Research

Staff at the Department of Performance are involved in a range of research activities. Details of specific projects will be published through this page, which is presently under construction: the links below are yet to be activated; instead, scroll down to read details of three current projects.

• Enacting Reconciliation: Negotiating Meaning in Youth Justice Conferencing
• Place and Performance
• "A Raffish Experiment": The Writings of Rex Cramphorn

Dr Paul Dwyer with Professor Jim Martin and Ms Michelle Zappavigna

An ARC Discovery Grant-funded project over four years (2008-2011)

'Restorative justice' initiatives like youth justice conferencing are aimed at strengthening the social fabric by making sure the voices of victims are heard while giving offenders a genuine opportunity to 'set things right' and get back on track with their lives. More detailed research into the way participants use language and other communicative modes will help the convenors of conferences, and the trainers of convenors, to understand better the potential of this social healing process. This project will also add to Australia's reputation as a world leader in the field of restorative justice.

Chief Investigator:

Participants:

• Gay McAuley (Convenor), Honorary Professor, Performance Studies, University of Sydney
• Paul Brown, Programme Co-ordinator, Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales
• Tom Burvill, Associate Professor Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University
• Michael Cohen, Programme Director, Live Sites, Newcastle
• Russell Emerson, Technical Director, Performance Studies, University of Sydney
• Tess de Quincey, Director, De Quincey Company
• Paul Dwyer, Lecturer, Performance Studies, University of Sydney
• Jane Goodall, Director of Research, Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney
• Stuart Grant, Ph.D candidate, Performance Studies, University of Sydney
• Julie Holledge, Professor, Drama, Flinders University
• Lowell Lewis, Senior Lecturer, Performance Studies/Anthropology, University of Sydney
• Ian Maxwell, Senior Lecturer, Performance Studies, University of Sydney
• Mary Moore, Theatre Designer and Visual Artist
• Kerrie Schaefer, Senior Lecturer, Drama, University of Newcastle
• Katrina Schlunke, Senior Lecturer, Cultural Studies, University of Technology Sydney
• Peter Snow, Senior Lecturer, Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University
• Joanne Tompkins, Associate Professor, English, University of Queensland

Current work in disciplines such as cultural geography, history, environmental studies and anthropology has brought to the fore in new ways the interdependence of human and other lived experience of place, the complex ecologies of place involving multiple histories of occupation and exploitation, and the central role of place in establishing personal or group identity and sense of self. A concern with place inevitably involves issues that have far-reaching political, moral and ethical implications. Theatre and performance are modes of cultural production that are inseparably bound up with space and place and they, too, are thereby drawn into an engagement with these issues. In this project, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from nine universities and site-based performance practitioners are together investigating the complicated nexus between place and performance and the ways in which this nexus functions in a range of performative practices that expose many of the faultlines running through Australian society.

The academics and artists constituting this Advanced Research Seminar have been meeting at intervals over a period of 3 years, reporting on a range of research projects in progress that provide insights into ways in which performance functions in relation to place and vice versa. Emerging from these discussions, the group is producing a collectively authored book entitled Contested Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place. The first part of the book, Interrogating Place in Aesthetic Performance, consists of essays dealing with ways in which place functions in a range of contemporary performance (text-based theatre, site-based performance, physical theatre, popular music); the second part, Place, Memory, Politics, takes the notion of performance more broadly and investigates performative practices (memorials, demonstrations, community action) occurring in real places, stirring memories and dealing with unresolved political issues; the third part, Place in Practice, consists of essays by artists specialising in site-based performance which provide a wealth of information and practical insights into their creative process and the ways in which they conceptualise and work with place. The book ends with an essay by anthropologist, Lowell Lewis, reflecting on theoretical issues raised by the other contributors and exploring key terms such as space, place and cultural memory.

Researcher: Ian Maxwell

• “In academic circles, I seem to be a sort of raffish experiment, and in practical circles I get branded an academic . . .”

Rex Cramphorn addressing the Inaugural Conference of the Australian Theatre Studies Centre, August 27-29th, 1976


Aims and Significance of Project
On his death in 1991, the obituarist in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald described Rex Cramphorn as ‘[o]ne of Australia’s most challenging and sensitive talents”. Katharine Brisbane concurred, writing in 1995 that he was “one of the most innovative directors Australia has produced”, before noting that “his relationships with established theatre companies were restless and short-lived” (Brisbane 1995: 165). No small part of the reason for this restlessness was the middle ground occupied by Cramphorn; he was cerebral director, with a decidedly European outlook, working at a time of radical cultural introspection and in a practical context deeply suspicious of intellectual aspiration, particularly in theatre.

