Investigators:

Chief Investigator: Dr Sarah Peters

Professor Sue Gordon

Research Assistant: Dr Alex Cothren

Summary:

The Verbatim Theatre and Ageing Well project has three goals:

• to research the lived experience of transitioning into aged care,
• to explore how that experience can be written meaningfully into performance, and
• to better understand the impact that sharing those stories has for the participants involved and the broader public audience.

The project uses a practice led verbatim theatre methodology to research this topic from the triangulated perspectives of people who are accessing aged care services themselves, their family members and carers, and people working in aged care.

Verbatim theatre involves interviewing a community about a specific topic or event and using these stories in the development of a performance. The work in progress title of the performance outcome of this project is Time. 

Grant:

Arts and Health Alliance

Category:

Verbatim theatre

Investigators:

Dr Renato Musolino

Summary:

A one-person theatre production, 'Sea Wall' by Simon Stephens. Following on from my PhD research, this project allowed me to look further into the creation of rehearsal methodologies that focus on the enhanced integration of Movement and Acting practices with the aim of enhancing the student/actor's psycho-physical work, an approach to Western Acting focused equally on the actor's psychology and physicality applied to textually based character acting (Zarrilli, 2009).

Having previously developed a seven-step rehearsal process, this project prompted the following questions:

1. How do you make the character resonate (emotionally and behaviourally through performance choices) in vastly different theatrical spaces?

2. Which steps of my rehearsal sequence would need to be altered, or indeed ignored to achieve such resonance? Which steps would need to be enhanced? Would the sequence of steps need to change?

I found that the sequence could be effectively adjusted, and that emotional and behavioural nuance could be maintained by emphasising particular steps over others, despite the significant change in performance space.

The new knowledge of most significance is the enhancement of voice and application of metaphorical images in warm-up/yoga/somatic work.

Category:

Live performance

Investigators:

Dr Sarah Peters

Summary:

Dramaturgy is a field of scholarship devoted to investigating the composition of theatrical works; analysing how meaning is communicated within the world of the play (through style, conventions, themes, character, language etc).

This project investigates the dramaturgies of solo performance. Via 10 interviews with playwrights, directors and actors I will research the specific dramaturgical considerations that go into writing, directing and performing a one person show, whilst also conducting practice-led research as I write an original one person play; An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Hugs. 

Category:

Dramaturgy

Investigators:

Dr Renato Musolino

Summary:

How might motion capture technologies communicate emotion? The project will investigate whether Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Laban Movement Psychology (LMP) can be used by digital motion capture practitioners to enrich the meanings communicated through avatar characters.

The research will use Laban working actions and psychological states to create a discrete repertoire of motion capture files using three simple actions: walking, sitting, standing. 

As a proof of concept, these files will be combined to create narratives that animate avatars.

The aim is to convince the viewer that the avatars possess complex subjective interiorities.

Findings from the experiment will be shared with potential research partners in the heritage and gaming industries.

Grant:

Assemblage (December 2022, seed funding)

Category:

Motion capture & movement studies

Investigators:

Dr Sarah Peters

Summary:

A verbatim theatre performance is based on sustained immersion in and interviews with a community of people, often focused on a specific topic or event. These conversations and shared experiences are recorded, and the resulting stories are written into performance. Researching the process, ethics, dramaturgy and impact of verbatim theatre is an ongoing project for Dr Sarah Peters.

Outcomes have included verbatim plays (published via Australian Plays Transform such as ‘bald heads & blue stars’, ‘twelve2twentyfive’, ‘Eternity’ and ‘Blister’), working with youth ensembles to create original verbatim inspired performances (such as ‘Allowed to Be’ with D’faces of Youth in 2019, ‘LockDown’ with ExpressWay Arts in 2021, and ‘Stuck’ with Prospect Theatre for Young People), and co-authoring a forthcoming book with friend and colleague Dr David Burton titled Verbatim theatre methodologies for community-engaged practice: Perspectives from Australia. 

Category:

Verbatim theatre

Investigators:

Dr Christopher Hurrell, Dr Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, Dr Alex Vickery-Howe

Summary:

Performing Justice on the Queen’s Stage is a trans-cultural, immersive performance project. It brings together performance makers from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds to re-enact the courtroom dramas, both real and fictional, which played out on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide from 1841-1851. 

