Postcard from Sydney

The Australian Theatre Forum 2015: Art and Politics

As with my previous Postcards from over east, I’m beginning this one on the long flight back west. The occasion this time: the Australian Theatre Forum in Sydney, which I attended as an ‘independent’ delegate, courtesy of an Artflight grant from the WA Department of Culture and the Arts which partially covered the cost of my trip.

There were 23 of us there from Perth, compared with 7 from the the Territory, 8 from the ACT, 9 from Tassie, 28 from South Australia, 32 from Queensland, 102 from Melbourne and 104 from Sydney – which I guess pretty much reflects national discrepancies in terms of population, arts funding and cultural empowerment (not to mention even bigger discrepancies between the capital cities, regional centres and remote areas across the country). In other words: as an actor and a regional artist I was in a double minority.

The first ATF was in 2009 at Arts House in Melbourne. I didn’t go; actually not many ‘independent’ artists (actors, playwrights) were invited; it was mostly people with ‘positions’ in organisations and their staff. The companies were however allocated a limited number of extra places to distribute to chosen ‘guest-artists’; I was offered one at the last minute, and pointedly declined.

Apparently it was wonderful. An overseas ‘guest-expert’ in a brainstorming conference technique called ‘Open Space’ came and facilitated the whole event. Delegates told me they found themselves thinking ‘outside the box’ and having ‘creative’ conversations they’d never had before. Then they all went back to their jobs.

ATF 2011 at the Brisbane Powerhouse broadened the brief: a limited number of subsidised places were made available for ‘independent’ artists; successful applicants could then then apply to their respective State funding bodies for a grant to assist them in attending. I jumped through the hoops and went.

This second ATF was a bit of a let-down, at least according to those who’d attended the first one. After an enthusiastic opening address about the current state and projected future of the theatre industry (which felt a bit like a revivalist prayer meeting), a high-speed version of Open Space followed that afternoon. We were invited to call out concrete proposals for the future, from which a list of topics was drawn up on butcher’s paper, as the basis for discussion in sub-groups over the next few days. The final afternoon culminated in a manifesto of ‘resolutions’ for the future, which we all felt great about before going back home to our jobs (or lack thereof).

Actually, I had a great time. The Brisbane Festival was on, so I saw some theatre (some good, some awful); got to know Brisbane a bit; caught up with some mates; and felt part of ‘the national conversation’. There was a great sense of collaboration between freelance artists and company staff, all of us sitting at the same table. It was a glimpse of what could be, in the German philosopher Habermas’s phrase, ‘the ideal speech situation’. Of course it didn’t last.

In fact it was at that ATF that I had a road-to-Damascus moment. My proposal on that first afternoon was to establish – and fund – a genuine ensemble theatre company, like the one I’d been part of in Melbourne back in the 80s. It didn’t make the final cut (in fact no-one at my sub-group meeting agreed with me) but I took it home with me. It also clarified my mind wonderfully about what I felt was wrong with the industry: essentially, that it was no longer being driven by artists.

I didn’t go to the 2013 ATF in Canberra. I felt like I’d had my bite of the cherry, and to be honest I wasn’t sure I wanted or needed another. Apparently the mood this time was a lot angrier, and there were some chaotic discussions about race. One story that struck me was about a colleague of mine, who stood up during an argument and said he wanted to be identified simply as an artist without reference to the colour of his skin. He was rounded on by an Aboriginal artist for being a typical white male – only to discover that my friend was in fact Chinese.

This year I decided to go. It would be in Sydney at The Seymour Centre, during the Sydney Festival; there was a more structured daily agenda of speakers, panels and topics to choose from; and I’d just received a Creative Development Fellowship grant from DCA that would shortly see me heading overseas. I was also a month down the track from a knee operation that precluded me from performing for a while; so it would be the first tentative step, as it were, on my forthcoming travels.

In short: it felt like a good time to check in on ‘the national conversation’ and see where it (and I) was at.

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ATF Diary

Tuesday 20 January

Thanks to the time difference (plus the added insult of daylight saving, which puts Perth even further behind the rest of the country), I leave Perth at 10am and get into Sydney at 5.30pm with barely half an hour to get to the opening Public Keynote Address and Panel on ‘Art and Democracy’. I’ve got a date with a Sydney friend and colleague who’s waiting for me when I arrive.

The event is staged in the largest of the three theatres in the Seymour Centre, and it’s a bit of a mish-mash. The opening speaker is Goenawan Mohamad, an Indonesian poet and playwright who presents a sweeping account of the last thirty years of Indonesian theatre in the context of its political history. He’s urbane, witty, conceptually rigourous and emotionally restrained, but the urgency of the body of work he refers to is plain. I’m struck by what appears to be its evident emancipation from literalism or didacticism: it seems to owe less to Brecht than Artaud. ‘At the end of the day,’ Goenawan points out, ‘a play is an event.’ He describes the outbreak of radical Indonesian theatre in the 60s and 70s as ‘no longer shaped by the need to represent an idea, big or otherwise’. Specifically, ‘the visible took precedence over the speakable’ so that ‘words are no longer a force that gives the world external to language a form’ but instead become themselves ‘parts of the world’. He closes with the statement that Indonesian (and implicitly all) theatre is political ‘not because of its loud protest but because of its challenge to the words of power’. He also draws a clear distinction between political engagement and artistic autonomy, both of which he acknowledges as essential but essentially differentiated forms of activity. At one point he refers to Ho Chi Minh as an activist who also wrote poetry that was not ‘about’ politics. I could listen to him all night.

