Perspectives on creative arts in higher education
In 2018, the theatre department at the Victorian College of the Arts will launch a new BFA Theatre - a course designed for ‘actor-creators’ – those theatre artists who want to devise and perform in their own work. As we developed the course this year, I found myself thinking often of a quote from Saint-Exupery’s Wisdom of the Sands:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
As a visual artist, my practice led-research is into frontier scientific technologies and computational aesthetics has resulted in transdisciplinary outcomes in the field of 4D Microcomputed X-ray tomography. Yet when I took my first permanent academic position as a part time lecturer in Foundation Studies, in 2015, I became responsible for convening and teaching a first year life drawing Figure & Life, a 12 week observational drawing course using a life model in a studio environment.
Creative artist Louise Richardson, 23, said it was her father’s death from cancer that made her realise she wanted to follow her passion.
To work strategically can connote corporate, neoliberal ideology, selective professional networking, and economically motivated notions of efficiency that tend to exist in conflict with the ethos of the creative arts. But being strategic can also describe how we work creatively within our circumstances to enable a project to come to fruition.
“We are very visual people, could you imagine a world without colour or without any pictures, without any lettering, without any drawing, literally a blank world?’’
For Deakin University graduate, visionary artist Marta Oktaba “When you strip it back to a blank world of just grey blocks all around us there is still form, there are still lines and it is still something.”
Suf St James creates artworks completely within the social media app, “Snapchat” to challenge how women are subjected to abuse online. “This is the work people seem most interested in,” Suf said.
Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne is moving into a new generation of Actor’s Training. We have taken the current Theatre Practice degree and divided it into a BFA in Acting and a BFA in Theatre. With the competitive nature of the entertainment industry, we feel it is our obligation to equip our students with the mastery of skills applicable to contemporary theatre and film.
In our current climate of Higher Education funding cuts, academics are dealing with many tasks and additional administration as part of their job. As the pressures on academics mount, part-time and casual positions in academia have become the rule rather than the exception
Jessica Schwientek is known by her fellow artists as a “dirty photographer”. “I was always getting told off by how dirty and filthy my negatives were,” Jessica said. “I didn’t realize at the time that my lecturer did a similar thing . . .”
In the spirit of reconciliation, the DDCA acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.