japan in 1993 the French-Canadian director Robert Lepage and his company Ex Machina decided to create a monumental work - a seven hour piece of theatre in seven parts. First performed in 1994, The Seven Streams of the River Ota has been reworked and transformed many times during its five year life. This paper examines the innovative form and production context of this work, one of the most successful artistic products of the decade to be created specifically for the global festival industry.

------Holledge, Jules

Drama and English, Flinders University

"Ritual Translocations: Warlpiri Yawulyu and the Taedong Kut"

This paper on ritual translocation is part of a wider study of women's intercultural performance. It considers a performance tour of four Australian cities by the Korean shaman and spiritual leader Kim Kum hwa; and ritual performances in these same four cities, by indigenous women from the Central Australian Warlpiri clan. In both these accounts the artists' motivations for performing ritual in an intercultural context are contrasted with the responses of their urban Australian audiences. The paper argues that the Korean performances were consumed as a form of personal spiritual enrichment and the Warlpiri performances as symbolic gestures in the creation of national identity.

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Hunter, Richard

University of Sydney

" Awards and Disputes: Australian Performing Artists and Australian Industrial Relations"

I am the co-author of the article on industrial relations in the Currency Companion to Theatre in Australia, which came about as a result of research 1 was doing for an MA in 1985 supervised by Philip Parsons. The thesis was going to be called "Acting as Work: a' socioeconomic study of the performer in relation to the structure of the entertainment industry in Australia from 1900 to 1955". The research involved a close look at the early history of Actor's Equity using Commonwealth Arbitration Reports and Equity archives. I had to put the research on hold due to work commitments but Philip asked if the work I had already done could be incorporated into the Companion. My work was edited and elaborated on by Katherine Brisbane but they still gave me a credit in the book.

The work commitment was at the Sydney Opera House, where 1 was employed for 12 years, including a stint as a Union delegate for the ATAEA (now a part of the merged MEAA). I also co-ordinated a conference on industrial relations in the performing arts in the late 1980's. I left the Opera House earlier this year and now work at the University of Sydney. I have also taken the opportunity to return to study and am about to complete a coursework MA at the School of Theatre Film and Dance at UNSW.

I would like to kick start my past researches into the industrial conditions of performing artists and to this end I would like to propose a paper around the subject of the interaction between Australian performing artists and the formalised processes of Australian industrial relations, the setting of industrial awards and the mediation of disputes in the Commonwealth Arbitration Court and its successors. How has the main acting award evolved and been interpreted over the past 75 years and what can this tell us about how the work of the performing artist has been perceived by the community in the past and in the present?

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Jeffree, Darriel

The Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University

"Is Artaud Practically History?"

The stage of Antonin Artaud is much more than a metaphysical one. By further exploring some facets of Artaud's writings it becomes clear that his stage has a physicality and consists of a practical performative space. This Artaudian space is defined in his essays and letters. The historical Artaud has been practically neglected.

To understand more fully the extent of this physicality of the Artaudian stage one needs to revisit Artaud's earlier writings and not the life of the man himself in his last desperately lucid years. It is possible to construct an Artaudian space: not as defined by, or through, claims of influence but as defined by Artaud himself.

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The Antonin Artaud we generally know is the Artaud of a misinterpreted history, an essentially potted 'oral' history demi-mythical in nature. This 'oral' history focuses more on the later man rather than on his earlier theatrically prescriptive writings. The orally constructed Artaud is a theatrically implausible figure whose thoughts are generally interpreted as interesting yet impossible, at least impractical, to stage in any meaningful way; the historical or written Artaud prescribes a practical theatre space in which happenings can indeed happen. The historical Artaud is still important to today's stage, whereas the demi- mythical Artaud is, as ever, implausible.

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Joseph, Barbara

The Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University

"Careering into Comedy: making a place for live comedy in the Academy"

Stand-up comedy is a performance form that doesn't fit comfortably in 'theatre' or 'industry' and in some ways sits uneasily within the parameters of this particular conference topic. In the sense that there is no formal training available, nor any recognised place to practice the craft, a comedians apprenticeship is self-created and their art refined with little or no mentorship of any kind. Yet an industry is developing in Australia, much as it has done in America, around stand-up comedy. Performers are seeing potential career paths open up as producers, directors, and cable and free-to-air television networks scout festivals and comedy clubs looking for the next big act, the next local comedy 'star'. This paper examines the implications for the performance of live stand-up comedy that arise when a previously unrewarded apprenticeship has the potential to lead to a lucrative career in another medium. As the performer moderates the performance for an imagined audience, the audience/performer dynamic central to live comedy is ruptured by the real or imagined presence of the invisible mass audience.

For the academic engaged in the study of comedy questions arise as to the object of study. Distinctions need to be made between live and recorded performance, between performer and persona, between the jokes and the social and cultural meanings being exchanged. Where does the academic position themselves in relation to the performance? Are they merely the observer restricted to criticism of the socio-cultural issues raised by the performer and the performance, or is it possible to transcend these limitations and offer something else?

