{"id":1159,"date":"2023-12-30T13:05:15","date_gmt":"2023-12-30T13:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/?page_id=1159"},"modified":"2024-01-06T10:45:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T10:45:46","slug":"editorial-note","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/editorial-note\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial Note"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Traversing the Globe on Theatre’s Chariot<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Savas Patsalidis<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being<\/p>\nThornton Wilder<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

On the occasion of the New Year, the editorial board of Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> extends our most sincere wishes to everyone for a new year that is more optimistic, less violent, less self-destructive, less competitive and less cruel than previous years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life on Earth is threatened by reckless consumption, contamination of water resources, destruction of forests, damage to the ecosystem, and resulting rising temperatures, melting icebergs, and natural disasters. These calamities together constitute an urgent warning, as human beings have crossed many red lines related to planetary health and sustainability. And as if all that weren\u2019t enough, the proliferation of wars, territorial disputes and anachronistic revisionisms remind us that tragedies never made anyone wiser, especially those in power, for if they had, world leaders could not have forgotten what history has taught us: a descent into violence and war does not solve problems, but on the contrary encourages an escalation of problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the conclusion of the Global Conflict Tracker<\/strong><\/a> from the Council on Foreign Relations there are currently 32 ongoing conflicts worldwide. According to another study published in June 2023 by the Institute for Economics and Peace<\/strong><\/a> , nearly a quarter of a million people died last year in wars around the world. This marks a 96% increase year over year in deaths related to military conflicts. On top of all these sad figures, emerging technologies are removing one by one the barriers to acquiring biological weapons, thereby resulting in a further escalation of tensions which most likely will lead to even greater loss of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern biopolitics has radically altered many aspects of our daily routine. ZOOM has now become the major format of our meetings, yet the distance between people seems to be constantly increasing, and both communication and understanding are diminishing. The visibility that technology provides in the dissemination of news has confused us as to what is real and what is fake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this generally pessimistic climate, it is reasonable to ask what can theatre do<\/em>? The answer is simple: theatre continues to assert its presence boldly and dynamically. From its inception, theatre has functioned as a kind of seismograph and judge, measuring and evaluating everything that happens around us. In the words of Stella Adler, theatre \u201cis the spiritual and social X-ray of its time. The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social condition.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That having been said, we, the editorial team of this journal, passionately adhere to democratic principles and values; we advocate policies and procedures which promote peace, equity, diversity, free expression and inclusion in order to transcend racial, class, sociopolitical, ethnic, religious and gender categories and boundaries. We are part of this multicolored and polyvalent world, and we strive to engage in current artistic events, record them, and share them with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our gift to you for the New Year is a collection of 65 original texts signed by 75 authors from 25 countries<\/em>, representing the diversity of theatrical life on this planet, from Sri Lanka to Bulgaria, to Australia and New Zealand, from Toronto and Buenos Aires to Cyprus and Egypt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are very proud to host in this current edition a special issue on Australasian theatre, the first of its kind ever realized outside of Australia\/Aotearoa-New Zealand. With this special issue, we hope to reduce the geographical distance that separates artists and scholars by building more intercultural bridges and routes. This is a theatre that is very much alive, a theatre that follows the concerns and trends of contemporary theatre worldwide, and at the same time explores with courage and insightful critique the particularities of its colonial past and its indigenous cultures. I quote the words of the editors themselves from their Editorial: this special edition \u201cattempts to embrace the full spectrum of Australian and Aotearoa\/New Zealand theatre culture, incorporating First Nations and M\u0101ori live performance practices, as well as the modern settler, post-colonial drama of both nations.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arduous task of editing this special issue was undertaken by five distinguished colleagues from Australia and Aotearoa \/New Zealand: Kathryn Kelly, Julian Meyrick, Fiona Graham, Moana Nepia<\/strong> and Emily Coleman<\/strong>. We are deeply indebted to this guest editorial team, and in particular to Professor Kathryn Keller, the soul of the team; we have truly enjoyed working with her and her colleagues. Despite the spatial and temporal boundaries that separated us, we collaborated very intensely and closely as if we were all working together in the same city at the same time. The final selection for publication of the 21 articles provides a comprehensive and most enlightening picture of the current state of Australasian theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the large number of published works, for the needs of this editorial note I focus on a select few to give a general view of the contents of the volume. Playwright and theatre professor Julian Meyrick<\/strong> draws on Annie Baker\u2019s play Circle, Mirror, Transformation<\/em> to argue for dramaturgy as a learning in practice<\/em> rather than a type of academic discourse. \u201cThe dramaturg is not a removed intellectual,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut a member of a community of practice, working with terms and concepts defined as useful by that community.\u201d Rea Dennis <\/strong>and Kate Hunter<\/strong> believe that being theatre-makers in Australia attunes them \u201cto making meaning by listening to the land, traveling long distances and feeling [their] way.\u201d These conditions predispose them \u201cto ask questions of affect, of [their] experience of being part of a vast continent and of the way the ancient insinuates itself into the everyday present.\u201d In their co-authored work, Linda Hassall et al<\/strong> discuss the concept of ecosceno-dramaturgy as a framework for \u201cfacilitating community renewal following the Rocklea floods of 2022 in Meanjin\/Brisbane, Australia.\u201d Alyson Campbell <\/strong>and Meta Cohen<\/strong> consider how their collaborative work generates \u201cnew queer dramaturgical practices and offers new ways of thinking about queer(ing) dramaturgies.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fiona Graham<\/strong> examines the dramaturgical vision and composition processes of the performance artists Nisha Madhan and Julia Croft. Using the term\/idea\/practice of liquid dramaturgy, she investigates how \u201ctheir innovative and award-winning work offers new dramaturgical strategies that can support the development of Aotearoa \/ New Zealand and Australian performance.\u201d Sarah Peters,<\/strong> in her article, focuses on the work 19 weeks<\/em> by Emily Steel and \u201cinterrogates the conventions of bodily memory and frame of perception, exploring how these conventions curate the audience’s emotional proximity to the world of the play and emphasize the protagonist’s subjectivity.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The presence of articles that focus on theatre for children and young people is particularly noteworthy. For example, Sally Chance<\/strong> crafts the relationship between the \u201cprepared and spontaneous aesthetic dimensions of the adult performers’ rehearsed material and the children’s participatory responses to the world of the work.\u201d David Megarrity <\/strong>and Jenna Gillett-Swan<\/strong> survey how paratexts of thirty plays represent young people of the region. Their analysis suggests \u201ccongruences across themes and provenance, including an absence of the unadulterated voices of young people and concomitant concerns around authenticity.\u201d Rick Brayford<\/strong> et al<\/strong> explore how a classic work (such as Medea<\/em>) could be used to address members of indigenous cultures. The goal of this study is to encourage \u201ccontemporary Australian performer training programs to acknowledge and integrate First Nation’s influences into performance curriculum more holistically.\u201d An important contribution related to sex education of youth is offered by James Wenley,<\/strong> who analyzes the play Yes Yes Yes<\/em> by Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCraken to show how the two playwrights develop and activate a dramaturgy of consent. Also related to youth audiences is the article of Paul Rae <\/strong>and Abbie Victoria Trott <\/strong>which uses as a case study the play Melbourne Talam<\/em> to explain \u201c<\/strong>where and how a dramaturgical sensibility can be identified as arcing across the lifespan of a theatrical event, from production, through performance, to reception.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to these there are a few more important contributions by Aunty Colleen Wall<\/strong>, Dalisa Pigram et al<\/strong>, Danielle Wyatt<\/strong><\/a>, Jasmin Pfefferkorn<\/strong> and Dorita Hannah,<\/strong> as well as very revealing and informative interviews, one with the playwright and dramaturg David Geary<\/strong>, another one by Kathryn Kelly<\/strong> with dramaturg Peter Matheson<\/strong>, one by Alison Wells <\/strong>with two highly regarded directors (Ahilan Karunaharan<\/strong> and Jane Yonge<\/strong>) and finally one more by Moana Nepia <\/strong>with six artists from Aotearoa which, seen together, provide a panoramic view of current developments in Australasian theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last but not least, a videoed panel discussion among graduates of the Dramaturgy Masters program of Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, tackles key issues that predominate in many published articles; for example, <\/p>\n\n\n\n