2016: Motherland by Katherine Lyall-Watson

Motherland by Katherine Lyall-Watson.  An Ellen Belloo and Critical Stages Production at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 25-28, 2016.

Directed by Caroline Dunphy; Set and Costume Designer – Penny Challen; Lighting Designer – David Walters; Composer and Sound Designer – Dane Alexander; Dramaturg – Kathryn Kelly.

Cast
Kerith Atkinson – Nell Triton; Peter Cossar – Chris & Kerensky; Barbara Lowing – Nina; Daniel Murphy – Khodasevich & Sasha; Rebecca Riggs – Alyona.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 27

My first encounter with Russians in Australia was a friend whose parents had escaped Stalin via the well-worked route through Harbin and China, settling in the western outskirts of Sydney in the 1940s.  My second encounter was in Elena Govor’s book My Dark Brother: The Story Of The Illins, A Russian-Aboriginal Family (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000).  Her family were members of the Little Siberia community on the Atherton Tablelands around the beginning of the 20th Century.  What fascinating stories were these!

So Motherland turns out to be my third encounter of a very surprising kind.  In a single envelope in 90-year-old Nina’s cardboard box in Brisbane are two letters.  One is in Russian; the other in English.  The letter from Alexander Kerensky explains that Nell has died, but just managed to write her last letter to Nina.  Kerensky apologises to Nina for past misunderstandings.  The letters were posted in Brisbane.

And what an amazing story has Katherine Lyall-Watson created – not only of Nina Berberova’s life but also of the lives of Nell Tritton and Alyona in Moscow, Paris and Brisbane, and the men in their lives, from the time of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917.  

Alexander Kerensky had been Prime Minister in the short-lived government that declared the Russian Republic, before the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917.  The young radical poets Nina Berberova and her husband Vladislav Khodasevich left Russia in 1922 and finally settled in Paris.  The Australian Nell Tritton was secretary to the exiled Kerensky in Paris, returning with him to Brisbane during WWII to escape the likelihood of Stalin using the Nazi occupation as cover to assassinate him.  The Australian white-shoe brigade businessman, Chris, met Alyona in Moscow.  During the Fitzgerald Inquiry 1987-89 he bought for her and her son Sasha the house in Brisbane that Kerensky and Nell had previously owned.  Then he was bankrupted and jailed, leaving Alyona to fend for herself while Sasha insisted on returning to Russia – the Motherland.

The full story of the real life people on which the play is based is even more complicated: though the real Nell Tritton did return to Brisbane where she died, she and Kerensky had married and escaped to America in 1940; while Nina Berberova became a professor at Yale, and later Princeton in America, where she died aged 92 in 1993.

It’s the devil of a story to put on stage in 90 minutes, and I must say that I had to listen especially carefully for the first 15 minutes just to have some idea of how the five actors and seven characters were connected to each other. 

The first aha! moment came when the Paris exiles –the poets and the very much ex-Prime Minister – had to endure a performance by the typically artistically unsophisticated Australian, Nell, of her poem about the beauty of Queensland.  This was not just funny in its own right (however embarrassing to recognise its crass rhymes and rhythms as genuinely Australian), but was the point when the interpersonal relationships began to be established, including the unexpected feeling between Nina and Nell – which Kerensky referred to in the letters in the envelope at the end.

Apart from the fact that all the actors were excellent, the credit for the success of the production goes to Caroline Dunphy as director and I guess to the dramaturg Kathryn Kelly, and certainly to the adept use of sound and music by Dane Alexander.  Despite the complications of a history over many decades in real time, there was a neat sense of how those complications played out to make each woman’s personal story into a sticky web needing a spider’s skill to negotiate.

The special value of the play and its presentation around the country is that it makes you alert to the people living next door and down the street in this multicultural country.  You might pass Nina, Nell and Alyona in the local supermarket.  It’s stories like theirs which make up modern Australian culture.  And I thank Stephen Pike, director of The Q, for bringing this play to our attention.






©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Happy Birthday Play School – Celebrating 50 Years at National Museum of Australia

Happy Birthday Play School – Celebrating 50 Years.  Exhibition at National Museum of Australia, Canberra, May 7-July 24, 2016.

Tickets on site or online at www.nma.gov.au/playschool

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 21

The only faces not always smiling in the Play School exhibition were the sometimes worried parents having to stop their very young children from taking the invitation to “Come Inside” literally, as they clambered over the transparent plastic barricades – space invaders of a very excited kind.

The see-through nature of the displays symbolises the central concept of Play School, which still has as much impact today as 50 years ago.  Long before ‘digital’ and ‘interactive’ became our established way of life, Play School played with the deep theatre issue – how to create a believable illusion of reality in a live performance.

This is also why Play School wins hands down over the USA’s Sesame Street.  I can claim to write about this since my first child, born in 1967, is only one year younger than ABC TV’s Play School.  I saw the differences between American culture and ours; and note too that even the BBC 1964 original Play School, which ABC borrowed and adapted, came to the end of its life in 1988.

My thinking at this adult level of apparently abstruse philosophy was stirred by observing, and then talking with, mother Katherine – who arrived here from Malaysia in the late 1970s – and her Australian born adult daughter, Jessica.  Their joy at recognising and remembering favourite episodes and presenters was palpable – a link in their family relationship forged by Play School in the 1980s.

Speaking later to the mother of a three-and-a-half year-old about the comparison with Sesame Street, I found she was adamant that her daughter prefers Play School.  And, watching a boy the same age using a touch-screen in the exhibition (where he realised that by moving the image of the moon he could change the time shown by the hands on the clock), his mother commented on the focussed attention he maintained and his learning in the digital interactive environment.

So the Happy Birthday Play School exhibition’s already a winner even before I analyse its importance.  What it shows is how original our theatrical artists were all that time ago.  Taking what was still a new performance medium (for example, television had only just had its first demonstration in 1965 in Broken Hill, for which I directed a short dance item), they discovered how to educate the imagination of the very young better even than through live performance on stage.

What happened?  And how?  Two major changes were underway in Australia, in theatre and in education. 

