By Land and Sea: Wayfinding and Weaving Contemporary Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Dramaturgies – Editors’ Note

Kathryn Kelly, Julian Meyrick, Fiona Graham, Moana Nepia and Emily Coleman

This special edition of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques aims to build on scattered accounts of Australasian dramaturgy across national and international publications over recent decades to provide a timely focus on the field now. Adopting a place-based curation approach, it attempts to embrace the full spectrum of Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand theatre culture, incorporating First Nations and Māori live performance practices, as well as the modern settler, post-colonial drama of both nations. Within this complex narrative, Australasian dramaturgy has a history filled with contention, paradox, improvisation and passionate practice. It is narrative that as editors, inevitably, we selectively excerpt rather than comprehensively represent.

We also seek to honour the primacy and distinctive nature of First Nations and Māori cultural practices and scholarship. In collating the articles presented, we were supported by the appointment of cultural consultants to ensure the agency of First Nations and Māori perspectives in the curatorial process.

As Turner and Behrndt note in their seminal work, Dramaturgy and Performance,“dramaturgy is as diverse as performance-making itself” (17). We adopt an inclusive conception of dramaturgy as drawn from existing Australasian scholarship and global dramaturgical research, while recognising it is a specialised field of professional knowledge, with shared approaches and objectives that sit alongside distinctive patterns of work. This broad-church outlook allows for different currents of dramaturgical theory and practice to co-exist in their contradictions and challenges without invalidating potential commonalities that might arise from their distinctive Australasian context. What these are we leave for readers to discern.

To encourage a wide range of submissions, we welcomed traditional research articles on the last ten years of dramaturgical practice and theory, case studies, interviews and panel discussions in video or text form, diagrammatic representations, models and theorisations, and innovative proposals that value oral traditions, or capture diverse dramaturgical practices in culturally appropriate ways. In the event, the issue coheres around place and practice and offers an eclectic range which wayfinds between Australia and Aotearoa /New Zealand as it moves across east and west coasts, saltwater and freshwater, city and region.

While there is no explicit central question or thematic through-line, we have been mindful of key seams of dramaturgy and leading dramaturgs in both countries. We have not put the articles into titled subsections, but they do fall into some rough categories nevertheless: First Nations and Māori theatre dramaturgies; eco- and climate change dramaturgies; articles focused on dramaturgical theories and practices; articles focused on queer dramaturgies; articles focused on dance dramaturgies; youth theatre dramaturgies; and post-human dramaturgies. We place First Nations dramaturgies first, and follow with eco-dramaturgies, reflecting their central importance to our times, and to our connected thinking. A gap we should explicitly acknowledge are dramaturgies that engage with Disability or come from artists with that disclosed lived experience.

Within this loose order, there is a deliberate alternation between articles addressing dramaturgies in contemporary Australia, and those speaking to contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand. Each contribution speaks for itself, but to give a brief sense of their range and flavour,

• We are honoured to begin with elder and cultural dramaturg, Aunty Colleen Wall, a proud Dauwa (Stringy-Bark) woman of the Kau’bvai (Bee) Nation from the Mary River watershed, who has worked for thirty years in First Nations arts in Australia. Her article describes her dramaturgical practice as a Truth Telling process focused on “intergenerational trauma reactivated during rehearsals by personal, cultural and/or relived experiences. Some works draw place ancestors, who pop into rehearsals to see who’s causing trouble.” She reaches across the continent of Australia to situate key First Nations companies and institutions in this issue, such as Marrugeku and the Aboriginal Performing Arts Program at the Western Australian Academy of the Arts, whose own articles describe their distinctive approaches to First Nations dramaturgy (see below).

• Dalisa Pigram et al. present a collaborative weaving of critical discourse and reflections on Dance and Cultural Dramaturgies in Contested Land—two practice-led and (inter)culturally informed research laboratories that took place on Yawuru Country (Broome) in May 2022 and Gadigal and Bidiagal Country (Sydney) in July 2023. Presented by Marrugeku, an Indigenous and intercultural performance company, the laboratories brought together First Nations performance-makers from around the world to explore First Nations dramaturgy.

• Moana Nepia et al. interview the playwright and dramaturg David Geary, whose origins include Indigenous Māori connections to the Taranaki iwi (tribe) on Aotearoa/New Zealand’s North Island, and to English, Irish and Scottish settler colonial nations.