Unfortunately the facilitator (a TV presenter and journalist with no background in theatre or the arts) is out of her depth, the questions that follow are clumsy, the other panel members don’t gel, and the discussion drifts in circles. I feel like I’m watching TV, as I often do with panel discussions; there’s something inherently glib, superficial and sensationalized about the format itself. I notice a simplistic tendency on the part of the Australian speakers to politicize art and reduce everything to content without recognising the role of form and the function of representation, which is surely as central to the art of theatre as it is to democracy. Not for the last time during the Forum, there’s a failure to analyse the terms of the debate.

My friend agrees: it’s a bit of a let down; we’d both much rather have listened to Mohammad, perhaps in conversation with the most astute of the panellists. We have dinner and dissect the event, the theatre industry, and our own recent and forthcoming professional adventures. I’m glad I came after all.

Afterwards she helps me with my hand-luggage while I hobble down Glebe Point Road to my guesthouse, a beautifully restored old Victorian terrace with a bus-stop and a fruit-shop across the street. My first-floor room opens onto a balcony; there are bats in the Moreton Bay figs outside; the air is humid and sweet. Ah, Sydney.

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Wednesday 21 January

Day Two begins with a Welcome to Country and a Curator’s Welcome from David Williams, followed by a Keynote Address from actor, director and Artistic Director of Ilbijerri Theatre Company Rachael Maza. It’s the first of three successive morning keynote addresses by Aboriginal cultural leaders and arts professionals, though not all them of them are exclusively or even principally known as theatre artists, the other two being Richard Frankland and Rhoda Roberts. Astutely, Williams has structured this year’s Forum to address the issue of Aboriginal theatre head-on, but has he chosen the right people to do it?

Rachael is a brilliant speaker, and begins by lightly tracing the issues as they surface in her own life-story and its historical context, before taking a deep breath and plunging into the substance of her address: a political demand for ‘land-rights, sovereignty and self-determination’; and a cultural demand for Aboriginal people to take charge of telling their own stories, rather than continuing to rely on well-intentioned white directors and playwrights to do the job for them, with inevitably one-sided results (The Secret River gets ritually speared for using language to further marginalize the Aboriginal characters).

‘Aboriginal theatre’ is bluntly defined as ‘theatre created and performed by Aboriginal people’. At last, a definition of terms – and one that immediately throws up a host of questions, if not apparently for anyone in the audience. I applaud along with everyone else the existence of Aboriginal directors, artistic directors and theatre companies; but I can’t help asking if other imperatives (colour-blind casting, for example, especially on the mainstage) aren’t equally pressing; and more profoundly what the (essentially colonial, European, generalized) term ‘Aboriginal’ means in a post-colonial, multicultural and increasingly deterritorialized world. This isn’t to say the word doesn’t have a meaning; perhaps it has more than one; and perhaps none of them is entirely stable. And if there are multiple, labile ‘Aboriginalities’, then there’s a much more differentiated discussion to be had about identity, culture and politics.

And beyond this, a strictly artistic question: can an artform like theatre (or indeed art itself – as opposed to a person, a culture or even a nation) be Aboriginal, or indeed ‘black’ or ‘white’? Or do terms like ‘theatre’ or ‘art’ belong to a different language-game – one that throws into question notions like ‘Aboriginal theatre’ or ‘Aboriginal art’ (or indeed ‘white theatre’ or ‘white art’) as somehow reductive of the very theatricality or artistry in question. This isn’t to say that works of theatre or art are somehow beyond culture or politics; but perhaps their theatricality or artistry needs to be determined according to more differentiated criteria than simply the culture they belong to. This is what Adorno calls ‘the autonomy of the aesthetic’: an endangered species in postmodern culture, but one that we neglect at our peril, if not at the risk of artforms and even art itself becoming extinct.

After morning tea, I attend a ‘Breakout Session’ on ‘The Betterment Clause’, a proposed amendment to the standard MEAA contract that would enable actors to be released by theatre companies in the event of a ‘better offer’ – typically a film or TV role. It’s a focussed, meaty and honest discussion by a panel facilated by a general manager and featuring an MEAA representative who is also an actor; another actor who is also an associate director with a major company; an artistic director of another major company; and another general manager and CEO.

I’m struck by the absence of an actor's agent on the panel – or for that matter an actor who isn’t also a union rep or on a company payroll. Agents and freelance performers are after all the ones most likely to invoke such a clause. Needless to say, a similar clause already exists allowing employers to break contract and dismiss actors, but this doesn’t receive the same level of scrutiny.

Unsurprisingly, the general consensus is that such a clause on behalf of actors would be deleterious to the interests of companies and audiences, and would have a direct negative impact on the all-important box office. Again, the direct impact on an actor’s wages and profile (positive or negative) of getting a film or TV role or, conversely, being dismissed isn’t given comparable weight. After all, it’s the actor, not the company CEO, who gains or loses a job.

I can’t help thinking: surely it should be enshrined in contracts that actors are free to leave their employment for personal as well as professional reasons, for example in the case of illness or bereavement? Of course, this happens in practice all the time without any need for lawyers at twenty paces. Once again, though, its ad hoc nature underscores the relative powerlessness of actors, and contract workers generally, in comparison with their employers.

I’m also struck by the relatively small number of actors actually attending the conference, let alone appearing as guest speakers, on panels or even as facilitators. This structural imbalance of power reflects that of the industry as a whole: the real politics, perhaps, of ‘Art and Democracy'.

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Humph’s ATF Diary continues later this week. 