La Mama and the New Wave in Melbourne, and Jane Street, with the establishment of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney were in the process of happening.  NIDA produced the new young modern trained actors who became Play School presenters.  For me the great turning point was the 1966 production at Jane Street of Rodney Milgate’s A Refined Look at Existence, directed by Robin Lovejoy.  It began with the arrest of a member of the audience by policemen, including the inimitable Michael Boddy, co-writer with Bob Ellis of The Legend of King O’Malley.  Only when Boddy’s very recognisable rather large body appeared in the curtain call was I sure that the policemen had not been real.  In passing, let me remember the recent deaths of these indefatigable stirrers whose legacy we should never forget.

In education, as my career began in 1963, New South Wales at last began to break out of the strictures of teacher-down instruction, via the new Wyndham Scheme.  Teachers were now to take into account the particular needs of the actual students they were teaching, and devise programs to help them learn, instead of teaching nothing but the content of a predetermined syllabus, according to which every student in every classroom in the same year level at the same date would be being taught the same material.

This new freedom of thinking about how to do theatre and how to teach came together in Australia’s version of Play School. 

But there’s more.  To make television no longer a picture of a performance on a screen, being pumped out to absorbent viewers (that is, parallel to the old syllabus teaching), the Play School team engaged the viewers’ imagination in a brand new way.  Here’s a house.  It’s got windows and a door.  Come inside, through the door.  The presenters do things with toys and expect you to do things with them.  The children are not absorbent dishcloths, but are doing things – doing drama in their own house with the presenters in their house.

But then there’s even more.  From inside the house on television, we look through the windows and see what’s happening outside, and we find all sorts of new wonders.  In one episode I watched, the presenter had the children guess what the other presenter could see through the window, by describing and acting out what it looked like and what it was doing.  It was large – very large – and had something which it swung from side to side in front of it.  It was an elephant, which we then saw the other presenter patting and even feeding, and talking to the zoo-keeper.

This use of television was absolutely original at that time.  In comparison, even though Sesame Street today is modern in style, and highly entertaining, with the messages to be learnt built into the dialogue and songs, it’s still a ‘teacher-down’ process and the learning is largely by rote.  In watching Play School, the viewer’s imagination keeps them in their own reality in their own house while at the same time shifts them into the television house where they do things in that reality, including going out through the windows into exploring another reality ‘outside’.  This is the brilliant device which makes Play School maintain its place after 50 years, even as technology has changed to become digital, interactive and worldwide. 

What Play School has done is to create its own world wide web in the imaginations of all those children, and as they have grown through the generations, in the imaginations of all those parents – in the past, present and future.  The proof is there to be seen as you watch people from my age to two-year-olds thoroughly engrossed in this exhibition.

50 years!  I’m sure there will be Happy Birthday Play School – Celebrating 100 Years!  Because the theatrical device is brilliant, yet simple, and the educational principle is perfect.

So, this National Museum of Australia exhibition is a very important event.  It engages adults and children at all levels, including when talking to me in the cafe over lunch. 

But will the NMA and the ABC still be here in 50 years’ time, entertaining and educating us in the present and through our history?  There are conservative politicians who would dearly love to take us back to the 1950s – at least to the 1950s of their imaginations, where education was cut and dried and theatre was all about nothing but J C Williamson entertainment; where debutantes had balls, men were the breadwinners and women knew their place (and certain other sexes didn’t exist at all).

Funding cuts, to all the national institutions, in the recent May Federal Budget, are a serious worry, so take the opportunity to visit the National Museum of Australia now, before the July 2 election, just in case the world ends before July 24 when the exhibition closes.

National Museum of Australia, Canberra

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: The Next Generation of Cultural Institution by Lisa Havilah - Breakfast Address

The Next Generation of Cultural Institution by Lisa Havilah.  Currency House Creativity and Business Breakfast Series, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Wednesday May 18, 7.30am.
Media Contact: Martin Portus, Mobile 0401 360 806 mportus@optusnet.com.au

Commentary by Frank McKone
May 18

A 300 kilometre drive from Canberra to Sydney before breakfast, to hear Lisa Havilah was a bit too daunting, so I thank Currency House’s Arts and Media Consultant, Martin Portus, for making available the text of Lisa’s early morning address.

To provide some kind of context for Lisa Havilah, Director of Carriageworks, I have found two interesting and at least superficially contrasting ‘frames’ for her personality. 

She appears in an august listing of speakers, put together by BoardConnect, “a service designed to support the boards of arts and nonprofit organisations.”  The keynote speaker for their Creative Leadership Symposium, Sydney 21-22 March 2013, was the trusted economist we often see on ABC TV, Saul Eslake. 
http://boardconnect.com.au/Speaker_biographies_Sydney_Symposium_2013.pdf

On the other hand (or should I say on the other foot?), Lisa appears in the fashion pages of the Sydney Morning Herald:
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/ls-fashion-trends/in-my-wardrobe-lisa-havilah-20140417-36vdf.html where “Your most recent purchase?” is “A pair of Celine gold-plated brogues.”

However, that report characterises Lisa Havilah as “Havilah prefers to blend into the background and let the art do the talking.”  Here, on the Canberra Critics’ Circle site, I’ll focus on key points she made in this morning’s speech. 

On my own blog, at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com.au, where my reviews and commentaries are collected together, I have copied the complete text.

Havilah’s story begins:

We have through our practice re-thought what a cultural institution is and can be and worked consistently in modelling and implementing an ambitious multi-year strategy that has clarity of purpose. Our strategy not only asks a lot of us but asks a lot of our artists, collaborators, our partners and our communities.  We haven’t let anyone labour under low expectations. 

As a result over the last 4 years;

-    Audiences have doubled each year and over 1 million people will engage with Carriageworks programs in 2016.

-    Our investment into our Artistic Program has grown by 400% and this year we will commission and present over 54 projects supporting more than 850 artists.

-    Our earned income has more than doubled and in 2016, Carriageworks is forecast to generate more than $7m in revenue.


