This inquiry is a two-tongued performance as research project asking &quotWhy was the voice of the Sirens deadly?" and &quotHow can the Sirens inform contemporary feminist theatre praxis?". The two questions in constant dialectic have been explored in a written dissertation as well as in a one-hour original and ensemble performance called The Quivering: a Matter of Life and Death. Analysing references in mythology, art and history, the written component suggests how the Siren's sonic qualities are manifest in distinct cultural icons and embodied by actual female performers. Four Siren vocalities are identified and theorised: The Monster vocality is evidenced in the figure of the femme fatale; the Lamenter exists in traditional funerary singers and contemporary torch songs; the sound of the Diva is heard in the opera queen; and the Lullaby Maker acoustics oscillate between the banter of Mother Goose and the 'red hot mamas' of the blues. Pursuing what is deadly about each of these embodied voices, the thesis articulates why female sound, like the Siren song of knowledge, is so ambivalently received - its evocation of otherness (Monster), liminality (Lamenter), jouissance (Diva) and contra-diction (Lullaby Maker) is both feared and revered. These four vocalities have grown in and out of The Quivering, a performance odyssey that has interrogated aesthetic, content, characterisation, narrative and devising practice, all with an ear to the Siren's 'deadly' sonority. Subverting portrayals of death as a woman and a taboo, its comic-tragic heroines exist in a liminal landscape as lamenters who confront and facilitate the audience's death passage. In counterpoint to Homeric legacy, it has been designed as an open text, which, combined with its heightened physicality and musicality, make for an 'other' aesthetic or contemporary Siren 'song'. The Quivering is pitched at the same tone as the distilled Siren vocalities or 'blue notes', and, as a performance as research project, also re-sounds provocatively within traditional academic discourse. The 'deadliness' of the female voice, in myth, in theory and in performance thus resides in its dissolution of logos and certainty. It quivers with the pleasure and trauma of a corporeal jouissance that exceeds narrative and linguistic frames with its full-bodied, acoustic and imagistic resonance.

This study addresses the central question of how Brisbane's La Boite Theatre negotiated its transformation from an amateur repertory society to an established professional company and, despite set-backs and crises, survived, changed and developed in an unbroken line of theatrical activity from its genesis in1925 to 2003. To answer the question, La Boite's history is surveyed within its three status modes of amateur, 'pro-am', and professional. Effective artistic and organizational leadership and a set of key manifestations of effective leadership are identified as crucial to the company's successful transformational journey. Such a transformation is a distinctive achievement in Australian repertory theatre history and, in exploring it, this study makes an original and important contribution to the history of Australian theatre organizations, very few of which have been the subject of scholarly research.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In this thesis, I examine the role performance plays in the adversarial criminal jury trial. The initial motivation behind this inquiry was the pervasiveness of a metaphor: why is the courtroom so frequently compared to a theatre? Most writings on this topic see the courtroom as bearing what might be termed a cosmetic resemblance to a theatre, making comparisons, for instance, between elements of costume and staging. I pursue a different line of argument. I argue that performance is not simply an embellishment of the trial process but rather a constitutive feature of the criminal jury trial. It is by means of what I call the performance of tradition that the trial acquires its social significance as a (supposedly) timeless bulwark of authority and impartiality. In the first three chapters I show that popular usage of the term ‘theatrical’ (whether it be to describe the practice of a flamboyant lawyer, or a misbehaving defendant) is frequently laden with pejorative connotations and invariably (though usually only implicitly) invokes comparison to a presupposed authentic or natural way of behaviour (‘not-performing’). Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu I argue that, whatever legal agents see as appropriate trial conduct (behaviour that is ‘not-performing’), they are misrecognising the performative accomplishments and demands required of both legal agents and laypersons in the trial. This performance constructs and maintains a gap between legal practitioners and laypersons which is essential to maintaining the status of the legal profession, and which continually positions the trial in legal and popular belief. I then look at specific moments of ‘anxiety’ where alterations to traditional procedure provoke debate as to the otherwise unnoticed or unarticulated value of live performance. In Chapter 4, I examine the growth of the private advocacy training industry that frequently positions lawyers as actors. Resistance to the idea of acting demonstrates the tainted status of performance terminology as well as legal agents’ belief that lawyers are acting naturally. I argue instead that lawyers have always been trained in acting: an habituated performance style I term legal naturalism. In Chapter 5, I examine the television broadcasting of trials. Some legal agents argue that broadcasting risks ‘theatricalising’ the trial—causing participants to ‘act up’. However, this overlooks the fact that the court has a long history as a source of popular entertainment. I argue that resistance to broadcasting also stems from a reluctance to remit control of the trial to external producers. Broadcasting invites greater scrutiny into a process that if not always fair, needs to be believed in as fair and has historically been tightly self-regulated by the legal field, through its reliance on live performance’s ‘essential’ quality—its inability to be captured and subsequent disappearance. In Chapter 6, I examine the debates around CCTV testimony, which demonstrate a consistency of belief in live or ‘face-to-face’ confrontation to produce juridical ‘Truth’ that can be traced back over 800 years. The final chapter of this thesis examines sexual assault trials. This chapter brings together all of these sources of anxiety. Although often termed ‘exceptional’, sexual assault trials highlight how essential live performance is to manufacturing the authority of ‘The Law’ through the weight given to demeanour assessment, and because these trials make visible the sustained symbolic violence characteristic of adversarial criminal trials that is particularly traumatic for sexual assault complainants. Examination of sexual assault trials also reveals the double-edged position of performance in the trial. The exploitation of the symbolic value of live performance is the source of much trauma, yet the performance of tradition is also essential to maintaining popular belief in the adversarial criminal jury trial.

