From the 'New Wave' to the 'Unnameable': post-dramatic theatre & Australia in the 1980s & 1990s

Abstract

The object of this dissertation is to re-assess Australian examples of ‘performance’ in light of discourses and directions in dramaturgy that have emerged since the 1970s internationally. The thesis applies Hans-Thies Lehmann’s comprehensive theory of post-dramatic theatre to explicate examples of departures from dramatic theatre in view of the expansive field of inquiry implied by the description ‘performance’ or ‘new media arts’ and general cultural-political theory. To examine the de-centralisation of text specific to post-dramatic theatre the dissertation analyses firstly, material devised collaboratively at all stages of creative development in its case studies of the Sydney based companies The Sydney Front (1986-1993) and Open City (1987 -); and secondly, Heiner Müller’s concept of ‘literature’ written for the theatre and in opposition to its convention. In addition, the analysis of Müller serves as an introduction to a comparative analysis of a dramatic (literary) theatre project by a group of Aboriginal artists based on a post-dramatic text by Müller. This dissertation endeavours to contribute to documentation on post-dramatic theatre in Australia and more broadly, to conceptions of contemporary forms of dramaturgy. More specifically, the thesis argues that dramaturgy no longer necessarily concerns the identification of an aesthetic locus that explicitly explicates the audience’s relation to a known macrocosm. Instead, the thesis conceives of dramaturgy as a compositional strategy that can be thought of within the bounds of Aristotle’s perfunctory visual dimension ‘opsis’ and elaborated upon in terms of Kristeva’s theory of the ‘thetic’ as regulating ‘semiotic’ incursions into the ‘symbolic’ order. In doing so, the thesis proposes the concept of a ‘televisual’ and an ‘abject’ dramaturgy, the latter on the basis of a relation to the older tradition of carnival and identifies a link between intertextuality (transposition) and dramaturgical strategies that engage the spectator in the theatre situation and the dissolution of logocentric hierarchy.