So how have we done this? We have

- Developed and presented a contemporary multi arts program that commissions and presents work across music, dance, performance and visual arts.

- We have implemented an innovative business model in which we entrepreneur 75% of our turnover through the application of a curatorial framework that brings together the Artistic Program, Major Events and Commercial Programs. This is a circular model, which is complex in application but simple in form. We invest into our Artistic Program, which grows our profile, which in turn grows our commercial and major events programs.  These commercial returns are then invested back into the Artistic Program.

- We present an Artistic Program that directly reflects the social and cultural diversity of NSW, that holds Aboriginal practice at its core and engages new communities. Cultural diversity is a key strategy within our Artistic Program and 70% of our artists are from culturally diverse backgrounds.

We have implemented major multi-year cultural strategies including

A new $2m strategy, Solid Ground, in partnership with Blacktown Arts Centre that provides pathways for young Aboriginal people in Sydney and Western Sydney into arts and cultural employment; and

New Normal, a National Arts and Disability Strategy that will commission 10 major new works by artists with disability over the next 3 years. 

Speaking in the presence of New South Wales State Deputy Premier and Arts Minister, Troy Grant,  Havilah made a strong point of the importance of clear government policy and practical application, saying:

We collaborate with the NSW government who support us to take significant risks in the scale and ambition of our projects.  This support has enabled us to constantly rethink our capacity as an institution. We have built long-term relationships with Destination NSW, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Festival and the City of Sydney.  This year we will work with over 150 partners across our Artistic Program.  We have re-thought and constantly rethink our management and operating systems to develop new hybrid models of activity and outcomes. Our curators and producers have been integrated into one team working across artistic, commercial and community outcomes.

So what is there not to be happy about?  Everything sounds as if it going our way, as Havilah describes:

Cultural institutions should be radical and participatory.  They should lie in the heart of their communities, providing moments of great joy and wonder, they should provide pathways, lead social change and create and deliver on our individual and collective ambition.  We as a community and as individuals should demand a lot of our institutions. They must reflect our everyday lives and allow us to step outside of ourselves - if just for a moment.

But look at the contrast between the NSW Government and the Australian Federal Government, and we see the cause of the establishment of The Arts Party which I have just joined in the hope that change may begin at the next election on July 2.  Here’s how Havilah lays out the situation:

Last year NSW adopted its first ever Arts and Cultural Policy: Create in NSW.  This Policy is being consistently applied by the NSW Government with great clarity of purpose. Within this Policy framework the Government has clearly articulated its vision and provided opportunities for the sector to deliver outcomes. Not everyone agrees with the priorities but everyone is clear on the direction and how they fit or not within a broader policy framework.  Policies are critical rules and directions that everyone understands. This is good government and policy directed investment results in strong returns.

Where things fall apart for the arts is when decisions are made by Government outside of a consistent policy framework. Within a reduced Federal resource base for the arts, inconsistently applied policy and government protectionism for parts of the sector result in inequity for some organisations and complacency by those protected.

Michael Lynch set up the Australia Council’s Major Performing Arts fund over 20 years ago as a bold initiative that that led to extraordinary growth and stability across the performing arts sector in Australia.  20 years later those companies are still our major performing arts companies – but is that it?

Will we have the same group of major performing arts companies for another 20 years? How do we ensure that we provide pathways and opportunities for new companies from the small to medium sector such as Sydney Chamber Opera, Force Majeure and Performance 4A to become the national Major Performing Arts Companies of the future?

Like any innovation in science, research medicine, sustained protected performance-managed government investment is required. Shouldn’t ambitious, new work, new companies and new institutions have an equal opportunity to deliver on any level of ambition that they may have?  We as a community should expect this.

Culture in Australia will continue to suffer unless we have a national arts policy.  This policy needs to be ambitious and enable a new way of thinking about how we support the arts and to what level. We need a policy that centralises Federal government investment to ensure that it is consistent, delivers sustainability across the sector and supports the new.  The ongoing lack of a national policy has resulted in unprecedented damage to the sector. It is not acceptable for the Australia Council, after authoring their strategy, a Culturally Ambitious Nation, to now be put into a position where they can no longer deliver that strategy to any great degree. Is it possible for the Australia Council to remain relevant when their decisions aren’t supported through a broader national policy?

Up with the economists or down to her shoes, Lisa Havilah is a formidable Director of Carriageworks.  “Biggest fashion indulgence?  Shoes. When you have good shoes, you really feel dressed, no matter what else you are wearing.”

The announcement this week of the details of that “unprecedented damage” must be seen as the indictment that it is for federal ex-Arts Minister – who still remains Attorney-General – George Brandis.  His murdering political knives remain as bloodied as Macbeth’s.  “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from [his] hand?  No, this [his] hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnidine, / Making the green one red.”

ALP Red maybe, or The Australian Greens, but surely not Liberal/National Coalition blue?  Yet, to be honest, where is the ALP’s or the Greens’ “Policy [which] is being consistently applied ... with great clarity of purpose [and] within this Policy framework [a potential] Government [which] has clearly articulated its vision and provided opportunities for the sector to deliver outcomes?”  Where indeed?  Whose shoes will we be in, come July?

Recent purchase: Celine gold-plated brogues. Photo: Peter Rae

CURRENCY HOUSE CREATIVITY AND BUSINESS BREAKFAST ADDRESS

At MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SYDNEY  on WEDNESDAY MAY 18 2016.

BY LISA HAVILAH, DIRECTOR OF CARRIAGEWORKS


I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and thank elders past and present for allowing us to be here today. I acknowledge and thank Katharine Brisbane and the Board of Currency House.

In this too cautious world it has been our champions such as the Deputy Premier and others in this room that have consistently supported and believed in Carriageworks. Thank you for taking a leap of faith, showing belief in the new – in the future and in a place that has no direct comparisons and is not easily understandable.

