on hiatus.

guerrilla semiotics (GS) is a theatre blog documenting, remembering, ten years in Australian theatre. Contained here are the reviews, published and unpublished, formally tidy and formally experimental, created by me, Jana Perković, between 2006-2016.

This decade, which I believe will be remembered as one of the most important decades in Melbourne theatre, both for theatre-making and its criticism, deserves not to be forgotten, not to disappear in the internet debris. I have the luxury of coding knowledge, and will be able to keep this small archive of my writings in a tidy, organised state, for some time to come.

There are many reasons why GS has to be discontinued: some are profoundly personal, others are rigorously professional, and some are an odd mixture of both. In 2017, I have had a series of conversations, with Alison Croggon, Carl Nilsson-Polias, Andrew Fuhrmann, Alex Griffin, Declan Greene, and Bek Berger, all running along the exact same lines. Each time, we queried each other on our mutual feeling that something special to us has ended, or changed, that a particular ecology delicately holding us all together has dispersed. That it was time.

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I started writing about theatre in 2006. I had just moved to Melbourne from Europe, and I found familiarity in theatre: here I found cultural open-mindedness, a sense of joy, intellectual rigour and moral honesty, while the rest of John Howard’s Australia perplexed me with its lack of all of the above.

Theatre was always my side thing, but it is a beloved side thing, and over these ten years it has given me a lot more than I had hoped for: numerous close friends, extraordinary experiences, and the opportunity to see some good things through.

Between 2006 and 2016, I did my best to play a good role in this delicate ecology. Carl Nilsson-Polias (of Hayloft Project) and I built the VCA student publication Spark Online into a theatre portal, in a concerted effort to bring together theatre bloggers around Australia. I was a member of Green Room Awards from 2011-2015, at a time when live art appeared in Melbourne, and we spent considerable time developing a local language suitable to this form. Carl and I created the first serious website for Green Room Awards, paving one small paver in its legitimisation as a Victorian theatre institution. I served on Malthouse Theatre’s Artistic Counsel from 2013-2015. From 2012 until 2015, I was Literary Manager at MKA Theatre of New Writing, where I read hundreds of Australian bad plays, discussed them in-depth with Glyn Roberts, and finally wrote an essay about them for Australian Script Centre. I became a lecturer at the highly regarded Theatre Department at VCA, where for four years now I’ve been allowed to torture up-and-coming theatre-makers with both theatre theory and philosophy. I helped develop Dancehouse Diary for Dancehouse Melbourne, which has easily become one of the most important publications on contemporary dance in Australia. Within MKA, we even made an effort to rethink playtext publishing. These have all been wonderful experiences.

Most importantly, however, a ton of work went into creating and supporting good criticism. During these years, I wrote for RealTime, The Guardian, The Crikey, New Matilda, TimeOut, The Conversation, as well as internationally, for Exeunt, Tanzconnexions. I tried to write good criticism in all these places, but GS was always the place where I had the space and time to be really considered, as well as formally brave. I wrote in-depth about independent artists whose work, I thought, deserved considered reflection. I challenged and pushed other independent critics to be more formally experimental, and was in turn pushed by them.

We will remember 2006-2016 for its phenomenal independent theatre, but I do hope we also remember it for its phenomenal independent criticism. In this pocket of self-published long-form blogs, free of editorial control but full of critical dialogue, between the insular safety of theatre and the brutal parochialism of the mainstream Australian culture, a vast number and variety of converging voices gave rise to formal and thematic experimentation that, I think, was unprecedented in the performing arts. We did good things. We wrote dot-point reviews, Socratic reviews, we wrote rants, we wrote theatre criticism that referenced Super Mario. Ming-Zhu Hii and Lee Lewis led some early conversations on race in Australian arts, and Augusta Supple opened up the overdue conversation about gender; the fruits of these efforts will be felt for some time to come. In Spark Online, Carl and I commissioned experimental criticism before experimental non-fiction was a thing. Some of Andrew Fuhrmann’s early, most radical writing has survived only on my server, pulled in by Spark’s early use of RSS (and how strange to think that RSS is now outdated technology). I started writing a slightly insane column for The Lifted Brow, that mixed serious theatre criticism with narrative fiction. And in 2014, fed up by the lack of long-form conversations with artists, I created Audiostage so that we could have deep thoughts about theatre practice for a whole hour uninterrupted, thus creating one of the first theatre podcasts in the world. We really did well. In the conversations I’ve had this year, it was repeatedly said that the art of these years was as rigorous as its criticism. And more than one person repeated Michael Kantor’s words: “We’re all only really making work in order to please Alison [Croggon],” who has over these years become not just a role-model, but one of my dearest friends.

