Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'The tantalising natural gold reserves of early Ballarat, combined with its central location, geographically anchored between the already established access ports of Melbourne, Geelong and Adelaide, ensured that global performing acts could identify the settlement as a stop on a potentially viable touring route. Public historian Albert Strange quoted an old description of 'Main Road - that curious cosmopolitan street, a continuous, twisted wandering thoroughfare of irregular width .. ,'5 Early Ballarat became a cultural nexus in the travelling circuit of the South, providing links to and from surrounding capital cities and townships, and facilitating a dynamic and flexible theatrical stage experience, albeit aesthetically modest. Following the first discovery of gold in Ballarat East in 1851, the township grew at breakneck speed, and the business of surviving everyday life was inherently dramatic, with night-time theatrical entertainment an integral part of this heady mix. Individual mining plots were tiny, at 2.5 square metres, making the area highly crowded, especially as most men had no option but to sleep on the ground beside their plot on the alluvial minefields, or risk losing their claim to theft.' (Publication abstract)

'Gelder describes the Australian Gothic as 'a shadow ... fallen over the colonial ego'.5 This shadow and its oft-acknowledged associations with the uncanny aspects of the colonial experience6 are perhaps most widely recognised in Picnic at Hanging Rock, be it Joan Lindsay's original novel (1967), Peter Weir's film version (1975), Matthew Lutton's Malthouse stage adaptation (2016) or the Foxtel-produced television serial (2018). With this description, people seem to understand that, broadly speaking, the Australian Gothic is a genre concerned with the terror-inducing effect of vast landscapes, the lurking dread of the natural world, the loss of sanity experienced by colonial settlers in the face of natural and human-generated adversity (fire, famine, drought), and the framing of the landscape as mysterious, malevolent and threatening to immigrant European cultures.7 As Turcotte notes, the Gothic mode, a 'form which emphasises the horror, uncertainty and desperation of the human experience', was a perfect genre to articulate the uncanny aspects of the colonial period.8 As a playwright and performer with my theatre company Suitcase Royale, I have created the Australian Gothic plays Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon (2006), The Ghosts of Ricketts Hill (2008), The Ballad of Backbone Joe (2009) and Zombatland (2011). For the best part of fifteen years, I have toured these works nationally and internationally - from staging The Ballad of Backbone Joe at the Sydney Theatre Company to touring Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon at London's Soho Theatre - and have faithfully spread the Gothic myth: rural Australian towns at best are not to be trusted and at worst exist as claustrophobic prisons filled with murderous villains. Since 2016, I have also regularly toured Victoria, and been generously supported by Regional Arts Victoria (RAV) and their 'Home Is Where the Hall Is' and 'Connecting Places' initiatives, for both regional centres and small communities. To analyse the development of the rural Australian town as Gothic location par excellence is therefore to contrast it with my experience of touring to such towns where, post-performance, locals are set mainly on plying me with homemade sponge cakes, Mars Bar slices, and sausage rolls the size of my head.' (Publication abstract)

'Regional venues are generally the old-school stage and dance hall set-up. Because I work regionally and do so much training, when [I go to] the UK, compared to other artists in the UK, I'm incredibly competitive because I'm really precise about my practice. When I'm bringing up terms within my community to do with improvisation practice, or when I'm referring to Keith Johnson and his improvisation practice, or puppetry techniques or directing techniques, there isn't the shared vocabulary that exists within my theatre community. [...] many people that were so excited - 'You're back! I'd love to work with you on this!' - when you push the conversation a bit further, there is a real fear: 'I don't think I'll be good enough; it's something I wanted to do as a kid, but I just never really pursued it; I don't really have time'.' (Publication abstract)

'First and foremost, it's located in the nub of something that you feel deeply about, and that is shared by others. The construction of towns and how farming works there speaks to a deep history that has propelled agriculture in Europe, and my understanding of the European connection to climate changes, seasons, and how you work with the land came through that. The shifts that are occurring in regional contexts around the world in a Western agricultural context are huge and swift, and farming is stepping out of being industrial into a supremely technological phase. The first project that I took on in that context was combining the notion of Chinese composting houses with 'night soil' with the very Australian notion of the outside dunny.6 We created the work in this vegetable garden area like a little cinema, where there was an animation around composting.' (Publication abstract)

