Theatre

Year 11: a sitting with Leisa Shelton

by Kate Ellis, teacher of MYP Drama and Language & Literature and DP Theatre

It is a wonderful thing to witness growth. On Tuesday 17 September, Year 11 Theatre students spent half an hour with Leisa Shelton’s archives at the Abbotsford Convent before taking part in a Q & A and ‘scribe’. Eleanor, Abi, Lucinda and Liv were a marvel to watch and speak to across the night as they saw the parallels of their own processes with professional artists; and birthed new ideas.

addendum; by theatre maker, artist and actor Leisa Shelton, ‘…takes the artist’s body of practice as a device to consider, speak to and reflect on the cultural landscape of the arts in Australia. It proposes a model for non-institutional embodied archives by burning the full archive to create a memorial document of ash as representative of the embodied archive’. Lisa has had on display 30 years of arts processes across the last five days at the convent and will burn them in a series of public burnings in October.

The Q & A following - with Leisa, State Library archivist Jo Ritale and artist Hannah Bertram - proposed to ask… “What records do Australians keep and what do we burn?” All three women discussed ‘… the importance of the role of the Archive in Australia through the lens of contemporary art, indigenous knowledge and cultural status’. Between the five of us, copious notes were taken and audible ‘yeses' and ‘mmmms’ were involuntarily inspired.  Having worked with Leisa over four weeks, students were earlier this year invited afterwards to solidify their thoughts through ‘scribe’, ‘…a live writing project within festival and event contexts in which artist scribes capture the experience of members of the public to create the democratic document of the festival’.

Students reflected on the nature of our Indigenous cultures’ oral relating of history as well as the tension felt in ‘letting go’ of things. We asked “Who gets to decide what is valuable enough to keep?” and wondered why Leisa had to go overseas to gather files on the Australian Theatre scene when putting together the VCA library.

It was a rich and rewarding night, with students revelling in new EE and CAS opportunities. The future is looking good, humans!

Sources: https://www.fragment31.com/scribe

https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/whats-on/events-exhibitions/addendum-by-leisa-shelton