Durban, Kim Dr

Position: Senior Lecturer
Location: Camp Street Campus, Old Law Courts Building, Room C308
Study area: Performing arts
Phone: 5327 8644
Email: k.durban@federation.edu.au

Qualifications

Doctor of Philosophy – La Trobe University – 2018

Master of Dramatic Arts (Direction) (First Class Honours) – University of Melbourne- 2001

Diploma of Dramatic Arts – Victorian College of the Arts – 1985

Bachelor of Education – South Australian College of Arts and Education – 1978

Diploma of Teaching – South Australian College of Arts and Education – 1977

Teaching

Course(s)

• Bachelor of Performing Arts
• Graduate Diploma of Theatre Production

Units

• Acting Project 1 (CPPRO2101)
• Critical Studies 5: Professional Practice (PACAC 3005)
• Acting Project 4: Production and Showcase (CPPRO3104)

Biography

Associate Professor Kim Durban trained as a teacher in South Australia, then as a director at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has a strong reputation as a director of new plays and classic texts for theatres across Australia, including Melbourne Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, State Theatre Company of SA, St Martins Youth Arts Centre, Playbox Theatre, La Mama Theatre and Red Stitch Theatre.

After leading the National Drama School in St Kilda,  Kim was appointed Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at Federation University where productions include Warp and Woof, Welcome to Thebes, The Glove Thief, The Sparagus Garden, Embers, The Northern Lass, Garden City Weeded, As You Like It, Machinal, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Hatpin, Murder on the Ballarat Train, 42nd Street and Kiss Me, Kate. She has also directed workshop productions of new Australian musicals A Little Touch of Chaos, and The White Rose, and a reading of Margaret of Anjou, the ‘new’ Shakespeare play, for Shakespeare 400.

Kim has trained over 1,000 actors. She is currently the Course Coordinator of the Bachelor of Performing Arts and the Graduate Diploma of Theatre Production.

With her lecturing team, Kim won a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching in 2015. In 2012 she won the EJ Barker Fellowship which facilitated research at both the Royal Shakespeare Company archives held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford upon Avon, and the archives of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London. She is also the winner of an ALTC Citation, the Yvonne Taylor Award for Directors, and she is a joint winner of the inaugural Ewa Czajor Memorial Award. She was invited to address a Directors' Forum in New York at the Public Theatre, on the topic "Expanding the Presence of Women Directors". Kim is a founding member of the Australian Women Directors Alliance. She has a current entry in the Who’s Who of Australian Women, and her PhD thesis explores her extensive direction of plays by Caroline playwright Richard Brome. Her productions of Oriel and Running With Emus by Merrilee Moss were seen at the Carlton Courthouse in 2016 and 2020.

Areas of expertise

Kim has extensive expertise in developing and directing the work of contemporary playwrights. Professional productions include the premieres of Running With Emus and Oriel (La Mama at Carlton Courthouse); Farragut North (Red Stitch Actors Theatre), Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Scenes From An Execution (State Theatre Company of SA); the premieres of The Conjurers, Gary's House and Good Works (Playbox); Lovechild (Queensland Theatre Company); the premieres of Vincent an acapella opera and Skins (St Martin's Youth Arts Centre); Barmaids (Zootango), Pushin' Up Daisies (Southern Lights); and the premieres of The Dam, Fairy Tales for the Future and After Dinner (La Mama). Productions of classic texts include Happy End, Three Sisters, The White Devil, Ghosts and King Lear (VCA); The Comedy of Errors (Zootango and Araluen Arts Centre), The Recruiting Officer (Melbourne Theatre Company, where Kim was the first woman to direct on The Playhouse stage) and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (St Martins Youth Arts Centre).

Kim’s work on classical texts ranges from the early modern stage to the twentieth century, with a special interest in Caroline playwright Richard Brome and also the work of female playwrights. Her thesis: “Double vision: raising Richard Brome’s plays from the page to the stage” can be viewed/downloaded via http://hdl.handle.net/1959.9/564893, 2017. Her commissioned essay “Upside Down at the Bottom of the World: Taking Richard Brome’s Plays to the Antipodes” appears at https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/viewEssay.jsp?file=KD_AUSTRALIA Her article “ ‘ I Love the Quality of Playing, I’: Directing Adventures in Ballarat.” appears in Australasian Drama Studies 57. Her original work Alice Arden was a Master of Dramatic Art – Direction (by Research) production, which radically reinterpreted female representation in Arden of Faversham. Kim received first class honours, and, because of this work, she was invited to address a Directors' Forum in New York at the Public Theatre, on the topic "Expanding the Presence of Women Directors".

Research interests

• Caroline playwright Richard Brome
• Actor Training in Australia
• Women playwrights and directors, including an investigation into the career and legacy of Australian director Ewa Czajor
• Australian theatre and playwrights

Publications

Book chapters

Chapter 9. ‘I must abroad or perish!’: The Meta-theatre of the Road in Brome’s A Jovial Crew, Kim Durban; in Reading the Road: from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Bill Angus, December 2019, Edinburgh University Press: 167-182.

“The Lidded Box and Its Function” in Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia: the Hidden Archive of Performance. edited by Glen McGillivray, Peter Lang, Bern, 2011.

Refereed journal articles

Durban, Kim. (2023). Navigating the staging of Richard Brome’s “comic therapy” in The Sparagus Garden. Australasian Drama Studies, (82), 145–172. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.166343813639393

Beddie, Crowley, Durban, and Hall. 2021. “Not a pivot, but a pirouette : a panel presentation about the Arts Academy online in a time of pandemic.” http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/186633

Campbell, A., Beer, T., Chew, R., & Durban, K. (2020). Ariel songs: Performing cultural ecologies of Ballarat. Australasian Drama Studies, (77), 208–243. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.645557940838049

Durban, Kim. “Haunted by Irrelevance?.” Fusion Journal, no. 17, 2020, pp. 39-48. https://fusion-journal.com/haunted-by-irrelevance/

Durban, Kim. “‘Had I been there, which am a silly woman’: Dealing with gendered casting in an Australian tertiary setting.” Fusion Journal, Issue 15 (2019), pp. 142-153. http://www.fusion-journal.com/had-i-been-there-which-am-a-silly-woman-dealing-with-gendered-casting-in-an-australian-tertiary-setting/

Durban, Kim. 'I Love the Quality of Playing, I': Directing Adventures in Ballarat [online]. Australasian Drama Studies, No. 57, Oct 2010: 115-128. (The Antipodes)

Availability: <https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=690594795356687;res=IELHSS> 

ISSN: 0810-4123 [cited 12 May 20].

Durban, Kim. “Upside Down at the Bottom of the World: Taking Richard Brome to the Antipodes” in Richard Brome Online ISBN 978-0-9557876-1-4.

Refereed conference proceedings

"The Necklace Theory" University of Sydney (https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/2488?mode=full)

Direction

Associations

• Australian Women Directors Alliance (AWDA)
• Media, Entertainment and Art Alliance (MEAA)