Moonshadows: A tribute to Cat Stevens. Concept by Peter Cox, starring Darren Coggan. Musical director Naomi Coggan. Produced by McPherson Ink at Canberra Playhouse, April 20 and 21.
Darren Coggan unplugged his guitar and left the stage, but appreciative applause would not let him “go, away, I know, I have to go”, as the real Cat Stevens had done, becoming Yusuf Islam in 1979. The theatre hushed as Coggan reappeared. "Thank you very much," he said.
Thank you from a single voice, sounding “miles from nowhere”, and as if the whole audience remembered the line from Longer Boats are Coming “just a flower I can help along”, a supportive murmur spread around for just one more song.
Coggan stars as narrator of the life story of Steven Demetre Georgiou, illustrating his significant experiences and spiritual searching through Cat Stevens’ songs. Coggan has found a quality of voice which is so close to the original that you would think it is Cat Stevens himself unless you are a bit too pedantic, like me, and play the original LPs like Tea for the Tillerman, Mona Bone Jakon and Teazle and the Firecat after the show.
The band and backing singers supporting Coggan, perhaps especially musical director Naomi Coggan on keyboard and piano, are impressive. Seeing a band play this music makes you realise how diverse and complex Cat Stevens’ compositions are. In this show, the effect is much bigger than the more intimate-sounding original recordings, but it works well because this is a show about Cat Stevens, not an attempt merely to reproduce him.
The commitment from writer Peter Cox is not just to the music, but to the message. When Georgiou, brought up in the anti-Turk tradition of Greek Cypriots of his time, finally finds in the Qur’an the central theme of peace and goodwill, of de-emphasising the superficiality of material wealth, we hear a message of just as much importance today as 30 years ago.
Moonshadows, thankfully, ends at this point, avoiding Yusuf Islam’s later unfortunate slip towards fundamentalism when he supported the fatwah against Salman Rushdie (though he claimed to have been misquoted). The result is an exciting concert and a dramatic narrative with a worthwhile theme - a success.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday, 20 April 2007
Thursday, 19 April 2007
2007: Eleven Year Itch - The Howard Years by Shortis and Simpson. Promo feature article.
Three months into his Canberra Times career, this very writer, reviewing John Shortis and Moya Simpson in June 1996, wrote “But maybe I expect too much of Queanbeyan: terror on Monaro Street is not something we can seriously contemplate” in response to the promise to “terrorise the audience” with satire.
Shortis & Curlies, with the late Andrew Bissett, at The School of Arts Cafe, presented by the now legendary Bill Stephens, was the first of the Shortis and Simpson series of satirical shows which have played (or maybe plagued, according to your political position) the Canberra region every year since. But not only did their career run parallel with mine. The much more illustrious comparison is with the grasp on government of PM John Howard, who has made the fear of terror real, even in Queanbeyan.
“Let the itch begin / Let us start from scratch” introduces Eleven Year Itch - The Howard Years, opening on May 3 at The Street Theatre.
The itch to write and sing satirical cabaret began in Sydney, when Stephens heard one of Shortis’ songs performed by Margaret Roadknight. Although Simpson was a also successful singer, it was not until 1995, when their children left home and gave them freedom, that the couple toured together in country regions. When their caravan reached Bungendore they stopped, and took up the School of Arts offer.
Eleven years on, looking back on both the political changes and their own creative development, audiences may be surprised to find themselves in a new theatrical world. The Street Theatre’s artistic director, Caroline Stacey, is working with Shortis and Simpson, building on and extending their talents. Eleven Year Itch is risky and demanding work, taking John Shortis out of the writer’s garrett, off the piano stool, and behind instruments we never knew he could play: ukulele, accordion, pedal organ, trombone among some others previously unknown to anyone.
Stacey’s expectations for the full depth of character which she brings fom directing plays and opera, is a new challenge for Moya Simpson. During rehearsal, as I watched, Simpson grew in one of her roles, as John Howard dreaming of waterfront reform (remember the black dogs in the night). Stacey also has expertise in European political cabaret, making each of her rehearsal notes hone both Simpson’s quality of voice and belief in her character’s desires. Just the first line “I’m down here, on the waterfront, in the full moonlight” suddenly became tragic (because we know the implications of his instructions to Peter Reith), romantic (in an irky sort of way), and horribly funny against Shortis’ French-style accordion playing.
