From Cultural Data to Creative Spark: The Shock of the New in Adelaide

This paper examines what “creative reuse” of cultural data might mean within the context of national research infrastructure. Drawing on the Australian Creative Histories and Futures (ACHF) project—part of the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons—it considers a work package requiring artists to “use creative data more creatively.” Rather than interpreting this mandate as a call for visualisation or public communication, the paper argues that it exposes a methodological problem: research infrastructure cannot predefine creative value. Creative value does not reside stably within datasets but emerges through interpretation, encounter, and domain expertise.

The case study presented is The Shock of the New in Adelaide, a live performance project developed in dialogue with AusStage, Australia’s national database of live performance. Treating AusStage not as content to be illustrated but as a curatorial resource, the project asked how moments of rupture, aesthetic risk, and institutional change register in the historical record. Working collaboratively with director Chris Drummond and a cohort of actor-researchers, the project combined database enquiry, archival research, and embodied re-investigation of selected works.

Focusing on the 1979 State Theatre Company production of Lulu, adapted by Louis Nowra and directed by Jim Sharman, the paper demonstrates how creative practice can reopen archival judgements that appear settled. Although critically received as a failure and lacking an afterlife in the repertoire, Lulu is revealed—through network analysis, historical context, and contemporary performance—as a formative moment in the emergence of the Lighthouse ensemble. A re-encounter led by a research-driven student performer further illustrates how embodied interpretation can generate new questions without displacing historical analysis.

The paper argues that creative practice constitutes a form of infrastructure literacy: a methodological mode capable of sustaining uncertainty, enabling plural epistemologies, and extending the research capacity of cultural datasets.