Creative Pathways, Industry Trajectories 1: Actors & announcers, live performance and contemporary platforms

Creative Pathways, Industry Trajectories 1: Actors & announcers,  live performance and contemporary platforms

Date: Friday 22 March, 2019
Time: 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Digital Learning Space (Room 224), Joyce Ackroyd Building (#37)

Discussion Leaders:  Tom O’Regan & Chris Hay

In this first conversation in what will become an extended series of a series of exploratory conversations about what is happening to creative occupations and media forms/industries we will examine the changing shape of actors and announcers employment and of the live performance and related media industries within which they work. Our starting point for discussion will be historical and contemporary census data on acting and announcing and the live performance and other industries that support these starting from 1933. Our conversation will range over the historical trajectory of actors and announcers since then including their employment within theatre and other live performance spaces and other media industries right up to and including the impact of platforms and platformisation most recently. We will also consider the relative performance of live performance in relation to other cognate media industries with which it is closely connected. Finally we will discuss some of the uncertainties associated with using census occupations and industry data longitudinally given the different industry and occupational classifications involved.

About our Discussion Leaders

Discussion will be led by Prof Tom O'Regan and Dr Chris Hay. Tom is interested in how media, including live performance, transforms itself over time, and the dynamic inter-medial relations that define its practitioners and their practice. The ABS data presented here grows out of Tom's research on Australian media transformations that was funded by an ARC Discovery Grant. Chris is interested in the historical evolution of state-subsidised theatre performance and venues and has a particular interest in contemporary Australian director training. His PhD was entitled: “Learning to inhabit the chair: Knowledge transfer in contemporary Australian director training”. 

About Creative Pathways, Industry Trajectories

“Creative Trajectories, Industry Trajectories” is an initiative of the Platform Media project encouraging discussion of how the contemporary platformising of our cultural forms is both in continuity with, and a point of departure from, longer term occupational and media developments including past media transformation events. These conversations are designed to offer participants the scope to have exploratory, open-ended conversations anchored in official data about the historical and contemporary trajectories of those creative occupations and media forms/industries. Each of these conversations will cover occupations, media forms and industries that we research, teach and train our students for in the School of Communication and Arts and the wider Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

This seminar is supported by The Platform Media SRF and IASH. This seminar is part of the “Platform Media: Algorithms, Accountability and Media Design” project,  a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences initiative bringing together researchers in the School of Communication and Arts and the T.C. Beirne Law School.