The river runs dry

As the Murray River - the natural border between New South Wales and Victoria - dries up, it seems that state borders are also breaking down. Well, in arts policy anyway.

Today in Crikey an interesting anonymous tip arrived;
Arts Victoria funding announcement is scheduled to be released this Friday. Several arts organisations that do really good work, highly respected, genuinely tick all the boxes for Australian content, developing young artists, building partnerships, have got the knife. This follows on from some severe bloodletting in the Australia Council funding announcements earlier this year. Some organisations that are rumoured to be defunded this year include Chambermade Opera, Astra, Ballet Lab, Elision (not able to be verified till after Arts Vic announcement).

Lots of disquiet and anger amongst the arts community which is waiting for the government injunction on Friday to lift following the announcement so that they start raising hell. Regarding the Australia Council, a strange Sydney focus and a big conservative lean. In Arts Vic, a sudden-death change in tune to organisations who were given assurances six months ago that all was well and now have had the plug pulled with no wind-down plan or valid explanation of why evaluations have changed. Several orgs are likely to fold, and others have dramatic staff, admin and programming cuts to face up to. A real kick in the guts to Australian culture and a worryingly cavalier attitude to sustainable art-making from the arts bodies.


There's three points to this argument that get lost amongst the general howling that goes on whenever there is some major funding changes.

Firstly, when is the arts industry going to learn to lobby governments as a united front? This constant justification for funding cloaked in terms of educational/community/social benefits instead of pushing the old fashioned we are here and we need to be funded line is extraordinarily divisive. This is not to mention the amount of back-stabbing that goes on behind closed doors whenever an organisation gets the ear of a Minister - 'they get lots of money, why don't we get some of that' type of tactic.

We must be the only industry in the country that lobbies the government like this and other industries representing anything from mining to banking to education wouldn't be caught dead playing those types of tactics.

Secondly, eventually there needs to be some clearing away of the deadwood so that emerging artists, practitioners and organisations get a turn at the funding pie (not that all the above companies are deadwood). But there needs to be a reality check from many organisations that maybe their time is up. Often a group will get funding for say ten years and what they were proposing back in 1998 hasn't really changed a decade later. And it's a funding pie that everyone seems to take for granted. I have seen on industry bulletin boards straight up whinging and moaning when a company does get funding that it is a) not enough b) too little too late or c) not the right type of funding.

And finally, surely it must be time to examine the rift that exists between the major performing arts companies (AMPAG) and the rest of the industry. This shouldn't just be couched in financial terms but also within the creative. Partnerships need to be established far more often that what they are and they must be across all platforms.

It really shouldn't be a surprise when the Australia Council, Arts NSW or Arts Victoria shake things up a bit. Shouldn't we be innovative enough to keep a bit ahead of the game?

Arts funding sticks to status quo

As first published in Crikey.

For the arts, this year’s budget is less about a "Creative Australia" and more like steady-as-she-goes, as Arts Minister Peter Garrett follows on closely from predecessor George Brandis. However, it's what happens over the coming years that could be of most concern to the arts community.

So far, very little has changed from the previous financial year, with the previous government delivering one of the largest injections of federal money to the arts just twelve months ago. Garrett has pretty much maintained the funding for the coming twelve months, adding a few small flourishes of his own that give a little push to arts institutions to foster new talent and new creativity.

The biggest change we will see this year is the creation of Screen Australia, a Howard Government initiative to merge the Australian Film Commission, Film Finance Corporation and Film Australia into one national peak body. It has been kept by Garrett and provided with $103 million for the coming financial year.

A closer look at the finances reveals that this is a funding cut to the film industry when you look at the overall provision of the three organisations from previous years. But a Garrett spokesman has told Crikey that the new 40% producer rebate for qualifying production expenditure will hopefully make more of the film industry "rely less on direct funding".

ArtStart, the controversial programme that will provide artists with improved access to social security has been ignored this year but Crikey has been told that it's "still an election commitment and has not dropped off the radar".

Regional Australia has also been left off the map after a continuing request for $24 million in touring and presentation funding was ignored. The Arts Minister has tried to offset that cut with the creation of a $10 million Creative Communities initiative that takes the arts to outer metropolitan and regional areas.

