ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7697-7932
Current Organisation
University of Melbourne
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Performing Arts and Creative Writing | Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies | Drama, Theatre And Performance Studies | Cultural Theory | Dance | Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Performing Arts
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
The Performing Arts (incl. Theatre and Dance) | Understanding other countries | The performing arts (incl. music, theatre and dance) | The creative arts | Conserving Intangible Cultural Heritage |
Related Links
Publications
Solid and Liquid Modernities in Regional Australia
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Gestus, affect and the Post-Semiotic in Contemporary Theatre
Publisher: Common Ground Research Networks
Date: 2007
Scenographies of the everyday in contemporary German theatre-anna Langhoff and Sasha Waltz restage the family drama
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2008
Identity Politics Forum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 26-01-2012
DOI: 10.1017/S030788331100085X
Abstract: Introduced, compiled and edited by Elin Diamond, this forum brings together feminist theatre erformance scholars to revisit the question of identity politics. Does it still have currency? Does it still matter for feminists today? In what theatre and performance contexts do we still discuss identity politics? Following an overview (from a US perspective) of past and present concerns by Elin Diamond, the forum voices a range of international views as contributors consider identity politics, theatre and performance in their countries of origin: Nobuko Anan (Japan), Denise Varney (Australia), Katrin Sieg (Germany), Bishnupriya Dutt (India) and Tiina Rosenberg (Sweden).
More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 02-2000
DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X00013488
Abstract: With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
White-out: Theatre as an agent of border patrol
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 10-2003
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883303001160
Abstract: In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman's 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.
Patrick White's Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage, 1960–2018
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Date: 09-2021
DOI: 10.30722/SUP.9781743327555
Abstract: One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting. In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.
Identity politics in Australian Context
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 26-01-2012
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883311000794
Abstract: Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and isions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.
Concluding Comments: Identity, Community and the Marketplace in Contemporary Indonesian Performance
Publisher: BRILL
Date: 2015
Transience and Connection in Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon: China in the Space of Flows
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 03-05-2012
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883312000041
Abstract: Despite the stylish blend of multimedia and live performance in Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon , touring in 2010 and 2011, critics are surprised by the reappearance of the archetypal love story in the space of contemporary intermedial performance. This article argues that the performance, set in contemporary Shanghai, explores the lived experience of transience and mobility through a narrative in which in idual lives are implicated in a transnational, transcultural and transgenerational romance. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's work on liquid modernity and liquid love, we argue that the performance grapples with the experience of being unbound and disconnected in a liquid world.
Introduction: ‘Street-fighters and philosophers’: Traversing ecofeminisms
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 06-12-2017
Feminist Ecologies
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Climate guardian angels: Feminist ecology and the activist tradition
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 06-12-2017
Heiner Müller and Martin Wuttke: Staging new images in a time of change
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2005
Introduction: Regional Modernities in the Global Era
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Feeling, sensation, and being moved: Case studies in affective performance
Publisher: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Date: 09-2017
DOI: 10.3138/MD.0873
Abstract: This article examines three recent adaptations of canonical works of modern drama – Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Botho Strauss’s Gross und Klein – that resituate their historically troubled female characters within the temporality of the contemporary spectator. It argues that Katharina Schüttler’s cool and detached Hedda for the Schaubühne Berlin production, Isabelle Huppert’s karaoke-singing Blanche DuBois in Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe’s Un tramway, and Cate Blanchett’s emotionally vulnerable Lotte in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Gross und Klein bring gestural extra-literary qualities to the characters and unexpected affective registers that call for a new interpretation of gendered experience. The analysis focuses therefore on the feeling, somatic, non-cognitive, and pre-rational sides of lived experience in the west today. It is interested in how gender and emotion, sociality, and historicity produce gestic affects that move audiences along the pathways of reactive feeling and sensation.
Australian Adaptations: The European Turn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Tokyo Diary
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2001
Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Modern Australian Drama: Haunted by the Past
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
Theatre In The Asia-Pacific: Regional Culture In A Modern Global Context
Start Date: 2009
End Date: 2011
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityWhere Culture And Politics Intersect: Trends In German Theatre Since Reunification
Start Date: 2004
End Date: 2006
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityAusStage, Phase 5: Australian Live Performance And The World - Global Networks, National Culture, Aesthetic Transmission
Start Date: 2014
End Date: 2014
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityProject DP140100776
Start Date: 2014
End Date: 2016
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP140100776
Start Date: 07-2014
End Date: 12-2018
Amount: $161,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP0450645
Start Date: 01-2004
End Date: 12-2007
Amount: $78,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP210100720
Start Date: 03-2021
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $340,781.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP0986324
Start Date: 2009
End Date: 12-2013
Amount: $199,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityLinkage Infrastructure, Equipment And Facilities - Grant ID: LE140100024
Start Date: 06-2014
End Date: 12-2017
Amount: $325,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity