AustLit

'The inquiry came on the back of an effective shutdown of most work in the creative sector as a result of social distancing restrictions and lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March, and of extensive debate about the Australian Government's reluctance to offer a dedicated financial support package to an industry that, by the government's own estimates, contributed $111.7 billion in 2016/17, or 6.4 per cent of GDP. The terms of reference for the inquiry appeared accordingly broad: 'The Committee will inquire into Australia's creative and cultural industries and institutions including, but not limited to, Indigenous, regional, rural and community based organisations'. More broadly, the frustrations of lockdown, a newfound capacity to work remotely, loss of income, and the more general reassessment of life choices and lifestyle that COVID-19 provoked all resulted in an unprecedented net population loss in Australia's big cities, with an October 2020 Ipsos poll finding that one in ten Melburnians were considering a move to regional Victoria. Meanwhile, among the very limited federal stimulus offered to the arts in the early months of the pandemic was a $27 million 'Targeted Support' package in April, which directed $10 million to the music industry, $7 million to Indigenous arts, and $10 million 'to help regional artists and organisations develop new work and explore new delivery models'. In short, while COVID-19 has arguably reconfigured the Australian arts landscape, and the ways in which we understand where arts happens, it also made visible changes that were already occurring, particularly outside major metropolitan centres. Recommendation 1 was that 'the Federal Government increase its investment in building enabling infrastructure to improve connectivity, key services and amenity through coordinated regional plans', while Recommendation 13 anticipated further work on 'the cultivation of social, cultural and community capital'.5 This initiative built in turn on existing trends. Australia's enormous size continues to present major practical challenges when it comes to touring on the one hand, or building and sustaining arts infrastructure on the other. [...]the high-profile shift in the funding narrative over 2020 towards the regions, as well as the obligatory pivot towards the digital environment, has not entirely done away with a metropolitan funding bias, which is most apparent in the fact that the city-based Major Performing Arts organisations receive a disproportionate amount of the federal funding pie.' (Editorial introduction)

'We publish this issue in extraordinarily bleak times – a plague year in which the public gatherings which underpin our discipline have been banned for the foreseeable future to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus. This follows a southern summer in which such substantial tracts of Australia burnt so fiercely that it sent a pall of smoke over parts of New Zealand. In Australasia, we have been ‘staying at home’ for close to two months, and our theatres are dark. The effects on the sector have been swift and devastating, as Jo Caust pointed out a month into the lockdown:

This past week the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed arts and recreation is the hardest hit of all the sectors most affected by government-imposed shutdowns in Australia. At least 53% of the sector is no longer functioning and it is likely these figures will worsen in the coming weeks. Now, researchers at the Grattan Institute have estimated up to 26% of the Australian workforce are likely to lose their jobs due to pandemic shutdowns and restrictions – but this rises to 75% for those employed in the creative and performing arts.' (Yoni Prior : Editorial introduction)

'Papers, presentations and workshops ranged across many subjects, including: individual performers and practices; dramaturgies of acting, technology, disability and access; rehearsal and hierarchies of power; acting and ethics; women in the acting and performance industries; diversity on the stage; mainstream and independent work; comedy; physical practices; and wellbeing and mental health. Actresses have been particularly vocal about the need to challenge the gender pay gap, sexism, racism and male abuse of power, and there is a noticeable difference in the numbers of actresses of all ages who are prepared to speak out about the invisibility and marginalisation that too many have endured. The different moods of the actresses in these articles and interviews are also striking: the optimism and celebratory notes evident in Trevor Jones's piece on women performers of musical theatre and the joyously comic anarchy manifest in Sarah Peters' article on the Travelling Sisters are not, for example, sounded by Candy Bowers, who describes a landscape of white supremacy and 'the centring of whiteness' above all, and identifies a major problem with diversity and access to training as well as an unwillingness to celebrate intersectionality and diverse storytelling on Australian stages. Forsyth observes that many women turn to film and television not just because of financial issues and the limited roles that mature actresses are offered on the stage, but also because of the physical wear and tear on the body and mind.' (Mary Lockhurst, Editorial abstract)

