Troubling spaces: The politics of New community-based guerrilla performance in Australia

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Copyright: Caines, Rebecca
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Abstract
This thesis examines the politics of twenty-first century guerrilla performance. It historicises site-specific, political performance by examining guerrilla art forms from the 1960s to the present. It argues that recent community-based, site-specific performance events can be seen as a new type of guerrilla work, as they utilise techniques which challenge public space, authorship and control without resorting to traditional guerrilla forms of didactic street protest. The author establishes two main political tactics of the community-based guerrilla artist. The first is the utilisation of a problematised definition of community and the second is an understanding of physical, conceptual and experiential space as open to intervention. Community-based performance and site-specific art practices are investigated and space and community are placed into critical theoretical frameworks using post-structural and spatiality theory. The author then argues that post-structured communities which are based on an ethics of difference can trouble and create site, conceptual space and place (site/concept/place) through contemporary guerrilla performance events. Three examples of community-based guerrilla performance in Australia are examined. The first case study explores Western Sydney based Urban Theatre Projects and their 1997 performance event TrackWork. The second focuses on community-based hip-hop artist Morganics and his facilitation of two hip-hop tracks Down River and The Block in 2001. The third considers US theatre director Peter Sellars problematic curation of the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. In all three case studies, guerrilla artists are shown working with post-structured communities to challenge and trouble site/concept/place in order to improve the lives of their participants and audiences. This thesis proposes new post-structural frameworks for the powerful presence of community and site in performance events, thus contributing to performance and cultural studies and to the emerging field of community-based performance scholarship.
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Author(s)
Caines, Rebecca
Supervisor(s)
Scheer, Edward
Mumford, Meg
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Publication Year
2008
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
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