The field of contemporary youth-specific theatre in Australia is one of change and, in some cases, anxiety. While Drama Studies continue to grow in popularity in schools, previously conventional developmental paradigms have become less mandatory for theatre for, by, and about young people outside the school context. Instead, ‘new generation’ approaches in youth-specific performance are placing greater value on young people's own preferences in cultural activity. Yet this development is being tempered and further complicated by a cultural ‘generationalism’, particularly in larger arts organizations as the youth sector becomes a more integral part of marketing strategies for the future. The resulting ambiguity in the representation, value, and positioning of young people and youth-specific arts in Australia's theatre industry is considered by focusing on Magpie2, a former youth-specific company attached to the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Magpie2 ceased operation in 1998 after experimenting with a ‘new generation’ approach to theatre for young people in the State Theatre realm. Both the artistic policy of Magpie2 Director, Benedict Andrews, and the critical reception of his two productions in 1997, Future Tense and Features of Blown Youth, demonstrate how competing systems of cultural value characterize the field of youth-specific theatre in Australia.

A feminist analysis of the repertoire written and directed by women within mainstream Australian theatre at the end of the millennium reveals that, in spite of thirty years of active feminism in Australia, as well as feminist theatre criticism and practice, the mainstream has only partially absorbed the influence of feminist ideas. A survey of all the mainland state theatre companies reveals the number of women making work for the mainstream and discusses the production politics that frames their representation as repertoire. Although theatre has become increasingly feminized, closer analysis reveals that women's theatre is either contained or diminished by its presence within the mainstream or utilizes conventional theatrical genres and dramatic narratives. Feminist theatre criticism, thus, needs to become more concerned with the material politics of mainstream culture, in which gender relations are being reconstructed under the power of a new economic and social order.

The cinema's developments in lighting, sound and image technology have helped the theatre, and have also allowed its aesthetics to become lighter (Strehler) as well as more complex (Langhoff). Films have originated in plays (not least Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, which has been accused of wiping away all traces of the theatre, when, in fact, this eradication was part of the staged work itself); and films have passed into plays (for example, Miracle in Milan staged by Zadek in 1993 after De Sica's film). The distinction between text and image, which defined the theatre/cinema split, is far less useful than distinctions between different types of images. The flux of audiovisual, informational and advertising images today has put the relationship between image and truth, as conceived by Bazin in the 1950s, into deep crisis. The theatre film transfers the dialogue between the stage and the audience into a dialogue between theatre and cinema, and is a meeting, rather than a fusion, between these two arts.

Rock ’n’ Roll Circus promotes an expectation of performance that is energetic, challenging, irreverent, and sexual. Their 1998 production in Brisbane of Sweetmeats follows the company's earlier work, such as The Dark, which established its reputation in Australia for idiosyncratic physical theatre with an acute awareness of its erotic potential and appeal. A close analysis of the construction of (sexual) desires and erotic energies in Sweetmeats illustrates how the study of sexuality is also the study of what may appear to be non-sexual. Interactions are a key to an appreciation of this form of physical theatre, whether they are between body and body, human and apparatus, sexual and non-sexual, desires and anxieties, and straight and queer. Lines of demarcation are blurred and superfluous. This analysis of Sweetmeats in performance makes use of Peta Tait's investigation of sexed bodies in physical theatre, and Elizabeth Grosz's (re)conceptualization of lesbian desire and its generation through contact between surfaces. Grosz's approach is particularly applicable to a form of theatre which relies on the energy of physical contact between performers, and between performer and apparatus. The latter is exploited effectively in Sweetmeats such that a circulation of multifarious, strange desires (and anxieties) permeates the production, in some sense ‘queering’ it.

The recent performance work, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, directed by Romeo Castellucci for his company, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, explores the ‘crisis of creation’, brought on by the scientific revolutions of genetics and nuclear physics and the cultural atrocity of the Holocaust. Genesi is analysed against Eduardo Kac's art installation, Genesis, which combines advanced media for telepresent interactivity and genetic engineering. Genesi and Genesis relate not only in the cultural concerns of science and technology studies, but in their interdisciplinary strategies, which include combining aspects of theatre, visual art, sculpture, and technology. Castellucci and Kac engage the risks inherent in the destruction possible through creation (both aesthetic and scientific) and isolate manners in which contemporary constructions of the human are challenged. The works signal an awareness of the constantly shifting boundaries and borders of aesthetic genres and the developing convergence of the disciplines of science and art.

Indigenous Australian theatre company Kooemba Jdarra's production of Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The 7 Stages of Grieving (performed by Mailman) presents us with a series of stories about grief, grieving and loss. Mailman adopts the position of a ‘nomadic performer’ moving between stories and personae, refusing to embrace a singular character position, instead weaving the performance together through her use of slides, photographs, story and song. The performer claims and marks the space and empowers herself through her control over representation. The stories told often use autobiographical references, however, the style of the work positions the performance piece as a pastiche of stories about Aboriginal grief and grieving rather than an attempt to tell ‘true’ stories. This analysis interrogates the ways in which the spectator is invited to question his/her understandings of, and responses to, the concepts of grief and grieving, and to further question the issue of belonging in Australia, given the past and ongoing oppression of the Indigenous peoples of this land.