Presentation — Every Woman Theatre Artist Remembered and Feminist Strategies and Tactics: Staging Australian Women’s Lives Collaborative Workshop Activities (AusStage 2023)

Citation: Stacy Holman Jones and Daniel X. Harris, Every Woman Theatre Artist Remembered and Feminist Strategies and Tactics: Staging Australian Women’s Lives Collaborative Workshop Activities, Clusters of Culture: Festivals, Mapping and Data Visualisation Conference, Flinders University and AusStage, 2023. This workshop presentation documents collaborative activities from the Staging Australian Women's Lives (SAWL) ARC Discovery Project, sharing outputs from workshops conducted across Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Darwin between 2020 and 2022. The presentation outlines the project's core aims: to document the influence and legacy of womxn theatre practitioners from the 1970s to the present, and to identify and analyse the creative strategies womxn theatre makers have developed in response to gender-based inequality and oppression. It showcases two key workshop activities: “Potted Histories,” in which participants collaboratively perform condensed histories of women's theatre in Australia, identifying key people, companies, works, and places; and "Every Womxn Theatre Artist Remembered," which generates collective records of womxn artists, companies, venues, and works across all four cities. The presentation also features outcomes from the "Feminist Strategies and Tactics" activity, in which participants create posters naming and describing specific tactics used to challenge gender discrimination and advance feminist ways of working in Australian theatre, alongside relevant practitioners and companies. Taken together, the workshop outputs demonstrate the SAWL project’s commitment to participatory, embodied, and creative research methodologies as means of recovering overlooked theatrical histories and building collective feminist knowledge.