Panel #4 Session 3
Wednesday 29 November - 16:30
Building 25, Main Room
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​Chair: Oz Hardwick
Wit(h)nessing cultural exchange via verbatim theatre
- Melody Ellis & Francesca Rendle-Short
RMIT University
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How do communities of writers in the Asia-Pacific find, in poet Alvin Pang’s words, ‘our own sustainable ways of speaking among ourselves’ (2016: 257)? Or in Melissa Lucashenko’s terms, ‘really dig down with writers from other nearby cultures (what we in Aboriginal English call “Proper Neighbour Country”)’ (258)?
The notion of ‘needing to talk’ collaboratively, collectively, and communitastically (Rendle-Short 2023) is central to our current Australian Research Council funded project ‘Connecting Asia Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds for Encounter and Exchange’.
The proposed performance paper engages interview data from the research via the method of documentary or witness theatre, known as verbatim theatre, where actors perform the testimonials of people’s personal and/or collective experiences. In this case Francesca Rendle-Short and Melody Ellis will perform the words of writers interviewed from across the region (Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam). In so doing, the interview transcriptions become script-as-listening and wit(h)nessing (Murray 2017, Bracha Ettinger 2006, Giffney 2009), or a kind of ‘ethical eavesdropping’ (Webb 2009, Schechner 1997, Valentine 2009, Peters 2017, Oades 2014-2018). ‘The “witness” who is usually an on-looker is now an in-looker’ (Murray 185).
In this performed ‘data theatre’ polylogue a complex space of encounter and exchange (between the writer participants interviewed for the research and the panellists and between the panellists and their audience) is made visible.
The proposed paper asks: what can the data tell us and what does it communicate? How does it feel to be an ‘in-looker’ when sounding out interview transcriptions (once, twice, three times removed) in company?
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References:
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Ettinger, Bracha L. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
Giffney, Noreen, et al. (2009), ‘Seduction Into Reading: Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace’, Studies in the Maternal, 1:2
Lucashenko, Melissa (2016), in The near and The Far, eds F. Rendle-Short and D. Carlin, Melbourne: Scribe Publications
Murray, Peta (2017), Essayesque Dismemoir: w/rites of elder-flowering, PhD Dissertation, RMIT University
Oades, Roslyn (2014-2018), ‘Roslyn Oades / responsibility on verbatim theatre, Audio Stage, Apple Podcasts, http://audiostage.guerrillasemiotics.com/roslyn-oades-responsibility-in-verbatim-theatre/
Pang, Alvin (2016), in The near and The Far, eds F. Rendle-Short and D. Carlin, Melbourne: Scribe Publications
Peters, Sarah (2017), ‘The function of verbatim theatre conventions in three Australian plays’, NJ: Drama Australia Journal, 41:2, 117–126
Rendle-Short, Francesca (2023), ‘Communitas’, in A-Z of Creative Writing Methods, eds D. Wardle, J. van Loon, S. Taylor, F. Rendle-Short, P. Murray, D. Carlin, London: Bloomsbury
Schechner, Richard. ‘Believed-in theatre’, Performance Research II.2 (1997): 76-91,https://hemisphericinstitute.org/images/courses/spring-2009/schechner_bta.pdf
Turner, E. (2012), Communitas: The anthropology of collective joy, Palgrave Macmillan
Valentine Alana (2009), ‘The verbatim play’, Currency Press Interview: Sydney, https://www.currency.com.au/verbatim-theatre-alana-valentine/
Webb, Jen (2009), ‘Sentences from the archive’, Performance Paradigm, 5.1, May, http://www.performanceparadigm.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/webb-final.pdf
Prof Francesca Rendle-Short and Dr Melody Ellis are Chief Investigators (with Prof David Carlin and Dr Michelle Aung Thin) on the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project ‘Connecting Asia Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds for Encounter and Exchange’.
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Francesca’s writing and research focuses on getting in/under the skin, prepositionally speaking. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne, and the co-founder of the non/fictionLab and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange). Her five books include The Near and the Far (Vol I and II) and Bite Your Tongue.
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Melody is interested in the politics of value, collectivity, movement, art, and writing as a tool for critical, ethical and creative inquiry. She is a Lecturer in creative writing at RMIT University where she manages the School of Media and Communication’s Honours degree program and where she is a member of the non/fictionLab.
Tell don’t show: voice, perspective and the limits of empathy in the fiction of Daniel Davis Wood
- Julian Novitz
Swinburne University of Technology
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Australian author Daniel Davis Wood demonstrates a consistent approach to narrative focalisation across his published works of fiction. All his novels are narrated in the first person, by a narrator who either explicitly stated to be Wood himself, or strikingly to him in background and identity. These first person narratives often move into third person speculation, where the narrator imagines events in the lives of other characters that he was not present to witness.
In both the first-person framing narrative and the third person fictions within fiction, Wood typically uses a direct, conversational address to the reader to provide a highly detailed summary of critical events rather than dramatic scenes. This approach inverts one of the typical strictures of contemporary fiction: to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell. ’This paper will examine how Wood’s approach to focalisation and voice delivers a provocative critique of understandings of fiction writing and reading as empathic practices, which, when successful, can work to develop and deepen understandings of feelings and experiences that are not our own. Wood’s style of narration deliberately denies readers the expected immersion and verisimilitude of fiction in ways that call attention to its constructed nature and the limitations of his own perspective as an author. My contention is that Wood’s approach to voice and focalisation offers an innovative response to contemporary debates around appropriation and authenticity in literary fiction
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Julian Novitz is a senior lecturer in writing at Swinburne University of Technology. He is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories and his creative and non-fictional work has been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies.
Self and other
- Eugen Bacon
Swinburne University of Technology
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I am a sum of parts. I am many. I am African Australian—the one is not exclusive from the other. I am okay with my dualities. Betwixt. In my lived experience of hybridity, I am an artist and a scholar. I write across forms. I write across genres. My hybridity manifests itself in the diversity of my creations—in the rhythm and dance of textual play, sometimes with illustration, performance, improvisation. The spoken word is an open and earnest dialogue with the self, with the other. In this session, I would like to be ardent, confronting—in a speculative telling that works for and against itself on themes of othering, climate action, mis/identity, lost, belonging, migration, ancestry, futurism, and more.
This is a creative performance of 5 – 7 pieces of prose poetry.
Dr Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels, prose poetry and fiction collections. She’s a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Her short story release Danged Black Thing received a 2021 Otherwise Award honor as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Recent books: Mage of Fools (novel), Chasing Whispers (short stories) and An Earnest Blackness (essays). Eugen has two novels, a novella and three anthologies (ed) out in 2023, including Serengotti, a novel, and the US release of Danged Black Thing. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com and Twitter feed at @EugenBacon