The story of Carriageworks is a great one. It was born like all cultural institutions through valiant battles, through triumph and failure. Carriageworks is a place that is grounded in its context.  It is one of the very few cultural institutions in Australia to be imagined and created in this century. Forever tied to now.  Located in Redfern the black capital of Australia, over 6,000 workers worked in Carriageworks every day– making trains – living lives. Those thousands of people shaped our national union movement and contributed to the development of NSW for over 100 years. Carriageworks has a long history of equity. It is one of the first places to employ Aboriginal people on an equal basis and it is the place where generations of new migrants were first employed.

Carriageworks is the next generation of cultural institution and one of the fastest growing in Australia. Carriageworks is a step forward from the great sandstone institutions that have come before us. We are red brick, more suburban than civic. An entrepreneurial hybrid, made for generations of workers for us to continue to work. So how are we this?  And how have we become this? We have through our practice re-thought what a cultural institution is and can be and worked consistently in modelling and implementing an ambitious multi-year strategy that has clarity of purpose. Our strategy not only asks a lot of us but asks a lot of our artists, collaborators, our partners and our communities.  We haven’t let anyone labour under low expectations. 

As a result over the last 4 years;

-    Audiences have doubled each year and over 1million people will engage with Carriageworks programs in 2016.

-    Our investment into our Artistic Program has grown by 400% and this year we will commission and present over 54 projects supporting more than 850 artists.

-    Our earned income has more than doubled and in 2016, Carriageworks is forecast to generate more than $7m in revenue.


So how have we done this? We have;

- Developed and presented of a contemporary multi arts program that commissions and presents work across music, dance, performance and visual arts

- We have implemented an innovative business model in which we entrepreneur 75% of our turnover through the application of a curatorial framework that brings together the Artistic Program, Major Events and Commercial Programs. This is a circular model, which is complex in application but simple in form. We invest into our Artistic Program, which grows our profile, which in turn grows our commercial and major events programs.  These commercial returns are then invested back into the Artistic Program.

- We present an Artistic Program that directly reflects the social and cultural diversity of NSW, that holds Aboriginal practice at its core and engages new communities. Cultural diversity is a key strategy within our Artistic Program and 70% of our artists are from culturally diverse backgrounds.

- We have implemented major multi-year cultural strategies including. A new $2m strategy, Solid Ground in partnership with Blacktown Arts Centre that provides pathways for young Aboriginal people in Sydney and Western Sydney into arts and cultural employment and New Normal a National Arts and Disability Strategy that will commission 10 major new works by artists with disability over the next 3 years.


Despite our great achievements over the past 4 years creating a new institution that is without precedent has been challenging. We have just begun to deliver our new 6-Year Strategy which identifies a higher level of growth than what has previously been achieved, and a major capital program. Carriageworks is located in the middle of the NSW Governments global development corridor Central to Eveleigh. This is a major opportunity for us an institution to work in collaboration with the development that is happening around us, to ensure connectivity and coherency across a critically important part of Sydney. We as an institution have a responsibility to respond to the social and cultural changes that will occur as a result of these developments.  In turn the developers and UrbanGrowth NSW have a responsibility to Carriageworks to ensure that their policies, structures and plans protect and amplify us as the major cultural institution within the Central to Eveleigh development corridor.

Our growth has been achieved through taking an expansive notion of collaboration and embedding it across the institution. To integrate artist’s priorities into the heart of our strategic planning we commissioned Agatha Goethe Snape to ask artists - what they need from a cultural institution. We have taken new approaches to governance through the establishment of a skills based board who work directly on the delivery of our strategy. We collaborate with the NSW government who support us to take significant risks in the scale and ambition of our projects.  This support has enabled us to constantly rethink our capacity as an institution. We have built long-term relationships with Destination NSW, Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Festival and the City of Sydney.  This year we will work with over 150 partners across our Artistic Program.  We have re-thought and constantly rethink our management and operating systems to develop new hybrid models of activity and outcomes. Our curators and producers have been integrated into one team working across artistic, commercial and community outcomes.

Cultural institutions should be radical and participatory.  They should lie in the heart of their communities, providing moments of great joy and wonder, they should provide pathways, lead social change and create and deliver on our individual and collective ambition.  We as a community and as individuals should demand a lot of our institutions. They must reflect our everyday lives and allow us to step outside of ourselves - if just for a moment.

I was the Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre from 2005-11.  Campbelltown is on of the fastest growing and most culturally diverse communities in the country.  Campbelltown like Redfern, like all suburban and regional areas has complex social, cultural and political histories. It is the role of the cultural institution to be an active community participant. The Strategy that we developed for Campbelltown Arts Centre was designed to deliver social plan outcomes through a culturally relevant internationally focused contemporary arts program.


This collaborative artist and community led approach, resulted in extraordinary audience growth, making Campbelltown Arts Centre at the time the most visited cultural institution outside of a metropolitan city. This artistic programming approach further enabled the leveraging of diverse government investment including health, housing and crime prevention, which grew our turnover by over 400% during this period.

At Campbelltown we created a new artistic model that delivered significant organisational gains through being culturally relevant and establishing a direct relationship between artistic identity and contemporary issues. At Campbelltown we never looked to the major institutions for leadership.  We were our own leaders, not outside the centre, but constructing our own centre.  We never attempted to educate anyone and as an institution we never saw ourselves as the professionals with the authoritative voice within our communities.

We all yearn to be part of something that is bigger than us. There is the community that you imagine, but the one you haven’t seen yet. You don’t even know that it exists but you feel that because of what you have heard or experienced it could exist.   Our young culturally diverse Carriageworks audiences, our future communities, the ones we imagine and the ones that are yet to exist are looking for the detail, for the relationship, for the fine grain, for the experience. As the next generation of cultural institution we are in the middle of the great age of creative entrepreneurship. No one understands this better than artists and they are now turning away from the mega stadiums and from the megalopolis museums that are replicated in the same ways but in different forms across the world.  They as artists, like all of us are looking for community.

Arts and culture needs to be de-institutionalised. Collaboration has to be considered core business and the commercial and the public must be constantly colliding in new ways.  Institutions need to be places that are entrepreneurial, expansive and multi centred. Survival should never be the aim. At Carriageworks we have aimed for excellence with a clarity of purpose and an unflinching commitment to taking risks.  As a new institution we have to work to earn the right to have an equal seat at any table. To compete equally within the known government policy context with those bigger and older than us. 

