Lodestar

Lodestar is a performance installation concerned with interpretations of intercultural dialogue in northern Australia. The audience explored the theatrical space, much like they might explore a gallery of visual objects. The audience situate themselves to experience the work from different view-points within the auditorium, traversing the installations, while the performance episodes unfolded. The audience expectations met with the experience of a theatrical world constructed scenographically and sensuously with representations and enactments of a world created by the artists based on ideas of the fantastical and wondrous. What is Lodestar? A 'lodestar' or guiding star is used in celestial navigation and metaphorically represents a guiding principle. You use a lodestar to help you find your way. Critical thinker Walter Benjamin (1940) proposed the organizing principle of a constellation to describe place and history. By drawing on Benjamin and other theories, the concept of the constellation becomes a multi-faceted metaphor that suggests negotiating the politics and time of place without fixing or limiting it to a linear concept. Lodestar explores imagined terrains with a lens on the contested psychologies and motivational implications of the Australian landscape. A process of mutual tolerance, vernacular and physical dramaturgy was a key to coalesce artistic disciplines and to describing imagined or magic geographies. Lodestar revealed the liminal terrain of shared environments in the microcosm of Australia’s far north.

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Lodestar

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