'A lot of the work that we do is about connecting regional stories, regional makers, communities and makers from across the state or wherever else, who are best placed to create that truth around that story. There's some different things at play when we talk about a piece of theatre that's dramaturged by an original practitioner in an original venue. [...] how does this work, then, in a policy practice? I can't give money to someone to work in a metropolitan setting to develop that regional work that has been created or conceived in a region. Much of the strategic work that we've been doing in the last couple of years has involved trying to come up with regional-level policy responses that are reflective of the needs of that particular area.' (Introduction)

'Specifically, the economic aesthetic of 'More art, less admin' will be seen in the expression of ACT members' hope and frustration that informed the decision to apply for government subsidy; the economic aesthetic of 'They're not volunteers' is the tension produced by 1812's commercial orientation with members' ambition, artistic dissatisfaction and desire for transformation; and finally, the economic aesthetic of 'The Stratford Experiment' is how CiA members' artistic aspiration is interwoven with authorial anxiety created by working within a private theatre's economy in a small town. [...] in this study members' willingness to do emotional labour on behalf of their company reflects a similar observation made by Hochschild, that emotional labour takes place because of the desire for 'competitive advantage' but also with the risk of 'burnout'.7 Hochschild argues that this is why feeling management is work worth paying for, but in this study emotional labour remains unremunerated. [...] in Hochschild's conception, to be paid or unpaid leads to different understandings of emotional management. ACT's economic aesthetic of 'More art, less admin' will describe how the decision to apply for government funding was influenced by hope for creative freedom from administrative and associated emotional labour, and will address frustration regarding regional equity.' (Publication abstract)

'(Edward Casey, The Fate of Place, 249) Philosopher of place Edward Casey proposes that regions are experienced through interconnected places; such place-filled regions are made up of the unique communities, environments and histories that dwell within them. Up to 60,000 people who attended the Begonia Festival in the regional city of Ballarat in 2019 may have walked past a modest grassy bank marked out by colourful bunting between three great oak trees in the Botanical Gardens. Importantly, Ballarat sits within the broader Central Victorian Goldfields Region, currently nominated for World Heritage Listing, with claims to be 'the most extensive, coherent and best-surviving landscape anywhere, that illustrates the global gold rush phenomenon of the second half of the 19th century'. This heritage works powerfully both on emotional and economic registers to define regional identity and 'a sense of place' that is strongly linked to tourism appeal. As Michelle Duffy notes, such regions are comprised of places and peoples and systems - interconnected in conversations with time, culture, reality, belief, nature, industry and relationships. Eco-scenographer Tanja Beer discusses the design process undertaken by her Masters of Landscape Architecture students, Libin Wang and Zongjing Yu, whose stage design for Ariel Songs won a competition undertaken as part of the Performing Landscape Studio. Beer led the design process and helped her students to deepen their understanding of place-based design thinking through extended community consultation with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens and the City of Ballarat. [...] in 2013, the City of Ballarat signed an agreement with UNESCO to act as a pilot city in the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) programme which takes a 'bottom up' approach to development and seeks significant consultation with 'grass roots' participants to elicit what the community values about their lived experience of place to plan future growth. The Ballarat Imagine survey identified that the community clearly valued their natural environment, gardens and also the tangible and intangible heritage of Ballarat. Accordingly, the Ballarat Creative City Strategy (2019)17 and the Ballarat Event Strategy 2018-2028118 highlight that festivals such as the Begonia Festival play an important role in the ongoing identity of the city and its surrounding rural areas.' (Publication abstract)

