And the debate still rages... but it's still all white on the night

For those of you new to this little blog site that concerns itself with all things artistic and cultural, let me recap on what has been happening this last week.

In short, I made a brief summary post about an essay published in an Australian performing arts publication about the lack of multi-racial casting on the stages of Sydney. It fit nicely with another event that occurred when the major Shakespearean company, Bell Shakespeare, cast an Indigenous actor for the first time in this country's history as Othello.

It was merely a summary, but it seems to have gone a little berserk and the traffic flow into the site has gone through the roof. At the same time, my esteemed colleague Mink Tails was diving into this blog, making excellent and passionate comments as well as having an excellent summary of the essay on her blog.

But, for fear of losing the central focus here and diving into an 'i love my stc/i hate my stc' argument, let's steer back to the nuts and bolts of what Lee Lewis said in her essay. (But I implore you all to read the full text, for fear that certain quotes I select below could be taken out of context, which I will desperately try not to allow.)

'This essay,' Lewis writes, 'argues that aggressive cross-racial casting of the classical repertoire is needed in order to subvert the 'inevitability' of White-centric theatre. It is a necessary step if we are to rid our mainstages of their current, implicitly colonial, practices and make them a cultural territory that is fully engaged with the socio-political complexities of representing hybridisation'.

That is the central theme of her essay, and I applaud her for making it.

Since reading her research and her ideas, it has started to put a barrier between myself and so much of what I am seeing at the moment. She is bloody well right and what is sad is that these arguments have been made before and nothing has been done about them.

A few weeks ago I had the fortune of teaching some high school students from a number of schools in the Penrith area of Sydney. These classes were made up with ethnically diverse students from a wide variety of backgrounds. We worked on devising short pieces of theatre which would culminate with a performance evening in front of their peers, friends and families.

It hasn't been until now, that I reflect on the workshops and realise how out of touch the mainstages are to the world that these students live in. Cultural diversity, ethnic diversity and racial diversity is the norm for them. How must main theatre companies look to them when they see a constructed world that does not reflect their own?

'The construction,' Lewis continues, 'of the all-White cast in Sydney as the 'natural order' is inherited from the British theatre, which functioned as the cultural face of imperial politics of domination. Our mainstages have yet to mount a serious challenge to this state of affairs. An all-White cast in a classical play on a mainstage in Sydney in 2007 is a nationalist strategy for reaffirming the dominant fantasy of Australia as an all-White nation...'

In the essay, Lewis makes fantastic arguments and provides excellent evidence that irrefutably shows that the cultural diversity of the Australian stage is at best, lacklustre. At worst, it verges on racial exclusion. When you compare the diversity that is gracing the stages of progressive institutions such as Performance Space, Sidetrack and Opera Australia, you get a sense of who is being left behind.

I would, however, give more weight to the role that programming plays in the lack of multi-racial casting. Someone mentioned in the previous post the speech that Richard Wherrett gave about anglo-centric programming and to be honest, I don't think that there is any evidence that the mainstage theatre environment has changed much since that speech was given in the mid-90's.

The conservative programming of mainstage theatre in this city is a central problem to the acceptance of a more diverse stage and until we start to develop audiences with more diverse points of views, more diverse texts, more diverse theatrical practice and scripts that don't prescribe to the US and UK stereotype, it will be very hard to move beyond the present situation.

Don't get me wrong, I like to hear what writers in the US and UK are talking about and the mainstages do those productions competently, but I would really LOVE to hear what Biljana Srbljanovic is saying, or Gao Xingjian, or Sabina Berman, or Yukio Mishima, or Andre Hieng, or Maribel Carrasco, or Jose Ramon Enriquez, or Noda Hideki, or the Presnayakov Brothers.... or maybe even someone from Sydney.

There is a tunnel vision in the diverse cultural impact of texts used by mainstage companies in Sydney. That is a hurdle they and their audiences need to get over if there is any hope for a more diverse cross section appearing on their stages.

Lewis uses Barrie Kosky as an example to be emulated. Again, I couldn't agree more. While I was studying theatre in Slovenia, I would occasionally indulge myself, catch the train a few hours north to Vienna and have a sticky-beak at what Kosky was doing at the Schauspielhaus. The production that stays in my memory more than any other was his production of Medea, starring Melita Jurisic in the title role.

At the beginning of the production, Kosky gets Jurisic to speak in Croatian, while someone in the lighting box did a voice over translation into German. Such a simple acceptance of diverse culture and language that enhanced the theatricality and impact of the play in such profound and beautiful ways. And not to mention pointing a big finger at the sore on the butt of Western Europe and what to do about those 'damn Eastern Europeans' who look so similar to us, but are so poor.

Lewis suggests the term 'Third World Looking Person' in preference to Non-English Speaking Background in the essay. She quotes Ghassan Hage who explains that 'when white people who embrace the White nation fantasy look at a migrant, what they differentiate between are not those who are NESB and those who are not, or those who are European and those who are not, but those who are Third-World looking and those who are not.'

From a theatre viewpoint, I think that the non-English speaking background influence has as much to do with the way that non-White actors look. The intolerance towards those that have an accent sits uncomfortably with our romantic notion of the days when actors spoke in Received Pronunciation - and this intolerance is stifling our theatre.

Lewis' essay is so much more comprehensive than I can give justice to in a short blog entry, but the study she gives to the situation is compelling. She is careful not to point the blame, and prefers to blame professionals for being naive. But at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is how we are going to change and when.


Image: Luke Chueh, Black in White