Last year NSW adopted its first ever Arts and Cultural Policy: Create in NSW.  This Policy is being consistently applied by the NSW Government with great clarity of purpose. Within this Policy framework the Government has clearly articulated its vision and provided opportunities for the sector to deliver outcomes. Not everyone agrees with the priorities but everyone is clear on the direction and how they fit or not within a broader policy framework.  Policies are critical rules and directions that everyone understands. This is good government and policy directed investment results in strong returns.

Where things fall apart for the arts is when decisions are made by Government outside of a consistent policy framework. Within a reduced Federal resource base for the arts, inconsistently applied policy and government protectionism for parts of the sector result in inequity for some organisations and complacency by those protected.

Michael Lynch set up the Australia Council’s Major Performing Arts fund over 20 years ago as a bold initiative that that led to extraordinary growth and stability across the performing arts sector in Australia.  20 years later those companies are still our major performing arts companies but is that it? Will we have the same group of major performing arts companies for another 20 years? How do we ensure that we provide pathways and opportunities for new companies from the small to medium sector such as Sydney Chamber Opera, Force Majeure and Performance 4A to become the national Major Performing Arts Companies of the future?
Like any innovation in science, research medicine, sustained protected performance managed government investment is required. Shouldn’t ambitious, new work, new companies and new institutions have an equal opportunity to deliver on any level of ambition that they may have?  We as a community should expect this.

Culture in Australia will continue to suffer unless we have a national arts policy.  This policy needs to be ambitious and enable a new way of thinking about how we support the arts and to what level. We need a policy that centralises Federal government investment to ensure that it is consistent, delivers sustainability across the sector and supports the new.  The ongoing lack of a national policy has resulted in unprecedented damage to the sector. It is not acceptable for the Australia Council who after authoring their strategy a Culturally Ambitious Nation to now be put into a position where they can no longer deliver that strategy to any great degree. Is it possible for the Australia Council to remain relevant when their decisions aren’t supported through a broader national policy?

The reality is that this is a new ecology. Within this ecology we should strive be more ambitious, have higher expectations of our artists, our partners, government and our communities. This new ecology also requires a different type of rigour not only around what we make but how we make it.  I hope that when the next generation of cultural institution emerges that it will be provided the space, the support the belief and the resources so it can be as ambitious as difficult and as risky as the artists it will support.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: STATE THEATRE COMPANIES CONDEMN LNP ARTS POLICY

STATE THEATRE COMPANIES CONDEMN LNP ARTS POLICY

These are dark days for the cultural life of the country. Today’s losses will have a destructive impact on a generational scale. The variety of our cultural life has been severely restricted. Great artists and great works will fail to materialise as a result.

Here's the link to the Daily Review to read the full article:

https://dailyreview.com.au/state-theatre-companies-condemn-lnp-arts-policy/42411/

and this to the Art Galleries views:

https://dailyreview.com.au/gallery-bosses-lament-lnp-arts-cuts/42709/



©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Play On! by Rick Abbot (Jack Sharkey)

Play On! by Rick Abbot.  Presented by Queanbeyan City Council, directed by Jarrad West at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 10-21, 2016.

Set Design – Brian Sudding; Costume Design – Jarrad West, Joyanne Gough, Marya Glyn-Daniel; Lighting Design – Hamish McConachie; Sound design – James McPherson.

Photos by Gary Schafer

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 10


Many years ago, when I was renting a room in a country town, my old landlady (goodness me, I’m her age now), after soup and mains, would inevitably plonk in front of me a bowl of pink fluffy stuff called ‘flummery’, a sort of frothed up blancmange.  I guess it’s long forgotten now, as I thought plays like Play On! had been.

This is not to say that Jarrad West and his team of largely well-known local actors have not done a good job.  The play is meant to be funny, and there were laughs which finally began to catch the spirit of farce in the last act, but the premise of the scriptwriting – let’s make fun of an amateur theatre group’s ineptitude – just doesn’t cut it in modern times.  In fact, I would say this kind of play was already out of date when Jack Sharkey wrote it in 1980.  No wonder he used a pseudonym – the mysterious, Rick Abbot.

Even the English farces, like The Reluctant Debutante (William Douglas Home, 1956) or Love’s a Luxury (Guy Paxton and Edward V Hoile, 1952) which I amateurishly acted in, in the late 1960s, were far better written.  As far as characterisation goes, only Tony Turner’s Henry Benish (“Lord Dudley”), Steph Roberts’ Violet Imbrey (socialite “Diana Lassiter”) and the exquisite bouncy twinkle-toes of Sian Harrington as Marla Smith (“Doris the Maid”) had enough in the writing to begin to compare.

Of course, it takes a professional quality of directing, design, acting and backstage operating to make a spoof of an amateur theatre group look like the real thing, and to the extent that the script allowed, this un-named company did a good job.  Even a flummery needs a good bit of beating to get up a decent head of froth – and flecks of the opening night of “Murder Most Foul” which the script presented for our delectation were suitably gross in taste and finesse.  The highlight in this achievement was undoubtedly Marion West as Aggie Manville – Stage Manager and Prompter extraordinaire.

The play within the play.

Micki Beckett as Louise Peary - Sound, Light and Scenic Technician
for Murder Most Foul

Steph Roberts, Riley Bell, Sian Harrington
as Diana Lassiter, Stephen Sellers, Doris the Maid
in Murder Most Foul

Bradley McDowell, Riley Bell, Steph Roberts
as Phillip Montague (author of Murder Most Foul),
Stephen Sellers, Diana Lassiter

Riley Bell, Steph Roberts, Duncan Driver
as Stephen Sellers, Diana Lassiter, Doctor Rex Forbes
in Murder Most Foul

Liz St Clair Long, Tony Turner, Duncan Driver
as Lady Margaret, Lord Dudley,
Doctor Rex Forbes (dead)
in Murder Most Foul

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Sugarland by Rachael Coopes with Wayne Blair

Sugarland by Rachael Coopes with Wayne Blair.  Australian Theatre for Young People directed by Fraser Corfield and David Page.  National Tour April 22 – June 23, 2016, Canberra Theatre Centre Courtyard Studio May 6-7.

