Cultural Justice and the Right to Thrive by
Scott Rankin. Platform Paper No 57, November 2018 (Currency House, Sydney)
Commentary by
Frank McKoneNovember 15, 2018
“Culture, and therefore cultural rights, are not the gravy on the economic meat and potatoes. Culture is nutrition itself.”
If anyone can speak for community arts and cultural development (CACD), Scott Rankin can.
I first saw the work of BIG hART, with the Pitjantjatjara people, telling their story of Trevor Jamieson’s family history in
Ngapartji Ngapartji.
It was shocking to see the effects on the country and the people, of
invasion by horse and camel, of the World Wars and worst of all, as I
wrote in the
Canberra Times, January 17, 2008, “the explosion of
nine major atomic bombs and many smaller bomb trials from 1953 to 1965
which killed and irradiated very many Pitjantjatjara and other Central
Australian people. Jamieson’s parents were orphans, refugees from their
own country.”
I knew then that Rankin would be a force to be reckoned with, and reading
Cultural Justice and the Right to Thrive
now makes clear what was meant by the acknowledgement in that review
“Written by Scott Rankin and co-creator Trevor Jamieson”. At the time I
imagined the two of them sitting down in a clay pan writing the script,
but – to use my kind of terminology – they were enablers, finding the
way with the whole community to express what needed to be told: firstly
for themselves and ultimately for the rest of the world.
This is what Rankin calls “thinking big” and explains the title of what became the non-profit company BIG hART.
Before
you read this Platform Paper – which is essential reading for theatre
practitioners and critics – it would be good to know with whom you are
dealing, to quote Pirate Jenny (of
Threepenny Opera fame). This
requires a substantial quote from the January 2008 (ie a decade ago)
annual Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture given by Scott Rankin at the
Sydney Festival:
"The phrase, ‘Taken with a grain of salt’, means
something like ‘to view something with a healthy dose of skepticism’.
Its original meaning, however, was far more onerous and dates back to
the the rather imposing figure of Pliny the Elder who was born around
79AD and wrote the best selling tome,
Naturalis Historia, in which he nominated salt as an important antidote for poisons. In addressing [the title of the lecture] ‘
DIY Virtuosity versus Professional Mediocrity’, I may inadvertently mention such things as:
The process of creating new work with large groups of people;
I may accidentally mention the word ‘community’;
I may allude to the idea of ‘political’ work – both in terms of content
of the theatre piece and the processes used to produce it;
It may appear that I’m suggesting that the individual-messiah-genius-as-artist is not the only way to create theatre;
You may even think I’m suggesting that governance should not be the
main preoccupation for the boards of theatre companies; or that the pool
of ex-Cranbrook, ex-Grammar, ex-Macquarie Bank Sydney
business/legal/professionals is not necessarily the best pool from which
to draw one’s board members for an arts company.
"[These are]
all dangerous, subversive and poisonous concepts I know, so pass the
salt if need be. From the other point of view, I may inadvertently use a
dangerous word like virtuosity, or
Somehow suggest I’m happy with the term ‘élite arts’ and that, God forbid, the term is useful;
That there is a place for the individual vision of an artist, and that
not every work has to be committed to the mediocrity inspired by
creation through committee;
You could misconstrue my words to
suggest that somehow I think theatre is something more than just the
nightly retail of small oblong pieces of printed cardboard, the hiring –
for two hours – of an uncomfortable seat and the flogging of an
overpriced glass of sponsored plonk and a wedge of cheap Cheddar cheese.
"In
the current ‘either/or’ Arts climate, many of these concepts are of
course poisonous,so, if I were you, to be on the safe side, I’d follow
the advice of Pliny the Elder, and just quietly help yourself to some
salt, should you be feeling a little queasy."
(Full text in
Australasian Drama Studies No 52, April 2008)
So that was the background to the
Ngapartji Ngapartji project,
the whole Pitjantjatjara community work which, I think it’s fair to
say, stunned the establishment from its inception at the 2005 Melbourne
International Arts festival as a work in progress, through the
production I saw at Belvoir, Sydney in 2008 to the 2011 International
Community Arts Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands (
Ngapartji One).
On the way it was seen in
2006 Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs (Developmental Showing)
2006 Melbourne International Arts Festival (World Premiere)
2006 Sydney Opera House (Language Show)
2007 Perth International Arts Festival
2007 The Dreaming Festival,(Language Show)
2007 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, (Language Show)
2008 Sydney Festival, Belvoir St Theatre
2008 Ernabella, (Open Air Community Showing)
2008 Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
and finally (perhaps) in 2012 Canberra, Canberra Theatre Centre (
Ngapartji One)
BIG hART and Rankin’s Platform Paper make it clear that this work is a ‘project’. The next most well-known is the
Namatjira
project, which has wonderfully resulted in the copyright in Albert’s
paintings only recently being returned by the Northern Territory
Government to the family, with a compensation payment for that
government’s wrongdoing in allowing their Public Trustee to sell the
copyright to a private art-selling business. The stage play was
reviewed here on October 19, 2010 at Belvoir, Sydney; the movie
documentary
Namatjira Project appeared in October 2017.