Postcard from Perth 38

Art and Creativity

1.    The Jargon of Creativity

‘Creativity’ is the new buzz-word in arts funding, sponsorship and administration, as well as in other spheres of government, business, education, training and personal development.

A recent piece on Arts Hub entitled ‘How to Have Creative Conversations’ tells us how to ‘spark creativity and collaboration’ (another buzz-word), citing a study by ‘the Social Psychological and Personality Science (SAGE)’ alongside ‘author and journalist Myke Bartlett’, who ‘points out that all kinds of art are essentially a conversation’ and talks knowledgably about ‘the creative process’ before proceeding to instruct us ‘how to add a dash of creativity to your next conversation around the water cooler’ (which I’m sure will be of great interest to all those artists out there who spend their time around a water cooler).

Another recent essay on Arts Hub by Professor Dan Hunter (Dean of Law at Swinburne) on ‘Why Cash and Copyright are Bad News for Creativity’ begins by conceding that ‘creativity is a tricky thing to understand’ before going on to claim that ‘one thing we do know about creativity is that a really good way to make people less creative is to pay them’. Professor Hunter bases this claim on ‘a series of studies’ by motivational psychologists allegedly showing that ‘primary school kids don’t learn to read if they’re paid to, artists produce their worst work if they’re paid to produce it, and people get worse at solving puzzles better if you reward them for creative solutions’. Perhaps the findings of motivational psychology need to be handled with a little more caution when it comes to art, arts law or business ethics. Motivating children to read or adults to solve puzzles strikes me as being of dubious relevance to artists; and I’m sure Michelangelo would be interested to learn that he did his ‘worst work’ on commission.

The jargon of creativity is now well-established in the language of arts bureaucratese. 2013 saw the launch of the long-awaited (and short-lived) ‘Creative Nation’ cultural policy document by the previous Labor federal government. The same year saw the launch of Creative Partnerships Australia, which according to its website aims ‘to innovate giving to the arts in support of creating sustainable and robust creative industries in Australia’. Meanwhile the Arts Victoria website announces that ‘on 1 January 2015 Arts Victoria formally transitioned into Creative Victoria, a new State Government body dedicated to supporting, championing and growing the arts and creative industries’. Rumour has it that the WA Department of Culture and the Arts is shortly to follow suit.

The phrase ‘creative industries’ generally comprises advertising and marketing, fashion and design, toys and games, software and computer games. Indeed the term ‘creative’ began being used as a noun in the 60s in the advertising industry, presumably in an effort to dignify the latter with connotations of artistic merit. With the increasing corporatisation of the arts, this usage has since returned to haunt the theatre industry, where it now applies to the director and design team – though significantly not the actors, who as skills-based artists are presumably not deemed ‘creative’ enough to deserve the title or bounce ideas off each other in ‘creative meetings’.

2.    Art and Creativity

In philosophical and psychological terms, art is to be distinguished from creativity and the imagination. As Kant pointed out, the imagination is a faculty that performs an essential synthetic role in all thought and experience. Under this faculty, the capacity for aesthetic contemplation may be further distinguished from creativity, the latter being what Kant’s contemporary Schiller also identified as the capacity for play.

However, while everyone is at least in principle capable of imagining, contemplating, creating, playing or watching others play – and by extension enjoying or even making art – it doesn’t follow that everyone is an artist (or even a critic). Alongside a heightened capacity for imagination or creativity – which may or may not go on to manifest itself as a particular talent or gift for a specific activity like drawing, writing, singing, dancing or indeed looking or listening – to become an artist (or critic) requires time, effort and discipline in the acquisition of skills, technique, knowledge and experience; and perhaps even the development of a unique and original personal vision – in other words, having something to say, as well as the means to say it. This is a far cry from simply being ‘imaginative’ or even ‘creative’.

The difference between art and creativity is not merely psychological or ontological but also social and historical. The terms ‘artist’ or ‘critic’ (or even more specifically, for example, ‘actor’ or ‘theatre critic’) imply a socially and historically determined activity, occupation, profession or vocation like teaching, law or medicine. In short: ‘artist’ or ‘critic’ are social categories, with an attendant history that cannot be reduced to the psychology of personality. The first time I called myself an actor was when I was in my thirties and filling out an arrival form on an international flight. It was the simplest way to describe what I do, rather than being a profound statement about what I am.

None of this in any way implies a value judgment that elevates artists or denigrates the work of amateurs. It is simply to recognize the difference between Haydn and his patron Prince Esterhazy (who was also an accomplished string player, but had other social duties to perform as an aristocrat that prevented him from spending his time on pursuing a career as a professional musician). This difference becomes less pronounced as society itself becomes increasingly de-differentiated (foreshadowed by the disappearance of the very class to which Esterhazy belonged).

Again, this is not to insist on social hierarchies or the division of labour. As Marx wrote, in an ideal world we would all be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evenings and philosophize after dinner. In the meantime however, like most things, having artists and being an artist in our society involves making a sacrifices and comes at a cost. Otherwise (as Marx also wrote) ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

In the ancient world, creativity and talent were viewed as external forces or gifts from the gods; in the Middle Ages they were regarded as being divinely inspired and directed by God. During the Renaissance this changed with the emergence of the cult of the individual artist, and the process was further secularised by the Reformation and refined by the Enlightenment. The notion of ‘the creative genius’ became a central feature of Romanticism, and largely prevailed throughout Modernism up until roughly the Second World War. With the onset of postmodernism in the post-War era, the notion of ‘genius’ begins to evaporate, and with it the separation between artforms and the distinction between art, entertainment and other forms of industrial production. Enter Andy Warhol and The Factory.