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Kelly, Veronica

English Department University of Queensland

"Alfred Dampier as performer of late colonial Australian masculinities"

Alfred Dampier as a respected and influential performer of predominantly middle-class constructions of masculinity made a considerable, long-sustained and I believe under- examined impact on colonial Australian culture. Like other actor-managers, Dampier occasionally positioned his work amidst the missionary project of bringing popular audiences into the ambit of great culture, while simultaneously using the rhetoric of moral persuasion to entice bourgeois audiences into the ambit of popular performance. A male performer, by virtue of his social identity as performer, already strays into the feminine-loaded symbolic territory of theatre, with its associations of display, seduction and inauthenticity. In the case of a cultural worker such as Dampier, it is interesting to speculate whether his social reading as 'actor' was an enabling or a disabling factor in his theatrical projections of acceptable and legible masculinities. The evidence seems to indicate that theatrical labour in his case empowered the cultural and artistic labour of transference, creation, negotiation and embodiment of modes of late colonial masculinities.

I have studied Alfred Dampier's Australian repertoire from his arrival in Melbourne in 1873, when he performed and stage-managed at the Theatre Royal, to the point of his return there to manage the Alexandra Theatre in late 1888. During the 1880s Dampier enjoyed protracted periods of management of two Sydney theatres, the Gaiety and the Royal Standard, during which he maintained a rapid turnover of repertoire and commissioned new plays to suit the audience of these relatively small-capacity houses. His roles traversed the character actor, the low ruffian, and above all the 'manly' hero. It is his performance and creation of significations of a renovated and domesticated, while still heroic, late-colonial 'manliness', which forms the topic of this paper.

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Loth, Joanne

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Presentation of Improvisation" and "Workshop in Suzuki Actor Training Method"

Presentation of Movement Improvisation and its application in the rehearsal process.

This presentation will demonstrate a new approach to movement improvisation based on The Suzuki Actor Training Method (and its application in a rehearsal process). The presentation

258 Industrial Relations will be interactive, and will involve a questionnaire and forum to discuss the possibilities this form of Improvisation may hold.

In 1997 and 1998 I was able to observe the training and rehearsals of the Suzuki Company of Toga, and (the newly formed company of) the Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre. The movement Improvisation work I saw during the training was exciting and completely engaging. Here were actors with awe-inspiring expressive abilities and physical responsiveness, whose skill in movement improvisation produced arresting viewing. Since Frank Productions' return from Toga in August 1998, the company have been developing their own style of improvisation under the guidance of directors Jacqui Carroll and John Nobbs. My own form of this improvisation has developed from my observations in Japan, and my training with Frank Productions.

Background Information: The Suzuki Actor Training Method develops a strong foundation for movement improvisation. In the 1960's, the Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki began to develop the Suzuki Method, utilizing the methods and approaches of the traditional Japanese theatre of Kabuki and Noh. The Suzuki Method is designed to develop a highly focused ensemble of actors, to strengthen and unify the body and voice, and to develop an expressive and engaging physical presence. The exercises are physically demanding, but are designed to develop a powerful, energised calmness rather than overt physical energy. Over an extended period, the training develops the listening body which is physically heightened, expressive and aware.

In the 1960's, the now Internationally renowned director Tadashi Suzuki began to develop the Suzuki Method, utilizing the methods and approaches of the traditional Japanese theatre of Kabuki and Noh. The Suzuki Method is designed to develop a highly focused ensemble of actors, to strengthen and unify the body and voice, and to develop an expressive and engaging physical presence. The training develops performers' physical confidence, spatial awareness and vocal strength, and consists of simple (and often extreme) repetitive actions invested with power, energy and focus. These exercises work to ground the body on the earth and in the space.

The Suzuki Actor Training Method is a long-term Eastern approach to actor training. Over an extended period, the Suzuki Method develops the 'listening' body that is responsive to the energy of the group; and is physically heightened and aware. During the Workshop, there will be short demonstrations of the training by members of Frank Productions (who have trained with the Suzuki Company of Toga in Japan). These demonstrations will clarify the purpose of each exercise, and display the long-term results of the training.

------MacAuslane, Debra QUT Academy of the Arts "The ethical police…classifying artistic practice under human experimentation" This paper addresses the benefits of ethical guidelines in research experiments to create a culture of social responsibility and accountability in the performing arts. On the other hand, there are concerns in reconciling the organic and evolving nature of researching and developing new artistic practice with the rigidity of working within specific approved guidelines. This paper deals with the paper war and long months of negotiations which help to refine the ethical considerations of performance research but which also serves to frustrate the arts practitioner in the process. An overview in light of a personal research story.

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MacAuslane, Debra QUT Academy of the Arts

"Actors in the theatre audience… looking at sport to create a new public domain" In response to calls for new theatre form at the end of the 20th century, this paper will look at the progress of my PhD research which is looking at developing a different way of making theatre a more 'authentic' experience for Australian audiences. I will attempt to reinforce the argument that live performance is one of the few places left where a physical experiential dimension is available to individuals to explore and communicate, and for this reason, that theatre should not be seen as the exclusive domain of conventional theatre practitioners.

As part of my research I have drawn upon the popular and experiential dimension of sport as a model framework for developing an audience-inclusive performance practice called Tribo- Phenomenal Theatre. Tribo-Phenomenal Theatre (TPT) is defined as a friction driven environment, in which audiences can assert their presence and perform themselves to play out extra-ordinary experiences within the framework of a fictional model of reality. Sport is linked to this idea of TPT because sport is an authentic experience, it is unpredictable in nature, it operates in a 'real life' context and participants rely on 'self' to act out a struggle for space. I am proposing that these elements of sport potentially offer the possibility for turning a theatrical environment into an event which is not rehearsed but is really taking place.