Parsi theatre, which emerged in Bombay in the mid-nineteenth century, was a specifically ‘modern’ form of performing art that was informed by factors as diverse (but historically interrelated) as the British imperialisation of India, the development of capitalism in India, the Parsis’ Persian historical heritage and the wider cultural environment of India. Assuming a public cultural role that was well out of proportion to the Parsis’ extreme minority status in India, Parsi theatre soon transcended its origins in the Parsi community and became an important generic category of popular public entertainment in late-imperial South Asia. This generic categorisation has led to many conceptualisations of ‘Parsi theatre’ which ignore the Parsi origins of Parsi theatre altogether. However, the specifically Parsi origins of Parsi theatre, in the public space which Parsis played a major part in constructing in nineteenth century Bombay, enable us, while at the same time avoiding an excessively ‘ethnographic’ approach, to identify the originative characteristics of Parsi theatre that inform its powerful legacy in South Asian cultural history. In particular, it is the characteristic ‘theatricality’ of Parsi theatre that enables it to act as a mediated representation of self-identity in the public space of modern South Asia. / The eclectic cultural economy of Parsi theatre has given it a ‘hybrid’ guise, enabling it to frame many different aspects of public space in modern South Asia. The continuing legacy of Parsi theatre in this respect can be seen in its cultural successor, the popular Indian cinema, in which a publicly-mediated representation of ‘community as nation’ has been constructed. However, the ‘hybridity’ of Parsi theatre is a publicly-mediated representation of specific historical conditions such as imperialism and capitalism, informed by Parsi theatre’s characteristic sense of theatricality, rather than a representation of a hybrid sense of self-identity (whether of the Parsi community itself or of the broader South Asian community/nation). This enables us to develop a critique of the notion of ‘hybridity’ as it has been denoted in postcolonial theory, and to question the intimate, essential ‘hybridisation of self’ that marks the postcolonial conception of the term. Postcolonial theory’s emphasis on the process and experience of ‘colonisation’ is countered in this critique by the processes of ‘imperialisation’ and ‘capitalisation’ and the active response to them on the part of Parsi theatre’s community. In this way, a greater sense of subjectivity and agency can be attributed to the historical actors in question, and the resilience of the South Asian cultural economy in the face of ‘global’ historical processes can be duly recognised.

Master of Education (Research) / Using arts-informed/narrative inquiry as its methodology, this thesis examines the creation of a performance text using verbatim theatre techniques. The play, Remembering One Day in December, evolved from the interweaving of personal narratives taken from volunteer participants, who were impacted by the 1999 Glenbrook Rail Disaster, when a crowded commuter train collided with the almost stationary Indian Pacific. It also includes documentary extracts from the first of three Public Inquiries into the event. From multiple perspectives, yet with shared motifs, the play tells the story of the day, the disillusionment with anticipated trauma support and concludes with the participants’ slow but inspiring journeys towards healing. The thesis also explores the increasing interest in performance as a research tool, because of its capacity to comprehensively present a multiplicity of complex truths. Also at this time of centralized media ownership and homogenized, reductionist media content, this thesis also suggests that the verbatim theatre form, so particularly dependent on complex cultural narratives, could be evolving as a bridge between mainstream stages and community concerns, where community can be either global or regional and some of its concerns are no longer the province of news and current affairs. Lastly this thesis offers the researcher an opportunity to reflexively examine the editing process in the construction of the play text. It describes the researcher’s journey from interviewer to story custodian and analyses how this shift in relationship affected the text’s content and structure, where the intention to deliver an authentic and compelling piece of verbatim theatre remained paramount.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In this thesis, I examine the role performance plays in the adversarial criminal jury trial. The initial motivation behind this inquiry was the pervasiveness of a metaphor: why is the courtroom so frequently compared to a theatre? Most writings on this topic see the courtroom as bearing what might be termed a cosmetic resemblance to a theatre, making comparisons, for instance, between elements of costume and staging. I pursue a different line of argument. I argue that performance is not simply an embellishment of the trial process but rather a constitutive feature of the criminal jury trial. It is by means of what I call the performance of tradition that the trial acquires its social significance as a (supposedly) timeless bulwark of authority and impartiality. In the first three chapters I show that popular usage of the term ‘theatrical’ (whether it be to describe the practice of a flamboyant lawyer, or a misbehaving defendant) is frequently laden with pejorative connotations and invariably (though usually only implicitly) invokes comparison to a presupposed authentic or natural way of behaviour (‘not-performing’). Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu I argue that, whatever legal agents see as appropriate trial conduct (behaviour that is ‘not-performing’), they are misrecognising the performative accomplishments and demands required of both legal agents and laypersons in the trial. This performance constructs and maintains a gap between legal practitioners and laypersons which is essential to maintaining the status of the legal profession, and which continually positions the trial in legal and popular belief. I then look at specific moments of ‘anxiety’ where alterations to traditional procedure provoke debate as to the otherwise unnoticed or unarticulated value of live performance. In Chapter 4, I examine the growth of the private advocacy training industry that frequently positions lawyers as actors. Resistance to the idea of acting demonstrates the tainted status of performance terminology as well as legal agents’ belief that lawyers are acting naturally. I argue instead that lawyers have always been trained in acting: an habituated performance style I term legal naturalism. In Chapter 5, I examine the television broadcasting of trials. Some legal agents argue that broadcasting risks ‘theatricalising’ the trial—causing participants to ‘act up’. However, this overlooks the fact that the court has a long history as a source of popular entertainment. I argue that resistance to broadcasting also stems from a reluctance to remit control of the trial to external producers. Broadcasting invites greater scrutiny into a process that if not always fair, needs to be believed in as fair and has historically been tightly self-regulated by the legal field, through its reliance on live performance’s ‘essential’ quality—its inability to be captured and subsequent disappearance. In Chapter 6, I examine the debates around CCTV testimony, which demonstrate a consistency of belief in live or ‘face-to-face’ confrontation to produce juridical ‘Truth’ that can be traced back over 800 years. The final chapter of this thesis examines sexual assault trials. This chapter brings together all of these sources of anxiety. Although often termed ‘exceptional’, sexual assault trials highlight how essential live performance is to manufacturing the authority of ‘The Law’ through the weight given to demeanour assessment, and because these trials make visible the sustained symbolic violence characteristic of adversarial criminal trials that is particularly traumatic for sexual assault complainants. Examination of sexual assault trials also reveals the double-edged position of performance in the trial. The exploitation of the symbolic value of live performance is the source of much trauma, yet the performance of tradition is also essential to maintaining popular belief in the adversarial criminal jury trial.

This thesis investigates the representation, positioning, and valuing of young people and youth-specific performance in the field of cultural production in Australia in the 1990s. Using specific case-studies, this thesis argues that young people and youth-specific performance are being represented, positioned, and valued in a variety of contradictory ways as a result of a number of significant contemporary factors: namely, a prevalence of 'new generation' discourse and an attendant generationalism, a growing critical recognition of young people's 'grounded aesthetics', and existing anxieties surrounding the economic future of Australia's arts industry. This is an unstable situation for youth-specific performance, contrasting from earlier periods in Australia's theatre history when young people were positioned principally in terms of their need for 'development' (education and training) or their potential contribution to ongoing 'progression'. This thesis considers this contemporary situation in relation to issues of access and power for young people in the changed social and cultural conditions of the 1990s. The introductory chapter provides a critical background to the main issues presented in the thesis: the concepts of 'youth' and 'culture', the social and cultural characteristics of young people's lives in the 1990s, the rise of generationalist discourse, and the anxious state of the Australian arts industry. The 'institutional' site of state theatre is then taken as a beginning case study to examine the positioning of young people and youth-specific programs in 'official' cultural environments. It argues that anxious plans for the future survival of state 'flagship' companies are positioning young people and youth-specific programs in predominantly generationalist ways, using 'new generation' discourse to mask often conservative approaches. Chapter One begins with a history of Magpie Theatre (a former youth-specific company attached to the State Theatre Company of South Australia) which reflects some of the major priorities of youth-specific theatre of the last twenty years. By way of contrast, the Sydney Theatre Company's recent attempts to reposition young people and youth-specific work in the 1990s are discussed in Chapter Two. This chapter shows how the company's developmental aims and processing of new work are achieved in 'new generation' programs that strictly control young people's contribution to the company's future. Both chapters help to demonstrate the main conceptual shift in youth-specific theatre in the 1990s from 'developmentalism' to 'difference' (with reference to the concomitant growth of drama-in-education in schools), while at the same time alluding to its varying effect. Chapter Three argues that festivals, as volatile sites of cultural production, magnify the wider cultural field's 'stake of struggles': particularly, the struggles to equitably value young people's diverse contributions to developments in the cultural field, both as cultural 'innovators' and cultural 'preservers'. Centred on an interrelated critique of access, this chapter discusses the various motives and priorities of three recent youth-specific arts festivals in terms of their representation and valuing of young people and their work: the