TROUBLING SPACES The Politics of “New” Community-Based Guerrilla Performance in Australia Rebecca Caines A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English, Media and the Performing Arts The University of New South Wales August 2007 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ Signed …………………………………………….............. Date …………………………………………….............. Acknowledgements Appropriately, I have many different communities in many locations to thank. First, I need to acknowledge the support of my academic community. I would like to recognize the tireless work of my two supervisors, Edward Scheer and Meg Mumford. Ed inspired me to academia and has stayed with this project throughout many years and across three countries. Meg’s insights, encouragement and attention to detail in the later stages of this project have been invaluable and without it, I do not think the thesis would have been completed. My co-supervisor John McCallum has been warm and supportive throughout. I am also grateful for my research exchange to Canada and the opportunity to work with Alan Filewod. Alan’s insight has deeply affected both my writing and my understanding of politics and theatre. Clare Grant and John Golder have been wonderful mentors throughout my academic life. I cannot thank John Golder enough for his professional proof-reading assistance at the end, it was so much more than I could ever have expected. I also need to thank my talented and generous postgraduate peers, both at the University of NSW, in Sydney and at the University of Guelph, in Canada, particularly Caroline Wake, Pamela Karantonis, Rayma Watkinson, Julie-Anne Long, Christopher Jess, Carolyn Young, Naava Smolash and Koon Fei Wong. Sam Spurr has been especially supportive in the final stages. Bryoni Trezise has been both an excellent academic critic and peer and, over the last few years, has become a dear friend who has supported me through many thesis trials. Secondly, I would like to acknowledge artists discussed in this thesis. I would particularly like to thank John Baylis, Fiona Winning and Morgan Lewis (Morganics) for allowing me to interview them and in Morgan’s case, for his permission to observe workshops and performances and copy video material. PACT Youth Theatre aided me by giving me access to audiovisual materials from Stand Your Ground. I would also like to thank performer Julietta Boscolo who has discussed the TrackWork event at length with me, as well as the many other participants in all three case studies who have shared their opinions and perspectives with me. Christine Nicholls from Flinders University was particularly helpful in copying and forwarding materials from her joint course with Peter Sellars and in sharing her perspectives of the Adelaide Festival with me. I also need to acknowledge the artists and participants in the many productions and events run through my company Greymantle Productions and through Bellingen and Seaboard Youth Services during the past ten years. Their humour and talent continually inspire me and the many performances we made together feed into my understandings of community and site. Thirdly, I need to thank my community of family and friends. My father, Leigh Caines and my dear Rosemary Galvin (see dedication) have supported me through every moment. My sister, Justine Caines and flatmate, Andy Moore and my nieces, Sarafina and Shae gave me a new, supportive base and taught me how to laugh at everything. My aunt Mary Rowland Haight provided me with an excellent academic role model, as she is a talented philosopher who is both rigorous and ethical. Together with my mother Amanda Haight (1947-1989) she fostered my love of books and learning. In Sydney, Rebecca Jee, Joe Couch, Anthea Williams and Ben Packer have been with me from the beginning. Clare Chambers generously paid to have my books and papers shipped across the world and, together with Brett Rolfe and Stephanie Gesling, helped with changes last moment. My friends from Space for God taught me that multifaith spirituality and academia do go together and fed my heart (and my body) on many occasions. The “Wasters” in Belfast and my new family, especially Margaret Campbell, have also made me very welcome in my new home. The final and most important acknowledgement is for my partner John Campbell. He has given many, many months of his time to this project. As well as providing significant emotional, financial and technical support at all hours of the day and from across the world, he also helped with transcription, put up with neurosis, long- distance relationship and disaster. His love and support is boundless and I am grateful everyday that I am lucky enough to have met him. Dedication This thesis is dedicated to Dr Rosemary Galvin. Our many debates and conversations change me and my work for the better every time. You have supported, loved, challenged and sustained me. Your academic insights shape my thoughts and the branches of our ideas intertwine together into a single, living (red) tree. This thesis is only here because you believed in me. List of Publications Arising From This Research FROM CHAPTERS 4 and 6 Rebecca Caines, "Haunted Voices in Everyday Spaces: The Community Based Hip- Hop of Australian "Guerrilla" Artist Morganics," in Community Performance: A Reader, ed. Petra Kuppers and Gwen Robertson (London and NY: Routledge, 2007) FROM CHAPTER 5 Rebecca Caines, "Intimate Interactions: Spatializing a Postmodern Sociology of Theatre," in Ethnicity and Identity: Global Performance ed. Ravi Chaturvedi and Brian Singleton (New Delhi: Rawat, 2005) FROM CHAPTER 4 Rebecca Caines, "Christian Boltanski: Representation and the Performance of Memory," Afterimage 32, no. 1 (2004) FROM CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3 and 5 Rebecca Caines, "Guerillas in Our Midst: Contemporary Australian Guerilla Performance and the Poststructural Community," Australasian Drama Studies, no. 42 (2003) TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 SECTION ONE: THEORETICAL INVESTIGATIONS 15 CHAPTER ONE 17 Guerrillas in Our Midst: Examining “New” Guerrilla Performance Forms CHAPTER TWO 51 “New” Guerrilla Politics CHAPTER THREE 67 Post-Structuring Community: The Politics of Contemporary Community in New Guerrilla Art CHAPTER FOUR 101 Creating Site/Concept/Place: The Site-specificity of the Guerrilla Performance SECTION TWO: PRACTICE 147 CHAPTER FIVE 149 Post-Structured Community and Site/Concept/Place in Urban Theatre Projects’ TrackWork CHAPTER SIX 193 Haunted Voices in Everyday Spaces: The Community-Based Hip-Hop of Australian Guerrilla Artist Morganics CHAPTER SEVEN 231 Experimental Politics: Peter Sellars and the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts CONCLUSIONS 295 APPENDICES 299 BIBLIOGRAPHY 367 INTRODUCTION This thesis explores the ways in which community, site and politics meet inside the troubling spaces of twenty-first century performance. I came to this research from a background as a young community performance-maker, working for over ten years in a small town called Bellingen and surrounding areas, located along the North Coast of NSW, Australia. With young people and other artists from these communities, I facilitated a number of large multimedia performance events, and helped to establish new community facilities and resources in conjunction with local organisations, festivals and regional arts networks.1 I saw community-based artwork as vital to engaging with the world and challenging social problems at the point where they intersected with everyday life. The people I worked with believed community artwork could do more than just challenge the inequitable social structures, stereotypes or government structures which constrained us. It could help us to examine how we saw ourselves and how we connected with others who were different from us. In the process of my performance work and as I began to study at university, I saw that communities both liberated and constrained people. Many who engaged with the productions I facilitated saw their geographical or ethnicity-based community as repressive impediments to their development, yet they were still gaining entertainment, support and connection through many other types of community interaction. Many new types of social networks were emerging around me and some even questioned key notions in community performance such as “commonality” and “unity”. While I remained committed to community performance, I began to believe new understandings of community were required to negotiate the many ways people form and resist these intimate networks of social interrelation. I needed new theoretical frameworks in order to understand how to negotiate the ethical difficulties of uneven power relations inside communities and to understand how community art could encompass and support difference. 1 I began the