• Dorita Hannah is a scholar and practitioner based in Aotearoa New Zealand, whose architecture and scenography explores the relationship between theatre and architectural built form. Her article considers Polynesia’s navigational approach to the Pacific Ocean as a ‘liquid continent’, offering Moana Nui spacing as an emerging dramaturgical methodology – spatiotemporally focussed, ecologically calibrated and specifically oceanic.

• Rick Brayford et al. describe a 2022 studio production of Quandamooka playwright Wesley Enoch’s adaptation of Black Medea, performed by First Nations actors at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

• Hassall et al. discuss the concept of ecosceno-dramaturgy as a framework for facilitating community renewal following the Rocklea floods of 2022 in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia. Currently in development, The Flood Project departs from the hyperrealist trend of theatre dramaturgies presenting climate change disasters as traditional play scripts. They argue that the confluence of ecoscenography and ecodramaturgy is crucial to investigating site specificity, as “place” itself is the dramatic provocation.

• Alison Walls, the Artistic Director of the Court Theatre in Ōtautahi, Christchurch, interviews Ahilan Karunaharan and Jane Yonge, two highly-regarded theatre makers who have branched into the role of dramaturg as a natural extension of their theatrical practice. Māori and other Global Majority theatre companies have been especially integral in the development of dramaturgy in Aotearoa and of the (conceptually different) Aoteoroa dramaturgy.

• Danielle Wyatt and Jasmin Pfefferkorn, scholars from the University of Melbourne discuss the dramaturgies of climate through an examination of the Refuge art program, a six-year experiment in participatory performance and emergency preparedness that took place in Naarm/Melbourne between 2016-2021.

• Fiona Graham examines the dramaturgical vision and composition processes of the performance artists Nisha Madhan and Julia Croft. Using the key concept of “liquid dramaturgy,” her article investigates how their innovative work offers new dramaturgical strategies–– fragmented, nonlinear and interrupted, time collapsed or repeated, performers remaining situated and visible––to support the development of New Zealand/Aotearoa and Australian performance.

• Alyson Campbell and Meta Cohen explore an intergenerational collaboration between two Naarm/Melbourne-based queer artist-researchers. Structured as a dialogue, with interspersed analysis, critical framing, photographs and diagrams, this article considers how their collaborative work generates new queer dramaturgical practices and offers new ways of thinking about queer(ing) dramaturgies. 

• James Wenley discusses Yes Yes Yes, a signature work by Aotearoa New Zealand practitioners Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCraken, supporting social change through the promotion of a healthy, consent culture, targeted at 14- to 22-year-old youth audiences.

• Sarah Peters analyses the Adelaide production of 19 weeks by Emily Steel, a solo show performed by Tiffany Lyndall-Knight based on Steel’s experience of terminating a pregnancy at nineteen weeks after a foetal diagnosis of abnormality. Drawing on interviews with Steel and Lyndall-Knight, she interrogates the embodied dramaturgy used with a focus on conventions of bodily memory and frame of perception.

• Alys Longley presents a “practice snapshot” of her dramaturgy within a devised, multi-media, choreographic context through the performance h u m a t t e r i n g. Here, definitions of what constitutes a body, or what can constitute a sense of humanity, becomes uncertain. Longley explores how choreographic dramaturgy might be unsettled, extended and opened up, so that embodied states split performance language open.

• Using a number of examples drawn from contemporary Australian performance, Rea Dennis and Kate Hunter, explore a post-human dramaturgy of place, which “invites engagement with how sense is made beyond imported, otherwise colonial lenses, through the different sounds—of cities, of suburban backyards, of the bush—within Australia.”

• Julian Meyrick shares one letter in a correspondence between the author and New York playwright Will Eno regarding Circle, Mirror, Transformation by Anni Baker. The exchange focuses on the insights to be gathered from close analysis of how the play ‘works’ dramaturgically: “how it unfolds as a series of cognitive and emotional operations where the dramaturg is not a removed intellectual, but a member of a community of practice”.

• Paul Rae and Abbie Trott offer a rich and detailed account of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Rashma M. Kalsie’s Melbourne Talam as a dramaturgical case study speaking to the nature of the migrant experience in contemporary Australia. 