The ACT Creative Arts Fellowship which Shortis received a year or so ago led him to the same conclusion as Stacey. When it comes to New York cabaret or European cabaret, though he likes both, it’s the European tradition which underpins political satire. After a reading of some new work last year, Eleven Year Itch is Shortis’s first full production which has grown out of the Fellowship study which took him back to Paris in 1880, through the Berlin cabaret which made Bertolt Brecht famous. This show also has ACT backing through a one-off project grant, which has enabled Shortis and Simpson to work with Stacey, produce good publicity material, and set up the studio at The Street in style.
The floorspace where the audience sits, quaffing as required, is decorated in the ornate way which, in the European tradition, makes the audience feel glamorous. But don’t imagine the action will remain neatly confined to a tiny stage in the corner - as you may have seen in the restaurant scene in the French film The Singer, where Alain Moreau (Gerard Depardieu) is ignored by the snooty clientele. Be prepared, if you please, for the karaoke.
Already bookings are coming on apace, so some people may have discovered that their tables are not numbered. They are named. After all, naming names is often what politics is about. You will soon be singing along with I Lunched With a Man Who Lunched With a Man Who Lunched at the Burke and Grill.
Mention of Labor allows us to make a note that, though project money from the ACT Government supports Eleven Year Itch, the satirical target is not just the incumbent Commonwealth Government. Shortis has written more than humorous songs linked in a revue format. Using some of his own songs from previous years, many new ones and a powerful lament for David Hicks written by Peter J Casey, for the first time Shortis’s script is more like a play, with sections delimited by the election years since 1996, and leading to a mystery ending. What will happen in 2007?
Of course the Coalition comes in for the stick it deserves, but the failure of Labor gets its just deserts too. Latham in the Aisles will be one song you won’t want to miss, whatever your personal preference. Shortis makes no bones about how he sees satire. A good politician is an oxymoron, he says. He looks for “things that are worth being scathing about”. No politician is safe because dishonesty, manipulation of other people, using politics for one’s personal advancement, and aiming only at winning rather than doing honourable things are all worth being scathing about.
Being satirical is about being even-handed, which some people see as being wishy-washy, but being scathing leaves its mark on both hands, right and left. It’s theatrically and politically risky (though not as much in Canberra 2007 as, say, in Berlin 1933), but, say Shortis, Simpson and Stacey, the risk must be taken. You’ve got to do it, they say, in theatre, just as you have to in politics. Otherwise nothing is achieved.
This leads our discussion to the awful realisation that, indeed, Prime Minister Howard has done exactly that - achieved. All of a sudden there are dark stories on all sides. We see Australian culture as an Othello. In destroying Othello, Iago achieves everything he desires, through manipulating people’s fears, setting up fictional lines of demarcation, and creating immense but unjustified jealousies. But Othello’s power was Iago’s original support. By succeeding in cutting down Othello, Iago only destroys himself. Is this the real story of the last eleven years? Is aggrandisement the itch at which politicians must scratch away, until our culture is undermined, to the detriment of us all?
This is the new Shortis and Simpson. You will find an edge to their work, even in songs you’ve heard before. Stacey’s view is that a culture only comes to maturity when an audience appreciates a satire even of itself. In the humour of political satire, dark though it may be when governments make life and death decisions, or light as we delve into the Prince of Dorkness himself, we find strength as a culture.
At the same time, as Shortis, Simpson and Stacey explore new ways to stretch their and our imaginations, they pull together the experience of theatre and the strands of history, at least of the last eleven years - the Howard Years.
Eleven Year Itch - The Howard YearsShortis and Simpson at The Street Theatre
Directed by Caroline Stacey.
May 3 May 19, 8.30pm
Matinee May 19, 2.30pm
Tickets: $30 full; $26 concession and groups.
Previews: May 1 and 2 $20
Bookings: 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Shortis & Curlies, with the late Andrew Bissett, at The School of Arts Cafe, presented by the now legendary Bill Stephens, was the first of the Shortis and Simpson series of satirical shows which have played (or maybe plagued, according to your political position) the Canberra region every year since. But not only did their career run parallel with mine. The much more illustrious comparison is with the grasp on government of PM John Howard, who has made the fear of terror real, even in Queanbeyan.
