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.