In between everything, I fell in love in immersive theatre performances, theatre zombies attacked me and Declan Greene in Berlin, my face was on very large MKA posters, I had Hayloft Project meetings at my house, and dinners with Black Lung on the roof of their possibly-squatted house. I saw Zoe Croggon’s very first collages chez Croggon-Keene’s, made gnocchi for all the theatre critics in Melbourne, workshopped games with Rob Reid and Sayra, drank till dawn with Steven Armstrong in the Malthouse forecourt, sat in James Waites’ living room reading through the clippings of his writings, and held Andrew Fuhrmann’s newborn baby. These, too, have been wonderful experiences. And if there is anything I have understood about this decade of art and arguing, it is that the only thing we can carry into the future – theatre being as ephemeral as life itself – is precisely our friendships, our camaraderie, our shared pride in having made something special together.

My one regret is those artists whose work I’ve never found the time to write about in a considered fashion – I owe an essay to Zoey Dawson, at the very least. Then there are all those things I didn’t write about, out of politeness – I couldn’t find a way to talk about being an ethnic woman in a culture often unaware of the depth of its racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism. If there is one change in independent culture that I love, it is that I no longer feel like the one wog voice in a sea of oblivious white.

That aside, however, I feel very creatively satisfied, and proud of everything we have done. I think history will be very kind to us all. It didn’t always seem like it, but we were a good team.

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The convergence of many delicate accidents that made this decade possible has dispersed again. A blog, which once offered editorial freedom, is now something to monetize. The wonderful community-building potential of This Thing Called The Internet has become a criss-crossing web of self-promotional channels. With the panopticon of social media has come a self-consciousness we didn’t quite have when we were little, and increasingly I speak to young people for whom Sisters Grimm are ancient, and Hayloft Project positively mythological.

It’s important not to fall into the same trap as those who regret not investing in Apple in the 1980s: new risky ventures are as present now as they were then, they just look different. The closing of one theatre world doesn’t mean that there aren’t artists who continue to make beautiful work: Adena Jacobs’ Fraught Outfit, Penny Harpham, the various members of post, The Rabble, a whole up-and-coming generation of black voices. And something new might be starting over at Witness. So let’s clear the old from the deck, for the new.

Audio Stage, e.3, ep.3: Bojana Cvejic, and some thoughts

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Bojana Cvejić has long been one of my intellectual idols, a dramaturg and performance scholar whose books, articles, and lectures show one of the most exemplary engagements with philosophy in the performing arts. Together with that other Bojana (Kunst), Cvejić thinks deeply, rigorously, and uncompromisingly about contemporary dance as a system, not merely of signification, but of production; of social relationships, modes of authorship, modes of creative and intellectual labour, modes of being, modes of citizenship -in her analysis, all are produced and reproduced in the arts just like they are would be on the factory floor. Bojana Cvejić’s enormous mind handles it all simultaneously, the ethical and the aesthetic and the pragmatic and the ideological. Reading her is always a pleasure. Speaking with her was momentuous.

“To affirm another politics of authorship means to control the conditions in which value is produced.”

What makes Cvejić particularly beautiful to listen is that she is not one of those thinkers who will throw a lot of ideas in the air as equally weighted possibilities, which cheapens them even when they have been thought through rigorously. Cvejić asserts, posits answers. Her thoughts form slowly and carefully and accurately, and listening to her is like watching a very large edifice – say, a bridge – being built from the bottom up, thought by careful thought, until an entire perspective on the world has sprung up.

“Artists… lack political education. I think it’s unclear to everyone what it means to be a citizen – this sense of belonging, of entitlement, of claiming, how one could be part of decision-making.”

In this conversation, which is so precious to me, Bojana charts the path that contemporary dance, as well as many kinds of participatory performance, have traversed since Bel and Le Roy’s experiments in the late 1990s, from collective authorship to participation and immersion. And this sentence keeps resounding in my mind: “I think it’s unclear to everyone what it means to be a citizen”.

Of all the art forms, theatre is singular in how closely it is related to participatory democracy, and yet how deeply, on the ground, it is immersed in what we might, for a lack of better word, term ‘narcissism’. There was a time when participatory performance offered the dream of restoring to theatre that dimension of political participation, that sense of agora; of us all coming together as people with rights, agency, ethics. To those of us interested in what it means to come together in real space, those of us who know the work of Brecht, Piscator, Boal, there was a sense that theatre was remembering its own political agency. And I still believe that theatre can play that role (as does Bojana, I believe): there have been performances recently, like Hot Brown Honey, like Zoe Coombs-Marr’s Trigger Warning, like Elbow Room’s We Get It, that left such a trail of electricity behind them: we were there, together, and something was happening in the room. At its finest, there is still immersive performance such as Miguel Gutierrez’ Deep Aerobics, which harnesses our being-there-together to make us angry and sad and armed for political change. But too often, theatre invites us to an evening of self-indulgence; of forgetting, rather than engaging, with the world.

The shift between coming together in public for a protest, and coming together for a flash mob – and a flash mob, it bears repeating, exists mainly on social media afterwards – that is the shift that Bojana talks about. Could it be that the immense precarity of our lives, the precarity of our jobs, our housing, our social safety nets, and our relationships, results in a kind of collective nervous breakdown, in which the selfie, the public performance of the self, is genuinely confused for personal agency? I don’t know. But between the extremes of performance where participation is measured in selfie numbers, and the aloof self-absorption of the solo, there is a hypothetical, if rarely utilised, middle ground, in which performance could still be a space of collective agency.

This is what we talk about today.

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I started Audio Stage because so often our conversations, in the arts, remain short and snappy and commercial: we put on our best faces to sell our shows, and we sell it as entertainment and as inoffensive and as fun, fun above everything. And yet, we are not doing justice to Australian art when we do so. We are not doing justice to the personal, political, moral, and imaginative quests that our artists are actually undertaking. To give an artist a large space, to let them speak about what they do and how with a greater grounding in our society – that is why these long conversations happen.
We hope you enjoy them.

Discussed in this episode:
Marx, dance in museums, who authors dance?, Xavier Le Roy’s early works, creating new values, dancers associated with certain choreographers – are they ‘damaged goods’?, collaboration vs collectivity, Marcel Mauss and social choreography, “I’ve done Vietnam, I’ve done the Paris Ballet Conservatory, I’ve done Wall St.”, the high-paying executive who gives it all up to find out who he is, ‘selfie-expression’, choreography as a cottage industry, YouTube, and remember when we used to think we could decide to make a viral video?

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes, find us on Facebook, or listen on the official website.

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Dance criticism, writing, and discourse

I’ve just realised that a video exists of the panel I joined, at Australian Dance Forum 2015, with the brilliant Matt Day, Jordan Beth Vincent, and Vicki van Hout, to discuss the relationship between dance and writing. Chair Ashley Dyer navigated us fantastically, and we had a really good time.

All the really thorny questions get raised – can you review dance is you can’t dance?. what is the value of a review?, can dance professionals write?, how do you write about dance? – and at the time we felt we discussed them extremely well.

Hope you enjoy.

Audio Stage, s.4, ep.2: Rachel Perks, and some thoughts

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If there is a voice of the new generation of Australian women, Rachel Perks is it. I have been in awe of this young, but very wise, woman, for a few years now, watching a string of shows that attack head-on some of the most toxic and problematic assumptions about what it means to be a woman today. Having her on Audio Stage, talking with Beth and myself, was a rare and precious opportunity to get under the pink, so to say, of womanhood in Australia today: how to deal with our hatred of our bodies, of our emotions, of our needs and desires.

“Feminism is still, in most circles, seen as radical… What you’re really saying is, misogyny is equatable with normativity.”
– Rachel Perks

What is interesting about the contemporary queer performance in Australia is that it diverges significantly from the queer historical canon. Our episode with Zvonimir Dobrović opened that conversation already: queer art used to be about the body. Queer identity, somewhat in parallel, used to be about the body. Butch or femme? Twink or bear? Trans or cis? How do you have sex? What got lost, and what this new wave of Australian queer performance is unearthing – and I am watching it with immense interest, because nothing else exists anywhere else in the world – is emotion.

Emotions are feminised and invalidated, says Rachel in the conversation, and this is what makes her show Ground Control so heart-breakingly important. What makes it queer sci-fi is not simply that the main character is queer: it is the emotional landscape she brings out, a landscape of care and invalidation, of self-hatred and success, that is so fundamental to being a woman because, as Nora Samaran says in her incredible essay, in a culture that does not expect men to show up for their own emotions, women get blamed for unaddressed male shame.

We discuss rape, in this episode, I should say. We discuss sexual assault with a candidness that is still too often lacking. We discuss it carefully, but you should still listen with care, because sexual assault is a topic that hurts, and sometimes it seems there is not enough warmth in the world, not enough hugs, to make that hurt go away. And we discuss sexual assault close to home.

No one is going to prosecute this person. How do we deal with this situation? My only answer was, let’s just get all these women in a room. Because that’s something that doesn’t happen: women are not allowed to speak to each other about their experience and feel that their experience is valid.”
– Rachel Perks

This is the part of the conversation that re-emerged in editing as a stand-out statement. I have thought about it a lot, this month, as I publish two pieces about rape, one here, one in print, soon.

I have long found the concept of radical honesty very interesting, because it has the potential to cut through that shame that cloaks the lives of so many of us, as we’re stumbling to play perfectly our roles of man, woman, girl, boy. I teach a class at the VCA, in which we delve deep into gender and race performance, and it is a class that has over the years become a sacred space of intimacy and confession, and in which I try, as best as I can, to hold space as sadness and grief emerge. To validate, and frame, experiences, as not unique, not shameful, and not too horrible to be heard, accepted, embraced. The change in public discourse helps: this essay, by Alison Croggon, helped; this video, by Van Badham, helped. No one has the obligation to talk about their personal experiences, far from it. But the space it opens up,

In that amazing apology to the LGBT folk on behalf of the state, Victorian premier Daniel Andrews quoted Peter McEwen say: “We learnt to say ‘black is beautiful, women are strong – and gay is good.’ Once I learnt I was good, it led me to question everyone who said I was evil and sick.”

In a certain sense, I am thinking as I am releasing this precious, precious conversation into the world, the queerest thing one can do as a woman is to talk with other women, as women. To bypass that discourse of shame and invalidation. To tell each other that we are good. As we are.

Thank you, Rachel.

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I started Audio Stage because so often our conversations, in the arts, remain short and snappy and commercial: we put on our best faces to sell our shows, and we sell it as entertainment and as inoffensive and as fun, fun above everything. And yet, we are not doing justice to Australian art when we do so. We are not doing justice to the personal, political, moral, and imaginative quests that our artists are actually undertaking. To give an artist a large space, to let them speak about what they do and how with a greater grounding in our society – that is why these long conversations happen.

We hope you enjoy them.

Discussed in this episode:
that Cyborg Manifesto, I Love Dick, femme invisibility a.k.a. what a lesbian should look like, The L Word, being angry while a woman, sexual assault in our circles and what can be done about it, the validity of emotions, queer emotions, emotions in Australia, and ‘Why do people think that women are debasing themselves when we reveal the conditions of our own debasement?’

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

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Audio Stage, s.4, ep.1: Zvonimir Dobrovic

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This year, we splice up our seasons: to our season of conversations on value and price of dance performance, we are adding one that has been on our minds for some time, one that we have been keen to discuss.

Queer is a season we have been meaning to do for a long time – and this conversation with Zvonimir was recorded during that preparation. Queer performance, which has been so important in defining queer identity, queer theory, queer practices, is having a powerful resurgence today. And yet – what is queer? What is not queer? How does queer exist in performance? How does queer performance exist in the world? What is its political power, and what its aesthetic urgency?

Zvonimir Dobrovic, the curator of Queer Festival in Zagreb and New York, is one of the seminal figures of queer performance today: curator, presenter, taste-shaper, conversation-shaper. Zvonimir was in Australia to give a lecture at Performance Space in Sydney and see some work at Dance Massive in Melbourne, and we jumped at the opportunity to talk to him. Queer Festival was very important in Croatia, both as a very visible part of the LGBT activism in the 200s, and for decisively redefining the notion of queer away from the narrow LGBT question and into a broader political gesture of resisting normativity. In this episode, we take time to talk about formative experiences, about being young, and about how arts festivals are so conducive to falling in love.

“Queer is everything outside the norm. It is subversive, but never violent.”

Discussed in this episode:
what we did in the 1990s, James Welshby’s HEX, what is gay and what is queer, the tabloid press, teaching tolerance in schools, barebacking in Australia, BalletLab’s Kingdom, Jerome Bel makes queer art!, single mothers are queer, heteronormativity, the monochrome Western uniform of LGBT sexuality, pulling flags out of your pussy VS lesbian pottery, whether art can really change the world, and how, if you must be gay in patriarchy, at least don’t be a bottom.

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

audio stage, s.3, ep.2: Deborah Jowitt

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And today, Angela, Beth, and I talk with Deborah Jowitt, the seminal dance critic. To say she is everyone’s idol is an enormous understatement: Deborah has taught me not only how to write about dance, but how to look at dance, and how to see dance. The conversation was held during the weeks of Keir Choreographic Award, which gave us a rare opportunity to discuss Australian contemporary dance with someone who really knows a lot – and to talk about what value has been created, and continue to be created, by dance criticism.

As often happens with Audio Stage, it was a very emotional experience. Please have a listen, enjoy, and share.

If somebody says it’s a dance, it’s a dance and we’ll deal with it.

Discussed in this episode:
it’s not ‘the body’, but ‘the dancers’; the 1960s revolution against elitism; incorporating the building janitor into a choreography; pilates; Keir Choreographic Awards, and where is the dancing in contemporary dancing?; ideas that cannot be physically fleshed out – what fuels it in Australia?; the overuse of the word ‘ephemeral’; how to legitimise a new form; Judson Dance Theater; how criticism creates desire; and that not being a good artist doesn’t mean you’re not a good person.

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

Audio Stage, s.3, ep.1: Chrysa Parkinson

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And Audio Stage is back, for a season in which we look at price and value of that most ephemeral of all performing arts: dance. Angela Conquet, the AD of Dancehouse, and I, will speak to an incredible line-up of international dance thinkers, and we start with esteemed dancer and thinker Chrysa Parkinson.

Chrysa now lives in Brussels, after many years in New York, where she worked with Tere O’Connor Dance. In Europe, she has worked with Boris Charmatz, Rosas/Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jonathan Burrows, Mette Ingvartsen, Phillip Gehmacher, Eszter Salomon, John Jasperse, Deborah Hay, Meg Stuart, and many others. She is an esteemed pedagogue, teaching annually at PARTS and is currently Director of the New Performative Practices MFA program at DOCH/Uniarts in Stockholm. Chrysa would say that her practice is dance.

Chrysa was in Australia as part of Adrian Heathfield’s project ghost telephone presented by the Biennale of Sydney, and in Melbourne invited by Dancehouse as part of the Keir Choreographic Award public program. It was such a pleasure to speak with this beautiful mind about the creativity and importance of doing, the false split between the mind and the body, and Richard Sennett. This episode of our little podcast has truly lived up to our wildest ambitions for Audio Stage.

I am always attended by what I called the ‘art dog’, which is just there: pretty big, at my shoulder, a little bit of a nice wet nose, it’s kinda looking around, it sees: ‘that’s life, that’s art’.

Discussed in this episode:
dance as manual labour, choreography as middle management; working with Deborah Hay; Richard Sennett arguing with Hannah Arendt about the importance of handiwork; the split between thingliness and beingness; who owns a choreography?; teaching as ‘trafficking in procedures’; differences in audiences between New York and Europe, where afterwards at the bar other artists just say ‘hi’; and can praise replace a living wage?

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

Audio Stage, s.3.1, ep.1: Andrew Haydon

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This week, Jana speaks with independent theatre critic, Andrew Haydon, about audiences, histories and European vs English theatre.

Andrew is one of the few British theatre critics who regularly travels around Europe to see new work, and who is conversant in contemporary European theatre (and not just what happens on the British Isles), approaching it with a distinctly British, but never parochial, perspective. In his writing for The Guardian, Time Out, Exeunt Magazine, and in his respected blog Postcards from the Gods, Andrew has long championed unusual work, difficult work, and has often argued that the British theatre is unnecessarily conservative in terms of form and interest.

“I always wonder what it would be like to get a hardcore German theatre theoretician in to watch a load of the really hardcore naturalistic productions that still exist in Britain but just tell them “it’s all a concept” and they are not allowed to go “oh, you’re just being British”. They have to believe that it’s a metaphor. How that would read? I’m sure there’s actually some really creative thinking if we didn’t all just go “urgh! It just looks like a room. It’s meant to look like that.” If we actually thought about it more creatively. There’s probably better ways we could understand what’s going on. There is craft in the way these things are put together, obviously. But craft and possibly not philosophy.”
– Andrew Haydon

Discussed in this episode:
‘Live art’ and its global history, stage metaphor, the white male default, new writing and authorship, national identity, what defines a ‘national theatre history’, the demographics of theatre goers, the importance of arts writing, the fallibility of the critic and can theatre ever just be bad?

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

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Audio Stage, s.2, ep.5: Esther Anatolitis & Angharad Wynne-Jones

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In our momentous final, fifth episode on responsibility, Fleur and Jana spoke with two great women of the Australian performing arts: all-round cultural leaders Angharad Wynne-Jones, Artistic Director of Arts House Melbourne, and Esther Anatolitis, Director of Regional Arts Victoria (formerly CEO of Melbourne Fringe). In an emotional ending to the series, we touch on some important, often neglected questions: how do we create an ecology that supports the artist, as well as the arts?”

“Risk is not so risky. It’s a necessity. It is how forms develop, how we find new audiences, new artists, how cultural conversations happen.”
– Angharad Wynne-Jones

This is a very special episode. Angharad and Esther spoke with an authenticity and feeling that is rare in public discourse. We felt very privileged to have them with us, and we all left in tears.

Discussed in this episode:
George Brandis, being a person with a ‘decision-making potential and capacity to be confused’, the future, ‘creating new artistic frameworks for established arts companies’ and what that could possibly mean, the difference between advocacy and lobbying, audiences, the importance of having rigorous conversations about art, being accountable to the rate-payers of the City of Melbourne, bushfires, Kat Muscat, burn-out, and what is cultural leadership anyway?!

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

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Audio Stage, s.2, ep.4: Jolyon James & Sonya Suares

This week, Fleur speaks with Sonya Suares and Jolyon James on how the concept of responsibility relates to the actor: the responsibility of the actor, of the director to the actor, diversity in casting and the potential impact of not providing a multiplicity of stories and voices for our stages, and the responsibilities of creating work for children.

“There’s a consciousness that needs to be put around the way that we behave. We can’t just keep patting ourselves on the back or excusing it: ‘We’re creating art! It’s not real!’ It is also really happening to somebody.”
– Sonya Suares

Discussed in this episode:
Finding the ‘truth’ as an actor or lying about finding it, 8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography, creating a sense of safety in the rehearsal room, onstage nudity and vulnerability, We Get It, drama schools, bullying in the rehearsal room, actors learning to say ‘no’, sexual abuse within creative exploration, experiences of acting and casting as a woman of colour, the transformative body of the white actor, racial dramaturgy, Arena Theatre Company, creating work for children.

Listen to the episode:

You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.

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