Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Artworks exhibited in the exhibition "ZeitBytes"

Brogan S. Bunt — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 18:00:13 PDT

Two algorithmic print works included in the ZeitBytes group show at Project Contemporary Art Space, Wollongong. The exhibition had a local digital arts focus. It included work by the following artists: Roz Batten, Brogan Bunt, Warren Burt, Kurt Brereton, Gino Chiodi, April Griffiths, Dulcie Dal Molin, Andrew Netherwood and Lea Williams.

A cleansing force

Donna Abela — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:50:46 PDT

A Cleansing Force was first performed on 11th November 2011 at The Old 505 Theatre 342 Elizabeth Street Surry Hills NSW.

The Rift

Donna T. Abela — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:41:30 PDT

The Rift was part of the Mardi Gras Colour Blind Project, performed at Sidetrack Theatre 23rd February to 4th March 2011.

Olympia and Phoung

Donna T. Abela — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:24:32 PDT

Olympia and Phoung was part of The 428 Project. It was first performed at Sidetrack Theatre 31st March - 4th April 2010.

Oliver Twist is

Donna T. Abela — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:14:45 PDT

Oliver Twist Is was part of The 428 Project. It was performed at Sidetrack Theatre 31st March to 4th April 2010.

Dumb living

Brogan S. Bunt — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:01:22 PDT

A walk in the park

Donna T. Abela — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:40:18 PDT

A Walk In The Park was part of Brand Spanking New, a celebration of new Australian Playwriting, at the New Theatre 27th October - 6 November 2010.

4 poems published in "Australian Poetry Since 1788"

Alan R. Wearne — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:14:28 PDT

Alan Wearne was born and grew up in Melbourne. He became friendly with Laurie Duggan and John Scott at Monash University, where he studied history, which he describes as his only intellectual love. He hosted "Conversations with a Dead Poet" (1999) a television documentary about his friend, John Forbes. A supporter of Essendon, the Australian Rules football club, since 1954 he helped found the Nunawading District Junior Football League and has published a prose satire about Melbourne's Australian Rules culture. He now teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong, living part of the year in Wollongong and part in Fremantle, Western Australia, and regards himself as an exile from Melbourne.

Some Thoughts on Autumn Song

Jon Cockburn — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:44:05 PDT

In late 1998, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney, Autumn Song, a twenty-three minute video by John Conomos, was shown for the first time. This work explores the theme of ‘threat’ meted out to John Conomos by his parents, when in his childhood he was thought to be indolent. The core of this threat was that Conomos would become a member of the do-nothing culturati, like his geographically distant Uncle Manoli “who never left the Greek island of Kythera” (Conomos “Artists Statement” 2). Yet for John Conomos’ parents, an immigrant family working-to-do-well operating an Australian milk bar, issuing the “Uncle Manoli” threat was always more about the engagement of memory than the calling to notice of a tangible and present reality. At the time, threats of becoming an “Uncle Manoli” provoked in the young John Conomos a distant narrative more than it did the prospect of a mimetic eventuality on reaching adulthood: Autumn Song implies that this response has changed. To negotiate its contents Conomos sets out Autumn Song in four sections following the introduction. These are: “I am at home, nowhere, in no house and in no country”; “The limits of my language”; “Nonsense...is the sense of all senses”; and “The writer, daytime insomniac”. The following thoughts on Conomos’ work are also set out under four sub-headings addressing the works’ concerns, but they do so differently.

Circus WOW, Women of Wollongong’s community circus: the politics of the site-specific

Janys Hayes — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:14:28 PDT

Circus WOW’s advertising motif is the phrase, ‘Ordinary women doing extraordinary things’. Created by Penny Lowther in 2001, Circus WOW appeared nearly a decade after Australia’s more renowned women’s circuses, such as the Women’s Circus and the Performing Older Women’s Circus in Melbourne and Vulcana in Brisbane. The late formation of Circus WOW in Wollongong coincided with the re-evaluation of the city’s industrial role in Australia’s economy. This paper argues that the success of Circus WOW reflects a reappraisal of place by audiences in a rapidly developing city. The site-specific and festival work of Circus WOW provides the principal means through which the company is recognised by the general public of Wollongong. The presence of site-specific performance events can be used to effect ‘place-making’. Circus WOW’s female performers through interactive relationships with Wollongong environments have realigned perspectives of culturally dormant sites. This paper explores three site-specific Circus WOW productions, to investigate the interaction of this women’s circus troupe with concepts of urban development in Wollongong spaces. Now in its seventh year, Circus WOW’s new director, Cheryle Moore, also director of Frumpus, a Sydney based all-women contemporary theatre company, seeks to strengthen the empowering role of Circus WOW in the cultural identity formation in the city of Wollongong. The enactment of differing possibilities for urban female subjects in a small city opens new spaces of contestation of identity for a wider public. This paper looks at the links between the visibility of outdoor and site-specific physical performance, regional politics and the concept of a ‘missing voice’ in the landscape. This perspective on the performative impact of an all female circus company complements the gender specific cultural niches occupied by women's circus companies established by previous research.

