Denise Varney – författare

Charting a history of theatrical resistance to environmental exploitation, this study places drama and theatrical performance staged in Australia within the context of international scholarship to address changing ecological systems. Exploring the staging of disasters ranging from droughts and floods to forest fires and rising seas, it examines a strikingly diverse body of work that reflects the entanglement of socio-economic and environmental forces leading to ecological damage and climate change. Weather phenomena become protagonists in plays by Jack Davis, Andrea James, Louis Nowra and Hannie Rayson, while mutant creatures manifest climate threats in Jill Orr's work, and performances by the Australian Indigenous Marrugeku and Bangarra Dance Theatre invite grief for immense losses. Featuring First Nations performance and its profound knowledge of biodiverse multispecies habitats, this study challenges the ways in which socio-ecological disaster is called 'natural' and positioned outside human responsibility.

Climate Theatre examines how distressed environments are portrayed through theatrical and performance arts.Despite variations in form and location, this volume unites diverse geographical settings through their shared concern with the effects of rising temperatures on land, sea, sky and beyond. Throughout history theatre and performance have mirrored society's most pressing moral, ethical and sociopolitical challenges. Today, various performance traditions—from ritual practices to cultural activism and historical reenactments—are being reassessed for their environmental resilience and ecological consciousness. The collection also showcases innovative contemporary works that position climate as a dynamic and meaningful presence within drama, performance, activism and art. These contributions reflect the global nature of climate challenges while carefully articulating the nuanced perspectives emerging from different geographical contexts.This volume will particularly appeal to performance scholars, environmental humanities researchers, climate activists, theatre practitioners and students seeking to understand the intersection of artistic expression and ecological crisis in our rapidly changing world.

Climate Theatre examines how distressed environments are portrayed through theatrical and performance arts.Despite variations in form and location, this volume unites diverse geographical settings through their shared concern with the effects of rising temperatures on land, sea, sky and beyond. Throughout history theatre and performance have mirrored society's most pressing moral, ethical and sociopolitical challenges. Today, various performance traditions—from ritual practices to cultural activism and historical reenactments—are being reassessed for their environmental resilience and ecological consciousness. The collection also showcases innovative contemporary works that position climate as a dynamic and meaningful presence within drama, performance, activism and art. These contributions reflect the global nature of climate challenges while carefully articulating the nuanced perspectives emerging from different geographical contexts.This volume will particularly appeal to performance scholars, environmental humanities researchers, climate activists, theatre practitioners and students seeking to understand the intersection of artistic expression and ecological crisis in our rapidly changing world.

This book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

This book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

Winner of the AUHE Prize in Literary Scholarship 2022“Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions … This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly.” - Jonathan Dunk, Australian Book ReviewOne of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.In Patrick White's Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White's eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White's complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.

In the early 1960s the board of governors of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia rejected two Patrick White plays, The Ham Funeral in 1962 and Night on Bald Mountain in 1964. Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions. Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The central argument of the book is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and posed a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The recent productions indicate that despite the Adelaide Festival’s early hostile rejections, White’s plays endure.

This book contains the proceedings of a symposium that took place in Melbourne in September 2006. Its focus is on theatre at the intersection of culture and politics during and after German reunification and the evolution of the Berlin Republic. The book considers how canonical and new theatrical works, including those performed at the renowned former East German theatres – the Deutsches Theater, the Volksbühne and the Berliner Ensemble – resonated with reunification. Topics include the dynamics of theatrical performance, the emergent performative identities, the new alliances between theatre and the world, the re-engagement with history and the shifting perspectives of nationalism, transnationalisation and globalisation. These matters acquire renewed focus with the approach of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in 2009. The book is the first to offer English-speaking readers a collection of essays on the key theatrical productions of this dynamic period of cultural and political change. Underlying the collection is a reaffirmation of the continuing relevance of theatre to events in the public sphere.

Together with new essays by contemporary ecofeminist scholars, the book uncovers the dialectical relationship between environmental and feminist causes, the relational identities of feminists and ecofeminists, and the concept of ecofeminism as a rallying point for environmental feminism.