'Show Reports provided by Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) from their touring schools shows between 2017 and 2019, and an interview with Drew discussing her memories of audience responses to these performances, contribute to better understanding of the impact of theatre in young people's lives in regional Victoria. Using discourse analysis, I examine here the variations between regional and urban young audiences in the commentary available in these Show Reports, in order to suggest that they provide qualitative data of significance to audience research. In researching young audiences, Willmar Sauter states that young people aged under twenty 'are more interested in the fictional story presented on stage, whereas interest in the actors and staging increases steadily with the age of the spectator'. Elizabeth Belfiore and Oliver Bennett have also contended that theatre-goers become more sophisticated 'in their appreciation' of theatre with age, as they develop more concrete skills in decoding cultural artefacts. This framing of cultural sophistication, which Belfiore and Bennett directly link to Pierre Bourdieu's idea of 'cultural capital', is used to explain differences in access and appreciation of cultural commodities. Bourdieu is commonly drawn into discussions of how young people do or do not engage with theatre because of his influential ideas about social formation and differentiation, which makes cultural capital particularly useful to this discussion on the varieties of audience response. THE STAGE MANAGER: In 2009, Helen Freshwater recognised that the previous 'dearth' of empirical studies privileging the audience had shifted, identifying a trend in other disciplines to focus on the active audience voice. From the perspective of Kirsty Sedgman, Theatre Studies must ask what 'good' theatre audience research might look like. For some researchers, such as Matthew Reason, this involves using surveys or post-performance workshops where the experiences of participants are examined through visual, oral, written and performance-based activities. While access to the experience of young people is vital to any reception study, the responses collected in a workshop model require careful ethics clearance, resulting in reduced numbers of research participants. [...] data can also be influenced by young people's tendency towards what John Tulloch describes as the 'red pen effect' - an expectation of pleasing the researcher that can lead to compromised results. On the other hand, although many audiences obey the 'rules' of theatre, not all young people are aware of these rules and may act more freely - at times calling out, booing and commenting as they might at other social, cultural and sporting events. I have suggested above that Drew be considered an audience expert because the Show Reports provide detailed data about audiences.' (Publication abstract)

'While their geographical, cultural and social diversity means that Australia's very remote regions certainly cannot be described in monolithic terms, the proportion of the population that is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in very remote regions is much higher than non-Indigenous;5 they are (as defined by the ASGS structure) extremely isolated from major towns, cities and services, and they therefore differ markedly from what might be termed 'mainstream' Australia in terms of culture, landscape, lifestyle and livelihoods. Around Tennant Creek and the Stuart Highway, where most of our study was centred, the land is largely flat, with a huge expanse of sky stretching over low scrub and spinifex grassland and dramatic rock formations such as Karlu Karlu and Kunjara - both significant cultural sites for the Warumungu traditional owners. Around 68.1 per cent of the population is comprised of First Nations Peoples, with sixteen different First Nations language groups represented. The remaining demographic profile is made up of non-Indigenous Australian born and 7.0 per cent overseas born from regions across Oceania, Europe, Asia, the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, with 49.0 per cent of the population speaking a language other than English at home. The main industries, in terms of economic output and employment in the Barkly, are agriculture, forestry and fishing, healthcare and social assistance and public administration and safety. The Barkly is a highly creative region with seven art centres and a broad array of art forms and creative activities being practised by adults of all ages across its culturally diverse population. Alongside the Barkly's cultural strengths, there exists extreme socio-economic disadvantage, with indicators of homelessness, domestic violence, unemployment, poverty and ill-health at much higher than national averages.11 Our study found that the arts and creativity played a key role in cultural transmission among both First Nations and non-Indigenous participants, enhancing health and well-being, strengthening community esteem and identity in the face of negative stories and stereotypes about the region, and providing flexible livelihoods and avenues for social enterprise.' (Publication abstract)

'This interview was conducted by Dalisa Pigram Ross from her home in Broome, while Edwin Lee Mulligan was fishing on a jetty; some of the interview was spoken by Mulligan in Walmajarri language, and the wind made other parts of the interview almost inaudible.' (Introduction)