Cramphorn’s career was, therefore, characterised by sustained attempts to establish a vital, new theatre within what he saw as an oppressively conservative, anti-intellectual and institutionally unsupportive milieu. This was to be an indigenous Australian theatre, but one based upon the revolutionary training, practices and ensemble ideas of Grotowski and Copeau, the writings of Artaud, and a repertoire built on a balance of devised work and European classical texts—in particular those of Shakespeare and the French Neo-Classicists (which he translated for himself).

Graduating from the University of Queensland, where he majored in theatre history and French, Cramphorn completed a one-year diploma in Theatrical Production at the National Institute for Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney—at that time the only professional theatre-training institute in the country. Leaving NIDA in 1967, he wrote theatre reviews for The Bulletin, at the end of 1968 taking stock of the state of play in local theatre. He wrote of

a particular atmosphere among actors . . . a free-for-all commercial struggle with no security of any kind, no opportunity for learning except by cumulative experience, and, consequently, no chance to develop anything other than a purely egocentric, personal style (November 9, 1968).

Two years later, with some despair, he noted that

Sydney theatre was perfectly intolerable, and would have kept any sane ticket - buyer in the cinema for the next twelve months . . . No one here is experimenting with acting . . . [a] nation as politically and socially apathetic as we are is unlikely to have anything serious to say in a theatre. Until theatre has something serious to say, or a distinctive statement to make—that is, until it demands to be taken seriously—it will remain a withering mistletoe on our gum-tree culture (January 3, 1970).

Subsequently, Cramphorn embarked upon a two decade career in the theatre, establishing first the Grotowski-influenced Theatre Syndicate (with William Yang, Robyn Nevin, Niko Lathouris and others), then working with Jim Sharman, first as costume designer for Sharman’s 1972 production of Jesus Christ Superstar and subsequently at the Paris Theatre (Maxwell 2005b), as Artistic Director of St Martins Theatre and Playbox Theatre in Melbourne (Minchinton 1998), and on a number of projects, including a long-term collaboration with researchers at the University of Sydney (Cramphorn 1987; Maxwell 2005a; McAuley 1987, 1999).

Throughout his career, Cramphorn wrote extensive self-evaluations, often appended to applications for funding to the Australia Council, and careful, often scholarly production notes. This material, already archived, offers a unique and significant insight into the working conditions, aspirations and cultural struggles of a theatrical artist with an ‘internationalist’ outlook, in the context of the decidedly parochial aspirations of the Australian ‘New Wave’ theatre of the 1970s (Meyrick 2002).

The proposed project is particularly significant given the dearth of readily available primary material and secondary sources about theatre practice in Australia. As Jim Sharman noted in his inaugural Rex Cramphorn Address in 1994, theatre is the last of the cottage industries: a world in which practical craft knowledge is passed on orally, from body to body, in rehearsal rooms, bars, foyers; in anecdote, apocrypha and gossip (Sharman 1996). For some, the absence of written history, documentation and recordings of theatre practice constitutes the very appeal of theatre. For others, Sharman among them, the absence of an historical consciousness condemns each generation of practitioners to a reinvention of the theatrical wheel. This current project will address the Australian theatre world’s dearth of historical consciousness—and in particular, will bring into that field an understanding of not just theatre writing—-for the historical record tends to constellate around texts and writer—but theatrical practice, and the art of the director.

This project will place Cramphorn’s practice, and his reflections upon his practice, on the record. Further, through the critical apparatus, including framing essays and annotations, this practice will be placed within historical, social and artistic contexts. In addition to placing Cramphorn’s own work on the record, making it available to students of theatre, the collection and the apparatus framing it will be a substantial contribution to the documentation of Australian cultural history.

Works cited

• Brisbane, Katharine 1995 “Rex Cramphorn” in The Currency Companion to Theatre in Australia (General Editor Philip Parsons) Currency Press, Sydney: 164-5.
• Braun, Edward 1969 Meyerhold on Theatre Methuen, London.
• Cramphorn, Rex 1987 “L’Illusion Comique to Theatrical Illusion: Textual Changes for Performance” in McAuley, Gay, editor From Page to Stage: L’Illusion Comique University of Sydney Theatre Services Unit, Sydney: 59-71.
• McAuley, Gay 1999 Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
• Maxwell, Ian 2005a “Rex Cramphorn” in Fifty Key Theatre Directors (edited by Shomit Mitter and Maria Shevtsova) Routledge, London: 178-185.
• Maxwell, Ian 2005b “Jim Sharman” in Fifty Key Theatre Directors (edited by Shomit Mitter and Maria Shevtsova) Routledge, London: 212-217.
• Meyrick, Julian 2002 See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave Currency Press, Sydney 2002.
• Minchinton, Mark 1998 “The Right and Only Direction: Rex Cramphorn, Shakespeare, and the Actors’ Development Stream” in Australasian Drama Studies 33: 128-144.
• Sharman, Jim 1996 “In the Realm of the Imagination” in Australasian Drama Studies 28: 20-29.
• Willett, John 1978 Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic Eyre Methuen, London