Set Designer – Jacob Nash; Lighting Designer – Juz McGuire; Sound Designer – Guy Webster; Costume Designer – Ruby Langton-Batty.

Cast
Narek Arman, Eliza Logan, Xanthe Paige, Calen Tassone, Jonas Thomson, Dubs Yunupingu
----------------------------------------
Vale, David Page.  May 4, 2016.

Sunset in Darwin
Photo by Juz McGuire

As the cast of Sugarland return to the stage in Lismore today we acknowledge and pay our respects to director David Page. For those of us fortunate enough to work with him, we were enriched by his warmth, his wicked sense of humour and his enormous heart. For our cast he was a mentor, a guide, a counsellor and friend. For all of us at ATYP he was an example of the extraordinary people that shape the performing arts in Australia. He was a prodigious talent and an inspiring human being.

In our sadness we take a moment to offer our condolences and love to the Page and wider Bangarra family. Our thoughts are with you.

David achieved things during his life that many of us could only dream of. This was made all the more extraordinary in that it was tempered with a humility, and openness that made you feel very close to him. We will carry him in our hearts always.
http://www.atyp.com.au/about/news/vale-david-page

-------------------------------------------

Review by Frank McKone
May 7

Sugarland is a simply told story, performed with consultation and permission from the Northern Territory communities of Beswick and Katherine, concerning the social positives and negatives faced by their teenage school students.  Rachael Coopes writes: I hope we have, in some way, done justice in reflecting what it’s like to be a young person living in that part of Australia, and at the same time explored what is universal about being a teenager.  What it means to be part of this fragmented, diverse, rich tapestry that is our country.  All rivers.  One river.  How are we going to fix it? How are we going to fix Country?

The positive is expressed through the story of a boy, spoken by Nina at the beginning, middle and end of the performance, going to the Gorge, seeing his Country and meditating: All rivers.  One river.


In between, we find that Nina has had to leave her immediate family, because of emotional turbulence and even violence.  She lives temporarily in Katherine in a crowded noisy house where she cannot concentrate on school study, though she is bright and wishes to succeed.  She works at the local cinema, but can’t raise enough money to find a place of her own.  Her final solution is to become pregnant because this moves her up the homeless queue to obtain subsidised housing.

Other students represented are not all Indigenous: one boy is from the Middle East with only a few years’ living in Australia; a girl has arrived, originally from Melbourne but has been shifted by her separated mum to many places around the country.  The teacher is also non-Indigenous, but is committed to her students against all the frustrations of the bureaucratic rules and regulations they face, and she must apply, not only to them as school students but in different ways according to their Aboriginality or non-Aboriginal status.

It is this last point that rang true for me.  I stood behind a person in the check-out queue in an Alice Springs supermarket on one occasion.  How did I come to know this person was Aboriginal?  As she went to put her card into the eftpos machine, it turned out to be a Basic Card – that is, the control card for the person’s income under the Intervention.  She had to leave her goods unsupervised to one side, leave the supermarket to find a Basic atm where she could take out the cash to pay her bill, come back and join the queue until she reached the checkout again.  I thought what kind of government enforces such an embarrassing put-down on its own citizens?

This memory came to the fore as, in Sugarland, Woolworths in Katherine got a mention.  Is this still the only supermarket for the Katherine and surrounding communities (up to 6 hours’ drive away, and inaccessible in much of The Wet) where a Basic card can be used?  If so, that’s entirely unethical profiteering on the backs of poverty and social stress.

As a play, Sugarland consists of short vignette scenes, running for about 90 minutes.  It is quite difficult to find the dramatic focus as the stories of the different characters develop, but finally the point of the show comes clear.  And the performances of the young actors are technically expert, with clear characterisation. 

The result is moving – both in sympathy with the characters as we understand why they are like they are, and politically as we realise the meaning of “All rivers.  One river.”  We are all one community across this country and we must all work together, in government and locally, to give everyone an equal chance.





©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Platform Papers No 47, May 2016

After the Creative Industries: Why We Need a Cultural Economy by Justin O’Connor.  Platform Papers No 47, May 2016 – quarterly published by Currency House, Sydney.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 8

O’Connor is a professorial academic, previously in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology and currently heading up Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash University, Melbourne.  He presents a detailed politico-economic history of the ever-changing meanings, internationally as well as in Australia specifically, given to the basic terms “arts” and “culture”.  My question is, does he reach conclusions which have practical import?

The key point in his history actually occurred in 1974, the details of which are conveniently described by Mike Seccombe in this week’s The Saturday Paper  (No 107, May 7-13, 2016).  This was when the originator of the “Laffer curve”, Ronald Reagan’s economics adviser Arthur Laffer, explained to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld his theory that by cutting taxes governments would “stimulate economic activity” and find “an optimal point that maximised both the return on endeavour and government revenue.” 

This theory became known as trickle-down economics, and turned into neo-liberalism and economic rationalism, emphasising low taxes and small government.

Justin O’Connor states, “Neo-liberalism is a kind of auto-immune disease” and goes on to to say “[Once] we were citizens and patriots, rebellious and dutiful by turns. Cultural policy was an attempt to create institutions that would reflect, create or mould these roles into a functioning unity. Culture was also about self-development, it asked questions about authentic individual experience and the infrastructure required for its extension. Neo-liberalism has removed the need for all this. Culture as self-development – when not dismissed as code for elitism – [is] now best secured by cost-effective market mechanisms of distribution, choice and purchase, and we are all bound together by our aggregated acts of purchase.”

Briefly, in a 7-Chapter essay which he warns us is itself a massive condensation of history, O’Connor shows how “culture” in its many differing definitions has become profit-making for large corporations as the world economy moves from industrial production and selling of physical goods to the selling of services, accelerated by communication on the internet, and profit-taking from ‘financialisation’ of ‘assets’.

