CURRENCY HOUSE CREATIVITY AND BUSINESS BREAKFAST ADDRESSWednesday, 8 March 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
by
Jacob Boehme.
Posted by
Frank McKone, from Currency House Media contact
Martin Portus
As
new director of the First Nations Yirramboi festival in Melbourne in
May, Jacob is sharply critical of the limited artistic control, vision
and opportunities experienced by indigenous performers, and the limited
exposure to indigenous arts recently revealed amongst Australians. But
in his address he’s defiantly hopeful about what to do about it! Jacob
Boehme’s life is an interesting blend of themes, as a gay, indigenous
and contemporary artist.
Long an advocate for dance that expresses real social issues, Jacob was at the recent Sydney Festival with his show Blood on the Dance Floor.
Martin Portus
Phone 0401 360 806
Email mportus@optusnet.com.au
JACOB BOEHME
March 8, 2017
Good
morning and thank you for being here so early. I’d like to pay my
respects to the people of the Eora / Gadigal nations on whose lands we
are gathered today and to acknowledge their Elders past, present and
future and to also acknowledge First Nations peoples and their Elders,
representing nations from across our country, here in the room today.
Thank
you Karilyn for being here this morning and taking up the invitation to
provide such a warm and generous introduction. Karilyn Brown and I only
met two years ago. But it has been a meeting of the minds, hearts and
passions that has made this friendship seem so much older than it
actually is. Thank you for being here Karilyn. It’s important to me that
you are here today and important too, that I get the opportunity to
acknowledge and state publicly how much I value you, your support and
friendship: as a colleague, as an accomplice and dear friend. Thank you
I would also like to thank Katharine Brisbane and Currency House for the invitation to speak here this morning.
My
name is Jacob Boehme. I stand here today as a member of the Narangga
and Kaurna nations of Yorke Peninsula and Adelaide Plains in South
Australia, with Irish, English and Finnish heritage. I was born in
Fitzroy on Wurundjeri country and grew up on the lands of the Boon
Wurrung in Newport. I call and consider Melbourne my home. First and
foremost I’m an artist with a background in theatre, dance, playwriting
and puppetry. Currently I am the Creative Director of YIRRAMBOI First
Nations Arts Festival, presented by the City of Melbourne in partnership
with Creative Victoria, gathering creative visionaries from across
Victoria, Australia and around the world in Nairm-Melbourne, this coming
May.
When I accepted the invitation to speak here this morning,
there was much discussion around the various ways in which I might
approach this address and of the topics that I might talk to and
experiences that I could share with you. Whether it be from the point of
view of the artist: Aboriginal and under-represented. Or of the
Aboriginal contemporary choreographer and the myriad of questions,
assumptions and complexities those three words together evoke for
enquiring or skeptical minds.
Or could I talk more broadly
about the consistency of challenges and problems encountered by the
Indigenous arts sector, across Australia? And on a good day, to each of
those topics, I could bend your ear for hours and hours and hours. There
are the ever-present issues of equity and authority to still be angry
about. There is data and statistics to bring about concern, rage and
shock (we’ll get to that in a minute). A ton of information I could
stand here and impart: of us as a nation of nations, of the diversity of
our cultures, traditions and peoples: as both practitioners and
sovereign citizens. Or of the complexities, anxiety and threat we face
internally, within our communities, arts and cultural sectors, when
asked to prescribe to a paradigm that requires us to define ourselves as
either traditional or contemporary.
And either directly or
indirectly, I will speak to each of these topics, but the ‘issues’ and
‘problems’ will not be a point of focus today. Today, I would like to
talk to you about hope: as an essential ingredient when taking or
calculating risk and, more specifically, how hope has been a key driver
in my approach to my new position as Creative Director of YIRRAMBOI.
In
August 2015, the Australia Council for the Arts released research
titled Building Audiences Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts,
examining models and strategies around audience development for
Indigenous arts in Australia.
It starts by outlining in the
introduction, statistics that demonstrate the vast gap between interest
and engagement in the Indigenous arts. 92% of respondents to the survey
considered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts an important part
of Australian culture. 64% expressed a strong or growing interest in
arts created or performed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples. However, only 24% had actually attended an Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander arts event or activity in that year.
The
research also used word cloud techniques to illustrate characteristics
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts that resonated most
strongly with members of the arts ecology, its audiences and potential
audiences. The most common words used to describe perceptions of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts by potential audiences:
Didgeridoo, Dots, Serious, Spiritual and Storytelling.
