Glenn D'Cruz

David McComb, the driving force behind The Triffids, shaped one of Australia's most revered albums, Born Sandy Devotional ( 1986). But after the band's breakup, illness curtailed his solo career. He died in 1999, age 36. Truckload of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb Vol. 1 (2020) revives his final, unrecorded songs through the efforts of longtime collaborators, friends and admirers, including Graham Lee, Robert McComb, Phil Kakulas, Rob Snarski, JP Shilo, Romy Vager and Angie Hart. The book traces how McComb's last songs extend his thematic preoccupations-love, loss, exile and the lingering pull of the past-through the framework of hauntology. Engaging with the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, it places his songwriting in a broader cultural and philosophical landscape before turning to his lost compositions, revealing an artist still in full command of his craft. Exploring connections between music, memory and artistic legacy, D'Cruz positions McComb as not only a singular songwriter, but a literary voice of lasting significance.

Various Artists' Truckload of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb Vol. 1

"This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: 'Remember Me' - the command King Hamlet's ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare's famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead. It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida's hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to the ghosts; Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds' development of Derrida's ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie. This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies"--

Affects, Archives, Ethics

Hauntological Dramaturgy

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" - 4.48 Psychosis How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis' inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane's final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It's a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre - as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre. Glenn D'Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne's Red Stitch Theatre (2007).

Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

A Foucauldian Approach to Theory and Practice

Performance Studies as a Discipline?

"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre. Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).

Taylor & Francis Group

The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead.

P. David Marshall

Sharyn McDonald

Katja Lee

If the twentieth century has been dominated by discussions of the public, public life, and the public sphere, Contemporary Publics argues that, in the twenty-first century, we must complicate the singularity of that paradigm and start thinking of our world in terms of multiple, overlapping, and competing publics. In three distinct streams—art, media and technology, and the intimate life—this volume offers up the intellectual and political significance of thinking through the plurality of our publics. “Countering Neoliberal Publics: Screen and Space,” explores how different artistic practices articulate the challenges and desires of multiple publics. “Making and Shaping Publics: Discourse and Technology” showcases how media shape publics, and how new and emerging publics use these technologies to construct identities. “Commodifying Public Intimacies” examines what happens to the notion of the private when intimacies structure publics, move into public spaces, and develop value that can be exchanged and circulated.

Shifting Boundaries in New Media, Technology and Culture

Contemporary Publics

'This book is the first detailed study of Anglo-Indians in literature. Rather than simply dismissing the representation of Anglo-Indians in literary texts as offensive stereotypes, the book identifies the conditions for the emergence of these stereotypes through close readings of key novels, such as Bhowani Junction, Midnight's Children and The Impressionist. It also examines the work of contemporary Anglo-Indian writers such as Allan Sealy and Christopher Cyrill".

Anglo-Indians in Post/colonial Literature

Midnight's Orphans

This book explores the concept and vocabulary of postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective. It identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes generated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice, with reference to the aesthetic, cultural and institutional pressures that shape teaching practices. It also presents a series of case studies that identify the pedagogical fault lines that expose the power-relations inherent in teaching (with a focus on the higher education sector as opposed to actor training institutions). It uses auto-ethnography, performance analysis and critical theory to assist university teachers involved in directing theatre productions to deepen their understanding of the concept of postdramatic theatre.

Glenn D'Cruz

Books

Your next favorite book is out there