Evoking and Excavating Representations of Landscape: How are Experiences of Landscape Explored in the Creation and Development of a New Play: Dawn's Faded Rose?

Abstract

The following practice led investigation explored the creation and development of a new play, Dawn’s Faded Rose. Drawing on experiences of memory, imagination, representation and dramatisation, the creation of the work revealed landscape as a powerful metaphor that reimagined nature and culture and reinterpreted concepts of the white woman’s inheritance of place from the position of a new play. The research makes a claim for the value of landscape as central to the play and to the cultural knowledge statements that are embedded within the fiction. The research posits that Dawn’s Faded Rose may be read outside its dramatic function by contributing to current discourse concerning the role landscape experience has in constructing cultural meaning. In doing so the research addressed the gap in landscape studies as identified by Fuchs and Chaudhuri (2002), from a dramatic perspective. Draft 1 provided a landscape discourse that framed an analysis of landscape and post-colonial theories embedded in the work. The draft further generated a phenomenological analysis of personal landscape narratives pertinent to the creation of the play and proposed the concept of Dramatic fusion, a method of analysis that explored the dramaturgical cohesion between phenomenological experiences and fiction. The second phase of the research investigated the creative development of the play. Informed by literature reviewed, this phase utilised dramaturgical processes that incorporated cyclic principles of action research for the purpose of refining the fictional contexts in the play. The research therefore proposes that principles of action research may be integrated into artistic creative development processes specifically for improvement of a dramatic work rather than for the enhancement of playwright’s knowledge of practice.