In
September 2016, the Australia Council released further research into the
situation, this time with a focus on presentation opportunities for
Indigenous artists in the country. Titled Showcasing Creativity:
Programming and Presenting First Nations Performing Arts it revealed,
through national mapping of the programs of 135 Australian presenters,
that First Nations performing arts made up only 2% of the 6,000 works
programmed in 2015. Just as shockingly, half of the Australian
presenters are not programming any First Nations work at all.
Currently,
programming decisions for major arts venues and festivals throughout
most Australian cities and towns are made by non-Indigenous
administrators, with limited networks and/or knowledge of the Indigenous
arts sector or of the complexities of contemporary Aboriginal (and
urban) cultures.
In Melbourne, where I am based, we don’t have a
dedicated Indigenous Arts venue or space for live performance, either
owned or managed. At present, we have one mid-career Indigenous arts
worker who holds an executive position at a ‘community arts’
organization. And at last count, we have eight Indigenous Producers of
live performance, working across Melbourne, with no programming
authority or capacity.
There has been much investment over the
past decade in building capacity for Indigenous Leadership in the arts,
with initiatives such as Treading the Pathways (now known as BlakDance)
becoming the peak body for Indigenous contemporary and cultural dance in
Australia; the Emerging Producers program, generating over 30
Indigenous producers now working in small to medium and mainstream
organisations across the country; and the British Council’s ACCELERATE
Indigenous Leaders Initiative, with an Alumni of over 40 emerging
leaders, building dreams and standing in their own truths, throughout
our states and territories.
We all understand the need for
self-determination, not just for our community but many communities
across the country. But even known allies are sometimes paralyzed with
fear when a conversation about Indigenous leadership and First Peoples
First, turns into action. The unproven fear of losing power, authority
and control far outweighs the opportunity to gain new knowledge.
The
lack of Indigenous leadership in the sector is not just a consideration
from the point of view of representation. It also means that the
content and ‘acceptable’ narratives for Indigenous creative expression
on Australian main stages – assuming that they get to presentation – are
shaped by other, more dominant narratives.
Faced with this
reality and armed with these statistics, one could assume that the
situation for Indigenous artists and the Blak arts sector in Australia,
is hopeless.
In 1994, Simon and Schuster published The Psychology of
Hope by Professor Charles Richard Snyder. Throughout his career, Snyder
published six books and 262 articles about Hope Theory and the impact
hope can have on all aspects of our lives.
Snyder argues that there are three main things that make up hopeful thinking:
Goals – Approaching life in a goal-oriented way
Pathways – Finding different ways to achieve our goals
Agency - Believing that we can instigate change and achieve these goals
In
The Psychology of Hope, which grew out of his own 15-year struggle with
chronic pain, he explores two aspects concerning our ability to shape
our own futures:
Will Power - the will to shape our own future, and
Way Power - our ability to see ways to shape the future
He
explains why a normally positive person can feel confused if they feel
depressed when facing a particular challenge. They still have a strong
will to solve the issue, but cannot see a way to find a solution.
However, once they see a way through the problem, the cloud evaporates
and their sense of hope returns, feeling reinvigorated to tackle the
challenge. We all know the saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s a
way.” But this phrase can be turned around to say, “Where there’s a way,
there’s a will.”
Snyder also analyzes the significant events our
first 18 years of life contribute to the development of hope. Through a
variety of clinical cases, he explores how hope is often destroyed in
children and in adults. He shows how neglect, abuse, parental loss,
unrealistic expectations for the child, and inconsistent parenting can
erode in different ways the child’s ability to envision goals or their
ability to develop strategies to reach them. Now, if we, just for a
second, substitute the words ‘child’ and ‘parenting’ for ‘artist’ and
‘administration’, we get a fairly clear and concise summary of the chaos
the arts community, as a whole, is facing today. For the Indigenous
arts sector, there is a lot to be (potentially) less hopeful about.
I
met the opportunity to take on the role of Creative Director of the
then Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival with an equal measure of
excitement and terror. This new role posed challenges – namely, raising
the profile of Indigenous arts and culture, inspiring participation,
challenging perceptions and developing the next generation of Indigenous
arts practitioners. It is more than just a role, it is a
responsibility.
To play a role, with contractual obligations and
clauses, to me implies that one can hand over, delegate down, even opt
out. A responsibility, however, ups the stakes. It requires of you to
hold space and to take action.
