10.00am – 10.30am

Morning tea

Provided by AusStage

10.30am – 11.00am

Introduction & Website Launch

Chris Hay

11.00am – 12.30pm

Papers 1: Virtual Reality

Technological Developments to Enhance Nineteenth Century Theatre History Research in Australia

Julie Holledge & Joanne Tompkins

This presentation demonstrates two of the areas of nineteenth century research that have been enhanced by recent AusStage technological developments using virtual theatres. The first looks at the performance of the Chinese community on the Victorian goldfields. We have pursued two directions here: developing a model of the performance tents that reflect the realities of gold mining camps while reflecting the culture from which they came in the Pearl River Delta in southeastern China, and mapping company tours around Victoria.
The second reports briefly on the recent use of the AusStage Queen’s Theatre and IbsenStage’s Komediehus as research laboratories for exploring aspects of nineteenth century performance. While these initiatives are still in the relatively early days of development, they are of course useful well beyond these examples and suggest a different course for theatre history research in the future.

Visualising the Victoria Theatre: Come Backstage!

Gillian Arrighi

Newcastle’s Victoria Theatre was built in 1891 and was managed for 75 years as a commercial venture. In this presentation Assoc. Prof. Gillian Arrighi will share the intricate processes and visual outcomes of the project to reconstruct the theatre’s stage house. Her team’s investigations and reconstruction methods began with cultural-historic research, scenography, and traditional illustration. Recent developments in 3D modelling and gaming technology have enabled this challenging project to be realised.
Due to major interior renovations throughout the 20thC that were intended to modernise the theatre, knowledge about its original layout and appearance has been lost. There are no photographs, plans, or drawings of its various parts. An earlier phase of this project (2017-18) gave rise to a VR (virtual reality) experience of the auditorium and public areas. The recent project (2021-23) has used interdisciplinary methods to reconstruct the stage house, fly tower, dressing rooms, gas lighting technology, and the mechanics of the moving scenery.
Providing context for 3D visualisation of lighting and scenic mechanisms of the late-19thC, the research team has re-created the first scene of ‘Evangeline: or, the Belle of Arcadia,’ the straight-from-New York musical extravaganza that opened the Victoria in 1891.

Acting with the ghosts of Eliza and Cordelia: 1830s Australian theatre practice and the virtual world

Jane Woollard

This paper will describe and reflect on my findings to date in the LIEF Project AusStage 7: The international breakthrough. With two emerging performers I have explored possibilities for using a virtual recreation of Sydney’s Victoria Theatre to revive the performances of Cordelia Cameron and Eliza Winstanley, two leading performers in the 1830s and 40s.
In this presentation I will share the findings of a practice as research project which explored how VR technology might be integrated into an embodied investigation of colonial theatre practice in Sydney. I will outline how the discoveries made inside the VR theatre aided our understanding of the expression of emotion, the scale of gesture and voice, and the spaces between performers in the performance of our source texts.
Does the virtual theatre bring us nearer to the ghosts of these early performers? Is it possible for the virtual, the real and the past to travel together in a contiguous relationship? How can the visualisation of data assist us ‘to learn from the past how our desire for it can be used’? (Watson, 2004) In a virtual reality theatre the past is, (to paraphrase Jim Davis) memorialised, but also disrupted by the real performer. Nevertheless, the visualisation of data can help the performer reach into the past and make discoveries about the craft of performance.

12.30pm – 1.30pm

Lunch

Participants to source

1.30pm – 2.30pm

Workshop 1: Every Woman Theatre Artist Remembered and Feminist Strategies and Tactics

Stacy Holman Jones & Daniel Harris

In this workshop we will share and do some of the collaborative workshop activities we developed and shared as part of our fieldwork in the Staging Australian Women's Lives research. We'll also reflect on the insights and surprises we encountered in sharing these activities with the theatre makers who participated in the workshops and discuss how these insights and surprises are guiding the work we are doing to share the findings of the research both in writing and in performance.

