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Stanislavski was clear that the actor must take their place in the theatre. His writings are full of injunctions to reflexively situate oneself with respect to the stage, set, actors, objectives, and so on. Echoing Stanislavski’s conceptual and physical praxis, modernist performance makers such as Meyerhold and Schlemmer went on to postulate that the actor brought their own sense of place onto the stage, shaping the performance space and enabling performer to align themselves, their attention, and their movements to a range of axial placements and combinations, as in Laban’s kinesphere. Later theatre makers as varied as Declan Donnellan and Suzuki Tadashi have suggested that the theatre is a place of life-and-death struggle, a site where a battle for survival is conducted by both characters and the actors themselves.

The act of the performer taking their place in their body in the theatre developed in parallel to the importance of ‘place’ in the world of the playwright and in the places represented on stage. Stanislavski’s not always happy peer, Anton Chekhov, has been described as the “first environmental playwright,” with scripts such as Uncle Vanya (1898) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) being concerned with the places wherein they are set, with the environmental and socio-political conditions andhistories etched across their landscapes. Interestingly, there is a rich tradition of Australian plays which are strongly connected to place, No Sugar (Jack Davis, 1985), Cloudstreet (Nick Enright and Justin Monjo, 1998, after the novel by Tim Winton), When the Rain Stops Falling (Andrew Bovell, 2008), and more recently, City of Gold (Meyne Wyatt, 2019).

For the forthcoming Stanislavski and Place symposium, we invite presenters to consider the places of theatre arising from or existing alongside Stanislavskian performance and acting praxis, be these digital space (AI performance), or contested landscapes (Stanislavskian and Chekhovian performance on colonized lands), the spatio-temporal implications of active analysis, or multicultural performance modalities as they expand on or react to Stanislavskian paradigms

We invite you to come together on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja/Country, here at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University in Perth/Boorloo, and interact with this place, as you tell us about your places.

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