Cirrus@Austlit

'[...]an overview of our programming study findings looks closely at a selection of the highest selling spoken-word plays with female protagonists between 2006 and 2017. Historically, mainstream theatre has served a largely white, middle-class audience.4 Contemporary mainstream Australian society is both socially and culturally diverse, and this has been at odds with mainstream theatre, which 'continues to construct and represent ... a masculinist, colonial and white hegemony'.5 Furthermore, research into contemporary audiences indicates that mainstream theatre has a noticeably larger female fan base6 and yet the repertoire of Australian mainstream theatre points to a disparity in the representation of female-centred stories.7 The under-representation of women's stories in mainstream Australian plays can be considered critically important to the field of contemporary Australian performance when we consider the gendered voices, and audiences, who are shut out of an important cultural and socio-political conversation by the noticeable absence of women's stories in mainstream repertoire. Historically, the female characters of Australian theatre tended to serve as a reflection of men's perspectives of women, failing to challenge the clearly Anglophile ethos of traditional gender roles.10 In Female Absence: Women, Theatre, and Other Metaphors, Rob Baum argues that gendered constructions of women in domestic roles, particularly as mothers, stems from the flawed design of women as written by men in 'the standard [theatrical] canon'.11 In mainstream plays, Baum calls out the common construction of the female character as 'the metaphorical opposite [to men], circumscribed by [her] relationship to both male roles/ identity and social possibility'.12 It was not until the impact of second-wave feminism on Australian theatre that the problems associated with women's lack of representation, and their misrepresentation, began to be addressed more widely in the industry.13 In an overview of female characters in mainstream repertoire, it is not uncommon to find characters in plays who seemingly exist to be what Kerrie Schaefer and Laura Ginters describe as 'empty vessels for the projected desires of the male characters'.14 While there are exceptions to the stereotypes, it should be noted that the majority of these exceptions in mainstream repertoire are written by women playwrights.15 There have been several texts that give accounts of female representation in Australian plays, which provide a context for understanding the perseverance of stereotypical female characters and largely absent female protagonists. In this text, Gilbert discusses how Australian theatre has perpetuated the dominant culture as masculine, and the 'Other' as feminine, stating that 'patriarchal hegemony proceeds ... through the privileging of the masculine pole of a series of binary oppositions constructed on gender difference'.17 Gilbert writes that the idea of an 'Australian voice' has always been associated with a white, male, Eurocentric voice at the expense of other voices, and had been relatively unchallenged by drama critics until scholarship informed by second-wave feminism appeared in the 1970s.'  (Publication abstract)

'After graduating with a Bachelor of Dramatic Arts, Acting degree from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 2001, she rose to prominence as co-creator and performer in the cult hip-hop comedy act Sista She (with Sarah Ward, Kim 'Busty Beatz' Bowers, DJ Jonah and sometimes double bassist Thomas Butt), who toured Australia from 2003 to 2008. [...]Candy has worked as an actor on Australia's mainstages and starred in television sketch comedy shows, but is most well known for her original independent theatre works, including Who's That Chik? (2009), MC Platypus and Queen Koala (2012-13), Hot Brown Honey Burlesque (2013-15), Australian Booty (2012-19) and One the Bear (Arts Centre Melbourne/ Sydney Opera House 2019). Candy is currently a part of the British Council of the Arts INTERSECT UKAustralia peer mentorship initiative, she holds a MentorLA Fellowship interning with Peter Saji, is the showrunner of Black-ish (US TV series) in Los Angeles, and is also in the early stages of her first feature film with Arena Media. In high school, my debating teacher pushed my skills by throwing me in teams with senior students so by the time l was fourteen, I was winning wholeschool public speaking contests against seventeen-year-olds.' (Publication abstract)