'PROLOGUE Whitefella says: 'Now I want you to condense 70,000 years of ancestral lineage, of continuous culture and creative practice, of complex totemic, skin and ceremonial systems complicated by 229 years of colonisation, survival, government and social policy that continues to actively oppress your peoples and sovereignty into a two-minute elevator pitch or marketing blurb, but make it exciting and make it accessible'.1 *·· Rachael Swain's recently released book, Dance in Contested Land: New Intercultural Dramaturgies (Palgrave, 2020), coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Broome-based, internationally renowned Indigenous and intercultural contemporary dance company, Marrugeku. At first, the Sun King wanted to dance and the society of the spectacle was born, long before Guy Debord put it in a book; then 'pointes' took us to the skies and when we came back to the floor, Westerners scattered spectacle around the globe. Later, we got excited relearning to walk and ran outside of the theatre and we wrote manifestos to say 'no' to virtuosity, to moving and being moved, to glamour and transcendence, then 'yes' to conceptualising experience, affects and sensations, 'yes' to non-sense and illogics, and more recently, 'why not' to dancing on walls and roofs, in museums, in text, on screen or not at all.6 And as we moved from postmodern to non-dance to post dance to danses ďauteur, during the late 1980s - 1990s, the global interest in dance as idea, practice and product grew to be so impressive that it resulted in a surge of dedicated dance venues, festivals and infrastructure to create and present dance. In the undeniable process of intellectualisation (theory and praxis), contemporary dance took a somewhat narcissistic turn in its processes of 'self-isation'8 even as it expanded notions of choreography - the politics and critique of representation, authorship, agency, trans-individuation, queerness, and labour - to focus on 'expressive concepts that desubjectivise and disobjectivise relations between movement, body and time'. The dramaturgies that accompanied these intellectual dance meanderings have also evolved.' (Publication abstract)

'At a time when private studios proliferate and conservatoire-style schools are under pressure from universities to increase their class sizes, decrease their contact hours and become more aligned with academic models, it is useful to be reminded of the benefits of the apprenticeship model of actor training. What becomes apparent through Greenslade's book is how this on-the-job training involves a certain amount of trial and error, and requires self-discipline in order to reflect usefully on prior learning. Conservatoire training clearly offers key skills in script analysis, approaches to creating character and highly specific body and voice training.' (Publication abstract)

'While this historiographic imprecision is a drawback, the density of analytic detail and informed criticism which Murphet offers makes the book a crucial contribution to performance studies of Australia and the USA. Murphet's dramaturgy fractures events and experience into a series of not necessarily continuous tableaux or filmic frames, which may then be enacted as theatre (as in his first two plays, Quick Death and Slow Love) or are cinematically projected and layered on to a complex, stratified live performance (The Inhabited Woman and The Inhabited Man). [...] even if Murphet's theoretical architecture is not altogether persuasive from a historiographic perspective, the author's detailed focus on process and his cross-referencing between chapters illuminates a number of varying responses to thematic concerns characteristic of twentieth-century dramaturgy as a whole. [...] it is the amplified commentary from the otherwise unnamed figure of the Voice (often Foreman himself) which links his examination of objects, poses, mute positions, entrances, exits, with the subjectivity which is forced to endure them as an audience.' (Publication abstract)

'In this way, the book brings together theory and practice in an intersectional and situated manner, providing the reader with all the tools they need to comprehend the complexity of each case study and simultaneously demonstrating through the discussion how art and performance synthesises knowledge and enables embodied understandings. Sisters Grimm critically engage with cinematic texts to 'challenge certain filmic inscriptions of history and their basis in heteronormative, patriarchal, colonial and racist ideologies' (116), responding with what Stuart Hall (1980) describes as oppositional reception or oppositional reading which occurs when the person watching the film interprets it in a different way than what the author of the film intended (which French also describes as 'queering the text' (118)). Hot Brown Honey's tagline, 'Fighting the power never tasted so sweet' (2015), is the title of the concluding chapter, and sums up one of the central themes of the book: that queer feminist performance can function simultaneously as a political platform and an engaging form of entertainment. Combining collaborative and solo vignettes, Hot Brown Honey weaves together a variety of performance styles such as an aerial ribbon dance that deals with the theme of domestic violence, a burlesque 'strip' which metaphorically performs the removal of colonisation from the body of the performer and an exhilarating beatbox performance.' (Publication abstract)

'The history chapter could have been better organised. Because these sectioned topics were oddly placed, it interfered with the flow of this chapter. In addition to the creation of the play, Thurow includes the equally important role that Big hART played with members of the Arrernte community, through Pitjantjatjara language maintenance and creating employment and skill development opportunities for marginalised communities across the APY lands. Thurow explores the problematic association of 'authenticity' with outdated images and assumptions of what Indigenous stories should look like, but at the same time she is contributing to this by using an outdated an inaccurate term 'traditional' when referring to the cultural practices of Indigenous people.' (Publication abstract)