“Let the itch begin / Let us start from scratch” introduces Eleven Year Itch - The Howard Years, opening on May 3 at The Street Theatre.
The itch to write and sing satirical cabaret began in Sydney, when Stephens heard one of Shortis’ songs performed by Margaret Roadknight. Although Simpson was a also successful singer, it was not until 1995, when their children left home and gave them freedom, that the couple toured together in country regions. When their caravan reached Bungendore they stopped, and took up the School of Arts offer.
Eleven years on, looking back on both the political changes and their own creative development, audiences may be surprised to find themselves in a new theatrical world. The Street Theatre’s artistic director, Caroline Stacey, is working with Shortis and Simpson, building on and extending their talents. Eleven Year Itch is risky and demanding work, taking John Shortis out of the writer’s garrett, off the piano stool, and behind instruments we never knew he could play: ukulele, accordion, pedal organ, trombone among some others previously unknown to anyone.
Stacey’s expectations for the full depth of character which she brings fom directing plays and opera, is a new challenge for Moya Simpson. During rehearsal, as I watched, Simpson grew in one of her roles, as John Howard dreaming of waterfront reform (remember the black dogs in the night). Stacey also has expertise in European political cabaret, making each of her rehearsal notes hone both Simpson’s quality of voice and belief in her character’s desires. Just the first line “I’m down here, on the waterfront, in the full moonlight” suddenly became tragic (because we know the implications of his instructions to Peter Reith), romantic (in an irky sort of way), and horribly funny against Shortis’ French-style accordion playing.
The ACT Creative Arts Fellowship which Shortis received a year or so ago led him to the same conclusion as Stacey. When it comes to New York cabaret or European cabaret, though he likes both, it’s the European tradition which underpins political satire. After a reading of some new work last year, Eleven Year Itch is Shortis’s first full production which has grown out of the Fellowship study which took him back to Paris in 1880, through the Berlin cabaret which made Bertolt Brecht famous. This show also has ACT backing through a one-off project grant, which has enabled Shortis and Simpson to work with Stacey, produce good publicity material, and set up the studio at The Street in style.
The floorspace where the audience sits, quaffing as required, is decorated in the ornate way which, in the European tradition, makes the audience feel glamorous. But don’t imagine the action will remain neatly confined to a tiny stage in the corner - as you may have seen in the restaurant scene in the French film The Singer, where Alain Moreau (Gerard Depardieu) is ignored by the snooty clientele. Be prepared, if you please, for the karaoke.
Already bookings are coming on apace, so some people may have discovered that their tables are not numbered. They are named. After all, naming names is often what politics is about. You will soon be singing along with I Lunched With a Man Who Lunched With a Man Who Lunched at the Burke and Grill.
Mention of Labor allows us to make a note that, though project money from the ACT Government supports Eleven Year Itch, the satirical target is not just the incumbent Commonwealth Government. Shortis has written more than humorous songs linked in a revue format. Using some of his own songs from previous years, many new ones and a powerful lament for David Hicks written by Peter J Casey, for the first time Shortis’s script is more like a play, with sections delimited by the election years since 1996, and leading to a mystery ending. What will happen in 2007?
Of course the Coalition comes in for the stick it deserves, but the failure of Labor gets its just deserts too. Latham in the Aisles will be one song you won’t want to miss, whatever your personal preference. Shortis makes no bones about how he sees satire. A good politician is an oxymoron, he says. He looks for “things that are worth being scathing about”. No politician is safe because dishonesty, manipulation of other people, using politics for one’s personal advancement, and aiming only at winning rather than doing honourable things are all worth being scathing about.
Being satirical is about being even-handed, which some people see as being wishy-washy, but being scathing leaves its mark on both hands, right and left. It’s theatrically and politically risky (though not as much in Canberra 2007 as, say, in Berlin 1933), but, say Shortis, Simpson and Stacey, the risk must be taken. You’ve got to do it, they say, in theatre, just as you have to in politics. Otherwise nothing is achieved.