'Critical reception and repeated erasures Celebrity discourses and the construction of the star performer have been significantly fashioned by actresses, as theatre and film scholars have argued.1 Australian-American, Nicole Kidman, born in 1967, one of the highest paid actresses in the world and named as one of the top 100 most influential women in the world in 2018 and 2019, has generated her own celebrity industry with some striking particularities and risks in her career choices.2 She has knowingly drawn on the iconicity of celebrity performers from the Hollywood golden age, yet cleverly turned the chameleonic and unexpected into important aspects of her professional brand. In a recent essay, I have argued that intellectual acuity, shrewd business sense, strategic decision-making and agency have been effaced in theatre history and that memoir and biographical accounts of actresses all too often follow a familiar pattern that prefers the marginalisation of artistic craft, managerial excellence and commercial flair - as though the sagacious cultivation of a professional career might somehow do injury to an actress's professional persona.3 Kidman has suffered from these negative frames to an extreme degree. Male star studies theorists, such as Richard Dyer and David Thomson, have foregrounded discourses of desire that focus on spectator fantasy at the expense of an actress's acting prowess and agency.4 Kidman's glamorous sexual allure has famously dazzled influential cultural commentators (usually white and male) to such an extent that a prevalent construct of her acting technique is that it depends on a projection of herself as a beautiful but empty vessel in order to best accommodate viewer fantasy. To cite a few telling examples: 'Nicole may be an enquiring mind ... but she is a cover girl too'; 'intelligence muffles instinct and spontaneity because it shadows true acting'; 'She doesn't let herself be seen pondering or calculating. Because then if you make a mistake, you can begin to look foolish'; 'She knows how far she relies on stupid luck.' (Introduction)

'Zoe Coombs Marr is a multi-award-winning standup comedian, writer, director and theatre-maker. Since Trigger Warning, Zoe has retired Dave and returned to standup as herself. Whereas Trigger Warning was about public shaming, which again is a lot about the audience: how do you manifest that idea in the space through the framework the jokes hang off? Even when I'm making theatre, I'm aiming to making the audience laugh.' (Publication abstract)

'With Pin Drop, Saulwick cemented her reputation as an acclaimed performance-maker, creating sound-centred works across a variety of mediums - live performance (Pin Drop 2010, PUBLIC 2013, Endings 2015, Permission to Speak 2016); installation (Alter 2014); and audio walks (The Archives Project 2016) - all of which utilise dramaturgies of sound as a key creative feature in both their development and final production. Reviewers particularly noted Saulwick's ability to 'call up your memories of fear or threat',4 making 'the hairs on the back of your neck stand up'5 in 'a tour de force of fear'.6 It was a one-woman performance piece, created collaboratively between Saulwick and Knight and performed by Saulwick herself, supported sonically by a combination of live voice, pre-recorded voices, and live and pre-recorded sounds. Saulwick constructed part of the sound design through the manipulation of objects positioned in close proximity to two microphones and then further manipulated through different sonic processing tools by Knight, who was situated behind the audience at the operator desk. If performance is a summoning of other worlds, as Marvin Carlson has famously asserted,9 both real and imaginary, and for Saulwick, perhaps also worlds of spiritual and deathly import, then Saulwick needs to be understood as part of a neo-Gothic revival.10 Saulwick's mysterious and transfixing sonic innovations challenge orthodox ideas of the single voice in theatre and go far beyond English constructions of the received theatrical voice and the emphasis on the actress who can project up into the gods in the service of a conventional playtext.' (Publication abstract)

'The 2015 release of the Working in the Entertainment Industry report (Julie van den Eynde, Adrian Fisher and Christopher Sonn) and the Australian Actor's Wellbeing Study (Equity Foundation and Sydney University), the 2018 Platform Paper by Mark Williams, and a series of articles in Arts Hub have generated increasing discussion on the topic. Some of the contributing factors to poor mental health identified by this research include: actors feeling disposable because of the saturated performing arts market; the financial strain that results from a low annual income, no sick pay, no holiday pay and decreased super; the irregular hours, including night work which leads to disruption in sleep patterns; the isolation that occurs when on tour and the resultant strain on relationships; and the fact that actors are under constant scrutiny (by producers, the general public and the media). How did this move lead to your interest in artist mental health and wellbeing? MBA: Because I was studying largely Method acting, although Stella Adler was actually passing the actor s process through the imagination, it primarily focused on the emotions of the actor. [...]the sort of therapy that you come to me for is a very performative therapy, and it's also very arts-based.' (Publication abstract)