In Canberra, we have been grateful to have hosted another huge BIG hART project,
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters
at the National Museum of Australia, originating with the Martu people
of Roebourne, Western Australia – “Stories originally performed on
country are shared in new ways, with artworks becoming portals to the
deserts of the Martu, the Ngaanyatjarra and the Anangu Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara peoples.”
[
http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines ]
In
his speech today, launching Platform Paper No 57 at the National Museum
of Australia, Rankin – recently announced as the Australian of the Year
for Tasmania (where his career began in Burnie, following the closure
of the timber mill some 25 years ago) – pointed out two key issues
concerning Australian Indigenous people.
The great preponderance
of government funding goes to a relatively small number of Major
Performing Arts Companies – only one of which, Bangarra, is Indigenous.
At the same time the huge preponderance of smaller companies receive
between them barely one third of the MPC total funding.
And, he
explained, cultural justice is about supporting all cultures within the
overall Australian culture, with the Indigenous people not only having
arguably the greatest need on socio-economic grounds, but especially
because of the longstanding nature of their culture.
While
European culture has been here in Australia for some 10 generations,
and the culture of Ancient Egypt began some 130 generations ago,
Aboriginal Australia goes back an estimated 2,400 generations, and is
still evolving. BIG hART is engaged with the Murujuga Aboriginal
Corporation who manage their 40,000 year-old rock art on the Burrup
Peninsula, in the Dampier Archipelago near Karratha, Western Australia,
as they make their claim for UN World Heritage Listing – for the art,
the first in the world to depict human figures and faces; and for their
continuing culture in which the art is a crucial element in educating
each new generation.
When I reported on the
Big Ideas recording about the
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters
exhibition, on this blog November 17, 2017 [broadcast on ABC Radio
National, January 24, 2018], I was struck by Scott Rankin’s manner.
While the Indigenous women, the curator Margo Neale and designer Alison
Page held the floor, where was the firebrand one imagines from that Rex
Cramphorn lecture? Here was a quiet, almost self-effacing participant,
very much in keeping, I thought with the manner of the young Martu man,
Curtis Taylor, whose film-making with his elders made the telling of the
story so personal and engaging for the blockbuster crowds of all
cultural backgrounds who visited the exhibition.
As you see the firebrand Rankin again in the section in the Platform Paper called
Stat-chat: CACD funding 2017-2018 and his final chapter
The Way Forward,
the answer is to remember the quotation from Rex Cramphorn (who I have
to admit taught me achingly briefly for an hour or two in a summer camp
workshop and was a major influence on my own drama teaching). As an
introduction to the annual Memorial Lecture given by Scott Rankin,
Cramphorn’s words were:
I believed that my most important
function was to establish an atmosphere in which the grace of creativity
might fall on any member of the group, giving him or her the right to
lead the work.
Rex Cramphorn
When
I reviewed a project from BIG hART’s Project Cosmopolitana and the
resulting stage performance local to us in the Canberra region –
Ghosts in the Scheme
– about the community in Cooma who had built the Snowy Mountains Scheme
in the mid-20th Century, I felt that it had not “produced highly
effective theatrical storytelling of great significance to the wider
Australian community” as I had seen in
Ngapartji Ngapartji and
Namatjira. [September 2, 2015].
Now,with Cramphorn in mind, I can read
Cultural Justice and the Right to Thrive and come to understand how Scott Rankin could tell you as follows:
Firstly, in his launch speech today, that BIG hART’s is a ‘non-welfare approach’, and in the Paper itself:
“There
is never a perfect project and failure is always a critical part of the
mix. Being a humble listener, rather than focusing on delivering
‘solutions’, is a vital skill for artists in these cultural rights
settings.” Ghosts in the Scheme was a case
where the essential value of the project was in the process, rather than
a conventionally staged product. Even so, it did have strength in the
songs and performances by Michael Simic and his
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen.
I had taught Michael and knew his father, who had come to Australia
from Eastern Europe and worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Mikelangelo, of course, continues a successful career today.
[
http://www.mikelangelo.net.au/ ]
At
the launch today he performed songs developed from that show, in the
presence of his parents – and confirmed in conversation with me the
value of that project as cultural justice for the community; for the men
who
“Wake in the dark / Work in the dark/ Sleep in the dark” in the hope that some day
“The sun will shine in”.
Biassed as I may be, I say read Scott Rankin and be glad for CACD (and fund it at its real value):
“Cultural
policy must be rebuilt from the ground up to meet the urgencies of the
twenty-first century. We need to stop encouraging debilitating clusters
of cultural sameness, while robbing high-needs communities of their
human right to culture. Robbery is what it is.”
© Frank McKone, Canberra