“On the face of it,” he writes, this could be “a realisation of Schiller’s [18th Century] dream of the creative society.... But is there a dark side? What if all this becomes – as it does in the creative industries argument – an economy occupied with efficiency and cost-effectiveness, vulnerable to monopoly players providing culture at the right price? In this vision, we have a recipe for the collapse of culture into individual consumer preference; one of those efficiently provided entertainment systems that used to go by the name panem et circenses.”

On the positive side he quotes Stefano Harney in “Unfinished Business: labour, management and the creative industries” (2012: M. Hayward (ed), Cultural Studies and Finance Capitalism, Routledge, London):

Art is closer to people than at any other time in history. People make and compile music. They design interiors and make-over their bodies. They watch more television and more movies. They think deeply about food and clothes. They write software and surf the net of music videos and play on-line games together. They encounter, study, learn and evaluate languages, diasporas and heritages. There is also a massive daily practice in the arts, from underground music, to making gardens, to creative writing camps ... There is a massive daily register of judgment, critique, attention, and taste.

And O’Connor quotes a recent lecture by the composer Brian Eno, commenting that Eno “paints a picture of a post-scarcity society, where robots do all the work, and we will finally have plenty of time for creative self-realisation.  ‘We are going to be even more full-time artists than we are now.’”

But the picture O’Connor gives us of recent events in Australia, from the George Brandis Australia Council de-funding debacle to examples of real estate development on the MONA site in Tasmania and the struggling attempts to “Renew Newcastle” in New South Wales, is anything but encouraging.

From a practical action point of view, all O’Connor is able to suggest is:

As with the reform of the ABC or the arts funding system, we need a knowledge of the real workings of the economy of these sectors in order to secure public value from them. It is this understanding not just of ‘the market’ but of the social, political and cultural underpinnings of this market that I prefer to call cultural economy, and it is only with this knowledge that the cultural values that are central to that economy can be secured. It is the task of public policy to concern itself with these values, and we need to begin a robust argument for them before the very space for such an argument is closed down.

Though I can’t disagree in principle, the problem I see is that O’Connor is not offering any more than the arts community has been doing for all 60 years of my adult life: trying to persuade governments that the arts and culture should be funded because they are essential to individual and social development.  It seems to me that O’Connor is saying no more than that we have to keep advocating against economic rationalism – but we have always known that and in my experience have always done that.

The information O’Connor provides certainly helps us understand better what has and is happening – and I’m sure it is important for us as arts advocates to know.  But I would expect that, even if George Brandis and his ilk read O’Connor’s Platform Paper, they would do no more than Mitch Fifield has done in response to the outcry against the treatment of the Australia Council.  And I don’t see moves from the Labor Opposition in any particular direction on arts and culture. 

Maybe the Australian Greens could be persuaded to consider O’Connor’s thesis seriously, and, if they manage to establish a balance of power position in the upcoming election, the arts/culture community may have a foot in the door.  Perhaps this is the only practical way to achieve what O’Connor asks for, which is that:

We need a new articulation of the social cohesion and individual fulfilment for which culture once so obviously stood. In this we cannot retreat into a defence of art as ineffable and its payment a matter for somebody else’s accountant. We have to recognise that it is an economy but we cannot let the value of that economy be defined exclusively by economists.



©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: Alzheimer Symphony by Justus Neumann and Hanspeter Horner

Alzheimer Symphony by Justus Neumann and Hanspeter Horner.  Presented by Tasmania Performs supported by the Theatre Royal, Hobart.  Performed by Justus Neumann at The Street Theatre, Canberra, May 5-8, 2016.

Directed by Hanspeter Horner; designed by Greg Methe; original music by Julius Schwing; technical director – Wolfgang Kalal.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 5

In writing and performing Alzheimer Symphony, Justus Neumann and Hanspeter Horner have a purpose more related to be being of service in the community rather than competing in the commercial world of theatrical entertainment.  That does not mean that much of the ageing Ferdinand’s struggle with his developing dysfunctional memory is not entertaining, even often quite funny.  And his final stage of confusion and even death is certainly not presented as a tragedy.

The play is about recognition of what is a natural process and about non-judgemental acceptance of that reality by those of us who can ameliorate the effects, as friends and partners, and provide a sense of safety – of being at home – as carers.

On opening night in Canberra, Alzheimer’s Australia led an expert panel discussion with the audience for half an hour after the 75 minute show praising Neumann for demonstrating many aspects of behaviour seen in people suffering the problem, not merely of losing their memory but of being aware of the loss.  I think the essential point was about the fear people feel and how others can help maintain stability – the concept of home.

This was represented in the play by Ferdinand’s extraordinary wheelchair, with everything including the kitchen sink on board.  The core of the drama was a picture that was gradually revealed of Ferdinand’s past as an actor playing the role of King Lear.  Because he forgets his lines (and in that sense finds himself being like Lear rather than acting the role, forgetting his daughter Goneril’s name while remembering Cordelia and Regan), he has managed to put together a vast collection of household items, with tags numbered in the order of the words and phrases in his lines, which remind him mainly by the image, or sometimes by what he does with an object, of the words he needs.

In a tour de force, he finally succeeds through some 30 of these stimulating images to complete a short King Lear speech, beginning “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” (Act III, Sc II).  Later, though he cannot successfully repeat the act, he finds he is able to approach an off-stage beam of welcoming light with equanimity – with confidence that he can go with a sense of satisfaction.  We, watching (and caring) can see him go with pride in his achievement.

The Alzheimer Symphony title also refers to Neumann’s own background as an Austrian migrant to Australia: much of the accompanying music is by Schubert, while the thunder and lightning background which stirs Ferdinand’s King Lear memories sound awfully like the explosions of World War II.

This work is highly appropriate for presentation by The Street Theatre, now touring after its original presentation in Vienna and in translation  in Hobart.  For further information and assistance concerning dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, go to

https://fightdementia.org.au/about-us/our-organisation/governance

for Alzheimer’s Australia website.

