'For its size, with a population of roughly 80,000, the city boasts a remarkable appetite for performance - exemplified by 10,090 patrons over the three-week season of Strictly Ballroom, staged by local community company, Encore Theatre, in 2019. [...]this passion for theatre is part of a long and proud tradition, from the Muffs Dramatic Club, founded in 1889, and ongoing for many active amateur theatre companies, including the Launceston Players, founded in 1922. Or rather, is the Member suggesting a redefinition, attempting to reframe a collection of feelings, theatrical behaviours and practices more positively as acts of passion, and therefore acceptable in ways that parochialism is not? [...]the debate itself speaks to a surprising level of engagement from both state, and local politicians, who are entwined within the local theatre scene.3 So much so, that Asian Studies Professor Emerita at the University of Tasmania, Barbara Hatley, took a keen interest in local history and practices of theatre, researching the history of amateur theatre in Launceston, which was published in The Fabric of Launceston. The theatre scene of this regional city also sprawls across a range of institutions, and as Hatley's phrasing points out, involves interaction between the personal and the political, and between professional, amateur and pedagogical practices, all gathered under the umbrella of 'theatre'. A TALE OF TWO STAGES Launceston's theatre scene contains an expanse of actants: people, institutions, sites and histories, interlocking and enmeshed in a dense network of agencies.8 Methodologically, detailing this dense network poses distinct challenges, particularly those dense inter-relations that other scholars have framed in terms of ecology. (Publication abstract)
