Collaborative cultural production: generative processes of participation in textual creation

This paper has developed from original Doctoral research into the communication of the city of Newcastle’s cultural identity through and throughout theatrical and film productions which feature the city. "At 10.27 am on Thursday, 28 December, 1989, the City of Newcastle was devastated by a ML 5.6 (Richter magnitude) earthquake. This was one of the most serious natural disasters in Australia’s history" (Newcastle City Council, 2006). The Newcastle earthquake propagated a raft of mediated content and the purposeful production of related cultural texts. The play Aftershocks was "conceived by the Workers Cultural Action Committee as a community arts project in response to the 1989 Newcastle earthquake" (Brown & The Workers Cultural Action Committee, 2001, p. vii). This narrative material was also re-appropriated and became the chronicle foundation for the 1998 film Aftershocks (directed by Geoff Burton). Both texts maintain communicative currency as performance or pedagogic resources that continue to perpetuate perceptions of the city. In this paper, cultural production activities involved in the making of the play Aftershocks are examined within the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus to explain how meanings pertaining to the city’s culture have been generated through innovative creative practices. Richard Jenkins (2005, p. 353) describes habitus as: "... the framework within which humans improvise their way through life, a facilitatory capacity that allows locally specific learned practices and the classificatory architecture of knowledge and cognition to adjust to the demands, possibilities and impossibilities of actual settings and contexts, in such a way that meaningful, mutually sensible responses emerge and can be acted on". Habitus is a sociological platform that underpins what may be classed as professional production work and simultaneously encompasses the ordinariness of everyday sense-making activities. In the following discussion, the unique conditions that enabled communicative collaboration so that everyday residents could also participate in the construction of this distinct text are explored. How can creativity and communication be fostered within diverse social and cultural contexts?: "You can’t cement a text in concrete ... it’s got to move and grow and there’s [sic] different creative teams dealing with it in every manifestation and I recognize that, because you can’t stabilize things in that way. But there’s this human element ..." (WCAC Arts Administrator, personal communication, 29 October 29 1999).