As well, the Australia Council for the Arts, already hit with an "efficiency dividend" of 2% earlier this year, gets a slight increase in total government funding to $173.2 million. This will no doubt please the major performing arts companies, the small to medium performing arts sector and the visual arts and crafts industry, who profited most from Howard’s previous budget.

But after the slight increase this year, future budget estimates show that Federal Government funding plateaus despite inflation rising by 4%. As well as these increasing costs and the efficiency dividend, the Australia Council will also have to find $6.6 million to fund Garrett’s Young and Emerging Artists program, which aims to increase the exposure of performing arts companies to schools and young people.

Kathy Keele, Australia Council CEO has guaranteed that grants to artists, despite the rising costs, will not be affected. “We are putting in place measures to maintain our funding for artists and arts organisations by streamlining the organisation and making $2 million in administrative savings,” she said.

Another organisation hit by the efficiency dividend has been the National Library of Australia which sees funding drop $600,000 to around $57.6 million for the coming financial year. Already running off the smell of an oily rag, the cut to the NLA has angered many, not only within literary circles but also those who understand the importance of storing digital information – a costly and complicated exercise that will keep the nation's public records for years to come.

One of the positives from this year’s budget is the creation of a resale royalty rights scheme for visual artists that will cost $1.5 million over the next three years. The funding will assist in creating an independent collecting body that will ensure that artists continue to get paid for works when on-sold to other buyers.

“This scheme will bring Australia into line with similar resale royalty arrangements operating in the United Kingdom and Europe and will embody the recognition that visual artists’ rights extend beyond the first sale of an artwork,” Mr Garrett said in a statement on Budget night.

The creation of a new National Film and Sound Archive as an independent statutory authority is another big step and will receive an allocation of $105.2 million over four years.

“As well as continuing its important activities in relation to the national audiovisual collection, the government believes it is important that the National Film and Sound Archive has a strong role in public outreach,” Mr Garrett said.

It’s a solid first budget for Mr Garrett, setting him only slightly apart from his predecessor. He is slowly showing his stripes in favouring additional funding for young and emerging artists. It’s a small step, but it could be the tip of an iceberg as he slowly forces the institutions that previously found favour with the Howard Government to increase their involvement with young people and start investing in the future creativity of the country.

Review: Back from Front

Dean Walsh’s Back from Front
Performance Space


While absorbing the many beautiful moments in Dean Walsh’s new choreographic work, Back from Front, I was constantly reminded of one of the most beautiful art deco buildings in Sydney – the Hyde Park War Memorial.

Back from Front is Walsh’s self described ‘reflection on the cycles of violence’. But this dance piece is more specifically an intimate and close look at how the theatre of war impacts the soldiers and the people around them.

In the same way, a visit to the War Memorial has the same affect. Walking up the main stairs adjacent to the pool of remembrance, your head is immediately made to bow as you look down into a pit where a statue portrays a generic dead soldier bent backwards as some type of sacrificial lamb.

If you enter the War Memorial from underneath you can see the statue from ground level and look up to see three female figures holding the body aloft. His wife, his mother and a nurse.

Walsh, too, makes his reflection universal by not concentrating on one particular conflict but rather throws forward a collection of images that are from any war - the First World War, Second World, Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam or even the Gulf.

Using five dancers throughout the show, Walsh constructs domestic scenes and throws them against the violent reality of mass war. The opening alone is an amazing moment when you see a house-wife sitting at a kitchen table. Suddenly a soldier emerges from a wall that has camouflaged him and he enters the space as some type of ghost.

The scenes flow on from this beautiful beginning that take you to other domestic scenes, parents reacting to news of the death of their son, hospital scenes, love scenes and scenes of man-to-man conflict.

What is most impressive about Walsh’s production is the state-of-the-art multimedia element. There are times when the images are over-the-top and detract from the stagecraft. Most of the time, however, it fills the space without being over-bearing and even shrinks down to add slight and elegant elements to some beautiful dance sequences.

