Staging Social Change

Theatre spaces as sites for transformative civic dialogue

At a time of increasing polarisation, how can we create better civic discourse? Could the theatre be a useful place for hard conversations?

Historically and today, theatre serves as a rare space where people from different social, cultural and political backgrounds can reflect on shared human struggles, bridging economic and ideological divides. Unlike digital spaces, theatre requires a physical, communal presence where audiences and performers engage in a "live, shared experience". What might this space allow us to say – both to ourselves and to each other?

This session is for you if you are a researcher, policymaker, campaigner, theatre-maker, theatre-goer, NGO worker, or interested member of the public who would like to learn about the history and future of the theatre as a space for public dialogue.

Maybe you would like to learn new avenues for outreach and public engagement: you would like to share your research in public spaces but don’t know where to start. Maybe you’re a creative interested in extending your performance work into big ideas exchange?

You would like to ask practical questions from people who’ve done this before: how do you bring in an audience? How do you advertise effectively? How do you ‘pitch’ your event?

How do you generate effective and respectful audience dialogue?
Come and meet the experts: come and meet each other.

You are welcome (but not obliged) to think in advance about practical and theoretical questions you might want to pose to the experienced panellists – what would you like to know about using the theatre for public discussions of research, policy, or community work? What knowledge would help you to use the theatre in your own future events?

Panellists

Dr Rebecca Clode, Dramaturg and Ethel Tory Lecturer in Drama

Rebecca is a PhD graduate of the ANU and also holds an MA in Text and Performance Studies from King's College and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. Research interests include Australian drama (history and practice) as well as contemporary European and American drama. Her PhD thesis explores the use of metatheatrical techniques by Australian and British playwrights (Hewett, Nowra, Wertenbaker and Murray) during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Before commencing work at the ANU in 2007, Rebecca worked as a theatre maker. Plays directed include: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Sophokles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Ionesco's The Lesson (ANU), The Jungle Book (Freerain Frolics), Van Badham's An Organic Response to the Ideological State Apparatus: Australia 1996-2004 (Short & Sweet, Sydney), Jim Cartwright's Two (Edinburgh Fringe Festival), Rohini Sharma's Duckshove in the Cities of the Plain (White Bear Theatre, London), Pierre Marivaux's The Will (Darlo Drama). Assistant Director for: The Seven Year Itch (Freerain), Electronic City (For Lizzie Doyle in the NIDA Director's course), David Mamet's Edmond (B-Sharp, Belvoir), David Rabe's Hurly Burly (Griffin Stablemates), Tim Crouch's My Arm (B-Sharp, Belvoir), Ostrovsky's A Family Affair and Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk (B-Sharp, Belvoir).

Dr Leslie Barnes, Associate Professor of French and Founder of the ANU-Street Theatre Wellspring partnership

Leslie conducts research in 20th- and 21st-century French and francophone literature and film, with a special interest in the intersections of gender, labour, and migration in Southeast Asia. Her most recent book, Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh, 2025), engages with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, exploring the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, and considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated in fiction and creative nonfiction. Dr Barnes received her PhD in French and Francophone Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010 and has been at ANU since 2012. She is the author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Nebraska, 2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (Rutgers, 2021).

Moderator

Dr Bridget Vincent, Convenor of the Freilich Project and Senior Lecturer in English

Bridget Vincent’s research projects have focused on the specific contributions that literary works, and literary modes of analysis, can make to the interdisciplinary discussion of ethical and political problems. This interest has manifested itself in work on moral philosophy and post-1950s poetry for her first book (Oxford 2022), on public apology in global anglophone literature, on the ethics of attention in modern literature, and on representations of modern ruins in ecological fiction. She completed a PhD at Cambridge University as a General Sir John Monash Scholar and a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. Before coming to the ANU, she taught on modern and contemporary literature at the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham. She has a longstanding interest in the public role of the humanities, and while at the University of Melbourne created a program designed to foster conversations in young people about the civic importance of critical thinking. She is the current Convenor of the ANU Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry.

Street Two | Unreserved | 60 Minutes
Click here for information on accessibility.