2.30pm – 4.00pm

Papers 2: Data, Artists & Companies

Dancing Across the Pacific: Tony Ding Chai Yap & Australian Butoh

Jonathan W Marshall

Flin ders.edu.au ABN: 65 542 596 200 CRICOS No: 00114A
Papers 2: Data, Artists & Companies
Dancing Across the Pacific: Tony Ding Chai Yap and Australian Butoh
Jonathan W Marshall
In 1973, Clifford Geertz described his anthropological approach as “thick description” (“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight”). The method begins with a simple description of the event which is “thickened” by tracing multiple meanings and references which exist within each of the component parts. Geertz’s method is similar in this sense to iconological art history as pioneered by Erwin Panofsky (Saturn and Melancholy, 1964) and Aby Warburg (Renewal of Pagan antiquity, 1893-1927), in which the aim is to creatively trace previous instances of a symbol or a gesture across a range of visual, literary or cultural works, to unpick both “revivals” in which images return in the present, but also the mutations and fusions which occur. Methodologically, thick description functions according to a spatial logic, plotting horizontal transits in geography, or well as vertical ones in time. Thick description and iconology is widespread in art history (see Marshall 2022, on Georges Didi-Huberman) and history more generally (notably Robert Darnton’s celebrated account of “the Great Cat Massacre”, 1984).
Seen in this light, thick description is particularly apt for tracing trans- and cross-cultural movements across the Asia Pacific, enabling one to consider the transits of bodies, gestures, and corporeal sensations, as well as cultural exchanges and historical developments. With this in mind, I briefly review my work for the Stage 7 AusStage ARC LIEF project surveying the Australian diasporic artist and director of the Melaka Arts and Performance Festival, Tony Ding Chai Yap, who I characterise as a butoh dancer by merit of his conception of being moved by forces which emanate from outside of the subject. Tony calls this “trance dance.” With the assistance of Tony and Sean Weatherly, we have designed a web gallery to provide a taste of these allusions and links in space (movements in career; artistic exchanges; cultural exchanges), as well as corporeal ones (recurrent poses which evoke butoh and other forms), as well as historical developments over time.

Reticulated design and the scenographic ‘logic’ of mainstage theatre: mapping the aesthetic co-ordinates of the Director

Margaret Hamilton

In 2011 Australian theatre critic Alison Croggon described the design aesthetic of a Schaubühne production of Hedda Gabler, directed by Thomas Ostermeier and presented at the Melbourne Festival as familiar on the basis of work by Benedict Andrews and other directors in Australia. It is an observation that raises the question of ‘stages’ of influence in the form of festivals and projects situating ‘persons-in-relation’ in theatre medium. Is it possible to map the development of clusters of influence and in doing so, address the implications of directions in stagecraft for the aesthetic ‘logic’ of main stage theatre?

This paper has its genesis in datasets held in AusStage and is indebted to computational research techniques deployed by Jonathan O’Brien in so far as it uses SQL to manage the information in the database and Kumu software to generate graphs of this data as an interactive mode of visualising relationships and connections and trace sites of aesthetic cross-pollination. It emerges from a consideration of Simon Stone as part of a broader theatrical reticulation defined by Andrews and Barrie Kosky and seeks to contribute to discussion of the politics of directorial ‘signatures’ embedded in and indebted to networks of artistic interaction.

People, Places, and Radical Exchanges: Visualizing Circus Oz Data

Kirsten Stevens

A circus is many things. A series of acts, a collection of tours, a variety of shows staged in multiple locations, an assortment of individuals drawn together who make it all possible. As these elements merge, they produce on the one hand the magic of the circus as performance – a spectacle that is a source of memories and wonderment for audiences. But they also produce data. Records of show dates, cast-lists, locations, tour schedules, and more. These data perform the circus in their own way, offering insight into the collaborations, activity, and organisational trends that shape the circus company over time.
Presenting findings from the project “Circus Oz: People, Places, Radical Exchanges”, part of the ARC-funded AusStage LIEF 7, this paper explores the cultural data produced by Circus Oz over its more than forty-year history. Combining existing Circus Oz datasets with significant new data spanning the company’s history and archives, this paper offers insights made accessible through the visualization of a near-comprehensive dataset of Australia’s oldest contemporary circus company. Focusing on the people and performances that have shaped Circus Oz, this paper interrogates the power of data visualizations to offer meaningful insight into the story of circus in Australia.

