Denise Varney

More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Transience and Connection in Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon: China in the Space of Flows

Despite the stylish blend of multimedia and live performance in Robert Lepages The Blue Dragon, touring in 2010 and 2011, critics are surprised by the reappearance of the archetypal love story in the space of contemporary intermedial performance. This article argues that the performance, set in contemporary Shanghai, explores the lived experience of transience and mobility through a narrative in which individual lives are implicated in a transnational, transcultural and transgenerational romance. Drawing on Zygmunt Baumans work on liquid modernity and liquid love, we argue that the performance grapples with the experience of being unbound and disconnected in a liquid world.

Introduction: Regional Modernities in the Global Era

In the Asia-Pacific region, performances range from traditional Javanese shadow puppet theatre filmed on smart phones to Australian interpretations of European and American realism. Focusing on the region’s diverse theatre and performance from traditional premodern to contemporary postmodern forms, this book provides a view of Asia-Pacific performance that engages with questions of traditional cultural practices, modern dramatic form, digital technology and experimental and avant-garde practice in local settings that are inflected with geographic and cultural specificities. Drawing on sociological approaches to modernity that see the contemporary period as an era of new, alternative or ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2000) and on anthropological approaches to cultural practice that see an expanded role for the imagination in the social life of the present (Appadurai, 2005: 31), the book advances an argument for a regional, Asia-Pacific or as yet other unnamed modernity.

Identity Politics Forum

Introduced, compiled and edited by Elin Diamond, this forum brings together feminist theatre/performance scholars to revisit the question of identity politics. Does it still have currency? Does it still matter for feminists today? In what theatre and performance contexts do we still discuss identity politics? Following an overview (from a US perspective) of past and present concerns by Elin Diamond, the forum voices a range of international views as contributors consider identity politics, theatre and performance in their countries of origin: Nobuko Anan (Japan), Denise Varney (Australia), Katrin Sieg (Germany), Bishnupriya Dutt (India) and Tiina Rosenberg (Sweden).

Identity Politics in Australian Context

Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and divisions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.

Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White: Governing Culture

In the early 1960s the board of governors of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia rejected two Patrick White plays, The Ham Funeral in 1962 and Night on Bald Mountain in 1964. Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions. Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The central argument of the book is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and posed a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The recent productions indicate that despite the Adelaide Festival’s early hostile rejections, White’s plays endure.

Introduction: ‘Street-Fighters and Philosophers’: Traversing Ecofeminisms

Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene emerges at the intersection of two progressive twentieth-century political movements, one concerned with the fight for women’s rights and the other with ecological sustainability within the environment. The book celebrates the ongoing philosophical and activist advocacy of feminist ecologies as it traces the ecofeminist movement’s roots and alignment with recent social, cultural and artistic developments. It proposes the broad term ‘feminist ecologies’ to capture the diversity of the movement over the last 45 years and the range of possible ways in which feminist and ecological concerns can speak to one another in the era of the Anthropocene. To find solutions to ecological and feminist issues we need new modes of theory and praxis, activism and philosophizing as well as radical rethinking of policy, law, spirituality and education. Feminist Ecologies sets us on this path. It challenges us to take control over the Anthropocene and shift our environments towards new and more sustainable directions.

Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times

This collection of essays—Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times—edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney and Candice Amich is a compelling and energising read. The twenty-two essays gathered here, from an international cohort of scholars, speak with urgency and passion to a troubling political climate. Documenting the performative responses of women globally to the rise of neoliberalism, these writers engage the intersection of feminist artistic praxis with affective outcomes to demonstrate how these works reveal and resist this ideology and its products. Neoliberalism, which casts people as cogs in an economic machine, encourages entrepreneurship, competition, and do-ityourself individualism through government policies of free trade, reduced regulation, and stripped social safety networks. This “Third Way” governance creates precarity of labour, precarity of health, and a sense of dispossession as interdependent communal relations are undervalued and so eroded.

‘Not Now, Not Ever’: Julia Gillard and the Performative Power of Affect

Denise Varney traces the relentless gender-based attacks on Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister (2010–2013). Effectively engendered as a type of biopolitical subject, stripped of personhood and made fair game for political opponents, Gillard, in her widely circulated ‘Misogyny Speech’ of October 2012, denounced the sexist and misogynistic remarks mobilized to destabilize her leadership. Varney analyses the performative power of Gillard’s speech in the patriarchal context of Australian neoliberalism. Delivered in the ‘theatre’ of the Australian parliament, with an intensity that carried it around the world (more than 2.5 million views on YouTube) as a heightened feminist event, the Misogyny Speech recirculates the hateful affects directed at Gillard into a resistant and transgressive act.

Concluding Comments: Identity, Community and the Marketplace in Contemporary Indonesian Performance

One point I would like to comment on is the use of the phrase ‘post New Order’ in the title of the conference workshop, and as a reference point in individual contributions. I was hoping that people would problematize the term rather than simply taking it for granted as a description of a particular era. It suggests that there is something quite specific about this period, that it is significantly different from the New Order period. It prompts the question: what is this difference? I feel that not enough has been said in past two days about what is specific about ‘post-New Order’. Perhaps we can consider an alternative, broader term ‘post-Cold War’. This term would allow for comparisons among Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and to allow us to engage with the region that we know so little about. Discussing a post-Cold War era would also open the space for a reexamination of 1950s politics as related to culture and art, particularly of the work of the Community Party-affiliated cultural organization lekra. I cannot think of any other institution in entire history of Indonesia that has done what lekra did, namely the most ambitious attempt to theorize and to put into practice what they believed to be the progressive links between politics, art, and culture. Unfortunately, major political violence brought this project to an abrupt end. One wonders how they might have fared if they had been allowed to continue to pursue their project. When discussing Indonesia’s politics and arts, you risk missing a lot if you do not refer back to the 1950s. One can speculate that from lekra’s point of view nothing significant has changed since the 1950s, except its own destruction. There are changes here and there since 1965 in the links between arts and politics in Indonesia, but how significant are they? The fact that we are still talking about a post-New Order era, perhaps paradoxically indicates that we are still stuck under the shadow of the New Order. Why must the New Order