The 'inter-place' in actor training: Yat Malmgren's character analysis

Janys E. Hayes — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:17:05 PDT

Using Henri Bergson’s concept of the human body as an ‘interplace’, an ambiguous ‘place of meeting and transfer’ between materiality and culture, this paper examines the actor training practices of Yat Malmgren. Malmgren’s technique of Character Analysis sets particular movement and vocal patterns for trainee actors to perform, based on its traditional underpinnings from German expressionist dance. Integrating the phenomenologies of Bergson and Merleau-Ponty this paper illustrates the complex modalities of embodied experience inherent in actor training and Malmgren’s training in particular, where actors become keenly aware of corporeal dimensions of expression. Structural elements in the Malmgren technique highlight the chiasmatic relationship for actors of being both the viewed, constructed surface body of contesting discourses, as well as being the viewer, an embodied agency with direction. The resultant ‘excess’ or lack of congruency between these positions enables new movements in physical expression and language, as well as revealing sedimentations of habitual modes of engagement with the world. Malmgren’s emphasis is on otherness. In this actor training context otherness is first experienced as the intertwinement of the actor’s sense of self with the materiality of her own body, reflecting Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of alterity.

Naked to all but ourselves: some notes on actor training and phenomenology

Janys E. Hayes — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:20:04 PDT

Just as an audience can critically view the synthesised structure of any performance, evaluating the component elements which create meaning, so too each performing body in itself reflects nuances of embodied cultural meanings. Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology (1962; 1965; 1968) argues that human consciousness is ‘caught up’ in the ambiguity of the corporeal body so that any human body is both materially of the world that at the same time it is consciously directed towards (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 146). The body that is in action is already immersed in a subjective reality of its own and others making. For the actor, the negotiations between intentionality and viewed action are a daily consideration. These interactions between any body/subject and her lifeworld are partly visible for others to see. Yet the immersion in a lifeworld and the commitment to it mask reflection most particularly from those enacting it. We are revealed to others through our bodily performances in ways for which we ourselves do not have access. This paper is based on the author’s doctoral research (Hayes 2008), where Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is used to explore the experiential processes of actor training in Yat Malmgren’s actor training technique. My aim in this paper is to outline several of Merleau-Ponty’s concepts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘refusal’ (1962, p. 82) and his more recognised concept of the ‘chiasm’ (1968, p. 152), in order to offer a rich means of researching the development of actors’ skills, Both concepts enable new means of challenging actors’ habitual performance modes, whilst at the same time supporting their embodied agency.

Of the people, for the people: Duong Le Quy's site-specific spectacles at the 2010 Hue International Arts Festival

Janys Hayes — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:25:16 PDT

Duong Le Quy’s Journey to Create the Motherland, with its 1,000 performers, offered the 2010 Hue International Arts Festival a monolithic Vietnamese spectacle, designed for performance on the walls of Hue’s ancient Royal Citadel. Symbolically it linked the heartland of Vietnam’s nineteenth century Nguyen dynasty with contemporary Vietnam’s unification; the largest flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam formed an enormous tableau above the performers, as they drummed, sang, strode, danced and set off fireworks over Ky Dai – The Flag Tower of the Imperial Palace. This paper examines the use of traditional Vietnamese theatre practices, including Chèo, Tuồng and Cái luʹoŉg in Le Quy’s theatrical creations and specifically in three of his works at the 2010 Hue International Arts Festival: Dem Hoang cung (The Royal Palace by Night); Huyen thoai Song Huong (Legends of the Perfume River); Hanh trinh mo coi (Journey to Create the Motherland). Le Quy’s skills in creating festival performances across Vietnam, and his popularity in terms of the Communist government’s approval of his work, lies in his eclecticism. His western theatrical experiences (1994 – 2004) have given Le Quy few qualms about splicing traditional Vietnamese theatre and musical forms, overlaid with globalised commercial technology, with popular Vietnamese music and contemporary images. As Le Quy states ‘we integrate traditional and contemporary culture in a new content and form to ensure, on the one hand, that we don’t lose the beauty of tradition, but on the other hand, to make tradition take on new contemporary concepts.’ In revitalising traditional performance techniques and in his quest for a new sense of national identity imbued through cultural experiences, Le Quy’s work has resonances with the political uses made of Chèo, Tuong, and Cai luong in the 1930s by French–educated intellectuals, disseminating notions of resistance against colonial forces to a more general public. Traditional Vietnamese theatre practices have been used for nationalistic purposes at numerous times throughout Vietnamese history due to their deeply rooted recognition as popular entertainment and resulting in the many waves of renewal that these forms have absorbed since their early beginnings.

