2023-12 | Journal article

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques Journal

CONTRIBUTORS: Meta Cohen, Alyson Campbell

READ

This article explores an intergenerational collaboration between two Naarm/Melbourne-based queer artist-researchers or “co-conspirators” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time 162–63): director-dramaturg Alyson Campbell and composer-dramaturg Meta Cohen. Structured as a dialogue between the two of us, with interspersed analysis, critical framing, photographs and diagrams, we consider how our collaborative work generates new queer dramaturgical practices and offers new ways of thinking about queer(ing) dramaturgies. We realised that for both of us the process begins with the corporeality of text but that each offered “know-how” (Nelson 114) the other did not have. We conspired together to examine what this means in creating a performance dramaturgy and, further, what it might mean for a project of queering performance.

Keywords: affect, musicality, queer performance, queer dramaturgies, collaboration, scoring, Gertrude Stein, “co-conspirators,” intergenerational

2023-07-17 | Journal article

Performance Matters Journal

CONTRIBUTORS: Meta Cohen; Alyson Campbell; Emma Lockhart-Wilson

MORE INFO

This article is an exploration of the ideas galvanising our practice-based research. Structured as a dialogue between a director, sound designer and lighting designer, this piece explores how the nexus of queerness, affect and performance informs each of our specialist areas. We articulate how affect and queer theories drive our individual enquiries and use our experience of working together on the Australian premiere production of Lachlan Philpott’s promiscuous/cities to consider the relationships between our disciplines. We focus on moments of transition—common components of any theatre piece—as a way of interrogating how this interdisciplinary dialogue works within the development of the work and performance outcomes. Throughout this dialogue, we ask what the state of transition does for each of us when we make or see a piece of work—whether this be an experience of temporal instability, a rhythmic movement into a new state or a form of punctuation—and we consider how we can approach affect and queer thinking through these transitional moments. These moments of possibility are what excite us and push us to consider the potential of our individual practices through the experience of collaborative performance-making.

2022 | Book chapter
Book: Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism

DOI: 10.5040/9781350194625.ch-010

CONTRIBUTORS: Alyson Campbell; Meta Cohen; Stephen Farrier; Hannah McCann

This chapter explores how ‘feral pedagogies’ can be deployed as a methodology and means of de-domesticating feminist queer knowledges and re-wilding the nexus of academic and queer community practice. Here we define feral as “the domesticated gone wild”, to refer to taking queer theory out of the academy and back into the streets. The conceptual approach of feral pedagogies is particularly significant for the queer community because so many queer-identifying people have felt excluded or alienated from mainstream education, and yet have embodied knowledge of queer identity and life. Through the vehicle of queer performance and its impact on the wellbeing of queer communities, we look at the possibilities for taking theory out of the elite environment of the university and directly into community environments to facilitate new, peer-to-peer, ways to think about feminist queer experience. Discussion here is focused on a series of events held in Belfast, North of Ireland and Melbourne Australia we call Feral Queer Camp. In particular we look at how live theatre/performance plays a part in creating queer communities and how queer-identified people are sustained by them and argue that ‘going feral’ is an aspirational pedagogical practice that can only ever be both flawed and partial, but is nonetheless valuable.

2021-12 | Journal article

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques Journal

CONTRIBUTORS: Peta Murray; Alyson Campbell; Meta Cohen

READ

In Sonic Agency (2019), Brandon LaBelle draws on the thinking of both Judith Butler (1990) and Sara Ahmed (2006) to put forward an argument for queering the acoustic, or “giving accent to the ways in which acts of compositioning assist in processes of (re)orientation that may additionally upset the dominant tonality of a given place” (190). Here we draw on LaBelle’s work to think into sonic elements of Practice as Research in a new work of music theatre on queerness and pandemics, HERD. Through a speculative essaimblage sub-titled: “Fantasia on A Debrief We Have Yet to Have,” we draw out the underherd and the underheard through the interplay of individual and collective experience and propose an emergent glossary of terms for queer dramaturgy. This, we propose, articulates nascent methodologies for queer performance-making, while providing a touchpoint for thinking through how we negotiate queerness and sound in our work, and in our methods of collaboration.

Keywords: Queerness, pandemics, musical thinking, dramaturgy, music theatre, collaboration, composition, sound, queer methods

2019 | Journal article/interview

Contemporary Theatre Review Journal

CONTRIBUTORS: Gemma Hutton and Greg Thorpe, interviewed by Alyson Campbell, Meta Cohen and Stephen Farrier

READ MORE / LISTEN