'The opening image of this Special Issue of the Australasian Drama Studies journal comes from The Vultures, a contemporary Indigenous satire written and directed by Tawata Productions’ Mīria George (Te Arawa; Ngati Awa; Rarotonga and Atiu, Cook Islands), and staged at Wellington’s BATS theatre as part of the Kia Mau Festival in 2017. The Vultures plays around with the politics of place; of native ecologies versus the National Economy; of the negotiation of Indigenous identities between town and country; of the rejection of the passive ‘Ecological Indigene’ trope; and of the literal ways we trace our whakapapa (lineage) to the landscapes of our ancestors. It envisions an Indigenous Aristocracy, dominated by an internally conflicted whānau (family) of exceptional Māori wāhine (women), engaged in power struggles for wealth and control of a new Empire. The central conflict in this narrative conflates the whakataukī (proverb) about the causes of war: He wāhine, he whenua, ka ngaro te tangata – often translated as ‘For women and land, men perish’ – where the battle over a contested territory is fought by resistant Indigenous women, on their own behalf. This image speaks to an intrinsic premise behind this long-awaited Special Issue: that Indigenous voices are diverse, rich and complex. There is no such thing as a typical Indigenous play.' (Hyland, Nicola; Syron, Liza-Mare and Casey, Maryrose. 'Turangawaewae': A place to stand in contemporary indigenous performance in Australasia and beyond 1-16)

'‘I’ve been invited to edit the Australasian Drama Studies journal.’

‘Great! How does it rank?’

'The changing of the guard in the editorship of this journal offers the opportunity to consider its mission, its form, its value and its position in an increasingly challenging and stringent research environment. Here, outgoing editors Julian Meyrick and Meredith Rogers, and incoming editor Yoni Prior, offer thoughts about the past, present and future of Australasian Drama Studies in a moment of transition: between editors; between past and present locations; between print and digital publication; and between positions in the rankings game.   In 1992 I attended my first ADSA conference, at Wollongong University. By then the Association was over ten years old. As a beginner in the academy, I felt I was joining a robust community of scholars with hefty credentials in the history of theatre, textual analysis and the still emerging field of performance studies. But alongside the evident depth and generosity of the scholarship, there was also a sociability and playfulness not always found among researchers, as well as a sense of tradition and continuity so relatively recently established. There were intriguing rumours of fabled events at past conferences, including the existence of a photograph of massed nude theatre scholars on a Western Australian beach, though the evidence has never been sighted by this researcher.' (Rick, Juli Anmey; Prior, Yoni and Rogers, Meredith. Editorial)

'This Special Issue began life as a one-day symposium at the University of Melbourne in November 2015, called ‘Reappraising Aesthetic Modernisms in Australian Theatre: Patrick White and Beyond’. It aimed to re-engage with the question of modernism as a style, a question of form and an approach to dramaturgy and theatricality in the Australian and international contexts. Some of the articles in this issue were first presented at the Melbourne symposium, while those by theatre artists Kerry Dwyer and Nicola Heywood started out as talks given at ‘Ten Questions about the Australian Theatrical Avant-Garde’, a symposium held at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney in November 2016, co-convened by Ian Maxwell and Mike Mullins. As a collection, the articles featured in this issue address the question and the problem of aesthetic modernism and its impact on twentieth-century Australian playwriting, performance and staging practices.' (Editorial introduction)

'In the fortieth year of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, this seventieth issue of its journal continues to publish a remarkably diverse range of articles from a continuously evolving set of disciplines. The collection is presented in roughly chronological order, beginning with two articles exploring aspects of Australia's colonial past. Jane Woollard's richly detailed account of the different styles and careers of two of Australia's best known nineteenth-century actresses is followed by an article in which William Dunstone and Helena Grehan revisit the history of performance on the Western Australian Goldfields through the lens of cultural geography.' (Editorial introduction)

'The articles in this issue of Australasian Drama Studies respond to the call to consider 'performance and mobility' in rich and diverse ways.'

(Editorial Note)