DR CHRIS HAY

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKs

Contemporary Australian Playwriting: Re-visioning the Nation on the Mainstage (2022).

This book, which I co-wrote with Stephen Carleton from the University of Queensland, provides a thorough and accessible overview of the diverse and exciting new directions that Australian Playwriting is taking in the twenty-first century. As writers of colour, queer writers, and gender diverse writers are produced on the mainstage in larger numbers, they bring new critical directions to the twenty-first century Australian stage. At a politically turbulent time when national identity is fractured, this book examines the ways in which Australia’s leading playwrights have interrogated, problematised, and tried to make sense of the nation. Tracing contemporary trends, the book takes a thematic approach to the re-evaluation of the nation that is dramatized in key Australian plays. Each chapter is accompanied by a duologue between two of the playwrights whose work has been analysed, to provide a dual perspective of theory and practice.

Knowledge, Creativity and Failure: A new pedagogical framework for creative arts (2016). 

This book offers a new framework for the analysis of teaching and learning in the creative arts. It provides teachers with a vocabulary to describe what they teach and how they do this within the creative arts. Teaching and learning within this field, with its focus on the personal characteristics of the student and its insistence on intangible qualities like talent and creativity, has long resisted traditional models of pedagogy. In this brave new world of high-stakes assessment and examination-driven outcomes across the education system, this resistance has proven to be a severe weakness and driven creative arts teachers further into the margins. Instead of accepting this relegation, teachers of creative arts must set out to capture the distinctiveness of their pedagogy. This book allows teachers to transcend the opaque metaphors that proliferate in the creative arts, and instead argue for the robustness and rigour of their practice.

Eurovision and Australia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Down Under (2019).

This collection of essays, which I co-edited with Jessica Carniel from the University of Southern Queensland, offers the first collection of interdisciplinary scholarship on Australia and Eurovision from predominantly Australian scholars. In it, we present timely intervention into questions of Australian national identity and culture on an international and non-sporting stage, by providing an in-depth exploration of Australia’s multi-faceted engagement with the Eurovision Song Contest over thirty-six years. As well as the Introduction, some of my own research is also published in the book, including a chapter about what it means to watch Eurovision from Australia, and reflecting on the recent invention of the “Eurovision — Australia Decides” national selection competition.

BOOK CHAPTERS

“The Intracultural Actor: Embracing Difference in Theatre Arts Teaching” in New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts (2019).

In this chapter, which I co-wrote with my colleague Kristine Landon-Smith, we introduce Kristine’s intracultural methodology, which she has developed in order to allow acting students to embrace their full cultural context during training. Instead of abandoning their differences in search of some mythic ‘neutral’ — a neutral that is of course merely reflective of the mainstream — the intracultural methodology empowers actors to play with and through difference. This is the first publication in a planned series that explore different elements of Kristine’s work.

“Failure, Fear, and Alternate Routes” Foreword to Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What it Means to Fail (2020).

This Foreword to Allison Carr and Laura Micciche’s edited collection on the pedagogy of failure uses a personal reflection on Australia’s Marriage Equality Postal Survey to introduce the over-arching concerns of the book, which cohere around the questions of productive failure and the privilege to fail.

Journal Articles

“Until I know this sure uncertainty: Actor Training and Original Practices” in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 12.1 (2021) [co-authored with Robin Dixon]

This article reflects on a rehearsed reading of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, working with conservatoire-trained actors to replicate Early Modern rehearsal and performance practices. We argue for a more historically-informed model of training that brings actors closer to the original performance conditions of the text, rather than estranging them from it.

“Global weirding: Australian Absurdist Cli-Fi Plays” in Performance Research 25(2) (June 2020) [co-authored with Stephen Carleton]

This article takes two recent winners of the Griffin Prize for new Australian playwriting — The Turquoise Elephant (Stephen Carleton) and Kill Climate Deniers (David Finnigan) — and argues that they are representative of a new style of absurdist climate-fiction that responds to the wicked problem of staging life in the age of the Anthropocene.

"Black, White, and Red Faces: Race and Performance at NIDA" in Australasian Drama Studies 70 (April 2017). 

This paper compares two moments of racialised performance at NIDA: the 1960 production of Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures, which was performed with the full, thirty-strong company in blackface makeup; and a student production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in 2016, which used whiteface makeup to contest ideas of neutrality and belonging in actor training. 

