scholarly journals The royal New Wave: Aubrey Mellor and Queensland Theatre Company, 1988–1993

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Karen Hands
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Identity ◽  
New Wave ◽  
National State ◽  
Cultural Planning ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Artistic Director

AbstractWhen Aubrey Mellor returned to Brisbane in 1988 to become the second artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company (QTC), the company had been under the direction of a British-born and trained director since its formation in 1969. QTC was part of the national state theatre company network established as a result of postwar cultural planning. The network was charged with promoting national drama and producing theatre to a high artistic standard, but this objective imposed very specific constraints around the companies' programming. This was particularly observable at QTC: the company had been culturally and geographically distant from the New Wave movement that emerged in Sydney and Melbourne between 1968 and 1981. Mellor brought his experience of working in key institutions during this movement to QTC where he pursued a personal mission to develop Australian playwriting. During his five-year leadership he transitioned the artistic identity of the company to a more contemporary artistic framework.

Daring to Think Seriously: the Need for Aesthetic Judgements

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-80
Author(s):  
Jon Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
East End ◽  
Europe Today ◽  
Artistic Director

The issue of attitudes towards the arts in England is here compared and contrasted with those evident in the rest of Europe today. This article was written in June 2009, following discussions in Wroclaw during the festival ‘The World as a Place of Truth’, part of the Year of Grotowski. Jon Hewitt is Artistic Director of Admiration Theatre Company, based in London. He has directed several productions, the most recent being Romeo and Juliet Docklands, set in the East End of London. In February 2010 his latest production, Tower Hamlet, opens at the Courtyard Theatre.

‘Distilling the Essence’: Working with Shared Experience

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polly Teale
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Creative Arts ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Rehearsal Strategies ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Stage Adaptations ◽  
Andrew Lloyd Webber ◽  
Artistic Director

In this wide-ranging interview of 25 November 2014, Polly Teale, writer, director, and Artistic Director of UK-based Shared Experience theatre company, reflects on her stage adaptations of literary works, the lives of their authors, and the processes of adapting texts between genres. Founded in 1975 by Mike Alfreds, Shared Experience has toured internationally from Sydney to Beijing with highly physical stage adaptations of literary texts and biographies that express the inner lives of complex and fascinating characters. Teale discusses the adaptation of her play Brontë to a screenplay, Shared Experience’s upcoming production of Mermaid, and rehearsal strategies she uses to encourage actors to explore the subjective truths that lie beneath the surface of their characters. Besides Brontë, past productions have included Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, and After Mrs Rochester. Shared Experience was recently awarded a £105,000 grant by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation and has won several theatre awards including Time Out’s Live Award for Best Play in the West End (2004) and an Edinburgh Fringe First Award (2010). Rebecca Waese is a lecturer and researcher in Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is co-writing a book on Polly Teale and has previously written on interdisciplinary adaptations and dramatic modes in Australian and Canadian literature.

FROM ADAPTATION TO TRANSFORMATION: SHAKESPEARE CREOLIZED ON CAPE VERDE'S FESTIVAL STAGE

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina S. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Cape Verdean ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Artistic Director

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

East West Players and Asian American Theatre: A Retrospective

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-241
Author(s):  
Josephine Lee
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
East West

The following essays were inspired by talks delivered at the 2015 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference, where we commemorated the fifty years since the 1965 founding of East West Players (EWP) in Los Angeles. Currently led by artistic director Tim Dang, EWP is known as the first and longest-running Asian American theatre company. It has played a crucial part in the training of Asian American actors and the formation of other Asian American theatres across the nation and in the development of new plays and productions that articulate and challenge how “Asian America” is understood and represented. Through reflecting upon the past, present, and future of EWP, our essays contemplate the most significant questions about Asian American theatre practice: how theatre engages the multiple and even contradictory aspects of what is “Asian American,” the panethnic racial category that is consistently challenged by the diverse cultural practices, communities, and identities it purports to describe. EWP's history illustrates the multiple dimensions of how Asian American theatre can challenge the limited prescriptions, labels, and packaging so often used in talking about race both inside and outside the theatre.

‘First-Class Evening Entertainments’: Spectacle and Social Control in a Mid-Victorian Music Hall

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Till
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Urban Working

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

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