Take Over 97 National Festival for Young People, the Stage X Event, and the Loud National Media Festival of Youth Culture and the Arts. Chapter Four considers a site primarily and explicitly concerned with issues of access, representation, and value. This chapter examines in detail the 'self-narratives' of two youth-specific community-based performances, whereby young people's access to 'grounded' modes of cultural expression resulted in innovative cultural performance and signalled a regenerated social politics of community theatre. The chapter examines how Skate Girl Space by the Hereford Sisters and Zen Che by the Ningi Connection utilised young people's 'grounded aesthetics' of video performance to address young people's necessary negotiation with risk and individualisation in the late 1990s. Both projects counteracted public generationalist discourses, and challenged and reinscribed the conventions of gender performance and 'youth'. The final chapter considers the positioning of young people and youth-specific arts in Australian cultural policy, arguing that youth-specific cultural production rarely fits into the characteristic modes of arts production valorised by statistical frameworks for arts industry evaluation. The chapter calls for more open approaches whereby practice might inform policy which recognises the interconnected social, cultural and economic regimes of value that youth-specific work engages in. This thesis draws from theatre and performance studies, sociology, youth studies, cultural studies, and cultural policy studies.

This dissertation aims to provide an analysis of mainstream Australian playwriting at the turn of the 21st Century. It will argue that mainstream theatre in the 1990s and early 2000s in many ways reflects the concurrent national political developments, in particular the revision of many of the dominant ideals of previous eras, such as those of the sixties. In this dissertation, I will attempt to outline briefly some of the hallmarks of the theatre of the New Wave, and their relation to the broader social movements occurring in Australia at the time. I will trace the beginnings of disillusionment and revising of these ideals in the late seventies and early eighties. The majority of the argument will then discuss the ways in which early nineties theatre engages with and frequently rebuts these earlier ideals, just as nineties politics saw a revision of many of the ideals of the sixties in society as a whole. I will argue that in the latter nineties, mainstream playwrights begin to reverse this conservative shift, reinstating a number of the ideals of the earlier period. I will demonstrate that Australian mainstream theatre at the turn of the century is integrally related to the politics of the society of the time, and that mainstream theatre demonstrates both radical and conservative tendencies through the period under consideration.

This thesis analyses the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theatre company, seeking to investigate its relation to broader issues of gender in contemporary Japan. Takarazuka has simultaneously reinforced and challenged the gender norms of Japanese society for the past ninety years, and indeed provides insights into the construction of those very norms. Takarazuka takes images of masculinity and femininity from mainstream society, the media, arts and popular culture, in both Japan and other countries, and reconstructs them according to its own distinct notions of how gender should be portrayed, both on and off its stage, not only by its performers, but also by fans and creative staff. Unlike in other single-sex theatrical genres featuring cross-dressing, such as Kabuki, gender is the essential focus of every performance in Takarazuka. Takarazuka’s practices show that gender is not inherent, but must be learned through observation, imitation and direct instruction, and that various versions of male gender can be assumed for specific purposes, even temporarily, by biological females (and vice versa). Takarazuka’s relationship with gender extends well beyond the stage itself; and one of the ways in which this thesis goes beyond other studies is its focus on the whole life-course of Takarazuka performers, including their girlhood and post-retirement years. The relationship with gender issues encompasses fans as well. The popularity of Takarazuka’s male-role players (otokoyaku), in particular, indicates that the manipulation of gender within a theatrical context has great appeal for audiences. However, many Takarazuka fans, especially female fans of the otokoyaku, evidently not only passively consume the artistry of gender impersonation on its stage, but also actively contribute to its production by communicating their expectations about gender performance to the actors and the Takarazuka administration, and by encouraging each performer to sustain her stage gender off-stage when she appears in public, at least to a certain extent. The emotional investment of fans in supporting Takarazuka is often intense and long-lasting, and their attraction to Takarazuka clearly is not necessarily based solely upon sexuality, as other studies have proposed, but involves broader issues of gender. The influence of Takarazuka derives not only from its performances, but also from many other aspects of its organisation and gender-linked practices. Takarazuka’s existence and details about its members and various unique practices are widely publicised by the media. Its influence upon the social construction of gender in Japan extends beyond the confines of its theatres, its versions of gender roles affecting the lives of many in the general populace apart from those directly involved in performing in, creating or supporting its productions.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Music. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-172).