Imagination, Realisation and the Performing of Australia

In Imagination, Realisation and the Performing of Australia Rick De Vos offers a conception of performance as a way of working with real and abstract times, spaces and bodies. He suggests that performance provides a valuable site for examining the ways in which Australia privileges and remembers specific configurations of space, time, bodies and matter, while marginalising others,in producing official representations of the Australian nation. Such representations, reflected in government programmes such as those concerning citizenship and national security, have a bearing on how Australians view their national past, present and future, and how they perceive their social connections with each other. Just as specific performances are subject to the textual and discursive categories of literature and social theory, official enactments of the Australian nation are able to ''contain'' Australians who spatially, temporally and physically transgress national boundaries. As a material practice, performance is able to engage with official enactments of the nation in order to ''re-open'' the spaces, times and encounters concealed within these sites.