Janys Hayes

Sites to Remember: Performing the Landscape in Cultural History

This paper aims to compare and contrast two site-specific performance productions, both designed to grapple with processes of cultural remembrance, whilst also operating as successful tourist attractions. The narratives encompassed by both productions revolve around shared Australian histories, for audiences attracted by place and what it is able to represent. Re-enactments of past events call into the present a consideration of what still remains, with both shows enabling new subjective interpretations of earlier times. The defining difference between the two, however, rests in the context of each performance, in the one case as a commodification of heritage and in the other case as the desire to produce an artistic yet popular theatrical product. Ballarat’s, Sovereign Hill’s light and sound show, Blood on the Southern Cross celebrates and commemorates, in mega-spectacle style, the Eureka Stockade, one of Australia’s key historical events. Using a mechanised display of the original goldmining site of the Eureka rebellion, the performance is operated by computers with video-projection, multi-phonic sound, and moving model forms, with audiences moved around the massive site on transporters. The Piccolo Tales, a contrasting performance most notably in terms of size, unfolds the history of Kings Cross, through its setting in the miniscule iconic Piccolo Bar, in one of the tiny side streets of Sydney’s bustling and densest suburb. This paper encompasses an investigation of how the cultural inscriptions of the two specific sites interweave with the performance styles, materials, political and social positioning of the works. Previous performance studies examining site-specificity are utilised, including the author’s analysis of particular festival performances as “place-making” (Hayes, 2012, 2013). Smith’s (2009) model of “signposts” is used to consider acting within site-specific productions in a new light, whilst both performances are more completely analysed through Schneider’s (2011) concept of incomplete pasts forming “cycles of memory”.

Drumming the Future: Vietnamese drumming as a bridge between tradition and popular entertainment

The fascination of Vietnamese with drums and drumming reaches back into the pre-historic when bronze drums (Dong Son), from the Red River Delta region of Vietnam’s north, were prized trading commodities throughout the Asian world of that time. Substantial archaeological evidence from the Dong Son culture (1st millennium BCE – 2nd century CE) indicates that the bronze drums, cast in one piece through the lost-wax technique and often weighing two hundred kilograms or more were venerated possessions used as regalia, burial objects and musical instruments for ceremonies and festivals. Now in the twenty-first century the Dong Son and other historically renowned drum types have become symbols for Vietnam’s emergence into an international cultural and economic arena. Three Vietnamese international events illustrate the emblematic use of traditional drumming as a nationalistic symbol of modern Vietnam: The Third Asian Indoor Games held in Hanoi in 2009 opened with a drumming spectacle using battle drums; The Jubilee celebrations of the Vietnamese Catholic Church in 2010, drew delegates from across the Catholic world with the opening in the north in the Ha Nam province beginning with an immense traditional drumming performance within its religious setting; The 2012 Hue International Arts Festival incorporated ‘Resounding the Vietnamese Spirit’, a specific drums and percussion festival with performances using Binh Dinh war drums, royal drums from Hue, Dong Son drums, and Tay Son battle drums. In particular, Hue’s ‘Resounding the Vietnamese Spirit’ was designed to attract Vietnamese youth to the popular possibilities of traditional drumming. The hallmark of the move to drumming as popular entertainment, extending from the use of drumming in the traditional lion dance performances is the emergence of small, youth drumming groups who perform in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for shop openings and local cultural events.