The paper outlines the location of TPT in the performance field and the theorists and practitioners who have informed the evolving framework for practice, including Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, Peter Brook, Eric Morris, Eugenio Barba and Augusto Boal. Each of these practitioners have sought ways to create a more authentic experience for audiences and have acknowledged the creative potential of individuals who draw upon 'self' as a primary source of performance. The issues of the research question the possibilities (benefits and problems) of audiences entering the performance arena; of playing with 'self' in a fiction and of creating a public domain where an open licence to perform potentially can change a theatrical fiction into a faction. In order to redefine an 'authentic' theatre experience, I argue that such a task is only possible if audiences subject themselves to the experiential dimension of performance and judge for themselves.

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Makeham, Paul & McLean, Judith

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Blurred: A Performance for Young People collaboration between QPAT and QUT"

THIS IS A COMBINED PAPER/PRESENTATION WITH EXCERPTS FROM THE PRODUCTION OF BLURRED - a QPAT/QUT co-production, written by Stephen Davis, directed by Judith McLean.

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"Our children have ironically, already made their move. They are leading us in our revolution past linear thinking, duality, mechanism, hierarchy, metaphor, and God himself towards a dynamic, holistic, animistic, weightless, and recapitulated culture. Chaos is their natural environment." (Rushkoff, D. 1996:269)

The journey of Blurred concentrates on the first two phases of the Schoolies' rite of passage: the 'separation' and the 'transition'. The characters' discoveries occur as an integral part of leaving home and getting to their destination on the highways/pathways to the Gold Coast. Almost immediately they leave their familiar surroundings, home, school, part time jobs - opportunities for new insights about themselves and others begin to emerge. It is the characters' journey to their destination rather than the week of Schoolies itself that the performance engages with. What ostensibly begins as a straightforward drive, train, car, bus trip to the Gold Coast quickly 'blurs'. As is often the case, the greatest learning occurs within the process of 'getting there' rather than 'being there'.

In the performance text Blurred the audience is introduced to six different narratives using four different forms, drama, movement, sound/music and screen media. This is in keeping with the ideas outlined above that suggest that young people are already acquainted with new languages, new ideologies and very different ways of processing information. The makers of Blurred ask audiences to connect and bring "a broader attention range and a shorter absorption time" (Rushkoff, 1996:51) to the theatrical event to find the patterns within the chaos of images presented on stage. The artistic goal for Blurred is to create an 'open work' (Eco, 1979:58); to present audiences with forms that offer multiple readings of the performance. As each form unfolds to encourage the audience to become part author and part artist - to make space for their own stories as well as those seen and heard from the stage.

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Martin, Jacqueline

QUT Academy of the Arts

"The Academy as seeding ground for Performance as Research"

This paper aims to investigate how Performance as Research can be used to consolidate links between industry and academy. It is equally interested in how the theoretical discourses of post-colonialism and interculturalism can take into account the pragmatics of production, as much as investigating how the professional theatre should be concerned with the politics of representation.

The contemporary efforts by federal governments to bring about reconciliation with the Aboriginals have been a determining influence on my decision to make a new translation of Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888) and to read it through a post-colonial and intercultural lens, whereby the predominating themes of the play - power struggle, domination and class struggle, translate to culture clash and discrimination, and as a result dispel many of the myths which the anti-assimilationists still hold dear.

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A second site for research is related to exploring an anti-naturalistic acting style. For this reason Miss Julie was the perfect vehicle, as the rules for naturalistic acting were outlined in the author's Preface.

This paper follows the journey which I have made as translator, adaptor and dramaturge, together with Mark Radvan as director and acting instructor, in our efforts to transcribe this play and to bring it to professional performance and peer review as an example of Performance as Research.

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Maxwell, Ian

Centre for Performance Studies University of Sydney

"Towards a Reflexive Sociology of Theatre Production"

It is a commonplace to suggest that rehearsal is a 'hidden world', difficult for the theorist to access for a number of reasons: the nature of the work is, in the first instance, often regarded as highly personal, and requiring of a certain isolation of the participants from 'outsiders' of any kind. Further, considerable methodological difficulties confront the researcher attempting to 'capture' (if I may be allowed this problematic metaphor) the fleeting moments of rehearsal process.

Recent work, borrowing from a range of disciplinary sites has gone a long way towards documenting and analysing the various processes of rehearsal, with methodologies ranging from linguistic analysis, through semiotics, ethnography and phenomenology.

However, analysis of the place of rehearsal can only ever hope to offer a partial account of what it is to create theatre. In this paper, I want to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology to start to develop an understanding of the practical, lived context within which rehearsal takes place. In effect, I want to add another frame to the theatrical event, seeing rehearsal not simply as the pretext to performance, but as itself an end product of a vast mass of work, arguing that without an understanding of the field within which theatrical production takes place (including the phenomenology of the theatre worker - the lived experience of being an actor / director / writer, gossip, relationships, shared work histories, genealogies, networking and 'schmoozing'), we are not really understanding the process of making theatre at all.

This paper will take as its point of departure the derailing of one particular professional rehearsal process, tracing through this one episode the density of the field of theatrical production, and in the process, raising acute methodological and ethical questions.

