Cirrus@Austlit

'The following reflects a conversation between Dr Susanne Thurow (Deputy Director, iCinema Centre, University of New South Wales – scholar in Performance and Digital Media), Professor Helena Grehan (Murdoch University – scholar in Performance and Theatre Studies), and Professor Jane Davidson (The University of Melbourne – artist and scholar in Social Psychology of Music) that took place on 6 July 2023, via Microsoft Teams. Brought together by an interest in exploring the ways in which the performing arts may help to foster understanding and preparedness for the vast impacts of climate change, we canvassed developments that have been standing out to each of us, seen from our distinct disciplinary vantage points. While such discussion can by definition never be exhaustive, we are hoping that our conversation may inspire a strength-based reflection of the as yet untapped potential and opportunities that lie ahead in our challenging planetary future.' 

(Introduction)

'This article discusses the findings of a qualitative study of the effects of eighteen months of the COVID pandemic on the careers, livelihoods and creative practice of ten Australian women playwrights. We find that the gendered impacts of the pandemic, and the calls for resilience it prompted, compounded a series of challenges that were already being faced by women playwrights in Australia. Between March and September 2021, we interviewed Australian women playwrights, asking them to speak about their experiences throughout the COVID crisis. These interviews were situated within a broader study of the effects of the pandemic upon Australian women writers.2 Expanding upon our previous work, we wanted to explore how those writing specifically for theatre – a fundamentally communal creative form – were impacted by the pandemic, and whether there was a gendered dimension to the pandemic’s effects in theatre as seen elsewhere.3 Our methodology, the interview, was chosen primarily to offer playwrights an opportunity to speak freely about the situations in which they found themselves. A key observation from our interviews was that playwrights had entered the pandemic against the background of an already depleted and under-resourced industry. Drawing on work by Suman Gupta and Ayan-Yue Gupta along with John Yves Pinder, and extending the provocations offered by Margaret Ames and Stephen Greer in their 2021 editorial ‘Renegotiating Resilience, Redefining Resourcefulness’, we explore the problematic notion of resilience and its deployment as a part of a neoliberal rhetoric.4 We connect the social and political contexts of the austerity crisis in which Australian theatre-makers encountered the pandemic, extending and expanding their observations on ‘resilience’ and the arts in the Global North.' 

(Introduction)

'A week prior to 2021’s Alexander Ball, I attended an open training held by the House of Alexander. The House had held public throwdowns intended to introduce newcomers to Vogue Ballroom culture across that year, all of which I walked in, often in multiple categories. They had not yet, at least since I had joined the scene in January of that year, opened a House training to non-members. As such, I jumped at the opportunity to attend. I washed my hair, applied my eyeliner with a seemingly newfound precision. When I arrived, I changed into a pair of cut-off denim shorts, black thigh-high boots, and a cropped long-sleeved shirt so transformed my entire chest became visible at the mere thought of raising my arms above shoulder height. I was there to serve on every front possible.' 

(Introduction)

'Mohebat Ahmadi’s Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene offers a significant contribution to the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism and scholarship on theatrical representations of the Anthropocene. The book argues for the ecocritical potential of theatre and performance that foregrounds the non-human via diverse and thorough formal innovations that ultimately destabilise anthropocentrism. This argument is supported by close textual and critical analysis of plays and performances from various contexts in the Anglophone sphere. Ahmadi examines works by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall and Miwa Matreyek, through an ecocritical lens, finding within them ‘a radical rethinking of some of the principal assumptions made about human–nonhuman relationship’ (4). For Ahmadi, interrogation of this relationship is at the core of truly ecocritical drama, and central to the ‘Anthropocentric turn in theatre and performance’ (200) which the book traces and contends.' 

(Introduction)

'Across the last two years, perhaps due to the paucity of live theatre available during the shutdowns of the COVID pandemic, there has been a welcome surge in books dedicated to Australian plays – from Julian Meyrick’s lucid Australia in 50 Plays (2022) to Chris Mead’s meditation on new play development, Wondrous Strange: Seven Brief Thoughts about New Plays (2022). Chris Hay and Stephen Carleton’s monograph, Contemporary Australian Playwrighting: Re-visioning the Nation on the Mainstage, sits within this good company as an elegant, cogently argued scholarly work, which honours the long tradition of play scholarship in Australia while illuminating the profound and necessary changes that have occurred to the field of Australian performance since 2007.' (Introduction)