• Kathryn Kelly interviews Peter Matheson, one Australia’s most experienced and skilled dramaturgs, who is now a regionally-based freelancer. A playwright and former Literary Manager of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Peter’s diverse, generous and wise dramaturgical practice spans five decades of Australian theatre.

• Sally Chance describes Australian Theatre for Young Audiences’ program Theatre for Early Years, and its ethos of encounter. This positions children as co-creators and participants in professional works constructed to respond to their presence. Her article describes the dramaturgical principles underpinning Sally Chance Dance’s The Thing That Matters, to explore “the relationship between… the adult performers’ rehearsed material and the children’s participatory responses to the world of the work”.

• David Megarrity and Jenna Gillett-Swan survey the paratexts of thirty Australian plays to show how these represent regional young people. Their analysis suggests an absence of the voices of young people and concomitant concerns around authenticity.

• Robert Walton and Alyson Campbell present a recorded public panel discussion bringing together graduates of the Victorian College of the Arts’ Dramaturgy Masters program with the course’s founder Alyson Campbell. This course, the only one leading to a degree in dramaturgy in Australia, was introduced in 2015 as part of the graduate training program at the University of Melbourne. 

As such a selective list suggests, all the articles in this wide-ranging special issue consciously respond to our times, and what it means to be human in Australia and Aotearoa right now. Following Van Kerkhoven we have focussed on artist relationships, on their dialogue with audiences, and the praxis between dramaturgical practice and theoretical questions. Glissant’s archipelago thinking connects fluid and relational metaphors for dramaturgy in Australia and Aotearoa, where assemblage is navigated between islands and influenced by the sea. Accordingly, this issue explores connections at the edges of the land and intersections between islands of relation. Our dramaturgies are fluid and constantly developing, and can never be finally settled.

Cover image: From Dorita Hannah’s contribution to this special issue: “Fluid Dramaturgy: Moana Nui Spacing as Relational Performative Environment.” OneOne: Good Company Arts (Aotearoa/NZ): Daniel Belton with Janessa Dufty, Richard Nunns, Nigel Jenkins, Jac Grenfell and Simon Kaan. Photo: Good Company.

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Bibliography

Glissant, Édouard, 1928-2011. Poetics of Relation.: U of Michigan P, 1997.

Turner, Cathy, and Synne Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. Rev. ed. Red Globe Press (Bloomsbury Publishing), 2016.

Van Kerkhovan, Marianne. “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century: A Constant Movement.”. Performance Research, vol. 14, no. 3, 2009, pp. 7-11.

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Kathryn Kelly  is a dramaturg and theatre historian and a Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Her research interests include dramaturgy and socially engaged, feminist and transcultural performance. She is company dramaturg with Belloo Creative an award winning, all-female company, based in Meanjin/Brisbane.

Julian Meyrick is Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University, General Editor of Currency House’s New Platform Paper series, and Literary Adviser for the Queensland Theatre.  He was Literary Adviser for the State Theatre Company of South Australia 2013-2019, and Associate Director and Literary Advisor at Melbourne Theatre Company 2002-07. He has directed and dramaturged over 40 award-winning theatre productions and published numerous books and articles on Australian arts and culture.

Fiona Graham  (Britain / Aotearoa) is Programme Director for the MA Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths College, London University. She is also a freelance dramaturg and writer with forty years’ experience in Britain, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, and Australia. Publications include Performing Dramaturgy (Playmarket, 2017).

Moana Nepia  is a dancer/choreographer, curator, visual artist, and writer; Senior Research Fellow at Media Design School Auckland; leads an exhibition and book project on senior Māori artist Selwyn Muru; and co-leads Digitaonga — a co-design project exploring the application of emerging technologies in the curatorial sector with Māori communities and museums.

Emily Coleman, a Bundjalung-Githabul multidisciplinary artist, hails from Bonalbo, NSW, with land connections in Dungidau, Dungibara, and Jinibara lands. QUT BFA (Drama) graduate, she’s the Associate Producer at Belloo Creative, and the former Artistic Director of Digi Youth Arts. Contributing to projects nationwide, Emily’s practice is guided by a deep commitment to her community and a passion for truth-telling.