The Place of the Body and the Subject in Australian Contemporary Performance

This chapter provides an edited transcription of the plenary panel held as part of the 2024 Stanislavsky and Place Conference, featuring director-performers Maitland Schnaars, Kate Champion and Matthew Edgerton. All three, being based in Perth/Boorloo, were able to speak directly to the specific location out of which the conference emanated. In the end though, the body of the performer and their individual subjectivity emerged as the places out of which performance emanated for our three panellists. While artists might be deeply grounded in connections to the local landscapes, the energetics of such an emplacement were deemed sufficiently trans-specific to resonate in different locations. One might broadly suggest then that for the three panellists, performance is—as Jonathan Pitches points out in this volume—all but inevitably linked to place, while a degree of internationalism and syncretism was notable in the diverse influences on their practice which were cited by panellists. As such, the chapter offers insights into the specifics of Australian performance training and its outcomes, as well as how particular narratives across these fields resonate with global trends. Australian First Nations performance is nevertheless shown to be particularly place based in a way that other forms are not.