Audiostage

Performance scholar Bojana Cvejic joins hosts Jana Perkovic and Angela Conquet. The conversation explores Bojana's ideas on choreography as problem-setting and problem-solving, the generation of choreographers active around the early 2000s (Xavier Le Roy, Jerome Bel) who brought philosophy to choreography, questions of authorship and ownership, 'self-expression', and how we all perform ourselves today.

Melbourne-based theatre maker Rachel Perks joins hosts Jana Perkovic and Bethany Atkinson-Quinton. The conversation explores Rachel’s latest work Ground Control; as well as love, experiences of being female, cyborgs and myths. It covers how sometimes love is a duty, being angry while a woman, sexual assault in our circles and what can be done about it, the validity of emotions, queer emotions and emotions in Australia more broadly.

Trigger warning: This episode contains mention of sexual assault and our experiences with it.

Founder, curator and producer of both Queer Zagreb and Queer New York, Zvonimir Dobrovic joins host Jana Perkovic. They discuss his controversial curatorial policy, the power of norms, and how Queer Zagreb developed out of the anti-war activism in 90s Croatia.

Legendary dance critic,Deborah Jowitt joins hosts Jana Perkovic and Angela Conquet. The conversation gives explores the value of criticism, the worth it creates, by drawing on the experiences of someone who has seen half a century of dance go by, who wrote its history, who taught us how to see dance when we had no storyline, no character, and no balletic vocabulary to hook onto.

Discussed: 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.

In the first episode of season 3, Esteemed dancer and pedagogue Chrysa Parkinson joins Angela and Jana to chat about 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?

Fleur and Jana speak with two great women of the Australian performing arts: all-round cultural leaders Angharad Wynne-Jones, Creative Producer of Arts House Melbourne, and Esther Anatolitis, Director of Regional Arts Victoria (formerly CEO of Melbourne Fringe). In an emotional, grounding 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?"

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.

'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?

We talk about responsibility in the field of verbatim theatre: what it means to represent someone else's story, building a right of reply into your work, ethical eavesdropping and how the response and willingness of the individual participant does not necessarily reflect the response of the community they are a part of.

In the second episode of our season on responsibility, critics Jane Howard and Richard Watts join hosts Fleur Kilpatrick and Jana Perkovic. Discussed are: Margaret Pomeranz, how bad art can create a good review, so many white voices!, and whether 200 words can ever be enough.