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------Maxwell, Ian Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney

"StageStruck: Puppet Theatre in the Age of Electronic Reproduction"

StageStruck is an interactive CD-Rom, produced as part of the Federal Ministry for the Arts' Australia on CD initiative in collaboration with the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Sydney Opera House Trust, and the University of Wollongong's Interactive Multimedia Learning Laboratory.

StageStruck's media release invites users "to take on the ultimate challenge-direct your own show". Selecting your favourite genre, and choosing between a "large number of creative elements available, include dialogue, singing, music, movement, dance, backdrops, scenery, props and colours", the disc provides "plenty of scope to spend hours perfecting your scene and comparing it with other versions ... See how creative you can be in the rehearsal process, working with performers on scripts and choreography."

In addition to this gaming dimension, StageStruck claims to provide "a wealth of information on Australian cultural activities of broad, popular appeal . . . [allowing] you to access key data about the Australian entertainment industry."

While recognising this as a pitch to the educational market, this paper offers a critical reading of StageStruck in the context of this Conference's thematic concerns with "the pragmatics of professional production", the relationship between theatre history and practice, and the politics of representation.

I will argue that StageStruck constructs a model of contemporary performance practice that is alarmingly selective in its historical and sociological purview, and which not only grossly misrepresents the range of performance in contemporary Australia, but, in attempting to digitally model the process of putting on a show, misapprehends what it is to make performance at all.

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McAuley, Gay

Centre for Performance Studies, University of Sydney

"Work practices in contemporary theatre: the actor and the spectator"

Reflecting on the theatre at the end of the 20th century, a period that began with claims that the theatre as an art form was dead and ends with theatre unashamedly proclaimed as an industry, my paper looks at the situation of the actor and the spectator in contemporary theatre practice. I see the actor and the spectator as forming what can be called the primary couple, without which there is no theatre, and I argue that both are in trouble in the theatre of

263 Industrial Relations this fin de siecle. The actor is increasingly disempowered, not only in the commercial domain of the mega-musical, but also in the production line system of the state subsidised companies and in "directors' theatre" in which the creative agency is that of the director/author and the actor's function is to serve that vision. The situation of the spectator is equally threatened by conventions of theatre design and lighting that impose a kind of inertia and reduce the social experience, as well as by postmodern performance practices that deny the central spectatorial experience of denegation.

Henri Lefebvre claimed in The Production of Space in 1974 that "...any revolutionary project today, whether utopian or realistic, must, if it is to avoid hopeless banality, make the reappropriation of the body, in association with the reappropriation of space, into a non- negotiable part of its agenda". Live performance provides one of the few sites left in our over-mediated cyber society where the demands of such a project can be explored and my argument in this paper is that, unless practitioners and spectators resist the tendencies I have outlined, theatre will have failed its most potent social challenge.

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McCarron, Robyn

Arts Program Edith Cowan University

"Regional Performing Arts Centres and community productions: the amateur/professional nexus"

Bunbury, Western Australia, is a major regional centre with a community-owned performing arts centre. In the ten year existence of the Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre it has been central to major changes in the social and cultural life of the city which include urban design programs which have changed an industrial harbourfront into a lively cultural and tourist inner-city precinct.

This paper examines the nexus between the professional concerns of the management of the centre to ensure its economic viability and high level of service with the strongly expressed desire of the community for the centre to actively support community performing arts. The creative outcome of this interaction has been a series of 'community productions' done in collaboration with local performing arts organisations or individuals. These productions have been major successes in terms of audience appeal. However, the demand for a highly polished 'professional' outcome can lead to perceptual differences between the largely amateur (volunteer) cast and crew, and the professional technical and managerial staff and highlights the role of the volunteer in sustaining performing arts in regional communities.

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------McKemmish, Jan

English Department University of Queensland

"Collision: Love and War : the adaptation for performance of two prose texts by writers Elizabeth Smart and Joan Didion, at the same time"

The paper will discuss the theoretical, industrial, literary and political issues raised in writing a particular script for performance, Collision (for radio and live performance). The script is based on research and takes into it the developments in the field of research as performance. It is also a script that is based around adaptation and collision of forms and writings and times, and is a script that deals with the themes of love and war and the personal, the biographical, as well as the iconic, the heroic and the tragic.

This paper will take the form of a presentation of the initial exercise in adaptation outlined below:

The Performance Script This is a major new writing and research project called Collision: Love and War, the adaptation for performance of two novels at once: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (BGCSISDAW), by Elizabeth Smart (1946); and Democracy, by Joan Didion (Chatto and Windus, London, 1984).

This project is based on several strands of knowledge:

- experimental theatre work as produced by the ensembles The Wooster Group, the Sydney Front and Carbone Quatorze (Quebec) where existing texts (novels, plays, court transcripts, written history etc.) are combined to make a performance script and a performance, - my work and interest as a novelist in formally stylised contemporary prose fiction, - my desire to write for performance again - both a radio script and a theatre piece.

This will proceed in stages, with workshops and readings at each stage to test the work and to advance it to the next draft.