It is these sequences when Walsh is at his best, but unfortunately he is let down by male dancers who don’t have the presence they need to dominate the space as images of the military. On the other hand, the performances by the female dancers are strong, intricate and moving, most particularly from Marnie Palomares – one of the finest new dance talents I have seen recently.

But don’t expect this production to hit you from all sides with special effects. It is just like the War Memorial in that you should sit back, consider it and let it immerse you. Back from Front, like the architecture is a beautiful and confronting reflection.


Until 10 May
$20-30
Carriageworks
http://www.performancespace.com.au/
Ticketmaster 1300 723 038

Allocation Exhausted

UPDATE: For the latest in Sydney Festival news please CLICK HERE for my live blog.


Just hours after launching the Sydney Festival 2008 programme, the headline act Bjork has already sold out. Is this a sign of things to come for the ever popular Sydney Festival?

This, Fergus Linehan's third year at the helm, looks to be the most successful festival programme yet and is an exhilarating foray into a musical wonderland and a spectacle of dance.

Breaking with the tradition of exclusivity, Linehan has dispensed with the conga-lines of security buffoons and invited the entire city to the opening night festivities. There'll be no door list for this event.

Kids will be invited into the central plaza of Martin Place for festivities as they write down their 'hopes and dreams for Sydney in the year ahead'. These hopes and dreams will then be broadcast on massive projections throughout the night, reminding us all of our inner innocence, our inner faith. The Place will then transform into a massive outdoor dance venue to the beat of DJ's and local and international musical acts.

The evening will crack along as Brian Wilson and Paul Kelly stage a huge free concert in the Domain. This will be coupled by live bands pumping out salsa, tango, jive under the trees in Hyde Park. Macquarie Street will upstage St Mary's cathedral as three couples from a Sunday Telegraph competition will walk up a red carpet aisle with 20,000 onlookers.

Now, that's an opening night. "Welcome, welcome, welcome."

The programme for this year's festival is really a salute to two distinct areas, Australian Dance and Indigenous Arts which are both represented proudly and with attitude.

For the last couple of years there have been grumble-grumblings from the local community about the lack of Australian content. This year makes amends and Linehan has programmed a thorough series of events that appropriately showcase what many consider to be the real export of Australia's performing arts.

At the apex of the dance programme is the About an Hour series, which returns once again to the Sydney Opera House. It will include the new work from Chunky Move, a contemporary story from Stephen Page, Lucy Guerin's Aether, Kate Champion's The Age I'm In, Shaun Parker's This Show Is About People and the last choreographic work from Tanja Liedtke Construct.

Coupled with three works from Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato and the Compania Nacional De Danza who last came to the Sydney Festival in 2001, this should be a treat of a festival for those who like a bit of toe-tapping.

On the Indigenous front, Linehan has brought together a beautiful programme that cuts across the artistic boundaries of classic Australian musical ballads, urban rock, physical theatre and South Australian story-telling.

For many the Kev Carmody retrospective concert at the State Theatre will be an event not to be missed. Especially when you have a line-up of singers such as Paul Kelly, Dan Kelly, Tex Perkins, Clare Bowditch, The Drones, Missy Higgins, Steve Kilbey and Sara Storer all singing the classic anthems from Carmody's prolific and beautiful career.

The Black Arm Band will also burst out onto the Indigenous stage, but this time at the Opera House with a concert that will feature the stunning vocals of Ursula Yovich (I saw her pick up the microphone late into the night at a party a few months ago, and I implore you to believe the hype... she is awesome), Archie Roach, Bart Willoughby, Emma Donovan, Ruby Hunter, Dan Sultan and again Kev Carmody.

In association with Company B, the festival will also be presenting BIG hART's Ngapartji Ngapartji which when translated from the local South Australian dialect means "I give you something, you give me something." Central to what is billed as a beautiful theatrical journey is the belief that this country must do more to protect and promote local indigenous languages. So watch as the theatrical journey then becomes one of shared cultures and a beautiful candle for honest reconciliation.