This leads our discussion to the awful realisation that, indeed, Prime Minister Howard has done exactly that - achieved. All of a sudden there are dark stories on all sides. We see Australian culture as an Othello. In destroying Othello, Iago achieves everything he desires, through manipulating people’s fears, setting up fictional lines of demarcation, and creating immense but unjustified jealousies. But Othello’s power was Iago’s original support. By succeeding in cutting down Othello, Iago only destroys himself. Is this the real story of the last eleven years? Is aggrandisement the itch at which politicians must scratch away, until our culture is undermined, to the detriment of us all?
This is the new Shortis and Simpson. You will find an edge to their work, even in songs you’ve heard before. Stacey’s view is that a culture only comes to maturity when an audience appreciates a satire even of itself. In the humour of political satire, dark though it may be when governments make life and death decisions, or light as we delve into the Prince of Dorkness himself, we find strength as a culture.
At the same time, as Shortis, Simpson and Stacey explore new ways to stretch their and our imaginations, they pull together the experience of theatre and the strands of history, at least of the last eleven years - the Howard Years.
Eleven Year Itch - The Howard YearsShortis and Simpson at The Street Theatre
Directed by Caroline Stacey.
May 3 May 19, 8.30pm
Matinee May 19, 2.30pm
Tickets: $30 full; $26 concession and groups.
Previews: May 1 and 2 $20
Bookings: 6247 1223
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
National Folk Festival opening by Hon Barry Cohen
The Hon Barry Cohen, former Arts Minister in the Hawke Labor Government, said he was surprised and proud to be asked to open this year’s National Folk Festival last Thursday. Thoroughly in keeping with Australian folk culture, and in tune with his many books of anecdotes such as What About the Workers?, The Almost Complete Gough and From Whitlam to Winston, humour of an unofficial kind was the keynote of his official opening speech.
For NFF Board President, John Taylor, there was good reason to celebrate the publication 20 years ago this year of the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia: Our Living Heritage, commissioned by Cohen. “It is a unique document with which any student of Australia’s rich and diverse cultural history should familiarise themselves … We have Barry to thank for having the vision to get this project started.”
Unfortunately one of his revealing anecdotes, a bit less than humorous but nonetheless of the blunt Australian kind, told in conversation with the Canberra Times, concerned later Prime Minister Keating and Minister for Education John Dawkins.
Cohen had done his research, personally observing the positive social impact of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington. The famous and continuing Centre's interests and practical work in cultural policy are “framed principally around local agency and cultural democracy in grassroots communities, and collaborative projects designed to foster self-representation.”
But Keating “wouldn’t have a bar of it” as year after year Cohen tried in Cabinet to implement the Inquiry’s recommendation to set up a Folklife Centre in Canberra. Dawkins put in the boot in the last budget before Keating’s fatal flaw election in 1996, using the favourite politician’s ploy by going for an inquiry. At this point in history a project delayed was a project as dead as a bloated wombat on a country road.
Mention of wombats introduces a different side of Barry Cohen, wildlife sanctuary endangered species breeder until, in 2005, age crept into the picture and he passed on this work to others. Environmental issues are an important theme in this year’s National Folk Festival with three interrelated themes.
Various performers present songs, poems and even narrative dances about water, in its many incarnations. But the flip side of the issue is the presentation, headed by Social History and Folklore Collector Rob Willis, of material from the National Library of Australia’s ongoing project on drought. Among presenters is Dr Graham Seal of Curtin University, WA, who had a major part to play in the Folklife inquiry back in 1987. Another is Sue Riley, a Centrelink Counsellor, addressing the human impact and social cost of continued drought. Willis can be contacted at rwillis@westserv.net.au if you have stories to add to the collection.
Alongside the NLA is the Climate Change Tent, where there are workshops, talks and films by a wide range of experts and commentators including Professor Will Steffen, director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, the Fair Trade Society, Australian Greens economics researcher Richard Dennis and Bob Douglass, formerly head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population at ANU who leads a Forum on Nature and Society at 3.30pm tomorrow.
Everyone can take part in the third aspect of cleaning up the National Folk Festival, called No Ifs, No Butts. Clean Up Australia says that 49% of rubbish around Australia consists of cigarette butts, so this year there are specially designed bins all over the Festival site, and special individual butt bins for smokers to carry with them, produced in a new partnership with the Butt Littering Trust.