4.00pm – 4.30pm

Afternoon tea

Provided by AusStage

4.30pm – 5.30pm

Keynote 1: New York as Node – How clusters of culture power ecologies of practice

Oskar Eustis in conversation with Chris Hay

In this keynote conversation, Oskar Eustis reflects on how the theatre scene of New York City functions as a cluster of culture, and as a key note in an international performance network. With the regular movements between off-Broadway and Broadway houses, and the touring houses in Brooklyn and Manhattan, a vibrant ecology of practice is sustained by a hierarchised clustering of venues. Influential venues like the Public Theater host their own festivals, too, which further position them as nodes of influence. Participants will have the opportunity to ask their own questions of Oskar Eustis during the session.

Oskar Eustis has served as the artistic director of The Public Theater since 2005, after serving as the artistic director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI from 1994 to 2005. Throughout his career, Oskar has been dedicated to the development of new work that speaks to the great issues of our time and has worked with countless artists in pursuit of that aim, including Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Richard Nelson, Rinne Groff, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Lisa Kron. He is currently a professor at NYU and has held professorships at UCLA, Middlebury College, and Brown University.

9.30am – 10.30am

Workshop 2: Visualising Festival Data in Australasia

Jonathan Bollen, Sarah Thomasson & James Wenley

Cultural databases like AusStage enable performance scholars and festival stakeholders to explore clusters of culture in data-oriented and relational ways to identify trends within festival programming and assess the impact of events on broader ecologies over time. Fully realising these opportunities within performing arts research requires reframing what it means to work in data-oriented ways as creative artists and performance scholars while engaging with the digital tools of our day. To support researchers and artists interested in utilising data and developing skills in data analysis through visualization, this workshop will launch the “Performing Data in Australasia” project. This project is a collaboration between Theatre Aotearoa and AusStage that aims to bring together a trans-national community to provide peer support through an online seminar series and hopefully prompt further collaborations.
Using Adelaide festival data as an illustrative example, we will demonstrate AusStage’s new export function that makes working with data more accessible to a wider range of users and showcase visualisations that can be developed as a result. Both Theatre Aotearoa and AusStage are long-running, data-oriented, collaborative projects committed to documenting the diversity of performing arts and festivalisation in our region. By asking broader questions of festival data, we have an opportunity, with this workshop and series, to do more with cultural datasets. There will be an opportunity to export your own datasets and trial some visualisation software as part of the session so bring your laptop to participate.

10.30am – 11.00am

Morning tea

Provided by AusStage

11.00am – 12.30pm

Papers 3: Data, Themes & Categories

Enhanced representation of d/Deaf, disabled, and neurodiverse artists in AusStage

Bree Hadley & Morgan Batch

This presentation reports on the continuing work updating the contributor category in AusStage to represent d/Deaf, disabled, and neurodiverse artists and their work.

Tracing Environmental Themes through AusStage

Peta Tait

The AusStage data base has the potential to be a useful source of information about themes in Australian theatre and drama over time. This paper is about research asking what does AusStage reveal about environmental themes in the twentieth century and what are the limitations of its content? As part of an ARC funded project, ‘Towards an Australian Ecological Theatre’, I investigated clusters of themes and settings in the theatrical records of AusStage starting with keyword searches in July 2022. I found several identifiable trends that can be considered to reflect shifts and preoccupations within culture more broadly. The thematic clusters were sampled and supplemented as part of LIEF AusStage 7 – and these will form part of an exhibition visualization outcome in the future.

Visualising Australian Digital Performance

Bernadette Cochrane

The cinematic and digital screening of theatrical performances indicates intensifying demand for cultural exchange and access. Obscured by massive viewing figures and even more significant amounts of money, and the epistemological and ontological quagmire of notions of liveness, are questions relating to access and democratisation, neo-colonialism, genre-formation, community-generation, representation, and reception.
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic and with the subsequent closure of theatres, Australia had approximately five productions able to be streamed, broadcast, or disseminated digitally. By 2022, the digital theatrical landscape had changed dramatically. Via a completely new data set, this paper outlines some of the changes and impacts of the Australian pivot to the live-to-digital paradigm.

12.30pm – 1.30pm

Lunch

Participants to source

1.30pm – 3.00pm

Papers 4: Data, Finance & Policy

AusStage Follows the Money: an introduction to the new financial table

Julie Holledge, Tiffany Knight, Sean Weatherly & Alex Vickery-Howe

AusStage is the first Australian cultural dataset to store aesthetic and financial records in the same relational database. The new AusStage financial table (built through LIEF 7) allows researchers to visualise the flow of public, corporate, and private money coming from subsidy, sponsorship, and investment to the performing arts sector. The first part of this paper will provide an account of the design of the AusStage financial table and the second part will report on its use in a pilot research project that has integrated financial and event, organisation, and contributor data from the last ten years of performing arts production in South Australia. It focuses on the flow of government subsidy through SA performing arts from 2011-2022 and used all the tables in the database to trace public subsidy to organisations, venues, artists that resulted in ten years of performing arts production.

