Contemporary Australian Playwriting

Contemporary Australian Playwriting PDF Author: Chris Hay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000784568
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century. In 2007, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was William Shakespeare. In 2019, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. This book explores what has happened both on stage and off to generate this remarkable change. As writers of colour, queer writers, and gender diverse writers are produced on the mainstage in larger numbers, they bring new critical directions to the twenty-first century Australian stage. At a politically turbulent time when national identity is fractured, this book examines the ways in which Australia’s leading playwrights have interrogated, problematised, and tried to make sense of the nation. Tracing contemporary trends, the book takes a thematic approach to the re-evaluation of the nation that is dramatized in key Australian plays. Each chapter is accompanied by a duologue between two of the playwrights whose work has been analysed, to provide a dual perspective of theory and practice.

Contemporary Australian Playwriting

Contemporary Australian Playwriting PDF Author: Chris Hay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000784568
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contemporary Australian Playwriting provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century. In 2007, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was William Shakespeare. In 2019, the most produced playwright on the Australian mainstage was Nakkiah Lui, a Gamilaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. This book explores what has happened both on stage and off to generate this remarkable change. As writers of colour, queer writers, and gender diverse writers are produced on the mainstage in larger numbers, they bring new critical directions to the twenty-first century Australian stage. At a politically turbulent time when national identity is fractured, this book examines the ways in which Australia’s leading playwrights have interrogated, problematised, and tried to make sense of the nation. Tracing contemporary trends, the book takes a thematic approach to the re-evaluation of the nation that is dramatized in key Australian plays. Each chapter is accompanied by a duologue between two of the playwrights whose work has been analysed, to provide a dual perspective of theory and practice.

Belonging

Belonging PDF Author: John McCallum
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
John McCallum's new history explores the relationship between 20th century Australian drama and a developing concept of nation. The book focuses on the creative tension sparked by dueling impulses between nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and between artistic seriousness and larrikin populism. It explores issues such as the domineering influence of European high culture, the ongoing popularity of representational realism, the influence of popular theatrical forms, the ambivalence (between affection and aggression) of much Australian humour and satire, and the interaction between the personal and the political in drama. The strength of "Belonging" is its comprehensiveness, anyone studying an Australian play will find an account of it here in the context of the other works by its author or the time and place in which it was written. As well as a rundown of the major writers and their works, and an account of how the minor writers fitted in, the book also investigates the more obscure plays and writers about whom little has been written. This authoritative study of Australian drama gives an account of the relationship between our theatre and our sense of self while taking into account a broad range of influences that helped to shape both.

Contemporary Australian Playwrights

Contemporary Australian Playwrights PDF Author: Jennifer Palmer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Australian drama
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


Contemporary Australian Plays

Contemporary Australian Plays PDF Author: Ron Elisha
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474278183
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Saturday night, small town Wales, one pub, one party and three lads stuck with their school reputations - the gimp, the geek and the bully. Their dream - to get the hell out Dead White Males: "Triumphant...The neatly lined up ducks of academic absolutism are ruthlessly, and hilariously, assassinated" - Sydney Morning Herald; "Swain is a wonderful creation" - Guardian The 7 Stages of Grieving: "A subtle and complex invitation to experience something of the depth of Aboriginal grieving" - Melbourne Age. Hotel Sorrento: "Has a moody, evocative, literary sweep and scope to it" - Sydney Morning Herald Two: In 1948, in a German town, Anna comes to Rabbi Chaim Levi for Hebrew lessons. As the two study the language, their stories are gradually revealed, raising fundamental moral questions as they try to reconcile their tormented pasts and accept and renew their lives. The Popular Mechanicals: "One of the most rollickingly entertaining nights in the theatre" (Sydney Morning Herald)

Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage

Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage PDF Author: Charlotte Farrell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100044127X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of Australian theatre productions by internationally-renowned director, Barrie Kosky. Now a prolific opera director in Europe, Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage accounts for the formative years of Kosky's career in Australia. This book provides in-depth engagements with select productions including The Dybbuk which Kosky directed with Gilgul theatre company in 1991, as well as King Lear (1998), The Lost Echo (2006), and Women of Troy (2008). Using affect theory as a prism through which these works are analysed, the book accounts for the director's particular engagement with – and radical departure from – classical tragedy in contemporary performance: what the book defines as Kosky's 'post-tragedies'. Theatre studies scholars and students, particularly those with interests in affect, contemporary performance, 'director's theatre', and tragedy, will benefit from Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage’s vivid engagement with Kosky's work: a director who has become a singular figure in opera and theatre of international critical acclaim.