Smoking is no joke, but jokes aside, the former Minister Cohen was clearly the right person to open this year’s Festival. He even had a very serious suggestion for how to set up a Folklife Centre for Australia. Why not, he said, make it part of the National Museum of Australia? Why not, indeed.
Cohen is nowadays deputy chair at Old Parliament House, and points out that the National Portrait Gallery began life in a space shared with OPH. Its success has won it the fame and consequent power to claim a new building in its own right. An Australian National Folklife Centre set up in a space at the National Museum will surely have a parallel history in the future, he says. Now that heritage and history are the regular subject of debate, on all sides of politics, it’s time for the move to be made.
Young people and more recent migrants need an active centre to discover our folk history, as happens in Washington, where the Smithsonian themes cover indigenous life, working life, regional folklife, and recent migrants’ life. Like the National Folk Festival, which Cohen calls Canberra’s best kept secret, the Smithsonian exhibits include a Guest State each year, and even a Guest Country for comparison. With the National Museum’s visitor drawing power based so strongly already on its cultural history and personal story exhibits, a National Folklife Centre should be a natural fit, like a stockman on his horse or a novelist from Brindabella writing My Brilliant Career.
National Folk Festival runs until late on Monday April 9 at Exhibition Park. Information at www.folkfestival.asn.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
For NFF Board President, John Taylor, there was good reason to celebrate the publication 20 years ago this year of the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia: Our Living Heritage, commissioned by Cohen. “It is a unique document with which any student of Australia’s rich and diverse cultural history should familiarise themselves … We have Barry to thank for having the vision to get this project started.”
Unfortunately one of his revealing anecdotes, a bit less than humorous but nonetheless of the blunt Australian kind, told in conversation with the Canberra Times, concerned later Prime Minister Keating and Minister for Education John Dawkins.
Cohen had done his research, personally observing the positive social impact of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington. The famous and continuing Centre's interests and practical work in cultural policy are “framed principally around local agency and cultural democracy in grassroots communities, and collaborative projects designed to foster self-representation.”
But Keating “wouldn’t have a bar of it” as year after year Cohen tried in Cabinet to implement the Inquiry’s recommendation to set up a Folklife Centre in Canberra. Dawkins put in the boot in the last budget before Keating’s fatal flaw election in 1996, using the favourite politician’s ploy by going for an inquiry. At this point in history a project delayed was a project as dead as a bloated wombat on a country road.
Mention of wombats introduces a different side of Barry Cohen, wildlife sanctuary endangered species breeder until, in 2005, age crept into the picture and he passed on this work to others. Environmental issues are an important theme in this year’s National Folk Festival with three interrelated themes.
Various performers present songs, poems and even narrative dances about water, in its many incarnations. But the flip side of the issue is the presentation, headed by Social History and Folklore Collector Rob Willis, of material from the National Library of Australia’s ongoing project on drought. Among presenters is Dr Graham Seal of Curtin University, WA, who had a major part to play in the Folklife inquiry back in 1987. Another is Sue Riley, a Centrelink Counsellor, addressing the human impact and social cost of continued drought. Willis can be contacted at rwillis@westserv.net.au if you have stories to add to the collection.
Alongside the NLA is the Climate Change Tent, where there are workshops, talks and films by a wide range of experts and commentators including Professor Will Steffen, director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, the Fair Trade Society, Australian Greens economics researcher Richard Dennis and Bob Douglass, formerly head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population at ANU who leads a Forum on Nature and Society at 3.30pm tomorrow.
Everyone can take part in the third aspect of cleaning up the National Folk Festival, called No Ifs, No Butts. Clean Up Australia says that 49% of rubbish around Australia consists of cigarette butts, so this year there are specially designed bins all over the Festival site, and special individual butt bins for smokers to carry with them, produced in a new partnership with the Butt Littering Trust.
Smoking is no joke, but jokes aside, the former Minister Cohen was clearly the right person to open this year’s Festival. He even had a very serious suggestion for how to set up a Folklife Centre for Australia. Why not, he said, make it part of the National Museum of Australia? Why not, indeed.
