Abstract
At its 2010 season launch, marking long-time Artistic Director Neil Armfield’s final season, Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre invited the directors of the season’s productions to take to the stage. Only one woman was present in this group of ten. This moment became a lightning rod for examining women’s career paths to the Australian mainstage at this company and beyond. This article follows performance data to reveal how Belvoir responded to this outcry. Using improved AusStage records and data visualisations, the authors map women’s representation in positions of creative leadership on the mainstage over time, following Belvoir’s history from 1984 to 2024 as a case study. The AusStage database’s rich holdings also allow us to further contextualise these contemporary trends in the representation of female-identifying and non-binary directors and playwrights on the mainstage within the wider sweep of modern Australian theatre history from the 1950s to the 2010s.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 231-263 |
| Number of pages | 33 |
| Journal | Australasian Drama Studies |
| Issue number | 86 |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2025 |
Keywords
- AusStage
- Australian theatre
- Belvoir
- data
- feminism