This article provides a perspective from the margins of the Australian performing arts, investigating intersecting power relations, as Patricia Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) define intersectionality.
Shadows of the Australian Performing Arts Ecology Görkem Acaroğlu KEY WORDS: Queer, Cabaret, Melbourne, FeminismĦ. This queer audience released the performers from the heteronormative gaze, and thereby from the transformation of female subjects to fetishized objects In examining specific performances, their context and reception, I tease out the ways in which queer women in Melbourne were reworking lesbian and feminist identity positions as ‘desiring subjects’, specifically enabled through the development of a sophisticated queer audience with an appetite for performance which did more than trot out unifying slogans for them to applaud. This article takes an autoethnographic approach, drawing upon primary sources including performance texts, journal entries (autoethnographic record) and interviews with performers and event producers. These performances articulated developing ideas about lesbian and queer identities, feminist and female subjectivities, and the ‘body’ – the status and state of corporeality in the increasingly mediated and corporatized environment. Queer club nights incorporated performances including dance, spoken word, music and drag performance. In Melbourne in the 1990s, a burgeoning ‘queer cabaret’ scene and Dockland parties produced by the ALSO Foundation provided regular performances for LGBTQI+ audiences. Before Neo-Burlesque, There Was Queer Cabaret: Revisiting Queer Performances from Melbourne in the 1990s Maude Davey Hauntologically-inflected methods not only provide fresh insight into the contingency of Australian theatre’s development, they also de-reify the present moment.ĥ. The second half of the article demonstrates a number of practical, hauntologically-inflected methods for examining Australian theatre, asking what impact the activities of the 1930s and 1940s might have had on those in the 1950s as we receive this framing today.
The means proposed to explore the historical record in this way utilize the concept of “hauntology”, in both Jacques Derrida’s original definition as “the spectral traces of the past found in the present”, and of Mark Fisher’s notion of “lost futures”, where longing is felt for possibility states that remain unrealised, “a relation to what is no longer or not yet”. This article treats them as years that have yet to happen, returning to the 1930s and 1940s to look forward to an as-yet undisclosed future in Australian theatre. Invariably (and naturally) the 1950s are a decade we look back on. Looking Forwards to the 1950s: Utilising the Concept of Hauntology to Investigate Australian Theatre History Julian Meyrick Australasian Drama Studies Issue 80 | April 2022Ĥ.