Challenging (mis)conceptions of Asianness in the work of Yumi Umiumare

Since migrating to Australia more than a decade ago, butoh dancer Yumi Umiumare has been interested in performing her Japanese identity ironically, making her own otherness part of an ongoing choreographic challenge to (mis)conceptions of Asianness in Australia. Her butoh-based choreography traverses her body’s outer and inner landscapes to simultaneously expose stereotypes of Asianness, and explore the physical processes constrained by these stereotypes. Umiumare’s strategic performance of stereotypes is risky, readily collapsed back into the culturally ordained images of otherness she is trying to challenge. Nevertheless, Umiumare clearly believes this strategy is the most effective way of making the otherness she experiences as a Japanese woman living in Western society palpable for her largely white audiences, making them uncomfortable with the (mis)conceptions they hold. This strategy is central to How Could You Even Begin To Understand? Version 9-12, the small scale traverse stage performance I consider in this paper

Anne Bogart, and then, you act : making art in an unpredictable world

Review of Anne Bogart's 2007 'And then, you act: making art in an unpredictable world

A 'Value Ecology' approach to the performing arts

In recent years, ecological thinking has been applied to a range of social, cultural and aesthetic systems, including performing arts as a living system of policy makers, producers, organisations, artists and audiences. Ecological thinking is systems-based thinking which allows us to see the performing arts as a complex and protean ecosystem; to explain how elements in this system act and interact; and to evaluate its effects on Australia’s social fabric over time. According to Gallasch, ecological thinking is “what we desperately need for the arts.” It enables us to “defeat the fragmentary and utilitarian view of the arts that dominates, to make connections, to establish overviews of the arts that can be shared and debated” (Gallasch NP). John Baylis took up these issues in "Mapping Queensland Theatre" (2009), an Arts Queensland-funded survey designed to map practices in Brisbane and in Queensland more broadly, and to provide a platform to support future policy-making. In this paper, we propose a new approach to mapping Brisbane’s and Queensland’s theatre that extends Baylis’ ‘value chain’ into a ‘value ecology’ that provides a more textured picture of players, patterns, relationships and activity levels in local performing arts

Partnerships, Social Capital and the Successful Management of Small Scale Cultural Festivals: A Case Study of Hobart's Antarctic Midwinter Festival

This paper uses a case study of the Antarctic Midwinter Festival held annually in Hobart, Australia, to analyse the ways in which cooperation, partnerships and social capital contribute to the successful management of small scale cultural festivals. It argues that the strategic use of partnerships evident in much event management practice is especially important in small communities, where issues with cost, infrastructure and market scale make it even more challenging to create the critical mass of thematically linked activities that characterise a successful festival. An emphasis on marketing, branding and relationships management in the context of a partnerships approach can help festival coordinators establish a bedrock of social capital to support a small scale cultural festival like the Antarctic Midwinter Festival. This approach can, however, have implications for succession planning as stewardship of the festival, and the social capital that supports the festival, is transferred to different coordinators down the years

Dis/identification in Contemporary Physical Performance: NYID's Scenes of the Beginning from the End

Analysis of physical theatre's capacity to subversively (re)stage gender, race and cultural stereotypes, with specific reference to Australian company NYID's Scenes of the Beginning from the End

“That you would post such a thing implies that you are a despicable human being”: spectatorship, social media, & the struggle for meaning in disability performance

Artists with disabilities working in Live Art paradigms often present performances which replay the social attitudes they are subject to in daily life as guerilla theatre in public spaces – including online spaces. In doing so, these artists draw spectators’ attention to the way their responses to disabled people contribute to the social construction of disability. They provide different theatrical, architectural or technological devices to encourage spectators to articulate their response to themselves and others. But – the use of exaggeration, comedy and confrontation in these practices notwithstanding – their blurry boundaries mean some spectators experience confusion as to whether they are responding to real life or a representation of it. This results in conflicted responses which reveal as much about the politics of disability as the performances themselves. In this paper, I examine how these conflicted responses play out in online forums. I discuss diverse examples, from blog comments on Liz Crow’s Resistance on the Plinth on YouTube, to Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araneillo’s Disabled Avant-Garde clips on YouTube, to Ju Gosling’s Letter Writing Project on her website, to segments of UK Channel 4’s mock reality show Cast Offs on YouTube. I demonstrate how online forums become a place not just for recording memories of an original performance (which posters may not have seen), but for a new performance, which goes well beyond re-membering/remediating the original. I identify trends in the way experience, memory and meaningmaking play out in these performative forums – moving from clarification of the original act’s parameters, to claims of disgust, insult or offense, to counter-claims confirming the comic or political efficacy of the act, often linked disclosure of personal memory or experience of disability. I examine the way these encounters at the interstices of live and/or online performance, memory, technology and public/private history negotiate ideas about disability, and what they tell us about the ethics and efficacy of the specific modes of performance and spectatorship these artists with disabilities are invoking

Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics

Peta Tait, circus Bodies : cultural identity in aerial performance

Review of Peta Tait's Circus Bodies: Cultural identity in aerial performance (New York and London, Routledge, 2005