Over the past three decades, the plays and productions of Theatre de la Vieille 17 have made significant contributions to French Canadian children's theatre. Their productions embrace a fantastical and imaginative narrative that make them accessible to most audiences. As much as this company shows a remarkable openness to the world, it maintains strong ties to the Franco-Ontarian theatre milieu. This thesis examines key elements that have contributed to La Vieille 17's continual commitment to children's theatre as well as ways in which its productions and policy making have resulted in its increasing artistic and financial success. This study begins by looking at La Vieille 17's three most significant plays: Le Nez, Mentire, and Meta. This analysis takes into consideration the narrative of each play, production elements, co-producers and collaborators, funding, the scope of their tour, and awards and recognition. Each of these aspects contribute to giving these productions a broader world view and help to establish La Vieille 17 as a leading producer of children's theatre. The second part of this thesis analyses key moments during the company's history as well as moments in which it has acted as a common front with other Franco-Ontarian theatre companies. Both of these activities have shaped La Vieille 17's children theatre programming and have led the company to create a successful model in which to produce their works.

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This study analyses the role of the family as a metaphorical, thematic and structural device within the field of recent Australian drama. The family, as presented by Australian dramatists, is fragmented and incoherent. The impossibility to forge coherence is linked directly to the circumstances of contemporary Australia’s genesis as a colonial and postcolonial society, and the subsequent encouragement of a monolithic national culture through the conscious and unconscious suppression of alternative voices and histories. As a site of hierarchical power, the family supplies a convenient trope for the justification of particular paradigms of cultural dominance. At the same time, however, family is also a potent source of identity, and therefore becomes an important site of cultural recuperation as well. Consequently, it is a central assumption of this thesis that the familial context, as deployed by Australian dramatists, is both ambivalent and politically freighted. Performance plays a critical role in ‘liberating’ occluded and pathologised subjectivities from ideological exile and challenging embedded power structures. By its very nature, performance resists conscription into the totalising project that aims to validate the dominant culture’s hegemonic position. By embodying and reclaiming experience, all performance becomes political to some extent, and therefore intrinsically subversive; the resultant enactment of alternative histories not only serves to interrogate the hegemonic culture, but also empowers those ‘communities of silence’ rendered powerless under its discursive weight. The notion of family carries with it numerous attendant images including those of ‘home’ and ‘the child’. The fragmentary nature of the Australian dramatic family both complicates, and is complicated by, notions of home. So too do issues of familial succession and national capital surface to problematise concepts of childhood and establish it as a site of deep social and cultural anxiety. While this study is primarily concerned with the broader topic of family in recent Australian drama, it is the recurring figure of the child as the focus of the family, along with connected concepts of home and nation – family’s discursive parallel – that ultimately provides this study’s unifying thrust. This study covers the approximate period from 1975 to 2005, from the commencement of what is often termed the ‘New Wave’ of Australian drama, when smaller local companies and emerging dramatists began to gain an artistic credibility and popularity that would influence the conception and reception of subsequent drama. Some twenty-three works are considered in depth in this study, spread across four specific foci that contextualise the family thematic: ‘big house’ drama, which encompasses plays by Alex Buzo, Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell and Beatrix Christian; Aboriginal theatre, which includes works by Robert Merritt, Jack Davis, Jane Harrison, Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, and Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell; the drama of abject and appropriated youth, which examines selected works by Matt Cameron, Alison Lyssa, Michael Gow and Nick Enright; and the theatre of the displaced, which focuses on plays by Tes Lyssiotis, Ben Ellis and Christine Evans, as well as ‘autobiographical’ stories written and performed by Dina Panozzo and Anna Yen and ‘verbatim’ pieces dramatised by the activist theatre companies Sidetrack and version 1.0. The works considered in this study therefore represent a range of performance styles, forms and methodologies, in keeping with the overall dramatic tenor of the period.