Did I have a goal? Many. Could I
identify pathways toward achieving those goals? I wasn’t sure, but I had
a budget. Did I believe I had the agency to achieve, for my community
and myself, the hopes and dreams I held for our sector? At first, this
wasn’t clear either, but I had a vision of our future and the will to
fight for it. I just needed to find the way.
I’d inherited a
consortia model that consisted of mostly non-Indigenous organisations,
without Indigenous representation within their companies, or a
commitment to Indigenous arts as part of their core business. A model
whereby potential presenting partners were of the assumption that they,
knowing their audiences and in protecting their brand, bound by board
rooms and bottom lines, would feed this first time Festival Director
lists of shows and ideas and I, as the good novice, would curate these
into one cohesive thread under the guise of an Indigenous arts festival.
And when I looked at the list of shows I’d been asked to consider, what
I’d been given was a collection of serious, spiritual storytelling with
lots of dots and, you guessed it, didgeridoos. This just wasn’t gonna
work.
After many frustrated and failed attempts at early
negotiations, a bold and potentially risky move needed to be made. A
vision became a philosophy and a philosophy became a framework. A
framework, which delivered a set of four non-negotiable curatorial
principles, that hopefully we could all be guided by:
1.
Indigenous Leadership – ensuring that every production, exhibition,
concert and idea must have Indigenous creative as the lead. That each
event be conceived, choreographed, curated, written and directed by
First Nations talent, placing First Nations authority and decision
making first.
2. Visibility and Dialogue – seek out, provide and
support new platforms and contexts for presentation, whilst
simultaneously and rigorously creating space for new language and
dialogue to emerge around how we perceive and talk about Indigenous
contemporary arts.
3. New work and Ideas – supporting artists to
present work, at any stage of development, that seeks to go beyond
acceptable narratives and comfortable known outcomes. Not as a matter of
innovation, but integrity. Supporting artists bringing 60,000 plus
years of performance making dramaturgies and methodologies to the fore
of their practice and process, rather than performed cultures on stage.
4.
Collaboration and exchange – to create and facilitate a gathering space
that not only promotes exchange between our mob and First Nations
internationally, but encourages contemporary arts exchange and
collaboration, nation to nation within our country
Still a little shaky in my new shoes, I again hit the pavement, this time with a will and a way. But would they go for it?
I
wasn’t just pitching programming choices this time. I was suggesting
that together we not so much reinvent the wheel, but at least change it.
For as we know, the wheel is broken, the cart it fell off is now best
used as firewood and the horse pulling the cart, is practically dead,
poor thing.
And it has been through an act of hope that a will
and a way forward has been paved by the collective efforts of our
dedicated team at YIRRAMBOI, the City of Melbourne, Creative Victoria
and all our presenting partners. Sure, we lost a few along the way,
whether it be from fear of the unknown, a matter of bad timing or a
clash of ideology – some of us like things just as they are. And that’s
ok, because it created space for new allies to emerge.
Our
responsibility as curators, presenters and programmers of arts venues
and of festivals, is to facilitate space: for the individual and
collective voice. Indeed, this is the responsibility of all arts
organisations – to pave the way for expression and facilitate the civic
engagement of new voices. These may not always be voices we agree with,
at first. But unless they are given the opportunity to be heard – on
their own terms, in their own language, or form, experimentation or
discipline/s – we lose the chance to experience those moments when a
singular voice becomes the will and the vision of the collective. This,
as a curator or presenter, requires courage, hope and a fearless
embracing of risk - because it makes anything possible, and allows any
voice to be heard.
YIRRAMBOI First Nations Arts Festival is more than just dots and didgeridoos.
A 10-day feast of contemporary arts and events, YIRRAMBOI smashes through perceptions of Indigenous arts in Australia.
Showcasing
creative visionaries from across the country and the world, YIRRAMBOI
celebrates the diversity, individuality and creative risks of First
Nations artists leading contemporary 21st century arts practice.
We are more than just serious and spiritual storytellers.
YIRRAMBOI
challenges current language and old notions around what Indigenous art
is, creating opportunities for new language to emerge and a new dialogue
to begin.
What started as a flickering ember and the dream of
one voice, and then a few, by nation and by continent, became the vision
and hope of many, spreading like bushfire. And we, along with many
First Nations cultures visiting YIRRAMBOI in May, have been working with
fire for over 60,000 years.
Fire is the essential element in
Land Care and cultural practices spanning thousands of generations
across what is now known as Australia. Fire is used to eliminate danger,
to heal, to encourage new growth and abundance. And when managed with
over 60,000 years of knowledge, a controlled burn off could be exactly
what this fragile system needs.
