Artspeak : articulating artistic process across cultural boundaries through digital theatre

In early 2009, researchers in the English Department of the University of Amsterdam collaborated with researchers in the Drama Department, Deakin University, Australia on a project which brought English as a Second Language students from The Netherlands into the rehearsal studio of Australian students engaged in play-building on Australian themes. The project aims were multiple and interconnected. We extended a language acquisition framework established by the Dutch investigators in previous collaborations with the Universities of Venice and Southampton, and combined this with an investigation of ways to harness technology in order to teach Australian students to communicate with and about their art. The Dutch language students were prompted to develop art-related language literacy (description, interpretation, criticism), through live, video-streamed interaction with drama students in Australia at critical points in the development of a group-devised performance (conception, rehearsal, performance). The Australian student improved their capacity to articulate the aims and processes which drove their art-making by illuminating the art-making process for the Dutch students, and providing them with a real-life context for the use of extended vocabulary whilst making them partners in the process of shaping the work. All participants engaged in the common task of assessing the capacity of the art work produced to communicate meaning to a non-Australian audience.<br /

The play, of blessed memory : the Dybbuk as imagined and reconstructed Jewishness in the Gilgul Theatre\u27s \u27Exile Trilogy\u27

I have quite distinct memories of my first encounters with people I identified as Jews. In the 1970\u27s, when I was in my teens, I made friends with a group of Jewish girls, and was invited to their homes, most of which were in the Melbourne (Australia) suburb of Caulfield, which had one of the highest proportions of Jewish inhabitants in the city. I was growing up opposite a golf-course in an increasingly affluent, beachside, bleached-blonde outer suburb whose micro-culture epitomised entrenched Anglo-Australian values; good manners, regular hours, discreet display of wealth, restrained emotion, mid-week tennis, weekends on the beach. Entree to the homes of these Jewish families provided my fairly romantic and uncritical eye with a glimpse of another world....<br /

Pragmatic dramaturgy: the creative management of limits in performance-making processes.

This thesis proposes the lens of pragmatic dramaturgy as a way of understanding the complex interactions between process and performance that define theatre practice, and investigates the ways in which performance making practice is shaped by encounters with a range of limits that impact the creative process

e-learning through digital theatre : breaking down the tyranny of distance and limits of location

In this article, we report on a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural digital exchange project between Australian Drama and Education students and Dutch English Language and Culture students, and examine the impact of the place-independent, technology-mediated communications and collaboration on their learning trajectories. The intensive, intercultural collaboration between the two groups of students resulted in a 50-minute group-devised, digital theatre play entitled Quarter Acre Dreaming. This play, performed through live interactive media by both Dutch and Australian students, traced the historical development of the Australian suburb, while integrating scenes of Dutch immigration into Australia. In the creative process, the students on either side of the globe interacted through Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and used videoconferencing and Skype for live rehearsals and discussions to advance their learning of English, their performance repertoire and cross-cultural understanding

Redefining the (able) body: disabled performers make their presence felt at the Fringe

Analysis of performers with disability appearing in the Melbourne Fringe Festival, 2015. Actors with visible and audible disabilities challenge us to rethink conventional notions of &lsquo;acting&rsquo

\u27Scott\u27s aired a couple of things\u27 : back to back theatre rehearse Ganesh versus the third Reich

&nbsp;This chapter tracks the creation of Back to Back Theatre&rsquo;s 2011 performance, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, based on first-hand observation of the final stages in devising and refining the work. Ganesh traces two parallel narrative strands &ndash; that of an imagined journey of the Hindu God into the dark heart of Nazi Germany to reclaim the sacred Hindu symbol of the swastika, and the narrative which constantly threatens to engulf the Ganesh story &ndash; the fraught relations between a group of disabled artists and their non-disabled director as they negotiate the process of making the work.The focus of this chapter is the development of a single scene from the performance work, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, tracing it&rsquo;s evolution through periods of creative development and rehearsal. The stark contrast between the working practices observed on the studio floor and the brutally knowing and parodic representation of power relations in rehearsal seen in the performance work testifies to the peculiar and productive self-reflexivity that generates the work of Back To Back Theatre. An account and analysis of both real and fictional rehearsals reveal how Back to Back&rsquo;s creative processes position members of the ensemble &ldquo;perceived to have intellectual disabilities&rdquo; as entirely legitimate professional artists, while claiming the authority of &lsquo;outsider artists&rsquo; to challenge perceptions and representations of disability. <br /