We do not tell our story well. The system that supports us is patchy, ad hoc and antiquated. Robert Reid reflects on the structural malaise affecting our arts culture.
There is an anxiety that I struggle to name. A feeling that in the Australian performing arts community something is no longer working. It’s a feeling I’d hazard many of us know and give our own totemic names to – government funding cuts, lack of diversity, dying subscribers – but I think it’s much bigger than that and that these are only symptoms of a much broader malaise.
Across the country the performing arts struggle with inclusivity, diversity and sustainability. Their administrative processes are over tasked and unresponsive, their catchments shrinking and their resources dwindling.
These, of course, are symptoms of wider social issues too. It’s perhaps unsurprising that a community formed around cultural practices mirrors the stresses and procedural break-downs seen in contemporary postcolonial cultures generally. All these frustrations and disappointments, these exhausted faces and resigned voices, the barriers and myopic gate keepers, are signs of a social system no longer fit for purpose, moving from stasis into decay.
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I recently attended a meeting with the Shadow Arts Minister, The Hon Tony Burke MP, in Melbourne, an informal gathering with artists and arts workers to talk about policy, raise concerns and share ideas. For a dreary Monday afternoon in a drab undressed black box theatre we were a decent size crowd and a relatively broad representation of art forms – crafts, fine arts, dance, critics, theatre, educators and arts organisations. There were maybe thirty of us in total.
The Hon Member seemed a nice enough guy. He told us about his passion for the arts, for music in particular, and that he likes to travel with his guitar whenever he can. The Hon Member was Minister for the Arts for all of six months in 2013, before the unpleasantness, and has been the Shadow Minister for the Arts, among other things, since July 2016. Indeed, the Shadow Minister struck me much as have many of the series of junior ministers and retiring frontbenchers that have held the arts portfolio in the past. It’s a portfolio usually bundled together with a grab bag of ministries from communications and tourism to sport and the environment. Well-meaning and undetermined functionaries all.
What was the point of this meeting this guy? No strategy was developed, no action taken, no statement of policy or demands drawn up. Some of us, those not still too disillusioned or tired to speak out, had their say: more money for arts; what is an artist anyway; less bureaucracy in arts funding, a creeping suspicion of “creative arts”, including newer forms like design and games, in the funding process; the usual complaints about the major companies; the usual assertion that the small to medium and/or independent sector is more than just a training ground for the mainstream; assurances from the Shadow Minister that culture is vital to Australia and that should they get into power the current opposition will fully support them. Etc.
I can’t think what this meeting achieved. A few people sat together in an old theatre for an hour or so and, mostly, felt bad together about the state of the arts.
*
We do not tell our story well. We do not articulate the value of the performing arts well. The system that supports us is patchy, ad hoc and antiquated, but is no less entrenched for that.
Several commentators have pointed this out. In his 2013 Platform Paper Revaluing the Artist in the New World Order, David Pledger characterises the small to medium and independent arts ecology as “infrastructure heavy, ideas light, inflexible, under resourced and counter intuitive.”1
In The Arts and the Common Good, Katharine Brisbane describes the slow creep of the changes occurring in Australian performing arts. “This process has been gradual, but today novelty, spectacular design, star actors in revisionist productions of familiar classics, are evidence of loss of energy and a flagging imagination.”2
Finally, Cathy Hunt sketches the issue facing the community in Paying the Piper: There has to be a Better Way. She claims that we have “reached the “use by date’ of a funding system that has served the sector adequately for the past forty years but is no longer fit for the purpose.”3
If it is true that the performing arts community in Australia is beset by problems caused by system-wide entropic decay, then our task at some stage must be not simply to “solve” the problems and carry on but to assess the sustainability and operation of the system itself and consider if the current processes are worth continuing.
To do this, we need to step back and see the community as a whole, to assess how it is operating and, most crucially, ask ourselves if its methods and outcomes are still relevant. If, as I suspect, we find that the solutions to the problems of yesterday are no longer adequate to the obstacles of today, then we face the choice to adapt and create new structures and systems that address those obstacles, or to continue to support the infrastructure until it inevitably collapses
In 1979 Jack Hibberd suggested that the organisation of companies and their support structures in Australia – much the same then as now – should be replaced with
…a multi–focal poly–centric theatre structure…whereby you break down the major monoliths into smaller more intimate theatres only seating 200 and have a whole spread of them through the cities and you have community centres around the country, regional theatre, and you have a different kind of actor, one that wasn’t brought up in the old pseudo–English repertory–elocutionary–mannerist mode of theatre which is just a piece of cultural slavishness [….] So, that needs a whole revolution for a start before you are going to get anywhere.4
Impractical as it may have seemed at the time, is this still such an unattractive concept?
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Loosely speaking, a system is any group of agents interacting in an environment. The classic example is a pond with fish and bacteria and birds, all feeding off each other and co-existing in routines that sustain the pond itself. In each case, a system is a group of things with some degree of agency (hence “agents”) operating together and affecting each other within an environment. A system evolves and either achieves homeostasis, a productive and sustainable balance between its individual agents, or it fails and collapses. The longer a system carries on and the larger it grows, the more it must adapt to the changes in its environment in order to maintain homeostasis. If the system does not adapt, it gradually builds up entropy that leads to stasis, decay and eventual system-wide collapse.
Norbert Weiner’s 1948 introduction to systems theory, Cybernetics, says that systems are not only mechanical or biological: their metaphorical frameworks can be applied to human behaviours and social organisations.
The degree of integration of the life of the community may very well approach the level shown in the conduct of a single individual, yet the individual will probably have a fixed nervous system, with the permanent topographic relations between the elements and permanent connections, while the community consists of individuals with shifting relations in space and time and no permanent, unbreakable physical connections. … Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members.5
In this sense a social system can be a group of people who set out to do “something” together. They establish goals, roles, rules of engagement, decision-making processes, and so on. They become a community with an established set of practices and aims – a social system.
In Australia around the 1940s, a group of people began to establish a system that would eventually support and generate a certain kind of performing arts experience which they felt was under-served by the existing system. The pre-existing national commercial network, J.C. Williamson’s, was beginning to falter. At the same time the founders of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (the AETT) constructed a system that would gather money for and generate awareness of contemporary European drama and the “professionalised” theatre in Australia.
Today the system established by those founders is not just the AETT’s eventual successor, the Australia Council (Ozco), but also the Artistic Director-led repertory subscriber season company model, the metro-centric company distribution, the endless festival cycles, and the hierarchical constructions of cultural value as “excellence.” As JCW’s before it, this system is showing signs of entropic stress and decay. Many of these signs are addressed in the Currency Platform papers series. Together they paint a picture of the industry as it is now.
In his book When the Goal Posts Move, an analysis of the disastrous funding cuts under then Arts Minister George Brandis, Ben Eltham writes that “excellence” was never an artistic concept. “No national cultural policy can coherently articulate what ‘artistic excellence’ even is, let alone devise a policy which procures more of it. Instead, ‘excellence’ was simply the name given to the policy of supporting the major companies and institutions – those big companies that attracted the support of the elite class of art-loving bank CEO’s, company directors and merchant bankers.”6
In his 2013 Platform Paper Revaluing the Artist in the New World Order, David Pledger writes that “the idea that infrastructure solves the problem of the artists limited resources is fallacious. One reason is that governance structures come with conditions, often implicitly denoted, that suffocate and inhibit the artistic processes which they are supposed to support….There is a one-size-fits-all approach to the independent and small to medium sector. The fact is these areas of artistic production are varied, complex and changeable.”7
In Paying the Piper: There has to be a Better Way, Cathy Hunt sets out the major problem. “There never has been a coherent national system for funding and financing the arts in Australia. We have a group of agencies at different levels of government (as well as more and more foundations and individuals) that may be interactive and interdependent but certainly do not form an integrated whole and can still make unilateral changes without regard to their impact on the other players. Call it what you like, but it is not what we need to build a ‘culturally ambitions nation.’”8
In his 1985 book Arguing the Arts, Tim Rowse questioned whether a single system could produce a diverse culture. “It is a fiction quite inappropriate to a pluralist society, in which culture and values are in dispute, to think that there is a single ladder of excellence along which all endeavours can be placed,” he said. “But that fiction is sustained partly by the existence of an effectively singular set of public funds, whose controllers make judgements in the form of grants. This then is the first element in the utopia – that Australia is sufficiently homogenous that we could act according to a singular consensual scale of values.”9
These observations show the strains being placed on the system. They are descriptions of entropic drag caused, arguably, by the inappropriateness of the system itself. Inflexibility and increasing layers of administrative across the system increase systemic drag, contribute to the increase of entropy and manifests as the strain placed on artists and the failure of policies.
Today the structures and systems of the performing arts in Australia are the remnants of the system built to support the Union Theatre Repertory Company, NIDA, the Old Tote, and the ABC Orchestras. Serious consideration of our theatre culture rarely includes the professional commercial theatre, the suburban amateur theatres or student theatre, despite the vital role each of these sectors should play as part of the wider industry. Its industrial and non-governmental apparatus has developed organically around the companies and communities they were developed to support, and excludes vast aspects of the performing arts community, serving niche interests and ultimately transient audiences.
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In 1979 Hibberd said we should deconstruct the whole thing. It’s worth going back to re-read the quote because it covers a lot of interesting territory, including the use of council arts venues as homes for independent artists, new training structures, and new interfaces with the public.
Though all systems eventually tend towards stasis and decay, they also exist to perpetuate themselves. If they remain responsive to the changes in their environment, systems can evolve and transform.
Hibberd’s argument for regional expansion has some merit today, as populations begin to concentrate on the fringes of the greater suburban areas of our cities although our systems remain concentrated on the centre. The suburban arts complexes built during the 1980s and 1990s are coordinated by a range of administrators who book independent touring works and commercial children’s theatre, but they could also, for example, be used to house a number of independent companies to share resources, produce work for and develop relationships with local audiences. The same companies and venues could coordinate to develop and present new Australian works in a network that connects around the country and operate as a de facto National Australian Playwriting company.
None of these ideas is particularly new: they’ve been advanced in the past by Theatre Hydra, the Melbourne Independent Theatre Project, The Mill Community Theatre … the list could go on. They each demonstrate a systemic response to local environmental conditions. What would be new, I suppose, would be applying this thinking globally.
The realities that underlie these suggestions beg age-old questions. Where will the money come from? Who will direct the deconstruction of the old system and the implementation of the new? How will each local situation be developed responsively to community needs? How will they coordinate? How will we determine and share value in such a pluralistic structure? Such questions are, of course, far beyond the scope of this paper. I write only to propose that the way things are at the moment is not the way they have always been and not the way they need to stay.
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The exhaustion felt across the sector right now, the tired sighs, the slumped postures I saw huddled around the Shadow Minister that day in Melbourne, is not simply that of the people at the coal face of the practice, unfunded artists. It’s not just the groaning of the overloaded major companies and the funding bodies that support them, already too burdened but still expected to do more. It is the exhaustion of the whole system, worn down by maintaining itself since the 1950s and carrying forward the structural values and assumptions of a world nearly ninety years old.
Australian theatre history can be traced along lines of pre-colonisation, convict, actor manager, commercial and government subsidised epochs. Our current age, the age of the government subsidy, the age of the AETT and the Ozco, is struggling to adapt to the contemporary environment. Notions of excellence and international prestige remain as vestiges of a colonialist mind set. Imperialist structures of centralised power coalesce into exclusivist community and industry structures. Inequality grows and propagates systemic sexism, racism and classism. The arts are increasingly privatised and enclosed.
Systems stiffen as they age. The life leaves the pond.
The anxiety which I struggle to put a name to – the feeling that I sense in the work of our artists, the programming of our companies and the cuts to our funding – is systemic drag. It is the sign that the solutions of yesterday, the values and the structures that shape our community today, are no longer fit for purpose.
Citations
1 Pledger, David. Re-Valuing the Artist in the New World Order. Currency House, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2013, p.25.
2 Brisbane, Katharine. The Arts and the Common Good. Currency House, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2015, p.32.
3 Hunt, Cathy. Paying the Piper: There has to be a better way. Currency House, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2015, p.3.
4 Hibberd, Jack. Quoted in Palmer, Jennifer (ed.) Contemporary Australian Playwrights. Adelaide University Union Press, SA, 1979, p.128 – 129.
5 Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1948 p.156.
6 Eltham, Ben. When the Goal Posts Move. Currency House, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2016, p. 20.
7 Pledger, David, op. cit., p. 4 – 15.
8 Hunt, Cathy, op. cit., p.3.
9 Rowse, Tim. Arguing the Arts: the Funding of the Arts in Australia. Penguin, Ringwood, Vic, 1985, p.34.
Further Reading
https://culturalpolicyreform.wordpress.com/
http://www.janeannehoward.com/
https://theconversation.com/a-new-approach-to-culture-82448
https://dailyreview.com.au/flabby-populism-elitism-arts-policy/63044/
12 comments
Maybe the arts and the artists in Aus are just shit, and it’s as simple as that.
Much love,
Someone who used to think the arts were amazing, but no longer does.
All the arts? Every single artist? That’s a bit, well, sweeping… Does this count for art that isn’t Australian? But I am deeply interested in the reasons why you no longer love the arts. What caused the disillusion? – Alison
Oh, Farewell, i know that feeling, i really do. But my argument isn’t really about whether Aus arts are any good or not, but whether the system that produced them is working. Good and Bad are largely agreements made amongst the people served by the system about what has value. If the system itself is failing it doesn’t matter if the artists are good or not. I’ve seen shows overseas and i’ve seen some of the international stuff that comes to Melbourne Festival and from a personal perspective that Aus Artists are really no better or no worse than artists all around the world.
R.
Brilliant article! A great synthesis of the way we got to where we are and the history of attempts at change. Completely concur with the Hibbard model with regards theatre. Until the monoliths at the top (that take their lead from the moribund mid 20th Century UK repertory companies) are completely deconstructed for something lithe, flexible and accessible, the innovative, ground breaking artists and models coming through (like those you sited; Hydra, Melbourne Indy Theatre Proj etc), will always, always bang their heads on the way up. There is simply no way through for these practitioners. (And the ones who do make it through are subsumed inside the edifice only to disappear after a few seasons of work-like fine stones thrown into soggy marshmallow). The intractability of the model of the Major Performing Arts Company sits ominously like a great glass ceiling above Australian artists heads. A brief season of umbrellad indy works or a new slate of commissions just won’t cut it. The creative stream IS flowing strong, fresh and clean, but when it meets the dam of these overarching institutions is it any wonder it becomes stagnant and fetid. There’s a reason for the tired looks in the eyes of Australian artists (and I might argue audiences as well)! Year after year through a succession of senior leadership changes (some of them good ones) the model itself remains in place. Is this a problem of gaze? As long as we are looking elsewhere, for both the model of artistic delivery and the content we are delivering, we belittle our own capacities at greatness and, most importantly, impoverish our audiences.
Thanks Anthony. Yes yes yes to all you said. Rowse and Brisbane have some interesting opinions on the impoverishment of Australian audiences. There’s a lot more to be said about it. I like the Hibberd plan too. He had some other good ideas back then too. Problematic in real terms, of course. But then what isn’t. Might be i’m just arguing that the system of theatre in Australia needs to be reconstructed putting the relationship between the audience and their artists at the centre rather than a fairly limp pursuit of international accolade. But i feel like those thoughts are going to evolve over time here on Witness as i talk with more of you.
R
Great stuff, Rob. It’s hard not to be drawn to the Jack Hibberd model, isn’t it? What would a city of 50 La Mama-esque theatre venues be like compared to a city of one big state theatre company and satellites? Or could two such ecologies co-exist? Which do we need more?
hey ben, thanks man. Yeah, i know right? More work, more audiences, more artists…. there’s more room for us all if we aren’t all fighting for the same central spot….
I’m late to this, but it is interesting to note that most of the exciting/interesting/brave/successful/dangerous/compelling/any number of other good terms work in Sydney is happening in the Independent sector, with practitioners rarely being paid and with no Govt subsidy. Of course, one could argue that this has always been the way as careers develop and experience is gained, but up here we are now seeing those Independent companies doing great new plays that once would have been picked up by the STC or Belvoir and doing them exceptionally well whilst STC/Belvoir continue the classics/re-jigged (adapted) classics/safe show choices with predictable casts and predictable results. The best work on Sydney stages is regularly at The Old Fitz, Sport for Jove and other Independent venues. The Jack Hibberd model is still attractive, particularly in the light of Regional Cos. losing their State funding some years back so the failed STC Actors Company could be funded, which is what I believe happened. One of those companies was the Riverina Theatre Co, at the time the longest continually running Regional Theatre Co in the country and one that I was a founding member of back in the mists of time, so that hurt. Yes, it could be argued that a Company such as the RTC, like any system, may have reached it’s end point anyway, but that is not the point. It existed within the community and offered theatre to that community with ownership. It has been replaced by the FIFO model of touring shows which generally originate in the City and usually have no connection to the various communities they visit, having been chosen because they’re ‘good for touring’ (whatever that means – small casts I’d say in the main).
I’m VERY late to this & I probably need to review the article with more scrutiny (I think it’s a great article!), but I think there’s a danger lurking here – especially in regard to the “Hibberd model”.
While I agree that, as Hibberd points out, there was & is a real need to move away from stifling colonialist aspects of theatre-making & arts policies toward inclusive practices & acceptance of diversity from policy to playing, I disagree completely with the notion of what has since become an obvious leaning toward an “Australian” “de-facto” anything. That is a slippery slope, because WHO determines themselves the most “Australian”, what GROUP determines the values that I, for example, as an independent artist SHOULD have, what kind of COUNCIL of “elders” can make those sorts of decisions? Leading to what de-facto standards of diversity & quality?
It seems that if you pull away from one set of values, without changing a fundamental WAY of thinking, you’re going to hit another set smack bang into a brick wall – again not fit for purpose. And all the old over-arching ways of thinking will just have new clothes & the old argument will merely include ever-newer names, terms, definitions, leading to essentially the same closed systems. New clothes for old ways of thinking. And this is the very knot of the problem.
To really grapple with changing needs we need to have a fluid & permeable frame that is nimble, responds to specific needs, that values plurality, & focuses with a level head on policies that allow art-forms to be what they need to be. Meaning, that art-forms/values/practices/companies/artists must not be forced into shapes that reflect outside alien policies but are free to reflect what should be reflected: the diverse practices of the art-form, whatever that may be, for companies to be free to fulfil the needs of their practices, rather than fulfil political agendas, whether federal or state, or targeted audience demographics – what a furphy that is! Talk about misleading us into thinking spectators are some sort of homogenous group rather than as thinking independent individuals who change & develop (hopefully) as we enter different stages of life.
So let’s for a moment go back to a time when wanky words didn’t get so much in the way, when things were a bit rougher. During the Renaissance & Elizabethan times, the theatre, for example, was a rich, very eclectic mixture of the “highest” aristocratic based theatre patronised by the wealthy down to the “lowliest” single performer strutting their stuff on the streets living on charity. It was a market-place of conflicting ideas & styles. In its very roughness there was an openness to ideas, forms, rituals, enactments, performances. It’s stages were large theatres, chamber spaces, intimate gatherings, two planks & a passion, all sorts. All sort of ideas, concepts, styles were in the mix. I believe what we need today is exactly the same roughness.
When new names are exchanged for old ones towards anything “de-facto”, the inevitable problem reasserts itself ie. towards a “national guideline”. Brr, I can think of nothing more onerous. This, to me, is the “systemic drag” that Robert Reid states so well. We need openness to the idea of DIFFERENCE rather than different. Implicit in this notion is the presence of LIFE. We need to encourage that. We need imagination itself, as Daniel Keene mentioned in a public address not too long ago, to be “seditious” even to the values it holds dearly, even to the art form itself, rather than give credence to demographics & politicisation of the arts. These are only skin-deep momentary measures that, sooner or later, will again be seen to be not fit for purpose. The kind of sedition I’m referring to is always on the move forwards, keeps things healthy, allows us to be nourished by different tastes, not forever chewing on the same bone, for companies, artists & communities.
