AustLit logo

AustLit

Jonathan Bollen Jonathan Bollen i(A89281 works by)
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Visualising the Story of Theatre in Sydney : Venues, Repertoire and Change, 1920-2020 Jonathan Bollen , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , May no. 78 2021; (p. 72-109)

'Theatre is sometimes imagined as an art form at risk. From movies and television to global pandemics, these risks to theatre are significant and their impact on production is real. In Sydney, which provides a locus for this study, the arrival of talking pictures in the 1920s and the advent of broadcast television in the 1950s coincided with the demise of commercial enterprises and the demolition of old theatres in the city centre. More recently, the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on theatre programming and venue management is playing out across the city.' (Publication abstract)
1 [Review] Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White : Governing Culture Jonathan Bollen , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , May no. 74 2019; (p. 296-302) 'Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White: Governing Culture, by Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso, is a significant and unusual book. Studies of Australian playwrights are no longer published with the frequency and focus they once were. The Australian Playwrights series (now edited by Varney at Brill) began with a series of monographs on the playwrights of the ‘New Wave’. Since the mid-1990s, as the emphasis of research shifted towards performance, the series has extended beyond playwrights to include production histories, companies and venues, actors, directors and industry sectors.'

 (Introduction)

 
1 Data Models for Theatre Research : People, Places, and Performance Jonathan Bollen , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Theatre Journal , December vol. 68 no. 4 2016; (p. 615-632)

'How are theatre scholars sharing information about people, places, and performance? This essay considers the current prospects for collaborative research on theatre production within the context of recent developments in the digital humanities. It identifies convergence in the way that twelve projects around theworld are collecting and organizing information about performance: Abbey Theatre Archives Performance Database (Ireland); AusStage (Australia); Hamm Archives, Brooklyn Academy of Music (US); Global Performing Arts Database (US, Singapore, Japan, Russia, China); IbsenStage (Norway); Internet Broadway Database (US); Staging Beckett (England); Scottish Theatre Archive (Scotland); TheaterEncyclopedie (Netherlands); Theatre Aotearoa (New Zealand); Theatrescapes (Germany); and Toronto Theatre Database (Canada). The essay derives core descriptions for shared concepts from the data models in use, placing emphasis on practical solutions, while recognizing variations in implementation. In the process it distinguishes four levels of determination for concepts of performance, event, production, and work. Recognizing what has been achieved, the essay contributes to the prospects of sharing data among projects. It concludes by illustrating how visualizing information on performance opens new horizons of significance for theatre research at scales ranging from local activity to global networks.' (Publication summary)
1 Sex, Gender and the Industrial : Plays Performed by Broken Hill Repertory Society, 1945-1969 Jonathan Bollen , Murray Couch , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , April no. 64 2014; (p. 277-296) 'The Broken Hill Repertory Society (BHRS) was established in 1944. Sixty-two years earlier, in 1883, the ore body which provided the base for the silver, lead and zinc mining industry in western New South Wales was discovered. The municipality of Broken Hill was incorporated in 1888, and the city developed over the decades with a dense and locally specific political, industrial and cultural fabric. The establishment of BHRS added a new element to that fabric, at a time when the city was experiencing a period of renewed industrial and civic expansion after World War II.' (Publication summary)
1 From the Silver Lining to the Roaring Days! : Amateur Theatre and Social Class in Broken Hill, 1940s-1960s Jonathan Bollen , Murray Couch , 2014 single work
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , April no. 64 2014; (p. 257-276) 'By the early 1960s, the Broken Hill Repertory Society came to be recognised - alongside the Barrier Industrial Unions' Band, the Philharmonic Society and the Quartette Club - as a pillar of the civic infrastructure, a testament to the vitality of the city's cultural life. Reporting on Broken Hill in 1963 for ABC Television's Four Corners, Frank Bennett profiled the recently constructed Repertory Playhouse as 'Broken Hill's biggest, best and newest cultural landmark' and acknowledged the financial support given by the mining companies, although his story was criticised by locals for not representing Broken Hill as a 'progressive' city and overlooking the range of cultural activities to be found there. With its repertoire of modern drama from London and New York, the Repertory's contributions to Broken Hill were accommodated within a broad mix of live entertainments, some imported, much locally produced, that sustained audiences into the 1960s.' (Publication abstract)
1 Show Girls and the Choreographers in Australian Entertainment : The Transition to Nightclubs, 1946-1967 Jonathan Bollen , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , October no. 63 2013; (p. 52-68)

