Glenn D'Cruz
Glenn D’Cruz is a retired academic. He is Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis (Routledge, 2018) and Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias and Dispositions (Palgrave, 2018). He is the co-editor of Contemporary Publics: Shifting Boundaries in New Media, Technology and Culture —with Katja Lee, David Marshall, and Sharyn Macdonald (Palgrave, 2016). He is also the author of Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006), and the editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987-2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007) which was short listed for the Victorian premier’s prize for best community history. His work has appeared in journals such as New Theatre Quarterly, Australasian Drama Studies, Thesis 11, Southern Review, Meanjin, Celebrity Studies, Media International Australia.
He has been a visiting scholar at the Australian National University (2005) and City University New York (2018). His creative work has been performed and/or exhibited at Federation Square, Melbourne, the RMIT Gallery, Walker Street Gallery, Federation Hall, VCA and the Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne.
He was formerly a senior member of the AusStage project. AusStage provides an accessible online resource for researching live performance in Australia. The Project is led by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organisations and collecting institutions with funding from the Australian Research Council and other sources.
He is currently a freelance filmmaker, writer and editor. His latest book is Hauntological Dramaturgy (Routledge, 2022). His most recent film, Vanitas, premiered at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival in July 2022. The work won two awards at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival (2022): Best Australian Shorts Director and Best Melbourne Short Film. The film will screen at various festivals in 2022 and 2023.
He has been a visiting scholar at the Australian National University (2005) and City University New York (2018). His creative work has been performed and/or exhibited at Federation Square, Melbourne, the RMIT Gallery, Walker Street Gallery, Federation Hall, VCA and the Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne.
He was formerly a senior member of the AusStage project. AusStage provides an accessible online resource for researching live performance in Australia. The Project is led by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organisations and collecting institutions with funding from the Australian Research Council and other sources.
He is currently a freelance filmmaker, writer and editor. His latest book is Hauntological Dramaturgy (Routledge, 2022). His most recent film, Vanitas, premiered at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival in July 2022. The work won two awards at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival (2022): Best Australian Shorts Director and Best Melbourne Short Film. The film will screen at various festivals in 2022 and 2023.
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Books by Glenn D'Cruz
It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher's and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.
This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.
How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4:48’s inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.
Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).
Papers by Glenn D'Cruz
It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher's and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.
This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.
How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4:48’s inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.
Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).
D'Cruz’s claim in Midnight’s Orphans, that the racism Anglo-Indians face changes with shifts in sociopolitical coordinates, holds good to the present. In addition, the text’s performative quality sets an example for scholars to move away from institutional scholarly objectivity toward greater emotional gains. These and other factors help Midnight’s Orphans maintain its position as a seminal work with enduring relevance to the field of Anglo-Indian Studies fifteen years after its publication.
history of Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne.