Just read an interesting post on Mirror Up to Nature , a Boston playwrights’ blog. As follows:
“Core to the issue of sustainability is the creation of vibrant art. Without this understanding as a starting point, and as the goal for all artists, organisations and funding agencies, there is no future. Organisations can plan effectively only when they know what they are trying to achieve. Too often they fall into the trap of creating a vision in response to funding policies, and change course to attract program funding that is not core to what they do. The funding system therefore needs to be unambiguous in its expectations and fund only those willing to try to meet them.”
This sounds like it’s from the Australia Council. And I think the simple point —of organizing around a vision, rather than trying to shape one’s vision to the perceived bankability of the organization–is important and often overlooked. Which leads me to our own little local theatre here in Providence: Perishable Theatre. Now Perishable has barely the budget to change one of the big regional theatre behemoth’s lightbulbs, yet under the recent artistic direction of Vanessa Gilbert, it has an international women’s playwriting festival; a season of new plays; a Resident Artist program (modeled on the HERE arts center resident artist program (or HARP) in New York) where about seven artists nuture new work in monthly meetings and showings for a year (extendable for three). It also has a monthly late- night puppet salon and hosts many visiting productions such as James Scrugg’s amazing Disposable Men and New York’s Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf (whose kabuki-punk show was a highlight of last year). Some of the work is great, some is awful—that’s the nature of, er, RISK. (Full disclosure: I’m a Resident Artist at Perishable and they have produced 3 of my plays in the past 6 years. So I have personal reasons to love them too).
My larger point: The ratio of risk to finances in theatre is amazingly skewed towards the smaller, poorer, houses doing the R&D and the larger places then scooping the pool for commercial product. It wouldn’t fly in science or technology, where R&D is seen as essential to the future and ongoing life of the enterprise. Maybe that’s why we have such excellent bombs and such dismal theatre in this country. (Hang on, maybe there’s a connection between dinosaur theatre and lack of investment in experiment? )
Back home in the US! 34 hours travel time took me back half-way round the world, hurtled from Southern Hemisphere summer to northeastern US winter…. Brrr!! I think my brain froze on the drive home from Boston to Providence.
The distance between my countries (Australia & US) can also be measured in the word “Oz”. Colloquial Australian for the country itself, in the US it conjures camp images of Dorothy and Kansas. I don’t even use the word to refer to Australia when I’m State-side, its self-evidence sliding backwards to prove (as if it needed proving) that in the US, local fiction is closer than far-away geography. (If you think this is garbled, you’re right but I plead jet-lag and life-lag—yesterday Bondi surf, today Rhode Island snow flurries. Gaaak.)
Still, there are impressions stirring through the mental fog of an exciting new time in Oz (you know, the continent). A Labor government and whale mini-dramas in the Southern seas–I’d say “cautious” or pre-cynical optimism is the local mood. One of the things that most stayed with me was perhaps a small shift in theatre thinking, a move from an AD/ auteur model as company head to more of a curatorial model. One example: Jane Fuller, the incoming head of Vitalstatistix national women’s theatre in Adelaide (where I had one of my best-ever production experiences with My Vicious Angel) is to be titled “creative producer” instead of “artistic director”. Her current position is Creative Producer of the Adelaide Fringe Festival. In meeting briefly with her, she explained that she saw her role as a curatorial one–bringing together artists and projects from different media to create “experiential” theatre.
I heard this shift echoed in several conversations—the move towards at least considering a curatorial model for heading theatres, in acknowledgment that “artistic director” often bespeaks a painful contradiction for the individual so named—chosen for their artistic work, yet forced into administrative and curatorial work far more than actually practicing their art-form.
This move towards curating or stewardship, rather than the auteur stamp of the Visionary Director, seemed to be echoed in conversation with Nick Marchand (incoming AD at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre). (more…)
Zip. Nada. Zilch. That’s the theatre news. I’m in the remote South-Western Australia forest with my family and the days consist of a swim at the beach; coffee; lunch; reading nap; bush walk; dinner; look at the stars. That’s it. It’s so beautiful here. I’d forgotten how pristine the water and light is here. It’s like being bathed in light from all directions.
In a week I head to Adelaide and Sydney and will be talking with a couple of companies there about collaborating on some new theatre projects. My dream is to set up a bi-national life so I can still be based in the US but return to Australia regularly to work in the theatre and teach playwriting workshops. . . a life that’s much more possible than before the Internet, when leaving Australia really meant expatriation. So, we’ll see how it goes.