The central focus of this year's festival is well and truly music. You are already too late for Bjork, but don't despair because there is also Beach Boy musical visionary Brian Wilson, Sufjan Stevens, Fourplay, Martin Craft, Mice Parade, Joanna Newsom performing with the Sydney Symphony, The Triffids, slam poetry and afro-pop acts from South Africa, the Finnish Iiro Rantala Trio, Pink Martini, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, Meow Meow, and my pick of the musical genre - accordion-playing revolutionary Kimmo Pohjonen.

Then of course the is the usual crazy fiesta at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum and the Beck's Festival Bar with acts such as De La Soul, Mudhoney, Amp Fiddler and Spank Rock.

Hyde Park will also be transformed into a Festival Garden with Sydney Arts Journo's favourite summer watering hole the Famous Spiegeltent making a welcome return bringing acts like La Clique with it. Next door in the garden will be the Cirque Ici Tent where Johann Le Guillerm will perform mad circus performance nightly with two electro-acoustic live musicians.

For the theatre set, this is not really the festival for you. Previous years have delivered a feast of the text based magic, but apparently Linehan couldn't find appropriate acts for this years festival. Despite this, there are two shows coming from the National Theatre of Scotland - Black Watch, which tells the story of Scotland's iconic 300-year old Black Watch Regiment and how it has a head on collision with the new 'war on terror'.

The NTS will also present at CarriageWorks, Aalst, a show developed with the Belgian theatre company Victoria. Based on a true story, it is a domestic theatrical journey which follows the trial and conviction of a husband and wife who murder their infant daughter and young son.

My favourite theatrical rebels and theatre-event convention breakers, Urban Theatre Projects present another show this year The Last Highway. Performed in a service station in Bankstown the show will centre itself on the characters that come in and out of the station - sex workers, taxi drivers, shift workers and no doubt your token hoon in his pumped up noise machine.

The stunning and magical James Thieree, nephew of Charlie Chaplin, also makes a very exciting return for the third year in a row with Au Revoi Parapluie. If his previous two shows are any guide, this will be a theatrical delight.

The rest of the festival is made up of all the usual free outdoor events, domain concerts and quirky events made to get everyone in Sydney at least touched by this beautiful event. The pick of them for me is Haircuts by children, where local ten year olds will offer free haircuts at salons in Parramatta and Darlinghurst. The bill says 'after a team of children participate in a series of training workshops with local professional stylists, everyone is invited to get a free haircut.

But, if I was you, I'd get in early. This festival is going to capture a city and send ripples of creativity into a state of mass fiesta... and without a doubt the ticketek website will be in a constant state of 'Allocation Exhausted'.


Sydney Arts Journo Festival Picks

Theatre
Black Watch - National theatre of Scotland
James Thieree - Au Revoir Parapluie
National Theatre of Scotland - Aalst
Ngapartji Ngapartji at Belvoir St
Urban Theatre Projects - The Last Highway

Dance and Performance
Nacho Duato and the Compania Nacional De Danza
Lucy Guerin - Aether
Cirque Ici
La Clique at the Famous Spiegeltent
Tanja Liedtke - Construct

Music
Sufjan Stevens
House of the Holy Afro - Third World Bunfight
Pink Martini
Chromeo
Kimmo Pohjonen

The rest is silence...

Last night I sat down to watch an interview that Kerry O'Brien had recorded with Marcel Marceau during his recent trip to Australia in 2003.

Reflecting on the post I penned yesterday, I have thought a little more on what I said at the end of the post:

His death reminds us not only of the beauty of his performance but of the way that theatre can take us to places that no other art form in the world can. With so many trying to out-do each other with technical and multimedia effects, it is timely to remember that the journeys that Marceau carried audiences on can be reached with the mere flick of a hand, or the look of an eye.

I have seen a fair amount of interesting theatre in the last few years. A fair amount of bad theatre too. But essentially, most of the theatre I see is adequate.

Adequate in that actors can say their lines. The script is pretty good and that the production values of the play have covered all the bases and supported the actors appropriately.

But so often I walk out of the theatre perplexed at how so many directors cram their productions with bells and whistles, flashing lights, sponsored sets, overwhelming soundscapes and dreaded filmic elements.

Something has been forgotten. A missing key.

Thinking about the art of mime and watching some footage of Marceau over the weekend, it has affirmed my belief that so much of the theatre I see has forgotten the art of silence. The art of simplicity.