Perhaps it’s no accident that in the age of de-differentiation the affect of indifference or ‘cool’ becomes the dominant aesthetic style and form of response. This indifferent coolness is accentuated as artistic production, distribution and consumption become increasingly organised along industrial lines, and are increasingly divorced from the body or physical presence of the artist, artwork or audience with the advent of digital technology and the ubiquity of the screen in postmodern society.

If the process of professional differentiation was characteristic of modernity, then perhaps a generalized de-differentiation of all spheres of human activity and identity is characteristic of postmodern globalized capitalism (with a concomittant regression from what Durkheim called ‘organic’ to ‘mechanical’ solidarity as the binding agent of community and culture – which in the language of the internet is now euphemistically called ‘connectivity’). In place of specialization we now see a simplified division of labour into three classes: the owners of the means of production (governments and corporates working hand-in-hand in ‘creative partnership’), their salaried managers (bureaucracy and administration) and a contract labour force (which includes ‘creatives’). Meanwhile difference between one form of industry or organization and another begins to disappear. Such a regression in social terms is analogous to a de-differentiation of biological cells in organic life. As such, artists are reduced to being little more than fungible ‘creative’ stem-cells that can be successfully cultivated and grafted into the body-politic of an increasingly de-differentiated labour market.

3.    Artforms, Cultures and Communities

Recently the Australia Council has also restructured itself along more ‘creative’ lines, scrapping the old separate art-form-based boards, funding ‘silos’ and assessment panels in favour of a more flexible new model which (again according to its website) will allegedly ‘make it easier and simpler to apply for grants’ (as if the challenge for artists was in applying for grants rather than actually getting them). The ‘new model’ is meant to address in particular the emergence of interdisiplinary and multi-artform projects that don’t fit the old traditional categories. The emergence of hybrid and multi-media work certainly needs to be accommodated, but one can’t help wondering whether this wouldn’t be better served by designating a new board, new funds and a new peer assessment panel of experts in the field, rather than trashing the old model completely. 

This also applies to regional diversity, community access and participation, which was surely better served by maintaining distinct regional and community arts boards, funds and panels. Instead the Sydney–Melbourne nexus inevitably tightens its grip, as most of the applicants are from within those communities and their work is familiar to most of the panellists, who are now assembled on an ad hoc basis in response to each round of applications. In the name of ‘flexibility’ and ‘responsiveness’, the dissolution of art-form-specific and community-specific funds and assessment panels threatens a loss of collective identity, expertise, knowledge and memory from one funding round to the next. As with ‘creativity’ and ‘collaboration’, terms like ‘regional’ or ‘community’ become buzzwords that apply everywhere and to everything under the sun. The risk is that actual regions, communities and artforms begin to disappear off the radar and wither on the vine.

This is in no way to decry the development of national, international, multicultural, multimedia, new, hybrid, ‘nomad’, interdisciplinary, interactive or participatory art. Nor is it to insist on a return some kind of ‘identity politics’ in terms of artistic form or content. It is simply to avoid a situation where everyone and everything becomes the same, while individual artforms, traditions, cultures and practices are lost in a manner that parallels the loss of biodiversity in the natural world – or are preserved only in recordings, archives and museums.

The reality of course is that the new funding model is partly the result of having inadequate funds to go round, as a reflection of political and corporate priorities. However it also reflects the logic of de-differentiation which is characteristic of postmodern culture and society.

4.    Conclusion

So what is to be done? Conceptually and discursively, we need to distinguish between terms like creativity, art and industry. Creativity is a psychological faculty that belongs to everyone; art (like athletics) is a social category based on cultural tradition, individual talent, and physical and cognitive skills that can be innate, taught or learned by experience; and industry belongs to the sphere of economic activity.

We also need to distinguish between individual artforms, industries, cultures and communities: performing arts, visual art and literature; hybrid and multimedia arts; community and regional arts; the various arts industries and other creative industries like games or advertising. These terms and distinctions aren’t mutually exclusive: for example, creativity and artistry are both required in the advertising industry; creative marketing skills are required in the theatre industry; and all three (creativity, artistry and marketing) are required by a particular community or culture if it is to thrive. But they need to be distinguished in theory and practice in order to be applied properly and done well.

In the spheres of arts policy, funding, law, education and employment, these distinctions are of critical importance. Creativity cannot be legislated, funded, taught, bought or sold: like the imagination, it can only be freed, and freely applied. With regard to the arts, artists, audiences, arts organisations, arts workers and arts industries, however, the function of the state is precisely to nurture, protect and enable them to thrive through acts of legislation and funding, from copyright law to the establishment and support of art-form-specific and community-specific institutions and activities.

Without this kind of specificity, we are at the mercy of the market, which means that market-imperatives alone hold sway, while individual artists, artforms, cultures and communities are diminished, suffer or disappear. It’s the same for the arts as for the natural environment, ecosystems, species and individuals: governments exist precisely in order to nurture, protect and enable them to thrive.

And finally, we need to reassert the role of the body and physical presence at the heart of aesthetic experience. Technology and mechanical reproduction are no substitute for the creation and reception of works of art in real time and space. The ubiquity of the screen as a platform or device does not displace the specificity of the page, the stage, the canvas, the hand, the body or the voice as instruments or media of expression. Otherwise we lose not only our art, but our humanity.