 "Boos, Tears, Sweat, and Toil: Experiencing the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 Live" in Popular Entertainment Studies 8:1 (2017) [co-authored with Billy Kanafani].

The Eurovision Song Contest claims to be the most watched television broadcast of all time, with upwards of 180 million viewers for each outing. Every aspect of its broadcast is controlled by the organisers, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and participating nations air a glossy, noisy, seamlessly produced extravaganza each year. Yet, each Contest also has a live audience of between 10 and 30 000 spectators, who provide much of the noise and colour of the broadcast. In this article, I am interested in what those happy, screaming people on the bottom of your television screen are doing, thinking, and feeling. This project reports my findings on the live experience of being part of the audience for the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 in Vienna – which coincidentally featured Australia in its first outing in the competition. 

 "We are seeing what we saw before: The ghosts of SUDS" in About Performance 14/15 (2017).

This article recounts my experience with the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS), arguing that the history of the organisation is written on the walls and floors of the performance space. I argue that this effect is central to the illusio, or investment, that members must accept if they wish to be seen as successful within the Society.

 "The Corpse Corpses: Non-professional performers and misperformance" in Performance Paradigm 11 (2015). 

In this article, I consider the work of Australian contemporary performance ensemble 'post', and use their work Oedipus Schmoedipus (2014) as a case study of the use of non-professional performers. I argue that through embracing the inevitable failures of non-professional performers on stage, 'post' are able to harness the power of misperformance as an aesthetic strategy. 

"The Academic Lives of Student Actors: Conservatoire training as degree-level study" in About Performance 13 (2015) [co-authored with Dr Robin Dixon].

Using the case study of the theoretical component of the training offered at NIDA since 1959, this article interrogates what has historically distinguished the practice-led instruction at conservatories from theory-led university study. We argue that the theoretical study in these courses must be seen not as a distraction from the core business of training, but rather as central to the ongoing employability and adaptability of graduates.

"V-Effekt: Death, Mortality, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival" in Anthropology & Humanism 39:2 (December 2014).

In this paper, I use analyses of two performances to explore my personal engagements with death, grief and release. Part criticism, part exorcism, it is my attempt to understand what happened to me in the same theatre across two very different Octobers. How do we make sense of what it is to die? Even with that knowledge, how do we comprehend someone’s actual death? And what might theatre have to do with it?

"What is to Count as Knowledge? The evolving Directing program at the National Institute of Dramatic Art" in Australasian Drama Studies 60 (April 2012). 

This article applies Karl Maton's Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to the teaching and learning taking place in the one-year, postgraduate Directing program at NIDA. In it, I rehearse the argument — fleshed out in my doctoral thesis — that the content and delivery of the program has been radically redrawn by the demands of regulation and accreditation, so that the training now takes place in what Maton characterises as an elite mode.

DOCtoral thesis

Learning to Inhabit the Chair: Knowledge transfer in contemporary Australian director training (2014). 

How are theatre directors trained today? Although there is a body of work around what directors do, little sustained critical attention has been paid to the nature of teaching and learning within director training. Training a director has been called “teaching the unteachable” (Fliotsos, 2004) — yet training courses do exist, and many things, are taught in them. Using a theoretical framework drawn from the sociology of education, this thesis analyses how knowledge is transmitted and legitimated in creative arts training. This methodology seeks to understand the ‘on the ground’ realities of training, bringing into simultaneous view the official curriculum, institutional aspirations and the messy business of training. Using ethnographic fieldwork to apply this framework to the Directing program at NIDA, my thesis investigates the dual questions of what is taught and how it is taught. My research was conducted from within the Institute, paying close, sustained attention to what goes on in the room during training.

OTHER WRITING

“Ode to Joy: Why Australia’s Love for Eurovision Continues to Grow” in UQ Contact, May 2020.

This piece for UQ’s Contact online magazine highlighted the response of the global Eurovision fandom to the Contest’s cancellation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It offers a personal reflection on the experience of the Eurovision ‘aca-fan’ and argues for the place of joy in academic research.

"Conchita Wurst's Eurovision win and the power of performance" in The Conversation, 12 May 2014. 

In this article, which considers Conchita Wurst's win at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014, I argue that the politics of visibility that attend any performance is central to the significance of her victory. Not only does this begin to address the ire her entry attracted, but it also suggests a way forward for a 'soft diplomacy' approach: a worldwide queer politics of the twenty-first century.