Unearthing the hidden data: On the individualisation of arts entrepreneurship

Rea Dennis & Erica Charalambous

We report preliminary findings from the research project “Invisible labour and cost in Dance and Theatre Productions: Investigating in-kind contribution” part of ARC Austage7: The International Breakthrough. The paper considers the experiences of contemporary dance and theatre practitioners who participated in the focus groups and online survey we devised to explores the areas of unpaid labour and other non-financial costs associated with mounting works, that are borne by individual artists and artist-led companies in Melbourne Australia. We reflect on how bearing this unpaid load is a hidden economy and that impacts on the artist and the sector in relation to sustainability, wellbeing, career trajectory, artistic excellence, and discuss the resultant negative experience and trauma that embed within artists’ bodies and impact the making and presenting of work. We question an industry premised on an economy that rewards all kinds of investment in the public good with a living wage, yet artists are expected to work without adequate pay, and where the business models that work are the commercial production companies who report profits – the only people who are expected to do more for less are the artists.

AusStage & Cultural Policy

Julian Meyrick & Caitlyn Fields

Our subproject sought to identify and incorporate into the AusStage database, key Australian arts and cultural policies from 1945 to the present day. As this is an extensive and complex area of policymaking, the scope of discovery was limited to significant federal documents and reports that have shaped attitudes and public assistance to Australian arts and culture at a national level. A two-stage process was used. In the first stage, a search for cultural policies/reports was undertaken, and criteria for selecting key documents developed. In the second, over 50 items were uploaded to the AusStage database. Summaries and search terms were appended with the goal of maximizing functional searchability and incorporating the documents as a foundation for live performance researchers to build on. In a nascent third stage, some work was done connecting cultural policies to real-world outcomes to demonstrate one possible use of this AusStage data. Two documents were selected: Creative Nation (1994) and the Nugent Inquiry (2000). The choice of these policies was due to their readily identifiable short-term impacts.

3.00pm – 3.30pm

Afternoon tea

Provided by AusStage

3.30pm – 4.30pm

Workshop 3: Comparative Arts Analysis – ACD-E

Rachel Fensham & Justin Munoz

The ACD-Engine has been building an understanding of the information architecture of several distinctive Australian databases across visual and performing arts, architecture and design, and has begun comparative analysis of trends within a selection of aggregated datasets. Through a series of multivariant visualisations we will take a deep dive across some statistical and categorical associations latent within two strands of the Engine’s work. The first relates to analysis regarding gender and careers; and the second, how selected data (from AusStage and the DAAO) intersects across other platforms and external data sources. These ‘live’ datasets enable us to reveal international networks for Australian cultural data.

4.30pm – 5.30pm

Keynote 2: Adelaide, Festival City – Constructing and Contesting Public Space

Sarah Thomasson

The ACD-Engine has been building an understanding of the information architecture of several distinctive Australian databases across visual and performing arts, architecture and design, and has begun comparative analysis of trends within a selection of aggregated datasets. Through a series of multivariant visualisations we will take a deep dive across some statistical and categorical associations latent within two strands of the Engine’s work. The first relates to analysis regarding gender and careers; and the second, how selected data (from AusStage and the DAAO) intersects across other platforms and external data sources. These ‘live’ datasets enable us to reveal international networks for Australian cultural data.

In this presentation, I interrogate performative events in the recent history of Adelaide’s festivals to show how the festival city place myth is constructed and renewed even as it is contested by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Beyond the local context, Adelaide’s festivals also exist within national and regional networks to share touring costs and co-produce new work. I conclude by demonstrating how cultural databases and data visualisation can help to shift the scale of analysis from individual festivals to these regional networks to better interrogate the cultural impact of festivalisation. Cultural datasets enable festivals to be studied through multiple dimensions and interdisciplinary means to move beyond characterisation as recurring time-bound events and reductive measures that focus solely on economic impact.

Followed by the book launch of The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide by Sarah Thomasson.