Author: Fiona Sprott
Sprott, Fiona, 2015 Last Seen Alive: Navigating the Abyss, Flinders University, School of Humanities and Creative Arts
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This thesis combines a creative work titled Last Seen Alive which takes the form of an archive box filled with 'evidence' related to a fictional cold case, and theoretical exegesis. I explore my relationship to the 1983 true story of ten-year-old Louise Bell who disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night from a suburb south of Adelaide in South Australia, and has never been found. I was of a similar age and lived close by at the time she disappeared and her story affected me deeply by instilling in me a fear of being taken from my own bedroom in the middle of the night. This thesis details my research process using psychoanalysis as a theoretical and creative methodology for translating my personal relationship to the story of Louise Bell's mysterious disappearance into a creative work. I present a performance text which uses evidence collected from a crime scene as the form the 'script' takes.
Keywords: Performance,Lacan,Autobiographical Narrative,Character,Girlhood,Violence
Subject: Creative Arts thesis, Drama
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2015
School: School of Humanities and Creative Arts
Supervisor: Associate Professor Karen Orr Vered