Postcard from Perth 37

2014 Postcard Awards

I’m not a believer in star-ratings or ‘best-of’ awards in categories like ‘best actor’, ‘best play’, ‘best production’ or even ‘best company’. At the risk of repeating myself: I’m not really sure what such phrases mean, or how to compare or measure art in quantitative terms, as if it were some kind of sport. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in making qualitative aesthetic judgements per se. It simply means that I believe in making them by evaluating performances, productions or works according to their own criteria. So I prefer to give awards based on categories derived from the performances, productions or works themselves.

That said: here are my Postcard from Perth Awards for 2014 in chronological order, with apologies for everything I didn’t see – a substantial amount this year, as I was in more or less continuous work myself between April and November, for much of that time performing five nights a week. For those interested, longer reviews and discussions of many of the productions referred to can be found by searching the archives of this blog.

The year kicked off again in fine style with an even bigger and better Fringe World than last year, and with Perth International Festival hot on its heels. The True Grit Award for Non-Stop Treadmill Action and Stamina goes to Melbourne outfit Grit Theatre for Run Girl Run at PICA as part of Summer Nights: a relentless, edge-of-the-seat, alternately hilarious and hideous physical theatre journey to the dark heart of gender-as-performance. Also at PICA for Summer Nights, New Zealand devisor-performer Trygve Wakenshaw gets the Pied Piper Award for Inspiring Audience Participation (by eating invisible packets of crisps) and Evoking Multiple Characters, Narratives and Universes (using an endearingly ludicrous DIY costume) in Squidboy: a surreal one-man comedy show which I found irresistable. And last but not least, Mark Wilson’s Unsex Me for Melbourne company MKA at Noodle Palace/The Ken Dome (inside the former Picadilly Cinema) gets the Gene Roddenberry Award for Boldly Going Where No-Man/Woman Has Gone Before Onstage using drag, karaoke, Shakespeare and a well-lubricated microphone. Honourable mention should also be made of local writer-director-performer Will O’Mahony’s Great White, restaged at PICA for Summer Nights after an inaugural production at The Blue Room in 2013. Will gets the Trifecta Award for Writing, Staging and Performance (sharing the Award with co-performers Adriane Daff and Mikala Westall, set designer/producer Alicia Clements, sound designer Will Slade and lighting designer Joe Lui).

In the ‘main’ Festival, two theatre shows stood out that were perhaps more ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ but nevertheless ‘poor’ in the sense defined by Grotowski. Yaël Farber’s gripping contemporary South African adaptation and production of Mies Julie in the Octagon Theatre (with Hilde Cronje and Bongile Mantsai in the central roles) shares the Peter Brook Award for Poor Theatre Adapation with the fleet-footed and deftly touching version of An Iliad, staged in the Sunken Gardens at UWA by NYC-based two-person company Homer’s Coat (writer/performer Dennis O’Hare and co-writer/director Lisa Peterson). Mies Julie also gets the Last Tango Award for Rough Sex Onstage, while An Iliad conversely gets the Mahabharata Award for the Indirect Representation of Violence (in homage to the minimalist war scenes in Brook’s great production).

Three other outstanding Festival shows took place in non-theatre and gallery spaces and were in the realm of installation and visual art, although all I would argue were also works of theatre even without the presence of live actors. In the case of Situation Rooms – an immersive participatory work by German collective Rimini Protokoll about the ramifications of the weapons industry – the audience were themselves performers, armed with iPads, following instructions and moving through the interactive and hyper-real ‘set’ installed at the ABC studios in Claisebrook. This show wins the Augmented Reality Award, and also shares the Mahabarata Award for Indirect Representation of Violence with An Iliad – thus proving that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. In fact if I could I’d probably give both works a Nobel Prize for Peace. Across town at Curtin Gallery, The Tenth Sentiment by Japanese artist Ryota Kuwakubo – featuring a tiny toy train with a light-source inside it travelling through a landscape of domestic found objects and throwing their shadows on the walls – was also an enchanting work of theatre for me and gets the Minimalist Lighting Award. Meanwhile South African maestro William Kentridge’s enthralling film/sound/sculpture installation The Refusal of Time in the central atrium gallery space at PICA (courtesy of a loan from AGWA) gets the Henri Bergson/Albert Einstein Award for the Philosophical Investigation of Time. Here it was the setting, formal multiplicity and durational nature of the event that made it a theatrical experience for me – an experience anchored by the animated machine sculpture (the metaphorical ‘elephant’) keeping time in the centre of the room. PICA itself (and curator Leigh Robb) also gets an Award for Courageous Curatorial Collaborations and Spatial/Architectural Interventions for their shows throughout the year – most notably allowing Perth-born, now LA-based artist George Egerton-Warburton to punch holes in the walls of the West End Gallery Upstairs revealing random glimpses of the cityscape outside for his provocative installation Administration is a Form of Oulipian Poetry.

It was during Festival time that Black Swan Artistic Director Kate Cherry brought voice training legend and Shakespeare expert Kristin Linklater to Perth for a series of workshops with various smaller and larger groups of local theatre artists. As a participant I can testify to the powerfully transformative nature of these workshops – but also to the sense of solidarity they inspired in a local theatre industry that can otherwise feel somewhat fractured along artistic and generational faultlines. For facilitating this work – and that sense of solidarity – Black Swan, Kate Cherry and Kristin herself share the E.M.Forster ‘Only Connect’ Award, for that famous dictum in Howard’s End.  ‘Only connect! Live in fragments no longer!’ This was a State Theatre Company doing its job and generously sharing its resources with Black Swan affiliates and others, young and old.