Catalogue essay for "Learning from Experience: In League with the City of Melbourne" Visual Arts Project

Lucas M. Ihlein — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:16:28 PDT

The following essay was commissioned in early 2011, by the League of Resonance – a Melbourne artist group comprising Jason Maling, Jess Olivieri and Sarah Rodigari. In this piece, I try to tease out an anatomy of sorts for their particular brand of socially engaged art practice. Much of the underlying information comes from an interview I did with the artists in early 2011 (thanks to Liz Pulie for the transcription yakka)…

Through a glass darkly: Gesture in actor training

Janys Hayes — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:40:39 PDT

Cognitive science has offered rich understandings as to the meaning and role of gesture in communication. Whilst the neurosciences and behavioural and cognitive sciences forge ahead with new insights into human interactions, the theorisation of acting in order to take account of recent research in these fields is slow on the uptake. This paper seeks to integrate research from both cognitive science and phenomenology to explore the ways in which gesture transforms action. The paper aims to elucidate modes within actor- training that enhance subtle and in-depth performed communication. The term body-language (Lamb & Watson 1979; Pease 1987) has often been used within acting processes as if gesture can be considered as a code. However, the day to day unconscious, spontaneous and sometimes subtle movements of fingers, hands, feet, muscles in the face and arms that accompany speech have been revealed by cognitive psychologists (McNeill 2000, 2005; Kendon 2004, Goldin-Meadow 2003) as an active ingredient in the formation of speaking and thinking. McNeill (2005, p. 3) emphasises that gestures act in real-time ‘propelling and shaping speech and thought’. They act as a ‘dialectic between imagery and language’ (2005, p. 16). Phenomenology embraces the concept of a kinaesthetic landscape that exists prior to human intention being translated into action (Smith 2006; Lingis 2004; Irigaray 1986). Whilst physical forms of actor training pay close attention to kinaesthetic imagery, the complexities and contradictions of language-enhanced performed action require actors to fully engage with their own gestural subtleties.

Geek101: A Review of the Geekosystem

Su Ballard — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:50:13 PST

The Physics Room Annual 2008 comprises new writing by 19 writers, black and white as well as full colour images and documentation on the range of programmes and projects developed for The Physics Room during 2008.

Bennelong's gambit: The Aboriginal invention of modernism

Ian A. McLean — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:50:10 PST

Modernism is generally considered an arcane art movement associated with a small coterie of white bohemian middle-class renegades based in Paris and a few other canonical centres of modernity. The last place critics have gone looking for either modernity or modernism is on the colonial frontier and especially the Aboriginal frontier. This attitude is beginning to change, and reflects the post colonial recognition of non-European modernities.

From Terra Nullius to Land of Opportunities and Last Frontier, the European dream has constructed and deconstructed Australia to feed its imagination of new societies. At the same time Australia has over the last two centuries forged and re-invented its own liaisons with Europe arguably to carve out its identity. From the arts to social sciences, to society itself, a complex dynamic has grown between the two continents in ways that invite study and discussion. A transnational research group has begun its collective investigation project of which this first volume is the outcome. The book is a substantial multidisciplinary collection of current research and offers critical perspectives on culture, literature and history around themes at the heart of the Imagined Australia project. The essays instigate reflection, discovery and discussion of how reciprocal imagining between Australia and Europe has articulated itself and ways and dimensions in which a relationship between communities, imagined and not, has unfolded.

Artwork in the exhibition "360 degrees: sound in the gallery"

Su Ballard — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:30:15 PST

Aboriginal modernism in Australia

Ian A. McLean — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:30:14 PST

Remote Aboriginal painting earned a place in the contemporary global art world without any debts to modernism, as if it arrived fresh and new by some historical accident. The conventional art historical narrative traces the origins of the Desert art movement to the establishment of the Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd in 1972, at the very moment that modernism was suPposedly disintegrating. While occasional claims for the modernism of Central Australian (or Western Desert) acrylic paintings were made when they caught the eye of the art world in the 1980s, they were more rhetorical than substantial. Based on superficial stylistic affinities with western modernism, they have since been discredited. Curators stiff sometimes juxtapose these two very different traditions, but for poetic effect rather than any didactic point.

Papunya - circa 1980

Ian A. McLean — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:30:14 PST