Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 An HIV Love Story : Jacob Boehme's 'Blood on the Dance Floor's' Queer and Indigenous Revolt
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'This article is part of an ongoing conversation between Jacob Boehme, Alyson Campbell and Jonathan Graffam about Boehme's play 'Blood on the Dance Floor' (Melbourne and Sydney, 2016; Australia and Canada tour, 2019), and we see it now as a kind of queer collaborative musing that we are doing together to think through how the production works. While we have published some of our thinking on the play before, we realised that none of us was finished trying to articulate how it was created (Boehme), and the impact it had on us as spectators (Campbell and Graffam) and, indeed, that there was still so much to unravel in terms of its place in the context of queer performance in Australasia. In this article, we focus on key decisions made during the dramaturgical process of composing two sequences from the production, 'Sandridge Beach' and 'Anthony'. In examining the production's 'dramaturgy', we refer both to the structure and content of the piece and the processes of decision-making that are key to composing the work. While the term 'dramaturgy' is used to describe the selection of material in crafting and organising new work, on another level it seeks to make explicit the relationship between the artistic composition and the socio-political and cultural context in which the work is staged. There are multiple ways to approach any framing of 'Blood on the Dance Floor (BOTDF)' - Indigenous identity, queerness and HIV - and, though we start from the perspective of queerness for this special issue, they are as inextricably interwoven and inseparable as the double helix of DNA. In our conversations for this article, what emerged most strongly from Jacob were ideas of love, the complexity - or, perhaps more precisely, absence - of Indigenous sexual lives from stage and other representational forms, and queer kinship.' (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon Australasian Drama Studies no. 81 October 2022 25599393 2022 periodical issue 'It is time to pay attention to queer performance across our region. There are rich histories and thriving cultures of LGBTQI+ performance, including an explosion of queer performance from Indigenous artists. Queer performance is eclectic and tenacious, persisting as a field of innovation and continuing to sustain LGBTQI+ artists and their audiences despite contexts of ongoing homophobia, transphobia and criminalisation.' (Jonathan Bollen, Alyson Campbell, and Liza-Mare Syron : Editorial introduction) 2022 pg. 39-68
Last amended 4 Jan 2023 07:25:20
39-68 An HIV Love Story : Jacob Boehme's 'Blood on the Dance Floor's' Queer and Indigenous Revoltsmall AustLit logo Australasian Drama Studies
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