21st Century Playwriting

21st Century Playwriting PDF Author: Timothy Daly
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781575259222
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
This book is the most detailed analysis of contemporary playwriting techniques ever published. A decade in the making, "21st Century Playwriting" examines the contemporary theatre scene and the skills and writing techniques needed to succeed as a modern playwright. No other book goes into such depth and detail on areas like dramatic structure, story-shaping, characterization and the contemporary language techniques used in modern playwriting. Written by a multi-award winning playwright with many national and international production credits, the book offers many useful writing tips, as well as an understanding on how radically theatre has changed in the 21st century.

National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera

National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera PDF Author: Michael Halliwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317090810
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Opera has been performed in Australia for more than two hundred years, yet none of the operas written before the Second World War have become part of the repertoire. It is only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that there is evidence of the successful systematic production of indigenous opera. The premiere of Voss by Richard Meale and David Malouf in 1986 was a watershed in the staging and reception of new opera, and there has been a diverse series of new works staged in the last thirty years, not only by the national company, but also by thriving regional institutions. The emergence of a thriving operatic tradition in contemporary Australia is inextricably enmeshed in Australian cultural consciousness and issues of national identity. In this study of eighteen representative contemporary operas, Michael Halliwell elucidates the ways in which the operas reflect and engage with the issues facing contemporary Australians. Stylistically these eighteen operas vary greatly. The musical idiom is diverse, ranging from works in a modernist idiom such as The Ghost Wife, Whitsunday, Fly Away Peter, Black River and Bride of Fortune, to Voss, Batavia, Bliss, Lindy, Midnight Son, The Riders, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The Children’s Bach being works which straddle several musical styles. A number of operas draw strongly on musical theatre including The Eighth Wonder, Pecan Summer, The Rabbits and Cloudstreet, and Love in the Age of Therapy is couched in a predominantly jazz idiom. While some of them are overtly political, all, at least tangentially, deal with recent cultural politics in Australia and offer sharply differing perspectives.

Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage

Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage PDF Author: Susanne Thurow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000682188
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
Over the past 50 years, Indigenous Australian theatre practice has emerged as a dynamic site for the discursive reflection of culture and tradition as well as colonial legacies, leveraging the power of storytelling to create and advocate contemporary fluid conceptions of Indigeneity. Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage offers a window into the history and diversity of this vigorous practice. It introduces the reader to cornerstones of Indigenous Australian cultural frameworks and on this backdrop discusses a wealth of plays in light of their responses to contemporary Australian identity politics. The in-depth readings of two landmark theatre productions, Scott Rankin’s Namatjira (2010) and Wesley Enoch & Anita Heiss’ I Am Eora (2012), trace the artists’ engagement with questions of community consolidation and national reconciliation, carefully considering the implications of their propositions for identity work arising from the translation of traditional ontologies into contemporary orientations. The analyses of the dramatic texts are incrementally enriched by a dense reflection of the production and reception contexts of the plays, providing an expanded framework for the critical consideration of contemporary postcolonial theatre practice that allows for a well-founded appreciation of the strengths yet also pointing to the limitations of current representative approaches on the Australian mainstage. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of Postcolonial, Literary, Performance and Theatre Studies.

Men at Play

Men at Play PDF Author: Jonathan Bollen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401205523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
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.

Contemporary Australian Drama

Contemporary Australian Drama PDF Author: Peter Holloway
Publisher: Sydney : Currency Press
ISBN:
Category : Australian drama
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
Historical perspectives - Critical perspectives.