Rachel Fensham

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.

Dancing beyond Exercise: Young People's Experiences in Dance Classes.

Dance classes in urban settings may have a role in health-promotion programmes seeking to increase physical activity amongst young people. However, little is so far known about the motivations, experiences or health outcomes of those participating in dance classes. This qualitative study of young people attending recreational dance classes addressed motivations, the nature of the class experience, and implications for health and well-being. Data show that young dance participants’ experiences of ‘the physical’ are embedded in social, community/cultural or other values, and involve respect for older teachers and physical knowledge/expertise gained over the long term. Encouragement of dance-class participation may offer an important strategy for health promotion as long as the physical activity value of dance classes is not promoted in narrow, bio-mechanical terms.

Dancing the Transcultural across the South

In ‘Dancing the transcultural across the South’, Fensham and Kelada argue for the importance of incorporating the contribution of Dance Studies when examining the complex ‘entanglements’ of migration, interculturalism and globalisation. The article locates dancing within current intercultural debates, in particular utilising the idea of transculturalism to inform a concept of ‘trans/dans’, and foreground movement as localised expression. Culturally specific readings of dance as the articulation of moving bodies and site for experiential and artistic expression, can speak to the intricacies of social and political mobility. Embodiment is posited as central to examining how dance expands understandings of corporeal transmission and intercultural exchange in ways that are not restricted by monolithic categories of history, nation or culture. In this article, key scholars from Intercultural Studies and Dance Studies scholarship are referenced in order to map the rich territory offered by this productive interdisciplinary approach.

Beyond corporeal feminism: thinking performance at the end of the twentieth century

F I were to particularize the performing body during the twentieth century, to take ‘history as quotation’ as theatre director Heiner Müller did, I would suggest we have seen the ‘becoming-woman’ of theatre and dance. That is, a series of movements away from the signification and power of masculinity towards a signification of the feminine and the realization of women’s subjectivity on the stage. Think of Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House as she walks out of the bourgeois family drama at the close of the nineteenth century. She exits to an uncertain future, without husband, without children, with little to prepare her for working life or personal fulfillment. And her agent, the modern female actor, has brought into theatrical representation many other female subjects who consciously desire and claim sexual and social autonomy: examples include Elizabeth Robins who performed as Hedda Gabler (1896), Helene Weigel who played Mother Courage (1956) and Fiona Shaw who embodied Medea (2000). As performance theorist Elin Diamond notes, the female performing body mediated by history and individual specificity, ‘by virtue of entering stage space, enters representation’ (Diamond 1997:52). Think also of dancer Loie Fuller who flickered in the lights of a newly electrified society in 1896 and who became the motor for moving images that apparently ‘transcended her own womanly presence’ (Jowitt 1988:346). After her came many other women who danced on the I w R A C H E L F E N S H A M .......................................................................................................

Transvestophilia and gynemimesis: Performative strategies and feminist theory

ABSTRACT This article considers cross-dressing within feminist and cultural theory from the perspective of performance. It offers a close reading of the materiality of particular examples of transvestism, mostly drawn from the Australian context. The specificity of these performances reveals that bodies can both reproduce and fail to comply with discursive regimes of gender.

Post) community arts

Review essay of Gay Hawkins, From Nimbin To Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993. 189pp + xxv. ISBN 0 86373 466 X.

Nature, Force and Variation

19.95.

Farce or Failure? Feminist Tendencies in Mainstream Australian Theatre

During the first quarter of the twentieth century there was a return, in the West, to notions of the ‘natural’ in diverse fields of cultural activity. For many, outdoor pursuits; freer ways of learning; liberating costume; the authenticity of emotion and sexual desire; and the natural world itself were all privileged in action and belief. For others, the Hellenic Greek period (5 BCE) was viewed as the epitome of a natural harmony and balance between the State, the people and their gods. One of the central tenets of the beliefs, inspired by this Greek world, was a return to the representation of the ‘natural’ body in many forms of artistic expression, with aspirations to a liberation through nature, as seen in Art Nouveau objects, barefoot dancing, modern literature and theatre symbolism.

Heavy – Sleep, Dance, Loss: The surrender of the translator

A feminist analysis of the repertoire written and directed by women within mainstream Australian theatre at the end of the millennium reveals that, in spite of thirty years of active feminism in Australia, as well as feminist theatre criticism and practice, the mainstream has only partially absorbed the influence of feminist ideas. A survey of all the mainland state theatre companies reveals the number of women making work for the mainstream and discusses the production politics that frames their representation as repertoire. Although theatre has become increasingly feminized, closer analysis reveals that womens theatre is either contained or diminished by its presence within the mainstream or utilizes conventional theatrical genres and dramatic narratives. Feminist theatre criticism, thus, needs to become more concerned with the material politics of mainstream culture, in which gender relations are being reconstructed under the power of a new economic and social order.

Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance

A woman stares blankly into space, a clawed hand lifts over her left shoulder and her head turns sideways with no change in expression; as she bends forward, the pointed finger of her right hand slides past her face. A slow pulsing bass note is interrupted by the sound of a child’s voice repeating ‘we had the same dream’. Another three dancers knot their knees and legs around each other, falling and folding, at times covering someone else’s eyes while jigging them up and down. These eerie bodies with their disconnected gestures appeared in Lucy Guerin’s choreography for Heavy, drawing my attention to the phenomenology of sleep, that paradoxical reality in which unknown bodily states haunt the consciousness at the boundaries of the self. Heavy (1998) was Guerin’s first full-length theatrical work and it featured two male and two female dancers wearing red and black shirts and red trousers.1 The set included three volunteers sleeping vertically; inside a series of rectangular cots lined up along the metal mesh rear wall. Long paper strips from a continuous encephalograph, tracking brainwaves during sleep, descended from the ceiling, and a nighttime mood was created by dim lighting patches of deep blue and red interrupted intermittently by a bright neon glare, while a live DJ mixed electronic effects and estranged speech fragments. A work about sleeping, sleep disorders and dreaming, Heavy may have been the first contemporary dance piece to explore this science–arts frontier. Given the growing obsession with sleep or lack thereof, Heavy was also a witty, sometimes sinister, exploration of the expectations that surround sleeping in contemporary culture. More than one in three people in the Western world suffer from sleep disorders, many of them chronic. Regular patterns of sleep, and the particular loss of consciousness that is the state of sleeping, are thus far from a norm. Indeed, many adults suffer more than a few nights when they don’t sleep particularly well. As a result of this dysfunction, sleep research has become a major field of medical study and highly funded sleep research centres aim to understand the physiological causes of sleep; to identify the health benefits of sleep; or to examine changes in consciousness while we are sleeping. Sleep research laboratories can include environmentally controlled bedrooms, where expensive machines record EEG, EMG, EOG, movement, breathing and body temperature in order to document dreaming sleep and circadian rhythms. In economic terms, the medication of sleep represents a multimillion dollar industry, and online hundreds of sleep networks are dedicated to advice on how to improve sleeping. We lack sleep even as we crave ways to measure it, evaluate it and capture the effects of dreaming. As the eminent sleep researcher Michel Jouvet writes: