Issue 14

Theatre, Exchange and the Sine Wave: Reciprocal Relations in the World of Busting or Booming Performance

The Presentation of Indigenous Australian Plays in Japan

Cross-Cultural Encounters: Aboriginal Performers and European Audiences in the Late 1800s and Early 1900s

Opela in Taiwan: Commercial Theatre, Grassroots Theatre, and Intellectual Theatre

Corporeal Spectacle and Sublime Annihilation: Post World War Two US Art and the Theatrical Operations of Edward Burtynsky’s Environmental Photography

Home Theatre: Staging the Domestic Interior

In and Out of Tune with Reality: Opposed Strategies of Documentary Theatre

The Politics of Avarice: Re-Visiting Roger Hall’s Share Market Comedies

What Boom? What Bust? Initiative and Resilience in Regional Community Performing Arts

Surface Tensions: Land and Body Relations Through Live Research Inquiry: ROCKface

The Boom or Bust issue is based on the 2009 conference of the Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association.

Cover art: detail of Annabel Dixon’s Sales Horizons (1999+), from The Yellow Vest Syndrome: Recent West Australian Art (Fremantle Arts Centre, 2009). Image courtesy of FAC.

As disaster capitalism booms and environmental systems bust and collapse in the face of global industry and consumption, it has become increasingly clear that to think about art and performance in the twentieth century is to conceptualise culture in terms of the exchange, oscillations, inversions and sinusoidal rebounds of cultural, financial, material, imperial and racial exchanges.

The essays in this issue of Double Dialogues explore these cultural and economic exchanges, and the inevitable conflict between material conditions and the limits of representation versus the fantastic realm of our desires and fears, wishes and beliefs.

DOUBLE DIALOGUES

Boom or Bust

Economies of Production & Exchange in Theatre, Performance and Culture