PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Grantt: Clare | Australia

Surviving a perceived humiliation: a moment with the ‘wrong’ knowledge

Clare Grant (University of New South Wales, Australia)

This paper will trace how, over approximately seven years, and in a contracting government funding climate that only rewards written scholarly/theoretical research, a theatre-maker with 20 years of theatre-making practice in the ‘left-field’ end of physical performance practice has negotiated a research practice within a predominantly academic School that itself has shifted its emphasis from predominantly traditional theatre history to a heavier weighting in cultural theory and contemporary performance media.

This has entailed the negotiation of shifting pedagogical, economic and academic situations and the re-examination of my own aesthetic drives to define a space in which my specific performance interests can be researched while at the same time integrating that research closely into the broader academic aims of the School.

Drama/theatre was established at UNSW in 1958 with a three-fold aim: educational (The School of Drama), entrepreneurial (The Old Tote Theatre, subsequently the Sydney Theatre Company), and vocational (NIDA). By 1998, when I joined its staff, the School of Theatre, Film & Dance, as it had become, boasted a purpose-built, well-equipped theatre, the Io Myers Studio, to house the experiential element of the educational strand of its work. (Now, after a merger with Media and Communication, the School became the School of Media, Film and Theatre.)

I was appointed to provide experiential learning—not vocationally-oriented training —in the academic program, to help develop a culture of practical research and form a bridge with the wider theatre community outside the academy. My history as a performer in radical, physical, research-based practice, made my work markedly different from what was done at NIDA, but also set it apart somewhat from the School’s own academic work, which was strong in historical research. Meanwhile, the practice I was initiating in the School, while in no way vocational, was seen by outside practitioners, and began to enter the edges of the vital, if small, Sydney performance scene.

The clash between my experience as a practising investigative performer, intrigued by the written word but trained in a wide range of physical forms, and my function in the School as it has developed and continues to develop has required the on-going navigation of a number of deep and changing anomalies. I have frequently seen myself as ‘non-legitimate’, a ‘non-earner’ and, since the production unit is a costly operation, a ‘big spender’—this regardless of a heavy workload and strong peer acceptance of my work both within and outside the School.

This paper charts the struggles, shocks and occasional epiphanies of the only practitioner in a predominantly academic theatre school, as she has sought to find a place and modus operandi. Its point of departure is a moment of perceived humiliation in a postgraduate forum discussion, which illustrated painfully the different ‘knowledges’ in operation. It goes on to elaborate, not only on the ways in which my teaching has recently led to a clarification of a particular area of research, but also on the ways in which that work has stimulated and informed the world of practice from which I came.