“You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational” Joe Orton 1 It may be argued that a historically accepted model of an academic career begins with having completed a PhD and in so doing identifying a body of theory that will inform and constitute one’s practical academic work. While it may be an accepted model it does not necessarily take precedence as the only model. The relationship between theory and practice is symbiotic and as such it is possible, and indeed at times desirable, that practice inform theory. It is not advisable to be solely operating from a position of theory when making creative work; the risk is far too great. The gravitational force of theory can all too easily disturb the “fragile innocence” of creativity. Pulled and constrained by the logic of theory the work risks becoming too didactic and its creativity sacrificed for the sake of rationalism…a symptom almost diagnostic of our culture. I appreciate that the term “creative” is open to a plethora of readings, each with their own cogent claim to usage. When I employ the term I am referring to a particular type of decision-making process involved in the solution of problems. I will argue that a creative decision differs from other types of decisions [such as, practical or scientific] in the way the resultant solution of the problem remains open to a greater number of potential readings. I will also argue that it is precisely in those heuristic moments of potential impasse, often associated with a problem’s resolution, where creativity hangs out. In any creative venture, I have always been guided by the importance and significance of doing2…in the doing is the theory. This is not meant to dismiss theory but simply to see it in much the same way as when we see objects in our peripheral vision. Just as objects in our peripheral vision do not take their place in our visual field3, theory [for me] participates in creative processes by subconsciously serving as an early guiding system that helps monitor the work. In this age of information we are no longer innocent of theory -it is ineluctable. What is crucial is that we have a command of theory in order that we may go through it and regain our creative innocence. If we do not, we only achieve an artificial innocence born of enthusiasm, exuberance and imprecision. Creative innocence is re-found in doing. This assertion conceives of theory as participating as part of a creative subconscious and goes someway towards explaining the sudden epiphany of understanding that is frequently associated with prolonged and intense work, or the immense pleasure at retrospectively recognising the theory that seemed to have informed one’s work without being conscious of it -as if the theoretical component had always been there. This phenomenon is of fundamental concern to my thesis, especially when considering the theatre productions that constitute my creative oeuvre. Upon close inspection, my works ultimately reveal that the defining distance between a visceral creative decision [one whose manifestation is immediately felt as apposite] and one that is conceptualised as the illustration of a theory, is not that great…I just happen to begin working outside of the brackets of theoretical narration. Throughout my thesis I will refer to all visuals as images but I will argue that there are specific types of images, namely signs, symbols and metaphors. “In language the term ‘image’ can imply more than a verbal description of a purely visual experience; it can also mean the metaphoric, ornamental, rhetorical figurative use of language as opposed to its literal use.” 4 For the surrealists “image” meant more than the representation5 of an external thing in the material world, it also meant the revelation of an internal mental state, a psychological verity occluded from consciousness. “Images [of this kind] were incandescent flashes linking two elements belonging to categories that are so far removed from each other that reason would fail to connect them and that require a momentary suspension of the critical attitude in order for them to be brought together.” 6 Having already built a body of practical work [spanning thirty years] the challenge was to see if it was possible to identify a coherent theory that consistently functioned as the catalyst of the work - albeit disparate in its nature. The analytical process proved to be the reverse of that which may be observed in the historically accepted model of academic discourse…where the process is cumulative. In this instance the process was deductive -a forensic assignment akin to tracing the diverse creative elements to their creative source or motivation. The venture proved illuminating in much the same way as when one is asked to crystallise a complex theoretical argument; you have to reinvent the argument in a way that helps to simplify its complexity without attenuating its integrity -a complexity that is well known to you but that eludes the uninitiated reader. Whenever I try and think about my theatre practice I am vexed -particularly when I filter my own experiences and try and extract the meanings that seem genuinely inherent in them. At first glance it is satisfying because of a sense of coherence or pattern in a whole host of discrete events. However a closer inspection quickly reveals the fractal complexity of the pattern and demands a reappraisal of how we see and decipher it. Any attempt to understand its disparate nature by investigating one part in isolation from the whole proves initially unsatisfying and finally futile, for each part seems to be informed by and refer to other parts, as if participating in a greater organising principle; a principle that resists traditional cartography; one that is best seen as one sees the earth from outer space.7 When the earth is seen from outer space one becomes aware of the greater organising principle [the universe] within which it functions. Similarly it is only when the topology of my work is seen from a distance that its coherence is apparent…the further away one is, the more clearly one recognises its constituent parts. “Despite our desire to lose ourselves in the living depths of a work, we are constrained to distance ourselves from it in order to speak of it. Why, then not deliberately establish a distance that will reveal to us, in a panoramic perspective, the surroundings with which the work is organically linked?” 8 When I am in the middle of a theatre production, I have only the slightest idea of how it will end; I trust in the doing, and at the end I am always surprised by what I have created. Ambiguity and paradox and consequently indeterminacy ultimately emerge as the common features of my work; they appear as sign posts that mark a way of finally mapping it. Each individual piece of work remains coherently intact despite its seemingly obscure coalescence with others, but it is when the works intersect at these points of commonality that one may observe the greater organising matrix. “The phenomenological world is not a pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears.” 9 “If the most unrelated things share a place, time, or odd similarity, there develop wonderful unities and peculiar relationships –and one thing reminds us of everything.” Novalis 10

Masters Research - Master of Creative Arts (Drama) / This thesis traces the process of creating a music-theatre piece. Initial investigations into solo performance, community theatre and popular political theatre prove to be unworkable and frustrating. The embryonic story begins to emerge from readings into human trafficking in South-east Asia. The research travels from traditional political theatre, through Dada, Surrealism and Brechtian techniques towards a postmodern / post-dramatic approach to theatre that sees boundaries between performative traditions dissolve and hybrid forms come into play. The work of Robert Wilson serves as a model of subversive theatre. Tensions between form and content shape the metamorphosis of the piece. Radical techniques inspire the work although the piece eventually adopts a relatively conventional narrative structure. The postmodern distrust of language and the embrace of a wider definition as to what constitutes politics lead the story into the field of new music-theatre. The composition utilises obsolete technologies to create an electronic soundtrack. Images and a scenario are drawn from research and the subconscious. The blueprint of soundtrack and script offers interpretative scope for director / choreographer / performers and in this sense the creative process is incomplete. The author concludes that in the process of creating the piece, the story dictated its own form. Further exploration would investigate where to perform the piece to achieve maximum political impact.

Thesis (B.A. (Hons.)) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Drama, 1994.

Thesis (MA (Drama))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-287).

Thesis--Stanford University. / Abstracted in Dissertation abstracts, v. 16 (1956) no. 10, p. 1965-1966. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-220).