'When an Australian Cinesound newsreel from 1946 o!ers to take viewers behind the Tivoli curtains for a glimpse backstage at the life of a show girl, erotic fantasies are doused and moral qualms are soothed. As it turns out, Joyce Smith is just a girl-nextdoor, living an ordinary, respectable, work-a-day life. For 7 pounds and 2 shillings a week, she arrives at the theatre for morning rehearsal, performs two shows a day, matinee and evening, six days a week. She is met by her steady boyfriend a"er the evening show, but, too tired to socialise a"er a day's work, she heads straight home to bed. The glamour of the film's chorus line montage is grounded by the mundane narrative of a working girl's routine. A photo-essay on a 'Nightclub Dancer' in a 1950 issue of Pix magazine operates on similar terms. The visual eroticism of the nightclub, depicted in photographs of the floor show and dressing rooms, is stabilised in the story by a domestic frame: 'At night she frolics with other lovelies among crowded cabaret tables. By day she's a home girl, mad on pets. She doesn't drink or smoke.' The discourse on show girls' work is sustained when Pix profiles a Tivoli 'ballet girl' three months later: 'She thinks people have wrong ideas about the glamour of it. "There's not much glamour in sheer hard work," she says. "We're on the stage because we love it."' (Publication abstract)
1 Don't Give Up the Strip! : Erotic Performance as Live Entertainment in Mid-Twentieth Century Australia. Jonathan Bollen , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , June vol. 34 no. 2 2010; (p. 125-140) 'From 1949 to 1959 Brisbane's Theatre Royal presented a variety show with a weekly change of name, such as Grin and Bare It (1951), Nudes and Blushes (1952), Don't Give Up the Strip (1957), Hips Hooray (1958), Bareway to the Stars (1958) and Don't Point, It's Nude (1959). The show reportedly attracted a family audience; its highlight, according to one commentator, was the moment when 'Carmelita, the great striptease of the company ... and her four attendants coyly removed their bras'. Yet, in 1961, when the show was recreated in the television studios of Brisbane's BTQ7, striptease was not among the acts broadcast onto the city's television screens. This article explores the fate of erotic performance as live entertainment in mid-twentieth century Australia. Burlesque-style performances with showgirls in bustier and fishnet stockings were occasionally seen on variety shows in television's first decade in Australia, although such performances were more readily televised when framed by theatrical convention. While television's claim on the mass production of respectable variety for a suburban audience rendered the performer's eroticism innocuously nostalgic, new metropolitan niches for the live presentation of nude revue were emerging in Sydney and Melbourne.' (Abstract from author, p. 125)
1 White Men, Wet Dreams : Fishing, Fatherhood and Finitude in Australian Theatre, 1955-2004 Jonathan Bollen , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Something Rich and Strange : Sea Changes, Beaches and the Littoral in the Antipodes 2009; (p. 62-74) In an overview of films and dramas that feature sea and beach life, 'the plays discussed in this chapter envisage a different relation between masculinity and environment from that of the Bush realist plays. This new relation is one in which an exposure to the sea and the sky has a resolutive effect on men who are somehow incapacitated or incomplete' (71).
1 Belonging : Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century by John McCallum Jonathan Bollen , 2009 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , no. 9 2009;
— Review of Belonging : Australian Playwriting in the 20th Century John McCallum , 2009 multi chapter work criticism
1 AusStage : e-Research in the Performing Arts Jonathan Bollen , Glen McGillivray , Julie Holledge , Neal Harvey , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , April no. 54 2009; (p. 178-194)
1 3 y separately published work icon Men at Play : Masculinities in Australian Theatre Since the 1950s Jonathan Bollen , Bruce Parr , Adrian Kiernander , Amsterdam New York (City) : Rodopi , 2008 Z1491239 2008 single work criticism

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 Shifting Heart and Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year to David Williamson's Sons of Cain, Richard Barrett's The Heartbreak Kid, Gordon Graham's The Boys and Nick Enright's Blackrock.

The book looks at plays as they are produced in the theatre and masculinity as it is enacted on the stage. It is written in an accessible style for students and teachers in drama at university and senior high school. The book's contribution to contemporary debates about masculinity will also interest scholars in gender, race and sexuality studies, literary studies and Australian history. (Rodopi newsletter http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=AP+11)
1 2 y separately published work icon What a Man's Gotta Do? : Masculinities in Performance Adrian Kiernander (editor), Bruce Parr (editor), Jonathan Bollen (editor), Armidale : University of New England. Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies , 2006 Z1454706 2006 anthology criticism
1 Remembering Masculinities in the Theatre of War Jonathan Bollen , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , April no. 46 2005; (p. 3-19) Surveys post-war theatrical productions of plays which articulate men's experiences at war and back home. '...this article explores the propagation of gender anxieties in performance during the post-war period of suburban expansion. In contrast with more recent productions which have sought to celebrate the survival, ingenuity and achievements of Australian men at war, productions from the post-war period were less overtly nationalistic and less assertively masculinist. ... post-war productions celebrated less the heroism of men at war than the nostalgia of their returning home' (3).
X