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When people realise that I am Chilean, and that I migrated to Australia as a child during the Pinochet dictatorship, there’s always a set of mostly unspoken, but sometimes spoken, queries: Why did I move? Did my family seek asylum in Australia? Were my parents torture victims? Are they of the left, or right?! Do I speak Spanish? Do I still have family in Chile? Do I return? I ask: what does it mean to perform being a ‘Chilean’ in ‘Australia’ from the year I arrived, 1987, until now? What does it mean to be an ‘authentic’ Chilean, often conflated with the subjectivity of exile, in Australia? What does it mean to perform a Chilean-Australian? After spending over a decade writing about migration and contemporary art, I realised that I had never properly positioned myself in my work. In part, this has been due to my training in a stuffy art history department within a sandstone university where Kantian ‘critical distance’ dominated. But it has also been a result of never knowing how to situate myself as a Chilean-Australian, or as a Chilean in Australia. When I arrived here, I quickly absorbed the country’s assimilation culture, wanting to fit in. I learned to let go of things that didn’t fit the mould.⁠1 Recently, I have been re-connecting with my heritage and history, first returning to Chile to visit family, and then beginning to conduct archival research both on my kin and ancestors and Chilean history and art history more broadly. All of this eventually led,my development of a n which lead to new research project, focussed on cross-border collaborations between Chilean conceptual artists during the dictatorship, including across Australia and Chile. I can no longer escape situating myself in my research. In this essay, I do not discuss my new project in any depth. Instead my focus is on situating myself in my writing, and across the borders of Australia and Chile, memory and archives, history and autobiography. Building on the works and discourse of diasporic artis

This volume examines how migrant artists have shaped Canadian theatre. Themes include the intersection of migration and settler colonialism; the comparison of multiculturalism and interculturalism; the divergence of intercultural policy and theatrical practice; and the connections between first-, second-, and third-generation artists. The book contributes to theatre, performance, and migration studies.

Founded in 1983, Sydney’s Performance Space spent almost quarter of a century at 199 Cleveland Street, Redfern, before moving to Carriageworks in 2007. In doing so, it gave up being the sole occupant of an admittedly dilapidated building, for the promise of being an anchor tenant in a newly converted, post-industrial arts space. When tenancy arrangements were restructured again, it had to negotiate the shift from anchor tenant to resident company. This paper undertakes a ‘distant reading’ of the dataset assembled under the auspices of AusStage to analyse how this shift reinforced and altered aspects of Performance Space’s program, artists, audiences and aesthetics. We identify three continuities: a deep and abiding commitment to liveness; an ongoing interest in interdisciplinary and intermedial art forms; and a home for independent dance. We also identify several differences, including a decrease in the volume and variety of performance, a decline in the number of ensembles working, a rise in live art, and a festivalisation of programming. Yet these shifts cannot be attributed solely to the move, as the Carriageworks era coincides with a period of major cuts to arts funding.

This issue of Performance Paradigm locates itself within a body of recent scholarship on contemporary feminist performance; see, for example, Gorman, Harris, and Harvey’s issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, “Feminisms Now,” or the recent issue of Australasian Drama Studies on “The Actress in the Twenty-first Century.” We have a particular interest in Southern feminism, taking a cue from Celia Roberts and Raewyn Connell’s special issue of Feminist Theory.

Theatrical design has mostly been determined by conceptual approaches that leverage technology in monological ways – significantly impacting on the scope of theatrical staging. For example, the con-ventional ‘Bauprobe’ approach sees a set designer’s vision translated into a full-scale 3D physical mock-up that enables an embodied experience of a design’s spatial qualities. While constituting an in-dispensable step in the design process, current use of technology significantly delimits creative scope: Many designers use interactive digital design suites for early ideation and development, leveraging their iterative and dialogical capabilities to expand creative scope; yet, the Bauprobe phase currently brings an end to this fluid work: The costly physical extrusion process requires commitment to a design con-cept before having been able to verify its experiential qualities at one-to-one scale. Meaning that, after Bauprobe, a designer focuses mainly on improving disruptive aspects of the draft not anticipated in small-scale sketches as opposed to continuing to leverage the productive iterative dialogical process of the previous stages. The proposed presentation surveys recent cutting-edge digital technologies for the theatre sector that seek to extend dialogical iterative aesthetics to all stages of the design process. While briefly touching on Head-Mounted-Display solutions as trialled for example by the National Theatre (UK), the central focus will be placed on UNSW and Sydney Theatre Company’s experimentation with the 360° iDESIGN visualisation platform that allows comprehensive AI-supported set design (and potentially performance) in virtual space, fully immersing the creative team in an infinitely malleable datascape that can represent and adapt set designs at one-to-one scale in real-time.