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What does SCAtharsis mean?
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Events > SeminarsMonthly Seminar Presentations 2005: Semester 2 Wednesdays each month
Wednesday 17 August 4.30 – 6pm Multi-Function Room, SGS Ricci-Jane Adams Magical realism in Australian Theatre – Inheritors of the Dead Heart This paper explores the incidences of magical realism in Melbourne playwright, Ben Ellis’ play Falling Petals, as a strategy by which to investigate the cultural myths of national identity. I employ magical realism as a methodology in this analysis to reveal how magical realism is an invaluable tool in the exploration of cultural, political and historical identity and has long been employed by writers from postcolonial nations for that purpose. Christy Dena 'Texts, Worlds, Realms and Channels: Towards a Taxonomy of Polymorphic Works' Works are no-longer only delivered in single media channels at a single-point-in-time: they are distributed, accessed through different media types and delivered over months and years. Franchises of movies, games, comics and websites are commonplace, along with enhanced television, mobile gaming and multi-platform art. This paper subsumes these and other emerging forms under the banner of ‘polymorphic works’ (PMW): a work in many forms. A taxonomy of PMW is posited, considering arguments of Narratology, Ludology and Media Studies. The taxonomy intends to highlight the phenomenon, its emerging characteristics and the issues it raises, to assist in the recognition, design and analysis of such works. Wednesday 14 September 4.30 – 6pm Multi-Function Room, SGS Georgie Boucher Interstitial resistance in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña The unique work of Mexican-American performance artist, Guillermo Gómez-Peña from the early eighties onwards has contributed significantly to an artistic-political engagement with the commodification of ‘multiculturalism’ in both the U.S. art world and political terrain. For over twenty years, Gómez-Peña has dedicated his performance of hybrid, in-between identities to the strategic project of ‘border art’ and ‘cultural transvestism’ in order to address the violence of globalisation, or what he terms, ‘the borderization of the world.’ This paper will trace a chronological trajectory of ‘border politics’ through three of Gómez-Peña’s performances, ‘The End of the Line’ (1986), ‘Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…’ (1992) and ‘Pocha Nostra’s Museum of Frozen Identity ’ (1995 – 2005). From the early site-specific public interventions to current internet-based installations, notions of ‘subversion from within’, ‘reverse ethnography’ and creative expropriation will be analysed as post-colonialist performance strategies. Wednesday 26 October 4.30 – 6 pm Multi-function Room Mark Rashleigh Title and Abstract TBC Wednesday 9 November 5 – 7 pm (note different time and venue) Foundation Life Members Room (SGS). Followed by drinks/ dinner. Lucy Butler "Something borrowed, something blue" This paper will consider Jane Campion's film In the Cut (2003) as a contemporary reworking of the classic Perrault fairy tale Bluebeard. Utilising and challenging both fairy tale motifs and the conventions of the thriller genre, In the Cut uses images of physical dismemberment to illustrate the hidden dangers of a romantic mythology perpetuated by fairy tale and narrative cinema alike. Jennifer Decolongan “‘God knows Hudas Not Pay’: The trickster motif in Filipino popular and performance culture” A central figure in oral and literary folk traditions across many cultures, the trickster is a boundary-crossing archetype, a complex personality whose appetite for mischief-making, cheating, lying, sneaking and buffoonery signals the destructive and transformative forces at play within the cosmos. Ambivalent and amoral, trickster humour is the humour of carnival, of the lower bodily stratum. For Bakhtin, such moments of Rabelasian misrule are moments of popular revolt against hierarchy and order. Building on this notion of trickster humour as a liminal device that enables resistance and subversion, I explore the trickster motif in a range of Filipino popular and performance texts to show how the trickster and features thereof can be read as a trustworthy aspect of the Filipino Nationalist Imaginary. Drawing on contemporary work on the sociology of trust as well as on postcolonial theatre and literary theoretical work on dialogism, performativity and the role of the popular in the formation of imagined communities, I argue that trickster manipulation forces a collective, metatextual spectatorial or readerly confrontation and negotiation with complex questions of political, social and cultural trust that are always already overlaid by colonial and postcolonial disciplinary regimes. |
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