------McNamara, Andrew

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Dwelling in Ruins: After the Demise of Culture as We Once Knew It"

The ideas that have justified the role of the university have also played a significant part in justifying the role of culture in general. These ideas are now widely regarded as losing their capacity to explain the roles of both universities and culture. This paper will examine these grounding ideas. It will discuss some analyses both of the decline of these justifications and the ramifications of this development. In particular, it will examine the propositions of Bill

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Readings who argues that the university is in ruins. What are these ideas in ruins? How does one dwell among the ruins? What alternatives are available to us today? Such a debate is not only of relevance to academics, it is essential to contemporary art practice.

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Meyrick, Julian

Department of Theatre and Drama La Trobe University

"The Meaning of Tragedy: Literary Patterns vs Performance Form"

A discussion of the difference between the understanding of genre, style and form in literary discourse, and that advanced in the mode of live performance.

The paper is structured around a production of Barry Collins' monodrama, Judgement, staged as part of La Mama's 1998 Carlton Courthouse season. A brief description of the play and its self-conscious 'tragic form' is given. Observations are then made on how director, actor and designers came to an understanding of the play over an extended rehearsal process (one year), and how this translated into performance terms. Contrasted with this is a discussion on the meaning of tragedy put forward by the UK journal Aesthetics in a number of articles appearing over the same period. A phenomenological model is applied to the material to highlight the gap between two understandings of tragedy: literary and performative. The status of affective communication; the role of the live actor; the impact of the physical environment; these performance elements are shown to be not an extension of tragic literary pattern but another dimension entirely, within which the true meaning of 'tragic form' may be found.

The paper concludes with remarks on the 'ideas thick' nature of rehearsals and the care which must be taken by those versed in 'concept-rich' academic discourse not to dismiss the methods and values of customary performance processes.

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Monaghan, Paul

School of Studies in Creative Arts Victorian College of the Arts

"PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT MEETS DIONYSOS: the Greeks knew better"

The Performance Management system is eating away at the fabric of the arts and education in Australia. This system, which may appear harmless or even useful, is by definition deeply antithetical to the nature of artistic endeavour, and to the positive placement of the arts within the wider community.

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The only way that measurements can be taken within this system and correlated to others is to make them on increasingly meaningless quantums. In addition, the increasing emphasis on "managing" is directly proportionate to the diminishing emphasis on "doing" . The very notion of the arts as "industry" and as "profession" may well be feeding into this destructive paradigm.

The ancient Greek idea of a theatre was considerably more sophisticated. While performed in an environment of civic pride and ordered classification, Dionysos, the god of theatre, was a god of duality and indefinability, of the tension between forces and faces. Greek theatre challenged the established order in fundamental ways. Performance Management systems could never cope with Dionysos, yet the Greek concept carries within it critical information about the very nature of the arts.

Performance Management is one more weapon (whether consciously wielded or not) in the attempt by conservative forces in society to regulate and limit culture. We know what happened to Pentheus when he tried to regulate Dionysos !

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Morrell, Michael

Faculty of Arts University of Southern Queensland

"What Industrial Relations: Let's cut the 'B. S.' and talk about facts"

A personal introduction to myself as an academic and theatre professional This will be in the form of anecdotes and facts.

I do not propose to answer the questions on - What is The Academy? - What is The Industry? - Does dialogue ... constitute a type of intercultural exchange? … as I believe this is a backwards move.

I cite - 'Best Industry Practices' - 'Countless Proposed Modules' - 'Industry Competency Standards' and the kilometres of paper I have boxed away, gathering dust, is the reason for not going down this path.

I will however strongly present my assessment in the following areas.

Area 1 - Suspicion I am convinced that industry practitioners have an inherent distrust in academics and their ability (or lack of) to adequately provide required industry training.

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Area 2 - Links The major consistent link between industry and drama training institutions is through secondments and this still does not dispel the above as it is primarily in the area of production secondments not creative secondments.

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Palmer, Alan

Performing Arts School, Northland Polytechnic New Zealand

Workshop: "Spontaneous Theatre: Is it worth the risk?"

Alan Palmer is currently undertaking a Master of Arts ( Visual and Performing Arts ) through Charles Sturt University He has been researching the developments in improvised theatre over the past 30 years. It appears that during this time improvisation has been largely confined to two methods, devised rehearsed theatre and spontaneous improvised response a la Theatresports, playback et al.

Alan Palmer has worked with a group of actors and developed a method of improvised spontaneous theatre by introducing a director who improvises with the actors without interrupting the performance. In this workshop Alan will outline the method he has developed and discuss with the participants its potential to create 'meaningful' theatre and it's use as a training tool for developing actors.

Alan Palmer graduated from The Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1975. His most influential tutors during his time at Guildhall were Ben Benison and Rick Morgan who were at the time both members of Keith Johnstone's Theatre Machine. Since leaving Guildhall Alan has worked as a professional actor throughout the UK.

Whilst on a working holiday in New Zealand in the mid 80s Alan founded Northland Youth Theatre which has endured to the present as NZ's first professionally produced youth theatre company. In 1993 he returned to NZ and he is currently Programme Manager for the performing arts school at Northland Polytechnic.

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Parr, Bruce

English Department University of Queensland

"Sweetmeats As Space of Desire"

Rock'n'Roll Circus's 1998 Brisbane production of Sweetmeats follows its earlier work such as 'The Dark' which established the company's reputation in Australia for idiosyncratic physical

268 Industrial Relations theatre with an acute awareness of its erotic potentiality and appeal. This paper provides a close analysis of the construction of desires, not only sexual, and erotic energies in Sweetmeats to illustrate how the study of sexuality is also the study of what may appear to be non-sexual, and to suggest that the division between 'majority' and 'minority' sexualities, in a space where multiple desires and sexualities interact, is a false one. Interactions are a key to an appreciation of this form of physical theatre, whether they are between body and body, human and apparatus, sexual and non-sexual, desires and anxieties, and straight and queer. Lines of demarcation are blurred and superfluous.

