Peter Eckersall

Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on ‘The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project’

This essay is a report on the Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project (Dramaturgies), a forum for the investigation of issues in professional dramaturgical practice in Australia. It reviews the textual orientation of historical theatre practice in Australia before describing a series of events aiming to promote a wider and more culturally interactive understanding of dramaturgy. New forms of dramaturgy arising in response to the post-dramatic turn in theatre are discussed as a basis for exploring an expanded dramaturgical practice. Proposals for a politics of dramaturgy that revive theatre as a forum for social critique conclude the essay. While specific to one set of theatre interventions, it is intended that the proposals discussed herein have wider applications.

Locations of Dramaturgy – Kris Verdonck

Drawing on training in visual arts and theatre studies, Kris Verdonck creates arts works using spatially transforming elements such as light, haze, water and projections. His works combine elements of installation and performance art and utilize high definition video and machinic objects. In this essay I will consider how Verdonck explores ideas of theatre as a way of framing a sensible encounter that combines physical properties and metaphorical aspects. Verdonck creates situations where acts of watching and experiencing his performances are embodied and self-reflexive; where a memory of theatre (in contrast to Camillios ‘theatre of memory’) as a primary experience is always evoked. At the same time, his ‘theatre’ often questions the very idea of liveness and is presented in various stages of redundancy and reinvention: to act is useless, but to act is to go on, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, whose texts are sometimes adapted in Verdoncks performances. Cohering his work is the notion of ‘figures’: forms and objects manipulated in the artistic process and ‘acting’ (‘figuur’ from the Dutch can be translated to mean a character or personage) while also having a conceptual focus on the changing purview of figures in the context of expressive media. I argue that this encounter is productively seen as dramaturgical in the sense that Verdonck uses and subverts the vocabulary of performance making in expressive ways. Thus, I focus on the question of dramaturgy in Verdoncks work and think about the ways that his dramaturgy refashions ideas of theatre. In an exploration of two contrasting arts works made by Verdonck in 2011 aided by an extended consideration of the idea of the figure, I aim show how Verdoncks work is proposing an experimental dramaturgy and a memory of theatre as a transforming medium.

Towards a Dramaturgy of Robots and Object-Figures

Robotic and virtual figures have become increasingly visible in live performance. How these figures/performative agents come into the discussion of dramaturgy is considered in reference to recent works by Hirata Oriza and Kris Verdonck.

Between Antipodality and Relational Performance: Performance Studies in Australia

On Friday 30 August, 2002, a Performance Studies (PS) Symposium held at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney addressed a variety of questions about the ‘current disciplinary status of and the scope of research in Performance Studies in Australia’ and whether there is such a thing as “Australian Performance Studies” and, if so, how it differs from Performance Studies in other geographical locations, and especially from the United States.’ These questions was framed by the principal organizer of the event, Dr Moe Meyer, and the discussion chaired by Dr Sharon Mazer, both Americans working in Australia and New Zealand respectively. The responses were as varied as one might expect from scholars whose disciplinary backgrounds and institutional affiliations differed considerably and whose research took them across cultural studies, popular culture studies, theatre studies, and the visual arts, just to list a few of the key areas which were identified.1

Australian Performance Studies Marginally Off Centre

Performance studies (PS) explores transformative and transforming dimensions of human experience including those seen in the performing arts, social rituals, power, and everyday life practices. How PS is enabled in and by different contexts and locations is an important aspect of the discipline as a whole. This chapter discusses the influence of Richard Schechner’s work on the discipline of performance studies in contemporary Australia. Performance studies is indebted to theoretical work, teaching and artistic practices by Schechner. However, as the following example shows, demonstrating the performative transforming experience of PS is easier than locating precisely the place of Schechner in the field. The question of what it means to hold influence (or even assert control) over the substance of a discipline when that field of knowledge is transforming is a difficult one. In other words, taking from Schechner’s writings, how far do the strips of behavior/behaviour extend? At the very least, in this instance, the spelling changes; but so do many other things about PS.

The Emotional Geography of Shinjuku: The Case of Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza, 1970)

Ōuchida Keiyas Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza, 1970), a film from the Japanese underground cinema movement, documents the gathering of ‘folk guerrillas’ (activists and student protestors) at the underground plaza linking the west and east exits of the vast Shinjuku railway station in February 1969. This essay analyses their protests by highlighting their apparent search for a new performative praxis, amidst evidence of complicated broken threads, misplaced emotions and disconnections between politics and action. Through occupying and restoring other uses of the space, I argue that the protestors desired to remake the city as a forum for ideological confrontation and revolutionary aesthetics.

Valuing Ecologies of Performance: Culture and capital in a neoliberal world

‘Ecologies of Performance’ is an essay shared among four authors who bring their research and creative practices to questions of place, culture and capital. Addressing widely divergent habitations of performance, we consider the relationship between culture and capital in United Kingdom, South Africa and Japan. Dominic Gray, the Projects Director of Opera North at Leeds, charts the itineraries of opera in England over the last decade. He advocates a radical rethinking of opera, which urges its audiences to engage with the politics of place and time. Mike van Graan considers theatre in the context of contemporary democratic struggles and offers an account that threads together the Arab Spring, Millennium Development Goals and the African Renaissance. For van Graan, the blurred and complex constellations of power, race and class rather than the moral dichotomies of black and white provide the post-Apartheid terrain for creative and political interventions. Peter Eckersallquestions what it means to say that we value something and expect that something such as the arts will provide value-added functionality. He offers a snapshot of his experience of Leeds, UK in the 1980s. He then considers examples of how artists have responded to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan. Here artists have made renewed claims to imagination in dealing with the aftermath of disaster. Finally, Jisha Menon links these perspectives to disciplinary questions in performance studies. In a performative vein, we aim to shift the ‘value’ of performance from what it means to what it does.

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.

On the dramaturgical field in Port B's Tokyo 'Tour Performances'

At the conference ‘European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century’ a panel exploring non-Western sites for dramaturgical practice encompassed diverse ideas. If European dramaturgy was in a state of flux as the conference showed, then theories and practices of dramaturgy in other locations were even more complicated. The panel discussed a number of different approaches to dramaturgy among ‘off-centre’ performance-makers, ranging from the need to foster a deeper understanding of European practices to outright rejection of the value of the term.2 The panel also explored how dramaturgical practices in Asia tended to be informed historically by give-and-take responses On the Dramaturgical Field in Port B’s Tokyo ‘Tour Performances’ Four micro-essays

Cue Black Shadow Effect: The New Media Dramaturgy Experience

We begin with the notion that what was once called new media has increasingly become a familiar part of the dramaturgy of the last quarter century. By considering the dramaturgy of new media performance events, we seek to develop a language to describe, situate, and understand how the practices of conceptualizing, designing, directing, and reading/responding to performance are now in flux in new ways. This flux is facilitated in part by developments in digital culture, and by a desire to respond to and harness these. In observing these developments, we also see a decrease in the representation of mediated society and an increase in the simulation of the agency of its technical creations. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, the ‘new’ in NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important contemporary artists – through their work with objects, actants, atmospheres, visuality, sound, machines, and systems of various kinds. We note that the use of video, powerful data projections, new sound systems, and even technologies such as robots reflects not so much a vanishing of human bodily presence from the theatre or the arts of that period, but a more subtle repositioning of bodily presence.