Journal & Book Publications

Specifically, the presentation explores the vision for training global actors as it is put into practice at the School of Dance and Theatre of LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. After providing a contextual introduction to the argument, the presentation pivots from specific examples of our approach to actor and performer training. The presentation concludes by highlighting four characteristics of a global approach to actor training: (1) the increasing need of a transcultural ethos to theatre and performance making globally; (2) the impact that the fourth industrial revolution and digital technologies will have in actor training; (3) the importance of aligning curriculum planning with ecological sustainability; and (4) the importance of reconsidering what an Asian conservatoire can be in such landscape and in relation to China’s belt and road initiatives.

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe. ''Global Actor Training: Physicality, Digitality, and Sustainability in the Asian Conservatoire.'' Proceedings of Asia Theatre Education Centre Conference, Beijing, China 05/2019, Asia Theatre Education Centre, 2020, pp. 155-177.

The concept of ‘erase’ has informed much of 20th-century art, philosophy and cultures through either a palimpsestic re-writing/re-reading of issues, confrontation through the ideology of war or through forgetting. These practices speak directly to identity formation, cultural/self-representation and the manner in which the future is factualized. These perspectives form the basis of the current ISSUE. Looking through the prism of art, politics, power, philosophy, and reality-visual culture and ideas, these curated essays, interview and exhibition, consider the manner in which the notion to easily erase or delete can be seen to relativise our understanding of contemporary society. Moreover, they provide an avenue to the reader to consider the emergence of new cultural myths and forms and how these may manifest in contemporary art and visual culture.

Citation: 
Purushothaman, Venka, Author & Editor. Issue 08: Erase, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2019.

This is followed by the comparison and analyses of a range of interdisciplinary art works by Idris Khan, Alvin Lucier, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Wim Wenders, Yayoi Kusama and Qiu Zhijie, revealing how they manipulate source materials, through acts of removal and corrections, or by methods of intense layering to convey disruptions. The paper proposes erasure as an impossible act of forgetting, but rather one that conceals and reveals directionally complex visual and sonic information within a range of material constructs.

Citation: 
Woo, Ian. “Erasure and Abstraction - An Artistic Process.” Issue 08: Erase, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2019, pp. 35-45.

As the Museum of Emotion demonstrated, in Attia’s works these histories are not confined to the past. Instead, they continue to resonate through scars and wounds that in their visibility come to denote the simultaneous absence and presence of the violence of their origination. By focusing on one room within this exhibition, this paper draws analogies between the paradoxical status of the scar in Attia’s work and Jacques Derrida’s notion of writing “under erasure.” In doing so, I outline Attia’s exploration of the potentials and limitations of ‘representation’ and its fraught relationship with lived experience. As I argue, by placing his images “under erasure”, Attia performs a double gesture in recognising the inadequacy of representation for those still living with the legacies of colonialism, whilst still maintaining its fundamental promise to offer what Judith Butler calls the possibility of a “livable life”.

Citation: 
Veal, Clare. “Under erasure: Kader Attia's museum of emotion Hayward Gallery, London, 2019.” Issue 08: Erase, Lasalle College of the Arts, 2019, pp. 59-67.

While we were inspired by the symposium in Sydney, this issue is emphatically not a conventional conference proceeding discussed there. Rather, as editors we have taken the Sydney event as one among several points of departure. A number of contributors to this special issue were presenters in Sydney and have substantially reworked their research for publication here. Several other contributors challenge or even productively contradict and undermine the conversations that took place during the event.     

Citation: 
Low, Yvonne, Roger Nelson and Clare Veal. "Editorial Introduction: Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories." Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, Vol. 3 no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-11. Project MUSE, doi: 10.1353/sen.2019.0000

Although most scholarly and curatorial attention has focused on Araya’s moving image works, particularly those that involve corp hope of developing a chronological account of Araya’s artistic development, but is instead an attempt to read her early three-dimensional works through insights gleaned from her later artistic and literary practice. Specifically, in examining Araya’s work from an inter-medial persp between moving and static bodies. As I argue, when understood in conjunction with the ways in which Araya’s oeuvre simultaneously invites and refuses feminist readings, these works provoke a reconsideration of questions of agency and impotence, and their assumed correspondence between action and inaction.

Citation: 
Veal, Clare. “Water is Never Still: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Sculptural and Installation Practice.” Afterall 47, 2019, pp. 88-103.

This chapter refers on early colonial religious drama in Mexico and on the Shi’ite ritual performances of Ta’ziyeh in order to highlight the extent to which theatrical characterisations and representations of the end of times, its agents, the afterlife, and the powers that control them may get weaponised on the grounds of creating a sense of apocalyptic agency. That agency is likely to be sustained by a pretence of political and religious power. As such, it is never quite pure – never absolute. Who are the self-proclaimed owners of the end of times and of the final judgement? How are those ends being enacted and contested (or not) in theatre and performance?    

Citation:
Cervera, Felipe. “Theatre and Eschatological Politics.” The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Greha, Routledge, 2019, pp. 295-298.

When colouring each isolated object without being able to envisage the overall design, students tend to let the software dictate the visual style of their work. Taking inspiration from Woon Lam Ng’s (2016) painting approach, this research proposes that lighting precedes texturing. Students will firstly place objects in the scene and consider compositional elements such as tone and shape in relation to the whole before colouring them. The approach proposed in this paper aims to emphasize the overall picture-plane design so as to encourage conscious experimentation with visual style. 17 students from the final year BA(Hons) Animation Art programme were mentored with the proposed approach over 8 weeks. Still images from the students’ work before and after intervention were qualitatively assessed by different assessors based on a set of criteria. Further data collected from a student questionnaire and a research observation journal helped to verify the student’s intent to explore style. They also revealed challenges of the revised approach – productive efficiency and time constraints. The report concludes with possible areas of improvement to the research method and areas for future research.    

Citation:
Ang, Qing Sheng. “A painting-inspired approach to develop exploration in 3D animation visual style.” Animation Studies, vol. 14, 2019.