Cohen is nowadays deputy chair at Old Parliament House, and points out that the National Portrait Gallery began life in a space shared with OPH. Its success has won it the fame and consequent power to claim a new building in its own right. An Australian National Folklife Centre set up in a space at the National Museum will surely have a parallel history in the future, he says. Now that heritage and history are the regular subject of debate, on all sides of politics, it’s time for the move to be made.
Young people and more recent migrants need an active centre to discover our folk history, as happens in Washington, where the Smithsonian themes cover indigenous life, working life, regional folklife, and recent migrants’ life. Like the National Folk Festival, which Cohen calls Canberra’s best kept secret, the Smithsonian exhibits include a Guest State each year, and even a Guest Country for comparison. With the National Museum’s visitor drawing power based so strongly already on its cultural history and personal story exhibits, a National Folklife Centre should be a natural fit, like a stockman on his horse or a novelist from Brindabella writing My Brilliant Career.
National Folk Festival runs until late on Monday April 9 at Exhibition Park. Information at www.folkfestival.asn.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 2 April 2007
2007: National Folk Festival - feature article on Jared Wilkins and Dave O'Neill
The Board of the National Folk Festival is delighted to announce two new senior staff positions. Jared Wilkins, Production Manager of the Festival for the last three years has been appointed Managing Director and Dave O’Neill, Program Manager in 2000 and 2006, is now the Festival’s Artistic Director.
Both jobs are full time, fixed term contract positions. O’Neill, a music teacher and internationally acclaimed professional musician, a member of the Eric Bogle Band, has taken on an expanded role as artistic director. Wilkins began 10 years ago as a volunteer, then volunteer coordinator. I spoke to Wilkins as he stood in the middle of a paddock rapidly filling with tents as volunteers began arriving from all over Australia for the NFF, which will be opened on Thursday evening at 8pm by the Hon Barry Cohen, former Minister for the Arts in the Hawke Government.
1300 volunteers, grouped into teams managed by volunteer coordinators, work to a paid Volunteer Manager, one of only five paid staff in Wilkins’ office. I wondered on the one hand if, since the National Folk Festival was permanently based in Canberra in the early 1990s, the new positions represented a corporatisation of the NFF. On the other hand, here was the Managing Director in the field, literally, looking and sounding like just another groupie of the folk music community. How does it all work?
Wilkins’ personal history goes a long way to answering this question. Community, he says, is the key. Even he, who attended Narrabundah College, and O’Neill who went to Narrabundah High School work together as members of the Canberra community. Teaching, too, is a central component of their lives. Kids, says Wilkins, usually fantasise about growing up to run away with the circus (perhaps this is the story of O’Neill’s life as a musician), but being brought up in the household of well-known drama and art identities, Peter and Lola Wilkins, saw their son run away from the circus to become a chemistry teacher at Marist Brothers in Canberra for three years.
It was a hard struggle for Wilkins to succeed in chemistry and maths through secondary school and university, but he came to understand how to crack the code of scientific language and to appreciate the challenge his students faced. He clearly sees his managerial task in an educational light.
But he never really left the circus, working on events production at WOMADelaide, Adelaide Fringe and the real thing, Cirque du Soleil, to help pay his way through uni. The National Folk Festival had to become managed as a business to survive but, he says, the corporate-looking structure does not undermine the folk music community approach, even though there is great competition for places as performers. 2007 attracted 600 applications for 200 performing spots.
The way it works is that volunteers pay their own way to come from all over Australia, with even a few from overseas, because the quality of the program is guaranteed. Yet the program is designed deliberately to cover the range from performers at the beginning of their careers to those at their peak, with a strong emphasis on teaching and encouraging the young. The generations play and learn together so that the folk music community rolls on. We can hope that the NFF 40-year generational report will be more positive than Peter Costello’s announcement last Monday.
Even the three-year contract arrangements for the Artistic Director and Managing Director jobs are planned with the intention that these roles will be passed on to new people to maintain an invigorating folk music culture over the years. Each year, too, one of the states is the focus – this year Western Australia – so interest and personal involvement revolves around the country. And, as we reported in the Canberra Times Panorama last weekend (Lusty Lyricism and Politics), a relevant theme is chosen each year which helps to give the content of the Festival a direction and social purpose. For 2007 the Middle East is the focus.