If you want any guide into what I am talking about, you need not go any further than Peter Brook:
... there are two ends of the pole of silence. There is a dead silence, the silence of the dead, which doesn't help any of us and... there is the other silence, which is the supreme moment of communication - the moment when people normally divided from one another by every sort of natural human barrier suddenly find themselves truly together... In between two silences.. are the... areas where all the questions arise.

I think that when Brook talks of the silence between people, it is not only that which exists between actors, but that which exists between actors and the audience.

I knows it's a cliche to pull a quote from Brook to support a statement, but I think it's relevant to consider the lost of art of silence that theatre in Sydney is plagued by.

The digital age has brought about a need by so many companies and directors to fill silences and not leave anything to the imagination. The amount of times I have seen a lighting or sound cue destroy what could have spoken in greater volumes through silence makes me sometimes despair.

From much of the theatre I have seen of late, it seems that many directors have (through what I believe is an imagined fear) tried to compete on the technology stakes so that they can produce the latest, bestest, amazingest theatre experience that throws the gauntlet down to any of your facebook'd, second life'd virtual fantasy.

I know that the reason for this in some instances is that a handful of directors are wasting our time by using the theatre medium as a stepping stone into their real dreams of entering a career as music video director or film producer, but on the whole this journeying into technologically-induced-theatre (TIT) is a blind assumption on where theatre is heading.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to try out new elements of theatre technology as they make themselves available, but too many directors are using the technology as cornerstones of their rehearsal journey, not as the support instruments to a more organic process.

Robert Lepage is one great director who has deliberately installed the bells and whistles of TIT to tell his stories. Where he departs from a lot of what I see in Sydney is an astonishing ability to use the technology as a beginning to an end result of simple story-telling.

He said in an interview that "in my own work, the difference is that my starting point is a strictly formal one: just trying to get a form on stage and to have actors and collaborators visit that space, that form, and to try and find what stories it contains."

You can see evidence of the misuse of technology in Sydney theatre on a weekly basis when basic director skills in the movement of actors and in the discovery of simple theatrical processes is non-existent. So often I sit and am amazed at not only the lost opportunities, but the convoluted nature of production values.

More often that not, the embarrassing affect of this vamped up TIT is when you see an actor struggling under the weight of the 'amazing mood' of the music or the 'amazing mood' of the lighting. It becomes clear that the actor has found something else in rehearsal but is fighting against it because of the dictates in direction of design.

It all gets very tiring for audiences who aren't as stupid as many think. But somehow directors feel it necessary to clobber a hundred or so punters over the head with not only a clear text, but in the re-enforcement of the music, re-enforcement of the lighting and the indulgence of direction. It all adds up to getting the message three times all at once... "oh, I see!! This is a dramatic moment!" The end result is a theatre that is beginning to look a little uniform, corporate and mercantile*.

Enough already.

I am not alone in sharing the opinion of many that dislike the new multimedia affects now regularly used in so many shows. The central problem of the multimedia is that as soon as you throw a two-dimensional blanket over a three dimensional image, you deflate it quicker than a helium balloon with a flame. Whoof!

I apologise if I am preaching to the converted, but it seems so many have forgotten the art of story-telling. Theatre has with it an element that no technology can ever compete with and that is the raw nerve of human interaction.

"If the world of sameness refuses to absorb the element of otherness that every group and human being unconsciously carries within themselves, just as Pentheus refuses that mysterious, feminine Dionysiac element that attracts and fascinates him, despite the horror he claims to feel for it, then all that is stable, regular and the same tips over and collapses... The victorious eruption of Dionysusis a sign that otherness is being given its place with full honours at the centre of the social system."**

Theatre can learn a lot from the great Marceau and it's not just his passion for theatre, but in his ability to capture silence and overwhelm an audience by sliding it in next to the imagination of many. That is theatre and that is what takes an audience anywhere you want them to go.


* Michael Kustow, Theatre @ Risk, Metheun 2000
** Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Zone Books 1999

What?! Another forum...

Yes ladies and gentlemen - when one isn't sure how to do something, having a forum on it seems to be de rigeur in Sydney at the moment.

