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A Good Night Out for the Girls
Moving across the boundaries of mainstream and experimental circuits, from the affective pleasures of commercially successful shows such as Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia! to the feminist possibilities of new burlesque and stand-up, this book offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance.
The Postcolonial Eye
Informed by theories of the visual, knowledge and desire, The Postcolonial Eye is about the 'eye' and the 'I' in contemporary Australian scenes of race. Specifically, it is about seeing, where vision is taken to be subjective and shaped by desire, and about knowing one another across the cultural divide between white and Indigenous Australia. Writing against current moves to erase this divide and to obscure difference, Alison Ravenscroft stresses that modern Indigenous cultures can be profoundly, even bewilderingly, strange and at times unknowable within the terms of 'white' cultural forms. She argues for a different ethics of looking, in particular, for aesthetic practices that allow Indige...
The Idea of Audience
What sort of relationship do artists want with their audience? What kind of role do they imagine for the performing arts in their community? Under the “creative industries”, the audience relationship has been increasingly defined and shaped by marketing and/or institutional interests. Wedged between the competing needs of the market, and their belief in the power of art to positively impact their communities, many artists and arts workers are caught in what Julian Meyrick describes as a “confused intellectual terrain”. While much audience scholarship has focused on understanding the motivations of audience members engaging with the arts, there has been considerably less research into...
Becoming Female
"Becoming Female", the first book-length examination of the body in classical Athenian tragedy, reconsiders the figure of the male tragic hero, making use of both feminist and body theory. The male hero becomes female in the space of tragedy through the experience of suffering, and seems unable to return to any secure expression of masculinity. Katrina Cawthorn concentrates initially on the figure of Heracles in Sophocles' "The Women of Trachis", an exemplary specimen of the tragic process of becoming female, who exhibits many of the central issues considered in the book. The male hero is, in the course of the play, undone and feminised, while the instability of masculine identity is reveale...
Men at Play
How are masculinities enacted in Australian theatre? How do Australian playwrights depict masculinities in the present and the past, in the bush and on the beach, in the city and in the suburbs? How do Australian plays dramatise gender issues like father-son relations, romance and intimacy, violence and bullying, mateship and homosexuality, race relations between men, and men's experiences of war and migration? Men at Play explores theatre's role in presenting and contesting images of masculinity in Australia. It ranges from often-produced plays of the 1950s to successful contemporary plays - from Dick Diamond's Reedy River, Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Richard Beynon's The S...
Colonial Australian Fiction
Over the course of the nineteenth century a remarkable array of types appeared – and disappeared – in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the “currency lass”, the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the colonies’ developing sense of identity; others were more ephemeral. But all had a role to play in shaping and reflecting the social and economic circumstances of life in the colonies. In Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver explore the genres in which these characters flourished: the squatter novel, the bushranger adventure, coloni...
Dance in Contested Land
This book traces an engagement between intercultural dance company Marrugeku and unceded lands of the Yawuru, Bunuba, and Nyikina in the north west of Australia. In the face of colonial legacies and extractive capitalism, it examines how Indigenous ontologies bring ecological thought to dance through an entangled web of attachments to people, species, geologies, political histories, and land. Following choreographic interactions across the multiple subject positions of Indigenous, settler, and European artists between 2012–2016 the book closely examines projects such as Yawuru/Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram’s solo Gudirr Gudirr (2013) and the multimedia work Cut the Sky (2015). Dance in Contested Land reveals how emergent intercultural dramaturgies can mediate dance and land to revision and reorientate kinetics, emotion, and responsibilities through sites of Indigenous resurgence and experimentation.
Body Show/s
This collection contains critical analyses of cultural spectacle and social identity by eighteen major Australian scholars and practitioners. It discusses and describes bodies in contemporary performance, theatre, visual art and dance; in circus and ethnographic shows; in performance training, butoh and wrestling; at gay and lesbian dance parties; and in relation to digital images. It explores historical and theoretical issues of gender and postcoloniality, technology, and the location of bodies in architectural, social and virtual spaces.
Theorizing the Angura Space
This is the first history of Japan's avant-garde underground theatre (angura) in a time of its most intense, creative, and original productions, viz. 1960-2000. It closely investigates the interrelationship of aesthetics and politics and explores contrasting examples of contemporary performance in relation to social context and cultural history. Part one considers the 1960s era of protest and theatrical invention. The second part examines theatre in the 1980s, a time of unprecedented economic boom. The final section considers the work of four of the most important companies of the 1990s and explores how they are grappling with manifold new political and artistic challenges.
Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher
This book enriches our understanding of Romanticism and colonialism by telling the story of Henry Smeathman (1742-86), natural historian and sentimental traveller whose extraordinary life in West Africa and the West Indies provides us with vivid, eye-witness accounts of Atlantic slavery, the Middle Passage, and the difficulties of collecting in the tropics.
