Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Pivoting 'Resilience' : Australian Women Playwrights, Community and the Covid-19 Crisis
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Notes

  • Epigraph: People talk about the theatre ‘industry’. I find that word problematic. It’s a theatre community. I find it hard to say ‘industry’, to be honest. To me, an industry is where we’re all working and we’re all getting paid well for our work, and it’s not what happens in theatre at all. (Janet Brown, Interview, 2021)1

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australasian Drama Studies On Resilience no. 83 1 October 2023 27347517 2023 periodical issue 'The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the field of theatre and performance in Australasia have intensified and, in some cases, re-focused the attention of artists and scholars on issues of resilience, well-being and precarity that have been legitimate preoccupations across academic disciplines since the early 2000s. As Margaret Ames and Stephen Greer point out, however, the resilience so frequently attributed to those who work in creative spheres can also serve ‘to rationalise and naturalise the redistribution of responsibility for social and systemic problems from the state to communities and individuals’.1 The role of the artist in society is shifting alongside extreme shifts in forms in theatre and performance, in the way our audiences engage, and in the ways in which we congregate, associate and learn.' (Editorial introduction) 2023 pg. 67-101
Last amended 9 Jan 2024 10:52:29
67-101 Pivoting 'Resilience' : Australian Women Playwrights, Community and the Covid-19 Crisissmall AustLit logo Australasian Drama Studies
X