Shortly after the Perth Festival was over, the brouhaha erupted in March over Transfield’s sponsorship of the Sydney Biennale, and the group of artists who threatened to withdraw their work over the company’s involvement with the offshore detention of asylum seekers. Without rehearsing these arguments again, I give the Wesley Enoch Award for Leadership (if Wesley will forgive me for invoking his name and Platform Paper in the context of a topic on which we have slightly different views) to the artists concerned for persuading the Biennale to severe its ties with Transfield, and opening up a much broader debate over the nexus between corporate sponsorship, government funding, arts organisations, individual artists, art and politics.

Back to Perth, and theatre: while I felt Kate Cherry’s take on A Streetcar Named Desire for Black Swan at the Heath Ledger Theatre in March ultimately softened the edges of the play’s cruelty and underlying sexual violence, Luke Hewitt was a revelation as Mitch, and his scenes with Blanche stood out in sharp and painful clarity. Similarly, while I didn’t warm to Roger Hodgman’s dumbed-down production of As You Like It in May (again at the Heath for Black Swan), I doff my cap to Steve Turner’s intense, understated, uncompromising Jacques. Luke and Steve share the Rudyard Kiping Award for Keeping Your Head When All About You Are Losing Theirs: two fine mid-career all-round character actors who bless every production in which they appear.

Shifting focus to another of Perth’s four so-called Major Performing Arts Companies, the WA Symphony (the other two being the WA Opera and the WA Ballet): new Principal Conductor Asher Fisch has raised the bar in terms of programming and sound (especially from the strings) and the orchestra has risen to the challenge with flying colours. My first experience of Fisch and the ‘new’ WASO in action was their inaugural concert together in March, with a program featuring works by Mozart, Wagner and a thrilling performance of Richard Strauss’s epic tone poem Death and Transfiguration; followed in May by a sublime rendition of Mahler’s immense 9^th Symphony; and culminating in September with the monumental achievement of the Beethoven Festival, featuring all nine symphonies performed over two weekends. Fisch shares the Gough Whitlam Award for Vision and Ambition at the Helm with Paul Selwyn-Norton at STRUT Dance (see below); and the Beethoven Festival also shares the Dionysus Award for New Festivals with STRUT for the Move Me Improvisation Festival (ditto). With WASO’s Brahms Festival just around the corner next year, this is the kind of vision and ambition that justifies the existence and funding of Major Performing Arts Companies in the first place.

From Major Organisations back to local grass-roots theatre, my next two Awards go to productions at The Blue Room that were both directed by Joe Lui. Coming at the tail-end of Season One in June, Giving Up the Ghosts was a no-frills two-hander about mutually assisted suicide, written by local stand-up comedian and storyteller Sarah Young and performed with a commendable lack of judgement on their characters by Georgia King and Paul Grabovac. Ghosts gets the Harold Pinter Award for the Telling Use of Pauses, Ellipses and Silences Onstage. I don’t know how many were in the script, but they certainly enhanced its already terse, staccato vernacular eloquence. Later in the year towards the end of Season Two in October, Welcome to Slaughter was a devised work of Oz-road mock-horror with a text by Jeffrey Jay Fowler, co-devised and performed by Michelle Robyn Anderson, Jo Morris and Emily Rose Brennan, with a set design by Shaye Preston, sound design by Brett Smith and lighting design by Joe Lui – who also took the wheel as director at the last minute due to a previous cast-member dropping out and the original director-devisor taking their place onstage. I found the script a little two-dimensional but the performances, direction and design deliciously enjoyable. Slaughter gets the Halloween Award for Involuntary Audience Screams and Nervous Laughter. Together with Ghosts it also confirmed my suspicions that Joe is now a fully-fledged director of other people’s work as well as his own. On that score, he also gets the Tightrope Award for writing, directing and performing his own autobiographical solo work Letters Home at The Blue Room in September without falling into trap of being narcissistic or mawkish – a rare feat indeed.

Across the road at The Studio Underground in July, Declan Greene’s artfully excruciating 8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography was a co-production between Perth Theatre Company and Griffin in Sydney, directed by Griffin’s Artistic Director Lee Lewis and featuring toe-curlingly truthful performances by Andrea Gibbs and Steve Rodgers. A courageous verbal and physical exploration of contemporary online addictions and the fear that underlies them of real as opposed to virtual connection, 8 Gigs gets the Award for Proving that Live Theatre is More Relevant Than Ever in the Age of the Internet.

Upstairs at the Heath Ledger in August, Black Swan’s traditional period-costume Seagull was graced by a sublime turn from Rebecca Davis as Masha, and featured a revelatory Act 4 scene change for the final duet between Nina and Konstantin. Director Kate Cherry and designer Fiona Bruce share the Heath Ledger Theatre Award for Using the Fly-Tower to Reveal New Meaning in a Classic Without Updating It; and Rebecca Davis gets the Heath Ledger Performance Award for Finding the Creature Beneath the Skin of a Character (I’m thinking of Ledger’s late, great breakthrough performances in Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight).

Outside in the State Theatre Centre Courtyard in September, Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre Company presented a revival of David Milroy’s King Hit directed by the company’s current Artistic Director Kyle Morrison. Vigorous performances were set within the carnival ambience of an old-style boxing tent beautifully designed by India Mehta, which completely eclipsed the usually penitentiary/corporate surrounds of the courtyard and the STCWA itself. India gets the Award for Imaginatively Conceived and Scrupulously Realized Set Design with this and her hauntingly atmospheric set for Black Swan’s The House on the Lake upstairs in the Heath Ledger earlier in the year.