My analysis of Sweetmeats makes use of Peta Tait's investigation of sexed bodies in physical theatre, and Elizabeth Grosz's (re)conceptualisation of lesbian desire and its generation through contact between surfaces. Grosz's approach is particularly applicable to a form of theatre which relies on the energy of physical contact between performers, and between performer and apparatus. Awareness of touch and sensuous response is heightened through actions of sustained contact in physical theatre, and the play of surfaces extends to the erotic energies sparked by the contact between both skin and skin, and skin and object or material. The latter is effectively exploited in Sweetmeats such that a circulation of multifarious, strange desires (and anxieties) permeates the production, in some sense 'queering' it.

Sweetmeats defies simple sexual classification, and extends an understanding of what sexuality is and how it might be examined. I argue that the recent work of Rock'n'Roll Circus provides a model for theatre that self-reflexively explores the sexualising of theatre space, with a keen awareness that the arousal of audience desire(s) is an important factor in the appeal (and survival?) of theatre itself.

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Pfisterer, Susan

Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies Institute of Commonwealth Studies University of London

"Performing Australia in the heart of the 'Empiah' "

It is impossible to discuss the reception of Australian theatre in London without also considering perceptions of Australian identity, and how these have been shaped by imperial notions of what exactly 'Australian' is. This paper explores some early examples of performing Australianness on the English stage, and questions the degree to which colonial constructions of Australia's possibilities persist in contemporary English thought.

Exploring these ideas in a current context, the aim of this paper is to examine the recent work of the Blue Tongue Theatre Company. Blue Tongue, devoted to performing and profiling Australian dramatic talent, has had several successful performances during 1999, including Hilary Bell's Wolf Lullaby. What works and what doesn't, and why? Is Australian theatre parochial? What do directors do with the Australian idiom/landscape/character in a professional environment that is not necessarily receptive to difference? Strategies for the potential development of Australian theatre to make a niche for itself in the heart of the 'Empiah' are considered in conclusion.

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Pippen, Judith; O'Connor, Joseph; Benner, Sue

Metro Arts, Brisbane

"Exploring the links between theatre scholarship and professional theatre practice"

In the 1990's Brisbane began finally to address the residential needs of its arts organisations. New hope now exists for the traditionally poorly-serviced artist in the shining new sites at 381 Brunswick St, The Powerhouse and (perhaps) the Empire. In the midst of these glossy new structures sits a hundred year old building that has served the arts for 23 years in the heart of the city. How does it fare in the new scheme of things'?

How does it 'stand' up in a rationalist economic environment? How does it 'rate' socially, culturally and economically?

And - should we be asking these questions? Or should we shut up and let progress happen?

In this presentation we will visit some critical moments of Metro Arts' social history and argue for the continued inclusion of the building and its function in Brisbane's cultural planning and industrial life generally.

This will involve exploring Metro as a place for work on the margins, for off-beat experimentation; as the 'fire stair off the cultural corridor', for quick escapes from the slow- burning funding rounds. It will involve dreaming a future of activities with an accent on collaborative projects, performance praxis and critical reflection.

We will raise the question: can you have a State funded and State sanctioned arts space that is truly independent, truly subversive, in a way that speaks to, enlivens and builds the deepest artistic vision in our contemporary culture?

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Rogers, Meredith

Department of Theatre and Drama La Trobe University

"Design for a Found Space - Twice"

The Carlton Court House, managed by La Mama in Melbourne, is effectively a found theatre space. Subject to a national trust embargo on any change to its built fabric, its past as a Magistrate's court generally overwhelms its present use as a theatre space.

Designing for this awkward and pre-determined space twice in the same year - in May as a venue for a departmental production of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle and then in June for a production of Barry Collins' 70s classic Judgement - has led me to reflect on the role of the designer in these situations as a kind of spatial dramaturge negotiating between the production and the venue's past lives and present difficulties.

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As an exercise in the interface between the academy and the profession, two very different projects with much in common may also serve to illustrate some ways in which such an interface can be of practical advantage to each party.

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Radvan, Mark

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Three Frames: The Creativity of the Actor, The Physical Body, The Classic Text"

The Central Question: How do you go about enhancing the physical language of performance in order to illuminate rather than compete with the text?

This paper reports on a Creative Arts Development Project exploring methods for stimulating the physical creativity of the performer. Mark Radvan was the director, Graeme Watson the choreographer/movement specialist, the text was Strindberg's Miss Julie, newly translated and adapted by Jacqueline Martin. The starting point was road-testing Jeremy Whelan's 'Tape Technique'.

The findings? Still work in progress at this stage, but we think most movement approaches discipline the body into a state of obedience that works against physical creativity. The need for training remains but the Body has to be free to tell its own stories, and to enter into a Dialogue with other bodies.

