Theatre Works' Desdemona: Fusing technology and tradition

“Interculturalism” needs to be expanded and redefined to include the responses of spectators as well as the work of artists. In what ways does Theatre Works' Desdemona, as seen at the 2000 Adelaide Festival, represent a “new wave of Asian production”? Or are such works disturbing evidence of the increasing erosion of the local

Back to Back Theatre’s ‘Ganesh versus the Third Reich’: Politics, representation and response

This panel considers the work of the Australian contemporary performance company Back to Back Theatre within the context of the conference theme of ‘cultural articulations’. We will address the ways in which religious objections to Ganesh versus the Third Reich were entwined with questions about the economic impact of these objections in attempts to censor and control the work. Helena Grehan’s paper will analyse the production Ganesh versus the Third Reich in terms of the ethical, political and social questions the work engenders. Peter Eckersall’s 'Theatre Love' The paper considers some of the possible ways that reading Back to Back’s theatre might respond to the current wave of a politics where opposition is an end in itself, whereas the idea of ‘taking sides’ requires a radical appreciation of the other. The third element is a roundtable discussion/interview with Bruce Gladwin (Director of Back to Back Theatre) and Alice Nash (Executive Producer Back to Back Theatre

Making Sense of Nonprofit Collaborations

To better understand the use and success of collaborations, The Bridgespan Group, in collaboration with The Lodestar Foundation, surveyed 237 nonprofit CEOs and 101 foundation officers in 2014 on their participation in four common forms of formal collaboration: associations (including coalitions and community collaboratives), joint programs, shared support functions, and mergers (including subsidiary relationships). The survey uncovered details about their participation, as well as the barriers that block results. This report explores the findings in detail, sharing positive trends in collaboration as well as the barriers that keep nonprofits and funders from working more effectively to realize the promise of collaborations

The Events: Immanence and the Audience

David Greig’s The Events (2013) stages the aftermath of a traumatic event; a cleric tries to come to terms with the massacre of her multicultural choir. The play uses two actors (one playing the cleric, and the other playing all the other main roles, including that of the killer). The cast, however, also includes a choir, drawn from the town where the show is being performed: the choir sings, and takes on small speaking roles (reading their lines from the script). They also serve as an audience for the action, occupying tiered seating at the back of the stage. The choir serves as a powerful reminder of what Laura Cull, in Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (2012) identifies as Deleuzian immanence: a performance which stages “the participation, multiplication and extension of the human body – understood as that which is produced by relations of force and encounters with the affects of other bodies” (10). In this article, I argue that the strong affect generated by the play in performance stems mainly from the positioning of the choir, the performers and the audience as, simultaneously, participants and witnesses to trauma; and from the immanent relation of actors, choir and audience within the structure of the performance event

Troubleshooting methods for the generation of novel pseudotyped viruses

A pseudotyped virus (PV) is a virus particle with an envelope protein originating from a different virus. The ability to dictate which envelope proteins are expressed on the surface has made pseudotyping an important tool for basic virological studies such as determining the cellular targets of the envelope protein of the virus as well as identification of potential antiviral compounds and measuring specific antibody responses. In this review, we describe the common methodologies employed to generate PVs, with a focus on approaches to improve the efficacy of PV generation