At the PICA Performance Space in September–October, Perth indie supergroup The Last Great Hunt gave us visionary theatremaker Tim Watt’s latest excursion into the outer reaches of lo-fi animation, mask-work, projection and puppetry with Falling Through Clouds, created and performed by Adriane Daff, Arielle Gray, Chris Isaacs and Tim himself. This was a work whose formal virtuosity and thematic reach I felt ultimately exceeded its narrative grasp, but it nevertheless gets the Robert Lepage Award for Dazzingly Inventive Dramaturgy in the Imaginary Representation of Dreams. Fantasies about flying and being haunted by one’s double never looked so real.

Also in the field of animation, Spare Parts Puppet Theatre in September–October completed an epic cycle of regional community-based development with their epic visual theatre work Farm, written by Ian Sinclair, directed by company AD Philip Mitchell and co-devised by two of the performers, Chloe Flockart and Rebecca Bradley. I reviewed this production critically at the time for its claims to represent life on the land and some aspects of the script and staging; but in retrospect I find myself wanting to honour the poetry of Ian’s writing, the humanity of the performances, the sheer scale of the enterprise and the vision and ambition of Spare Parts and Philip in bringing the whole thing to fruition. For all these reasons Farm gets the Paul Kelly ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’ Award: a production that no doubt gave back in spades to the regional community that nurtured its development.

My next Award goes to STRUT Dance and its new director Paul Selwyn-Norton for a busy year taking the organisation to the next level as a National Choreographic Centre: initiating, supporting and hosting new work, residencies, worshops and classes, culminating in the inaugural Move Me Improvisation Festival which took place across Perth venues in November. As mentioned above, Paul and STRUT share with Asher Fisch and WASO the Whitlam Award for Vision at the Helm and the Dionysus Award for New Festivals. As with Kate Cherry and Black Swan bringing Kristin Linklater to Perth, these are fine instances of exisiting organisations large and small extending their reach and resourcing events that enrich the local artistic community and their audiences. In particular, I applaud the seeding of grass-roots, thematic and even one-off ‘micro-festivals’ – in contrast with the increasingly generic, globalized and institutionalized ‘mega-festivals’ that otherwise dominate the national landscape.

And finally, the Billy Bragg/Mao Zedong Great Leap Forward Award goes to Perth Theatre Company for their 2015 Season announced in November, with an increased output of five shows: two in the Studio Underground, one upstairs in the Heath Ledger, one in the STCWA Courtyard and one at PICA. These include three directed (and one also written) by artistic director Mel Cantwell, and two directed and/or devised and performed by local independent theatremakers. This feels like the realisation of a vision that’s been brewing in Mel’s head for a long time now as the AD of Perth’s alternative mainstage theatre company – one that reflects and connects with the city’s distinctive contemporary grass-roots theatre culture.

That’s it from me for 2014. Apologies to everyone I missed out on seeing or including in this list of Awards. As always, I’m circumscribed by the limits of time, space and of course subjective tastes and priorities. I hope this round-up gives local and national readers a sense of Perth as a place to make and see theatre, dance, music and art. Bring it on!

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For the record, Humph was busy rehearsing and performing in Perth from May till November with Wish (PTC/Night Train, Studio Underground), Jasper Jones (Barking Gecko, Studio Underground), Laughter on the 23^rd Floor (Black Swan, Heath Ledger Theatre) and Overexposed (Danielle Micich/ Performing Lines WA, Studio Underground). Postcards from Perth will resume at the end of January with the onset of Fringe World and Perth International Festival 2015.

Postcard from Perth 36

STRUT Dance: Move Me Improvisation Festival

Since his appointment as Director of STRUT Dance last year, the effervescent Paul Selwyn-Norton – South African-born dancer/choreographer and alumni of William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt – has been busy transforming the organisation into a national choreographic centre, with invited residencies and workshops by interstate and international luminaries like Anthony Hamilton and Byron Perry from Melbourne and former members of Ballet Frankfurt and Batsheva Dance in Israel. Paul has described his vision as ‘mulching the garden’, which is a great image for a landscape like Perth, where the sandy soil supports a small community of tough survivors who support each other across disciplines and generations. In the context of our relentless economic and cultural obsession with global and national export, it’s good to focus instead on enriching the local scene.

Last week saw STRUT hosting its inaugural Move Me Improvisation Festival, featuring a raft of performances, workshops, lectures and forums by local, national and international dance, music and theatre artists across Perth venues including PICA, The Blue Room, King Street Arts Centre and the State Theatre Centre. It was an exhilarating week, and I made the most of it, especially as the city’s cultural activities were winding up with the approach of Christmas, and my own capacities were about to be reduced by impending knee surgery. In fact I’m writing this now in recovery, in bed, with my leg in a brace and pain killers at the ready; so forgive me for waxing lyrical about my memories of Move Me.