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Ryan, Shay

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Red Jam Spreads" The Red Jam company of older women players grew from Shay Ryan's Masters (Research) Degree from QUT in which she used an ADSA document, Performance as Research / Research as Means of Performance (July 1995) by Alison Richards to help her through an investigation of an essentially woman-friendly process for a group- devised performance. The shape of the study was rhizomic, like couch grass, with no trunk but many networks. Three of its main stems were her personal experience as an older woman, her drama teaching experience and feminist methodology.

The collage-cabaret show Pots of Red Jam grew from this study. Its themes included menopause, body perceptions, sexuality, spirituality, rituals, media images of older women and feminism. In this paper Shay will discuss how the rhizome spread, how the company moved from academe to industry acceptance; the Brisbane Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, QPAT, ACT and conference work. She will reflect on how her role has changed, how much the ensemble adapted to the pragmatics of professional production and what they

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will not compromise in their playmaking process. Shay will finish with a discussion of Red Jam's 1998 work Stained Glass Ceiling in which the women of the company tell their stories about their working lives.

------Scollen, Rebecca

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Understanding New Audiences : An audience reception study of 'non-theatre goers' attending La Boite Theatre Company's 1998 season"

The primary aim of the project was to expose audience perceptions of La Boite Theatre's 1998 season; secondly, to test and refine the methodology; thirdly, to discover the reasons why participants do not regularly attend theatre productions.

La Boite Theatre is a professional company seen to be positioned between the larger State company and smaller professional and amateur companies in Brisbane. It is a theatre-in-the- round and so its spatial dynamics are conducive to audience participation and close involvement with the drama. In 1998 La Boite Theatre's season of plays was as follows: The John Wayne Principle, Emma Celebrazione!, The Conjurers, Speaking in Tongues, X-Stacy, and A Beautiful Life.

The 1998 La Boite Theatre audience reception study contained three groups of twelve participants. All were non-regular theatre goers. In each group there were two of each gender in the 20s, 30-40s, and 50+ age groups earning a variety of incomes.

An outline of this study, its success as an industry collaborative venture, and some results will be presented.

------

Scheer, Edward

School of Theatre, Film and Dance University of New South Wales

"Violence, Performance, Responsibility"

This paper examines these issues through a focus on the piece All that flows an important early piece from Open City addressing the male body: its inner tides and moods; its hard contours and soft articulations; its screams and murmurings; its silence and responsiveness, and considers the politics of the abject body in performance. How can such an irresponsible textual approach do justice to cultural demands for the perfect body and historically, to the fury of the custodians of this body when confronted with its impossibility? Consider the freikorps' fantasies that Theweleit describes: 'the fascist has 2 distinct and different masses in

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mind, 2 masses that stand in mutual opposition. The mass that is celebrated is strictly formed, poured into systems of dams. Above it there towers a leader (Fuhrer). To the despised mass, by contrast, is attributed all that is flowing, slimy, teeming.' (Theweleit vol.2 p4) The fascistic fear of all that flows is an interior realisation projected explosively onto the other. Open City's work opens a question that contemporary Australia needs to answer... if we are to become responsible: 'She'll be right. She'll be right. Maybe you did it. Maybe you bumped me off! It all falls into place. Not the women. Not the Asians...you! The enemy's on the inside. Mate versus mate. You're opening the floodgates...'

------

Seffrin, Georgia

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Intimate Relations: the Working Environment of the Merivale Street Public Programming Unit"

This paper focuses on the working environment of the Merivale Street Public Programming Unit of the Queensland Performing Arts Trust, which is currently curating the Stage X Festival, a multi-art form event for young people.

In my research role as observer it has become obvious that the model employed by the team is one based on a democracy of ideas and practice whereby concepts are freely generated, shared, reworked, and made concrete. This is in opposition to a traditional festival model in which the Artistic Director chooses and shapes product in accordance with a specific artistic vision.

The democratic model is highly appropriate for the nature of the Stage X Festival which focuses on young people aged between 12 - 25 years of age who have largely been marginalised or constructed conversely as "victim" or "threat" by mainstream culture. The Festival, located in the infrastructure of a core mainstream arts organisation, is the perfect tool by which "to encourage young people's participation in public and cultural life and cater for their arts related interests" (Stage X Discussion Paper).

Furthermore, this democracy of process is passed onto those artists whose work is commissioned for the festival: the entire working process is driven by a belief that the artists and the audiences "own" the event, with the Festival team acting as consultants and supporters, so that the social justice issues associated with youth arts are underpinned with an accessible and appropriate aesthetic framework.

The paper will be a case study through which to map the working process from the inception of ideas, through the commissioning of artists, to the final stages of rehearsal, as the event is staged after the conference closes.

By critically analysing the process as applied to 5 to Midnight, one of the Festival's key events, an effective model can be presented which will be of mutual benefit to the Merivale Street team, and other arts organisations.

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------Sinclair, Christine

School of Contemporary Arts Deakin University

"Playing to Learn : developing reflective practice in emerging artists. A university-industry partnership"

This paper considers the construction of a pedagogical framework within the University which supports the development of practical, artistic and reflective skills in students of the performing arts through engagement in supervised project-based learning in a community/industry setting.

For four years the drama strand at Deakin University has guided a collaboration between the School of Contemporary Arts at Deakin and Theatreworks, a professional theatre company located in St. Kilda, Melbourne, to create an annual two day performance event in the Melbourne suburb of St.Kilda. Drama, dance, media and visual arts students have participated in all aspects of the performance, from conception to performance and promotion, in partnership with University and Theatreworks staff.