Wilkins, says NFF Board President John Taylor, is “superbly able, committed and professional, and the Board has every confidence that the event will continue to prosper and grow under his leadership”. Wilkins claims it’s all just a matter of “nuts and bolts” putting the Festival together, connecting all the parts, working out how “everything affects everything else”.
All 1300 volunteers come together because “folk music is the music of the folk”. It’s all about community, the soul of the National Folk Festival, says the very model of a modern managing director, Jared Wilkins.
O’Neill’s understanding of the Festival’s program potential and his experience and personal status in the broader music industry is “enviable”, says John Taylor. “We are truly fortunate to have two highly skilled professionals to fill these roles”.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Both jobs are full time, fixed term contract positions. O’Neill, a music teacher and internationally acclaimed professional musician, a member of the Eric Bogle Band, has taken on an expanded role as artistic director. Wilkins began 10 years ago as a volunteer, then volunteer coordinator. I spoke to Wilkins as he stood in the middle of a paddock rapidly filling with tents as volunteers began arriving from all over Australia for the NFF, which will be opened on Thursday evening at 8pm by the Hon Barry Cohen, former Minister for the Arts in the Hawke Government.
1300 volunteers, grouped into teams managed by volunteer coordinators, work to a paid Volunteer Manager, one of only five paid staff in Wilkins’ office. I wondered on the one hand if, since the National Folk Festival was permanently based in Canberra in the early 1990s, the new positions represented a corporatisation of the NFF. On the other hand, here was the Managing Director in the field, literally, looking and sounding like just another groupie of the folk music community. How does it all work?
Wilkins’ personal history goes a long way to answering this question. Community, he says, is the key. Even he, who attended Narrabundah College, and O’Neill who went to Narrabundah High School work together as members of the Canberra community. Teaching, too, is a central component of their lives. Kids, says Wilkins, usually fantasise about growing up to run away with the circus (perhaps this is the story of O’Neill’s life as a musician), but being brought up in the household of well-known drama and art identities, Peter and Lola Wilkins, saw their son run away from the circus to become a chemistry teacher at Marist Brothers in Canberra for three years.
It was a hard struggle for Wilkins to succeed in chemistry and maths through secondary school and university, but he came to understand how to crack the code of scientific language and to appreciate the challenge his students faced. He clearly sees his managerial task in an educational light.
But he never really left the circus, working on events production at WOMADelaide, Adelaide Fringe and the real thing, Cirque du Soleil, to help pay his way through uni. The National Folk Festival had to become managed as a business to survive but, he says, the corporate-looking structure does not undermine the folk music community approach, even though there is great competition for places as performers. 2007 attracted 600 applications for 200 performing spots.
The way it works is that volunteers pay their own way to come from all over Australia, with even a few from overseas, because the quality of the program is guaranteed. Yet the program is designed deliberately to cover the range from performers at the beginning of their careers to those at their peak, with a strong emphasis on teaching and encouraging the young. The generations play and learn together so that the folk music community rolls on. We can hope that the NFF 40-year generational report will be more positive than Peter Costello’s announcement last Monday.
Even the three-year contract arrangements for the Artistic Director and Managing Director jobs are planned with the intention that these roles will be passed on to new people to maintain an invigorating folk music culture over the years. Each year, too, one of the states is the focus – this year Western Australia – so interest and personal involvement revolves around the country. And, as we reported in the Canberra Times Panorama last weekend (Lusty Lyricism and Politics), a relevant theme is chosen each year which helps to give the content of the Festival a direction and social purpose. For 2007 the Middle East is the focus.
Wilkins, says NFF Board President John Taylor, is “superbly able, committed and professional, and the Board has every confidence that the event will continue to prosper and grow under his leadership”. Wilkins claims it’s all just a matter of “nuts and bolts” putting the Festival together, connecting all the parts, working out how “everything affects everything else”.
All 1300 volunteers come together because “folk music is the music of the folk”. It’s all about community, the soul of the National Folk Festival, says the very model of a modern managing director, Jared Wilkins.
O’Neill’s understanding of the Festival’s program potential and his experience and personal status in the broader music industry is “enviable”, says John Taylor. “We are truly fortunate to have two highly skilled professionals to fill these roles”.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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