DTS Podcast 2009 Archive
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- DTS Podcast Archives 2009
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DTS Seminar Series: Dr Barry Laing
27th April 2009
A Horse Throwing its Rider: Practice-led Research in Performance Studies
A Horse Throwing its Rider: Practice-led Research in Performance Studies discusses Barry Laing’s PhD, Victoria University 2002. The PhD - an enquiry into subjectivity by means of performance - involved the writing, devising and performing of three solo performance works as well as a 60,000 word written document incorporating 18,000 words of the ‘performance texts’. This presentation engages with the strategies and methodologies employed as well as questions and complexities concerning theory, practice, praxis, method and knowledge as they might figure in postgraduate research by means of performance.
DTS Seminar Series: Professor Peter Fitzpatrick
27th April 2009
Biofiction: trying to find the Two Frank Thrings
A discussion of the challenges in writing a biography of notorious Australian actor Frank Thring, and dealing with the subjectivity of the subject matter in a form of writing that is considered historical and objective.
DTS Seminar Series: Dr Julian Meyrick
March 23rd 2009
The Ontology of Dramaturgy/Dramaturgy as Ontology
Drawing on the recent work of Alain Badiou in reviving discussions of the subject and of objective truth, this paper makes some remarks about the ontological parameters of dramaturgy, arguing that while the precise nature of a play text is hard to define, nevertheless dramaturgy is predicated on the notion that plays do have essential natures. On this ontological supposition resides the sense of a play’s structural elements, as well as its relationship to the real world ie. its relationship with truth. Dramaturgy is a way of intervening in processes of representation but it is anchored on issues of being. Questions of style, content, characterization, cultural context (both source and target) come second to the question of a play’s essential nature – its alethia.
The paper further argues that while dramaturgy is both a function and a method of work it is, at present times, also a metaphor. Dramaturgy as a ‘truth-procedure’ provides a language – limited, flawed but extant – to speak of the ‘whole’ of the theatre experience rather than a specialised part of it. As theatre becomes more technological, capitalised and rationalised – its identity as a totality is eclipsed. ‘Theatrical vision’ – whether that of the director’s, the designer’s, or the playwright’s – detaches from philosophical understanding and becomes the deployment of technique only.
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