Justus Neumann in
Alzheimer Symphony

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2016: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Pamela Rabe, Rose Riley, Luke Mullins as
Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield in
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
All photos by Brett Boardman

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.  Belvoir directed by Eamon Flack.  Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, May 3-7, 2016.

Set Designer – Michael Hankin; Costume Designer – Mel Page; Lighting Designer – Damien Cooper; Composer and Sound Designer – Stefan Gregory; Video Design – Sean Bacon; Dialect Coach – Paige Walker-Carlton.

Cast
Tom Wingfield – Luke Mullins
Amanda Wingfield – Pamela Rabe
Laura Wingfield – Rose Riley
Jim O’Connor – Harry Greenwood

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 4 (opening night)

This touring production must be among the most effective, and affecting, presentations of The Glass Menagerie.  Luke Mullins’ Tom and Rose Riley’s Laura  allow us into the delicate relationship between a sister and brother, each with their own hopes and limitations, each with their own responses to Pamela Rabe’s frantic domination of their lives as their mother, Amanda.  Even though at first I thought Rabe’s characterisation might be too ‘over-the-top’, the fact that her exaggerated behaviour is often funny just makes her more horrifying.

Pamela Rabe as Amanda Wingfield
Dressed to receive Laura's 'gentleman caller'

Pamela Rabe as Amanda Wingfield
Rose Riley as Laura

Rose Riley as Laura, Harry Greenwood as Jim O'Connor -
the 'gentleman caller'

“Blow out your candles, Laura,” says Tom, to bring to an end his staged presentation of his memories, looking back from his new-found but always fragile freedom, knowing that his sister could never escape.

Despite Tennessee Williams’ deliberate use of Brechtian ‘alienation’ effects – and Flack’s extension of these from the simple spotlighting and projected scene titles that Williams described, into modern live and recorded video – to keep our observant and rational minds in play, there were tears and silence as Laura extinguished her flames one by one, into blackout.

There are issues to think about, raised by this particular production, which are of interest intellectually – but only after allowing the experience of the play to sink in and settle in our feeling memory.

First was to see how clever Williams was in creating a character, Tom Wingfield, who appears to us as a quite tentative first-time playwright showing us himself, his sister and mother, and his work-place acquaintance Jim – played perfectly by Harry Greenwood – in a series of significant scenes in a slice of Tom’s life.  To create such a parallel to his own life, including his own struggle as a writer, takes Williams’ first major work immediately into a metacognitive level where we find ourselves thinking about his thinking about both the state of living in such a family and the business of expressing that thinking as an artist.

William Shakespeare was perhaps the only other playwright to achieve this level of complexity, so Jim O’Connor’s nickname for Tom – who was finally dismissed from working in the shoe warehouse for wasting his time writing a poem on a shoebox – was not just an ironic joke.  Tom – Tennessee – Williams really was as good as Shakespeare.

The program notes by Eamon Flack and Luke Mullins include a great deal of useful information and discussion of William’s situation in 1943.  The program is available online at https://issuu.com/canberratheatrecentre/docs/tgm_programissuu?e=1697837/35243007 .  Pamela Rabe was also interviewed by Michael Cathcart on Books and Arts, Radio National on the ABC, Thursday May 5, 2016 (https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pea357N64L )

I had some concern about Flack’s updating of William’s projected scene titles.  I was part stage and lighting designer (and operator) for an amateur production in 1968 (Wyong Drama Group: directed by John Werleman).  We stuck strictly to the published script, putting up scene titles above the action at the beginning of scenes, whereas Flack has made live and recorded video, and even the setting up of equipment by Tom, into an element in the action.

Pamela Rabe as Amanda Wingfield, Luke Mullins as Tom
on screen and on stage

Close-ups (on the two screens, one each side of the stage) were often very effective in giving emphasis to the feelings between characters, but sometimes there was too much distraction caused by, for example, lipsynch being slightly off (between a recording and the same words being spoken on stage).  Although I understood that Tom was doing practical things in putting on his play, on some occasions his being busy setting up a camera in front of action in the house divided my attention too much.  There was also a smoke machine downstage right which sent smoke straight upwards (and related to when Tom went outside the house ‘for a smoke’) but otherwise had little effect or apparent point.

An example I found interesting was that the title Blue Roses, in my earlier production, appeared at the beginning of the ‘gentleman caller’ scene – perhaps cueing in the audience to remember the first scene where Laura had told her mother the ‘pleurosis’ ‘Blue Roses’ story.  The effect was to heighten the expectation about what might happen in that scene, where Jim dances with Laura and breaks the glass unicorn.

In Flack’s production, the scene was well underway, and the topic of Blue Roses just about to be mentioned by Laura to Jim, when the title Blue Roses appeared on the screens.  Of course that reminded the audience of the earlier scene, but it didn’t have the effect of raising expectations and tension from the beginning of the scene that Williams had wanted, I thought.

The production was especially interesting, though, for the way issues arise which, in the past, I had not thought of as so significant.  Naive as I was 48 years ago, before the gay movement was properly established, and not having at that time studied Tennessee Williams’ personal life, I had not interpreted Tom’s “I’m going to the movies” as necessarily more than (as he says to his mother) needing to escape – even if that meant only to find vicarious adventure on the silver screen.

Of course Williams could not be explicit about homosexuality in his time and place, but Luke Mullins nuanced manner in playing Tom makes possible an even more sad ending.  When Jim O’Connor reveals that he is engaged to be married to a woman, both Laura and Tom are terribly disappointed, each for the same reason.

And finally, this production made clear – though it is in the script and yet I had not found it in focus before – that the play was written in wartime.  Tennessee makes his point by having Tom ‘reverse time’ to take us back from 1943 to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.  And so the internal warfare in his family becomes representative of all wars – totally destructive of the value of human life.

Overall, then, Belvoir’s The Glass Menagerie is more than interesting: it’s an excellent production of a great play.

 

Rose Riley as Laura Wingfield
in The Glass Menagerie

©Frank McKone, Canberra