The Festival kicked off on Saturday 22^nd November at PICA with an opening three-night season of a double bill: Beast #3 by local choreographers Jo Pollitt and Paea Leach – performed by them and six other local dancers with a soundscore by Mace Francis and lighting by Ellen Knops – and No one will tell us, an improvised performance by international Australian artist Rosalind Crisp in collaboration with her partner improviser Andrew Morrish, Swiss-German musician Hansueli Tischhauser on electric guitar and German lighting designer Marco Wehrspann. I saw the show last Monday night. The evening was introduced by local actor-improviser legend Sam Longley as amiable festival MC; waiting for the doors to open, we were also entertained by the Festival Imp, a silent, inscrutable, red-masked and body-fitted dance-improviser who made unpredictable appearances across town throughout the week. As for the shows themselves: as a 25-minute opener, I found Beast #3 engaging if a little underwhelming (and wasn’t sure how or how much improvisation was involved); but was then gripped and held for 55 minutes by three charismatic mature artists making a relentless work of substance, beauty, ferocity and delicacy on the edge of chaos with No one will tell us. If at times the sound-palette of the guitar was a little restrictive, and Andrew’s playful verbal interventions occasionally a little reductive, these (perhaps inevitable) restrictions and reductions only served to highlight the emotional and semantic richness of the dancer’s body as a vehicle of pure unbounded expressivity. I left pondering the fundamental differences and possible relationships between music, text and movement, as demonstrated and explored by three virtuosi absolutely attuned to each other in a performance that was also a master-class.

The following evening in Studio 3 at King Street Arts I attended Unwrapping Danse: a performance lecture by Ros Crisp about the history of her practice that folded together improvised dance, semi-improvised discourse, filmed dance footage and written text. Here the free-flow of meaning was gently underpinned by artistic and personal reflections, ending with a short reading from a journal entry about leaving the rural landscape of her childhood. The result was an infinitely generous gift to a small but privileged audience. It only went for 50 minutes, but we didn’t want it to stop. It gave me a context for the previous night’s show – and a level of depth, an economy of means and elegance of structure that ironically exceeded the show itself.

On Thursday night I unhappily missed seeing Ros Warby’s solos Court Dance and No Time to Fly due to other commitments and scheduling issues, but made it to PICA in time to catch Happy Little Accidents: a one-off, one-hour improvised theatre performance by Sam Longley and fellow local artists Shane Adamczak and Sean Walsh (all longstanding members of much-loved ongoing Perth improv comedy show The Big Hoo-Ha). I was a little anxious about how this performance would fit, in the context of a festival predominantly oriented towards contemporary dance. In the event, the boys rose to the occasion and delivered a well-judged mix of gentle comedy, poetry and pathos based on a tacit but profound understanding of the game, each other and their respective roles as joker, straight-man and puppet-master (or ‘pirate’, ‘robot’ and ‘ninja’, to use the terminology imparted to me by a fellow improviser) – including a stand-out cameo by an invisible (and inaudible) talking teddy bear which took the show to another level for me in terms of form, plot, emotional substance and imaginative engagement.

Friday night however provided my festival highlight with The Ferrymen: an improvised performance by Andrew Morrish and Peter Trotman, with minimal and perfectly judged lighting (again) by Marco Wehrspann. This was a truly sui generis work of improvised movement and text (spoken and sung) hovering like a moth between lightness and darkness, comedy and tragedy, life and death. If the sketch-bound situations and characters in Happy Little Accidents remained largely within the generic confines of pop culture, pulp fiction, film and TV, The Ferrymen took us deeper into the realm of myth and folklore, archetypal psychology and the animal dimensions of being human, ageing and mortality. This was a performance that took its time to unfurl in a manner at once genuinely unpredictable and utterly inevitable. Andrew and Peter began working together continuously in Melbourne back in the early 80s, and subsequently established an international practice; but they hadn’t performed together recently for some years until invited by Paul to reunite in Perth for Move Me; so the show had an added sense of occasion, which they graciously acknowledged after the last performance. (I also had the privilege of participating in a four-day workshop with them along with about fifteen other local artists, which I found transformative.)

The closing night of the Festival saw dancer-choreographer Michael Schumacher (also ex-Ballet Frankfurt) and cellist Alex Waterman (both from the US) perform Dans le jardin, a site-specific work originally created for the courtyard of the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon – and here reconceived for the courtyard of the State Theatre Centre (sensitively lit by Ellen Knops). Notwithstanding its heavy-sounding credentials, this was an engagingly light-handed finale, with Schumacher moving around and through (and occasionally interacting with) the crowd of onlookers, while playfully appearing and disappearing in and out of the somewhat grim, penal architecture. Best of all was the involvement of three young children in the audience, who followed the dancer like a Pied Piper and became his spontaneous assistants. The event was followed by the closing party and launch of the STRUT 2015 program across the way at the PICA bar; but I made my way to Perth Station instead, weary from a long week and with one final workshop with Andrew and Peter the next morning.

I haven’t even touched on all the events in the Festival I didn’t attend, including new works by local performers Jacob Lehrer and David Corbet; workshops with Ros Crisp, Ros Warby and Michael Schumacher (the latter culminating in a group performance by local participants at The Blue Room); and a one-off improvised concert by local and international musicians from across the festival including Rachael Dease, Tristen Parr, Louise Devenish, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, Hans Tischhauser and Alex Waterman.

It’s too early to assess the impact of the week, both personally and on Perth; but there’s no question in my mind that Paul has initiated a major new event on the national and international stage. Improvisation is a great theme for a festival at the edge of the world. More profoundly, I’m convinced that – as a concept and a practice – it lies at the heart of all performance, and perhaps all creation.

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Move Me Improvisation Festival presented by STRUT Dance took place in venues around Perth from Sat 22–Sun 30 Nov. Parts of the program were developed in partnership with Dancehouse in Melbourne and Critical Path in Sydney. Ros Crisp, Andrew Morrish and Ros Warby subsequently performed in Sydney from 29 Nov–5 Dec; Ros Crisp also performed in Brisbane from 3–5 Dec courtesy of Ausdance QLD; and Ros Warby is at Dancehouse on–12 December.