CREATIVITY UNLIMITED:

THE SCIENCE OF ART

Professor Garry Stewart

Institutes & Centres

Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts

Article published on 13 November 2020

Back to BRAVE Minds homepage

Artistic expression has never had limiting boundaries for Professor Garry Stewart.

Through his 21-year role as artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre, Professor Stewart has fused his daring choreography with elements drawn from neuroscience, physics, architecture and robotics.

Now he is expanding the possibilities of innovative artistic research collaboration as the new Professor of Creative Arts and the first director of Assemblage: the Centre for Creative Arts, at Flinders University.

“I’ve always been fascinated in science and other arenas of knowledge outside of the choreographic domain,” he says. “I’m exhilarated by alternate ways of thinking and collaborations that can assert new influences upon my own artistic processes.”

Assemblage is a new research centre designed to draw together myriad artistic and academic disciplines at Flinders University, while also encouraging external artists, researchers, industries and communities to join as partners in novel artistic ventures. It aims to forge bright ideas for research that can stimulate, measure and qualify the impact of Arts endeavours, resulting in complex, transdisciplinary knowledge creation.

“The word assemblage is fitting as it describes a space that facilitates disparate thinkers and practitioners to come together in order to try and answer complicated questions about an increasingly complex world,” says Professor Stewart.

“It's a facility which recognises that artists take concepts, data, philosophies and experience, metamorphosing them into transformative encounters that radically alter our perception and understanding of the world and our place in it.

“While we’re not creating a new physical centre, Assemblage will be drawing together the significant resources we already possess across the University. It pulls focus within the University and externally to generate interest from artists, industries, communities and supporters.”

Key project examples are taking shape in The Void, one of the largest virtual reality and motion capture labs in South Australia. Attached to the Flinders University drama unit and run by Dan Thorsland, The Void brings together filmmakers, choreographers, actors, dancers, gamers, archaeologists, medical researchers and technicians in collaborative projects. “It’s an environment where everyone is experimenting and exploring, and that brings much possibility,” says Mr Thorsland.

Such a daring embrace of uncharted artistic pursuits points to fresh possibilities about how the Arts can engage in innovative research that makes strong connection to industries, investors, practitioners and audiences.

As another example of how Flinders’ cross-disciplinary assistance can help shape new artistic endeavour, Professor Stewart points to the newly co-designed Arts in Health initiative, an inventive collaboration between the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. Given the significant health problems facing our society, Professor Stewart says creative arts have a profound role to play in all areas of health and wellbeing through contemporary research.

Assemblage aims to position Flinders at the centre of national and international activity in digital cultural heritage – especially presenting the rich histories of Indigenous Nations, building on foundations laid at Flinders University by the Tjilbruke Indigenous Studies and Research Group and the high-profile creative work of Unbound Collective. Flinders also hosts AusStage, the nation’s most comprehensive online performing arts database, holding data on over 120,000 Australian performances.

Professor Stewart is excited that Flinders University is breaking new ground by fostering such bold new ventures. “Assemblage facilitates collaborations and unique partnerships. It confronts the conventional, silo-based tradition of learning and encourages extending the boundaries of how artists work to achieve new methodologies and unanticipated outcomes. It is a space for unexpected collaborations and partnerships across a panoply of disciplines.”

Professor Garry Stewart

Professor Stewart’s route to academia has been similarly unconventional. Coming from rural New South Wales where his father was a stockman on a cattle station, he began studying social work at university in Sydney before committing himself to professional dance training at the Australian Ballet School. Through the 21 years he has spent at the helm of the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), he has choreographed more than 25 major productions and dozens of smaller projects. Much of his work has been notable for novel collaborations, exploring dance in confluence with ingenious approaches to staging and design, expressing ideas drawn from neuroscience, biology and physics, incorporating digital technologies such as 3D stereoscopic graphics, live interactive video, virtual reality, prosthetics and robotics.

“The desire to incorporate science and technology into dance originated in a number of my early works prior to my directorship of ADT, and at ADT this pursuit has been amplified. My production Devolution, made in 2006, involved 30 robotic machines including robotic prosthetics along with 10 dancers on stage. At that time, it was probably the world’s largest dance and robotics production.”

Professor Stewart has meshed this heavy artistic workload with academic roles. In 2014, Professor Stewart was Artist-in-Residence at the National Institute for Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney, and was Thinker-in-Residence at Deakin University in 2012–2013, attached to its Motion Lab and exploring motion capture, virtual reality and 3D stereoscopic graphics.

“I see research and acquiring knowledge as the essential building blocks of any innovative artistic pursuit; however all projects necessarily commence as fragile and uncharted and take time to disclose themselves. At Assemblage we are committed to supporting creative arts researchers through this process of discovery.”

Through his work as director of Assemblage, Professor Stewart says he will remain inexorably linked to artistic practice and is exploring the possibility of a new video installation that will utilise the facilities of The Void involving ADT during 2021. A more recent film project titled Microfilms - a collaboration between ADT, AC Arts and Flinders University Screen Studies - resulted in 24 new short dance films made in isolation conditions.

Professor Stewart believes the rigour and discipline of academic research is integral to the progress of performing arts.

“We live in an era when traditional boundaries are collapsing between different areas of thinking, knowledge bases and artistic forms. Artists have access to wider platforms of knowledge, which they absorb into the prism of their creativity. This permits unique and unanticipated discourses that are imperative for how artists try to comprehend our position in a rapidly changing world.”