Time to lobby with insight

A little news report that I wrote about Saturday's forum, as published in Arts Hub

The first of two Currency House forums was held in Sydney on Saturday to discuss Lee Lewis’ controversial new essay on cross-cultural casting. The forum, which will have a session in Melbourne, follows on from newspaper articles and internet debates that have raised questions about the lack of multicultural faces seen on Australia’s stages.

Introduced by Platform Papers Editor John Golder and chaired by Urban Theatre Projects Artistic Director Alicia Talbot, the discussion with the essays author Lee Lewis and performance artists Lina Kastoumis, was a vibrant and passionate debate that attracted nearly 40 people to Parramatta Riverside theatres.

“We aim to be stimulating, we aim to be provocative, we aim to ruffle a few feathers, we aim to lob a few hand grenades and I think we’ve never done it more successfully than with the current essay by Lee Lewis,” Golder said of their latest publication.

Lewis went on to explain to the audience her reasons for writing the essay explaining that the edition printed is part of a larger research she completed while studying a post-graduate degree at NIDA.

Lewis also responded to many within the industry who have expressed dismay that this is an issue that has been brought up previously, agreeing that “this shouldn’t exist as an essay. We should have actually got past this point.”

In what is seen as an embarrassment for the performing arts industry, Lewis also pointed out that “we are losing a lot of people through sheer attrition. All of the acting schools have been graduating non-White actors for a long time and they are frustrated by the lack of work for those actors. If those actors aren’t being selected by directors, after ten years those actors are just going to stop and their talents are not going to be developed.”

The forum discussed that the paper and the surrounding debate was not concerned with social ethics or positive discrimination but was centrally concerned with the quality of the work seen in Australia’s core cultural spaces. “When you look at publically funded work coming out of England or the US, the work is better on a question of how they’re engaging with the identities of their cities,” Lews said.

The audience who attended the forum expressed a desire for this discussion to continue beyond the forums in Sydney and Melbourne and proposed that the industry lobby SBS’s Insight programme to host a televised debate on the issues raised.

The next forum to discuss Lee Lewis’ essay will be held at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne on Wednesday 15 August and will be chaired by Alison Croggon of Theatre Notes.

For further information visit http://www.currencyhouse.org.au/

To submit this topic to SBS's Insight programme CLICK HERE.


Image credit: inweaknessbe/flickr