Categories:

Contemporary drama and new writing

Investigators:

Dr Sarah Peters, Dr Tom Young, Dr Sean Williams, Helen Carter, Rebecca Edwards, Dr Nicholas Godfrey, Shane Bevin, Katie Cavanagh, Jason Bevan

Summary:

The Life Savings project began in May 2021 with the establishment of an interdisciplinary writers room.

Our goal was to identify and experiment with innovative ways of working collaboratively in the development of a short film, generating a case study of methods and strategies which can then be implemented both in the classroom and in wider industry environments.

Grant:

• Assemblage Funding
  

Categories:

Dramaturgy

Digital performance environments

Performer and director training

Investigators:

Professor Chris Hay

Summary:

Founded in 2002, AusStage seeks to archive all live performance activity in Australia over time, holding almost 500 000 records from the 1770s to the present day. The database provides a comprehensive overview of how theatrical practice has evolved in Australia, and its importance as documentary heritage has been recognised by inscription on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.

Since it was first funded, work on AusStage has been undertaken in seven phases, the most recent of which introduced new virtual reality and data visualisation tools. Research using AusStage continues to be undertaken across Australia and around the world, including by a range of Flinders staff and HDR students. 

Grant:

• ARC LIEF

Category:

Theatre history

Investigators:

Professor Chris Hay

Summary:

This project investigates the Australian government’s early attempts at live performance subsidy between 1949 and 1975, before the formation of the Australia Council.

It traces the history of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT), and includes an archival collection of the unpublished and lost plays funded by the AETT that offers a deeper perspective on the institutionalisation of Australian theatre across this period.

The overall aim of the project is to reveal the multiple roads not taken, and the alternative histories that have been elided by the grand narrative of authoritative Australian theatre history.

Grant:

• ARC DECRA

Category:

Theatre history

Investigators:

Professor Chris Hay, Kristine Landon-Smith

Summary:

In a collaboration that began the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), I work with actor trainer Kristine Landon-Smith on an ongoing research project that seeks to document an approach to actor training that elevates the individual cultural context of the performer. Instead of erasing specificity in pursuit of an imagined neutrality, this approach seeks to play with and through difference.

Our work has been published in interdisciplinary collections, including New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts and Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training. We are also writing an actor training manual titled Embedding Diversity in Performer Training, which will be published by Routledge in 2024.

Category:

Performer and director training

Investigators:

Associate Professor Tully Barnett, Mr Alex Cothren, Professor Robert Phiddian

Summary:

Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture is a research project based at Flinders University in South Australia looking at ways of understanding the value of arts and culture beyond the economic data, ticket sales and spill-over effects.

Economic impact studies do not tell the full story of the value of an organisation or event. Funding agencies require new ways of understanding the value of arts and culture organisations, events and objects, and policy makers require a new framework for thinking about the value of arts and culture. To remedy this, a team of researchers is partnering with senior arts and cultural organisations in South Australia.

Laboratory Adelaide: the Value of Culture has been funded by two Australian Research Council Linkage projects based at Flinders University (LP140100802 and LP17101933). Its team includes Professor Julian Meyrick, Professor Robert Phiddian, Professor Steve Brown, Associate Professor Tully Barnett with industry partners including State Library of South Australia, the Adelaide Festival, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Arts South Australia and Festival City Adelaide.

The team published the book What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture in 2018. Published articles include

Phiddian, R., Meyrick, J., Barnett, T., & Maltby, R. (2017). Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics. Cultural Trends, 26(2), 174-180.

Meyrick, Julian, and Tully Barnett. "From public good to public value: arts and culture in a time of crisis." Cultural trends 30.1 (2021): 75-90.

Meyrick, Julian, and Tully Barnett. "Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid." Cultural Trends 26.2 (2017): 107-124.

Grant:

• LP140100802 Laboratory Adelaide: Accounting for Cultural Value in the Arts, Cultural Organisations and Events. 
• LP170100933 Meaningfully communicating the value of arts and culture through reporting.

Categories:

Creative industries