And I hereby announce another forum - yes another one - but this time with the Shadow Arts Minister, Mr Peter Garrett.

Here is the article I wrote in Arts Hub today:

Shadow Arts Minister Peter Garrett's nationwide artist forums will make their way to Sydney after a successful session in Melbourne last Sunday, where over 200 practitioners and stakeholders gathered.

"There was an excellent turn out of local artists and the discussion was lively and passionate, just as you would expect," said Mr Garrett.

"A number of key points were made by artists and we'll certainly be looking to incorporate that feedback into our policy deliberations over the coming months."

In what has been deemed by many as the first serious engagement by a Federal minister with artists from the ground-level, the forums hope to give artists and arts advocates the opportunity to voice their concerns and hopes for the future of Australia’s cultural life.

The forum in Sydney follows a successful City Talk hosted by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore that looked at the creative future vision for the city. That event attracted over 1000 people.

Garrett said the forums were an important component of the Australian Labor Party’s programme of connecting with artists and involving practitioners in determining arts policy.

After previous ALP policies, particularly Creative Nation which received criticism from both within and outside the artistic communities, it will be vital that these forums inform the Shadow Arts Minister of the changes required to further advance the artistic industries.

"As the Shadow Arts Minister it's vital to hear what artists working in our community have to say on the issues that affect them," explained Garrett. "'Your Shout' is a chance for those artists to have their opinions heard and considered."


** This forum has been postponed until further notice**

Review: The Unfolding Wife

The Unfolding Wife by Paschal Daantos Berry
Urban Theatre Projects & Blacktown Arts Centre
26 April 2007


Escape out of inner city Redfern, into the car, purge the Thursday evening peak-hour traffic to the expressway, and then plant ourselves into the heart of Sydney's great sprawling suburban palate.

Dim street lights hover over the terracotta carpet of roofs. It's quiet from the road.

We find our way to the Arts Centre, a very new, very contemporary and very impressive new venue that has been built to celebrate the cultural arts of Blacktown and its people. The venue sits elegantly next to the flashing bulbs of the Blacktown Workers Club. Bling bling.

It's amazing how many familiar faces I see there. It's a friendly and convivial environment and a measured anticipation suddenly builds as people quickly down their complimentary bottle of San Miguel beer. Welcome to the Philippines.

Entering the curtained off space, we are welcomed by the sound of classic Manila hits of the 1970's & 80's. Valerie Berry, sister of the playwright, is standing centre in nothing but her underwear. Her two attendants (protagonists?) start to play prop and costume games, dressing and de-robing her. They are symbolic representations that explore femininity, ethnicity, physical limitation and culture. They also accompany the music and whisk us off to Pacific Asia. We are now in the world of the Marcos'. Imelda and Ferdinand, that is.

This inaugural performance to open this new cultural hub brings a simple story of an individual, observing her place as a newly arrived migrant in Australia. But as with a really good book, it flips you around and confronts you with an epic storyline that drags out the weight of Spanish cultural colonialism, inter-generational influence, US foreign politics, third world poverty and Imelda's shoes.

The performance is delivered as a monologue of short chapters of history, of reflection. But we start at the end, go to the beginning and then explore all the bits in between. We travel from the Philippines to Australia. We visit the characters of this young woman's life. Her father, her mother and her grandmother.

While we are led through the chapters, the two attendants play at the foot of the stage using projection and multimedia images to provide a frame and another dimension to the story.

There are sometimes simple images and at other times more filmic representations that subtly lift this beautiful text based performance. Multimedia performance is a hard genre to pull off, because of the simple clash of two-dimensional with live action. This performance works most powerfully when the multimedia elements and the spoken word come crashing together and you can see the performer and the light of projection start to blend and mesh.

I really do try to see productions a bit earlier in the season, but I only managed to get to The Unfolding Wife on Thursday eve. It finishes tonight, but this show is a stunning exercise in performance art and theatre that has a earthy theatricality and celebrates simple story-telling.

It is a beautiful production which sits with you and it is the images of a wife unfolding her vulnerability that will startle even a passive observer.


Image: Valerie Berry, courtesy of UTP