'Described by Robert Reid as 'one of the most unforgettable actors we've seen',1 Yoni Prior has been a performance-maker and champion of the Australian independent theatre scene for over thirty years. After Gilgul disbanded, Yoni took up the helm as Head of the Drama Department at Deakin University (then Rusden State College), working as an actor trainer, director, researcher, and creating a number of digital theatre collaborations between Deakin University, the University of Amsterdam, the British Museum and Cambridge University. Matt Delbridge, Head of Theatre at VCA and funnily also a student of Yoni's and a member of Gilgul, was kind enough to lend us his office to do this interview as it was too noisy in the staff room and too cold out in the park. [...]that was an amazing time where Lyndal Jones had just started as director of student theatre, and introduced experimental work, street theatre, political theatre to the existing mix of plays and musicals. [...]there was this amazing collision of dance and impulse-based training that kept returning me to my body, back to my impulses in spaces where thinking was just not going to cut it.' (Publication abstract)

'Nancye Hayes, Toni Lamond and Jill Perryman.1 As the first Australian women to be cast in leading roles in major productions, these performers paved the way for a long succession of Australian leading ladies, including Geraldine Turner (Chicago), Marina Prior (The Phantom of the Opera) and Debra Byrne (Sunset Boulevard). Through interviews with these four leading ladies, this article investigates the impact of earlier pioneers on current female performers, as well as outlining the current opportunities and challenges for female musical theatre performers in Australia. Other starring roles in musicals included the title role in Wildcat (1963), Nancy in Oliver (1966) and Rose in Gypsy (1975). After years of smaller roles and understudying (most notably in the 1965 Australian production of Hello Dolly, in which she played the leading role on numerous occasions), Perryman was cast as Fanny Brice in the 1966 national touring production of Funny Girl.' (Publication abstract)

'Each of the other biographies streams easily from childhood, through to the early struggles of artistic exploration, to maturity and the many comedic and theatrical projects and ventures that the artist is involved with, and to the finale of a life well lived. The text jumps from university theatre where Humphries excels at creating grotesque characters, to a country tour of Twelfth Night directed by Ray Lawler where Humphries develops Edna as a cruel impersonation of CWA women, to the appearance of Edna in a Ray Lawler review just prior to the Olympic Games in 1955, to Humphries' first stage show starring Edna, A Nice Night's Entertainment in 1962, and so on. Max Gillies began his career through student acting at Monash University in Melbourne and from there joining the Australian Performing Group, working out of the Pram Factory in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton.' (Publication abstract)

'Article 27 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is unequivocal in its claim that culture is central to human dignity and identity. Projects such as Ngapartji Ngapartji, Acoustic Life of Sheds, Project O and Namatjira are 'large-scale, long-term, process-based' partnerships with 'high-needs communities' (25) that intend to go beyond nationally circumscribed ideas about capital 'C' Culture to engage with communities whose stories have been systematically silenced, sidelined, buried or dismissed. Since Big hART's beginning as an arts-based project in Burnie, a community deeply affected by the closure of a paper mill in north-west Tasmania, Big hART has partnered with over fifty communities across Australia and toured its works in theatre, music and film, internationally. Testimony providing evidence of the personal, social and language-recovery outcomes of Big hART's work is affecting, making the impact of Rankin's call for cultural justice speak all the more persuasively as it relates to practice on multiple platforms to multiple audiences. Equally important to the communication of these impacts in this essay is the description of Big hART's five foundational principles or 'domains of change' (15): with individuals and communities (who are supported for at least 150 weeks), with the nation, with art and content, and with knowledge and learning.' (Publication abstract)