IN DEVELOPMENT: Western Australian Academy of Performing Utopia

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“If we wish to see how contemporary drama and theatre might engage with the ‘great liberal motives’ underlying most conceptions of democracy, then we should be looking to resistant and transcendent practices which valorise the autonomous subject while reinforcing collective (or community) identities” (Kershaw, 1998, p.73).

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Adopting a Practice as Research methodology of research, this work is currently being developed through my honours study at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Through this work, I am seeking to explore how the pursuit of theories of utopia can inform my methodology as a

creative facilitator creating socially-engaged art, interrogating how the resistant,

alternative and radically hopeful undercurrent of utopia can facilitate artistic

engagement in precariouscommunities towards dramaturgies of visibility in

hegemonicspaces and systems. In this case, I am working with queer artists currently

studying atWAAPA, exploring how the confines of a binary, traditional training institution interplays

withthe expansivity of the queer identity, this focus group chosen over a vulnerable population to

facilitate deep experimentation in methodologies of process. A fundamental ethos of this methodology

is dramaturgical cogency; the way in which a work is made speaks to and takes active steps towards manifesting the future it wishes to create. In other words, we insist upon the concrete potential of a better world by living out what that might be in the present, inspiring gleeful resistance, community desire and the collective strengths to translate these tools into social action.

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Under the tutelage and mentorship of Dr Emma Fishwick and Dr Renee Newman, this project has allowed me to develop a practical toolkit and ideological foundation with which to conduct community-engaged arts praxis, and I feel evermore confident to transfer my learning and experience to wider communities.