In the months which follow each of these events, through the link established with the theatre industry and a specific arts community (in St. Kilda) or as a result of newly acquired skills and confidence, students and new graduates frequently move on to other projects with a professional profile. It is clear that the pedagogical paradigm which facilitates student readiness for this progression is critical, and it is the purpose of this paper to consider how this framework is constructed, implemented and refined for future applications. At the centre of this articulation of pedagogy is the drive towards the creation of reflective artistic practitioners, who are capable of theorising on their experience and of working both artistically and practically within the performing arts industry. In other words, artists with insight who can survive in the real world.

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Tait, Peta

Department of Theatre and Drama La Trobe University

"Acting Control / Disciplining Emotion" Chekhov's Three Sisters delineates how the female characters monitor their emotions and admonish others to self-control. Is this social disciplining of emotions (Lutz 1990) as it is acted in theatre also the performance of gender difference? This discussion has implications for all industry practice that perpetuates a paradoxical belief that emotions are culturally neutral. Clearly, the emotions that are performed in realist theatre as those of a social self.

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In her study of Paxtun culture Benedicte Grima finds that women re-tell stories and perform the language of Paxto as a public discourse of honour and the "performance is found in emotions of sadness, grief and suffering" (Grima 1992:1). Emotions are defined through social interchange. They are expressed in "cultural performances of an appropriate self" (Grima 1992:7).

With Stanislavski-derived realism in theatre that attempts to mask the artificial construction of theatrical identity in an apparently seamless life-like delivery, the actor is paradoxically assumed to reproduce his or her inner emotions in the performance of an appropriate social self. While this theatre has been interrogated since Brecht, even his writings nominate theatrical feeling as instinctive (1986: 37).

------Tompkins, Joanne

English Department, University of Queensland

"Marketing and the Arts: The 1998 Adelaide Festival Poster"

This paper analyses the 1998 Adelaide Festival Poster controversy in order to address the confusion of discourses (including multiculturalisrn, interculturalism, artistic license, artistic autonomy, and the representation of women's subjectivity) that emerged when the poster raised the ire of several groups. Robyn Archer adapted an image of the Virgin Mary to sell her festival but this choice was greeted with outrage by the Greek Orthodox Church and Labor politicians, among others. The poster controversy exemplifies how ownership of culture can become entwined with proprietary control over the body of the woman in the image. It also illustrates that in the hierarchy of discourses that can be mobilised to object to anything in the social sphere, the guarding against perceived cultural insensitivity now rates higher than eliminating misogyny in the public imagination. Multiculturalism became the weapon with which to denigrate Robyn Archer for representing a threat to existing power bases. The poster and the debate that it sparked provides an opportunity to identify some of the difficulties in representing women interculturally and in establishing cultural sensitivity in a multicultural society.

------Townsend, Barbara-Rose

Drama Department University of Newcastle

"DEATH DEFYING THEATRICAL PRACTICE: staying alive and funded"

Death Defying Theatre has turned 18. It is no longer called DDT nor does it resemble the street theatre company established in 1981. DDT is just one example of how theatre practice is not solely determined by practitioners. There are various powerful constraints operating on theatre companies in terms of cultural policy, audience demographics and funding availability. The latter one, inevitably, plays one of the major roles in determining practice.

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There are two pertinent moments in DDT's history that clearly delineate where funding policy has influenced and strongly directed artistic practice. By reading the signs of funding decisions in an intelligent and resourceful manner and being aware of the implications involved for theatre companies with these financial policies, the company was able to obtain funding earmarked for particular types and styles of performance. This meant that the company has moved through various incarnations and altered artistic practice to ensure its own survival.

------Wissler, Rod & Comans, Christine

QUT Academy of the Arts

"Brink Visual Theatre: A Case Study of Innovation in Theatre Form and Drama Education"

This joint presentation will report on two Australia Council funded residencies by Brink Visual Theatre at QUT Academy of the Arts. The collaborative creative process of this multi- art form company will be showcased against a background of recent policy frameworks. Spinoffs in the domain of arts education and secondary curriculum development will be discussed. This arts education partnership is posited as an important model for industry rejuvenation in terms of both form and outreach.

------Young, Stewart

Department of English University of Auckland

"Two Tribes" "Theory" shares the same Greek root as "theatre", yet, ironically, it signifies a sharp divide between theatre practitioners and academicians. Indeed each group speaks a different discourse. I am conscious of this in two respects: my research on theatrical practice and performance in Britain and New Zealand, and my teaching of Drama and Theatre Studies in a university.

For the student, theory is of course extremely seductive, especially in the domain of gender and sexual identity. As the exemplary site of both representation and transformation, theatre is ideally suited to express those theoretical conceptions. However, theatre is a notoriously messy art, in which practical considerations, coincidences and accidents conspire to frustrate the purely conceptual. It is salutary for the academic to be reminded that the business of theatre-making involves a series of fundamental, pragmatic questions.

In Auckland, where theatre is remarkably fragile, it is especially important that the worlds of academy and industry intersect. And it is important for the academic to acknowledge responsibility toward the profession: to recognise the limits of theory, but also to challenge, for example, those who take refuge in feeling and (pseudo-post modernist) style as a substitute for meaningful theatrical statement.

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