Perhaps, a way forwards to a more nimble, efficient guidance to plurality of funding, of resources, of imaginative ideas & practices by arts companies & individuals, imagination & discussion must come from every sector so that the playing field can be as equal as possible. So that we don’t get a situation where Ozco awards 3 circus companies in one year funding or continued funding while thoughtful, imaginative, un-classifiable theatre projects get not even a look in. That’s taking demographics too far.
Hibberd’s ideas make sense, but in the very repudiation of the structures he is arguing against there is an indigestible problem: emperor’s new clothes. In this Trump-driven age of lies, it is of paramount importance to believe in what you actually see, not what you are told to see.
Hey Alan
I think we agree mostly. I’m not a fan of the hierarchical structures baked into the theatre community that an actual National Theatre Company would represent the “pinnacle” of. I tend to think that hierarchical structures like national – state – local theatre companies are inimical to performance as a social practice. They serve market forces and authorities far better than the art and the community.
I do think there is currently a de facto national theatre mindset about the current model and i think we agree that, while it’s been useful in the past – sort of, not really – it’s certainly no longer fit to purpose. I turn to the Hibberd model as an example of other ways the practice of art by the community can be structured, rather than as any kind of blueprint for the future. Ultimately how the community carries out the practice of performance will shift and change over time and the structures that seem so permanent now will not prove to be.
A funding model that can recognize those kinds of shifts and respond to support them is unlikely to be anything like the size of an Ozco – a few people making decisions on behalf of a comparatively vast community. I don’t know what that funding or support mechanism will be really but i do think that so far, the solutions founded either on the market or on the government have proven to be unsustainable in the long run. What’s attractive in Hibberd’s model is its focus on the micro level of the system, which i think translates into local communities involved in the production of performance, verses the macro, which is one big company trying to cater to the amorphous “Australian’s” you’re right to be suspicious of.
thanks for writing
🙂
R
Hi there Robert,
Thanks for your thoughts & article. I hope this is not taking you too far back! But I do think it’s an important topic. Actually I think it’s critical. Because policies, bureaucracies, as we all know, can & do affect people’s, certainly artists’ lives, for good &/or ill. Whether artists can even sustain themselves enough to pay the rent. The situation is dire, no politician really cares or takes seriously the arts in general (except for suck-up parties at the end of some gala performance) & this is confirmed by the level of poverty in the general population let alone the artistic one in such a young country – it’s truly breathtaking. There are also many unused spaces littered about our major cities that could be turned into living & working studios, performance spaces, workshop venues, etc. But there is no political will to take any of this seriously. And it’s for another conversation.
I think presenting Hibberd’s views is valuable. His ideas do make sense & he is one of only a few people that has taken the argument from, as you state, the macro right through to the micro & I understand your cohesive reasons for presenting the case. I agree that no “blueprint” can ever be a complete answer, it is a falsity anyway, it may work for robots in certain automotive fields & such like (& the way things are going in AI, it may not even there!) & inanimate objects, that don’t change, but as for human beings blueprints are certain to fail.
I don’t know what the actual mechanisms might be either. But I come back to DIFFERENCE as INCLUSION. I believe this understanding is the only legitimate way forward. It implies DIVERSITY in its widest sense. In relation to the Arts for me this means giving equal voice to the NEEDS of arts practice, that what may work for a large company may be anathema to a small one. That focusing even further on resources being available to individual performers to develop their work & to mount productions should certainly be more available to enrich the art as well as the communities that benefit when they witness it.
Perhaps a way to funding can be incorporated from large to medium companies providing a portion of their income (relative to earning) to small ones as part of the democratising of our institutions so that there is more inter-institutional dialogue & give & take. And ALL artistic companies from every discipline should be involved. Certainly the corporate world could assist as well. Corporations will not be dying off soon so maybe they can help. For these, I’m talking about skimming off some of the fat & the re-distribution of some of those millions. There is so much profit floating around that stakeholders can still be satisfied WHILE companies give back to the wider community. Perhaps I’m being naive here..
One point I have to mention about national theatres. I worked at the National Theatre in London as an actor & an usher way back in the ’90’s. I saw this as a great way to learn my craft at that level through direct observation, lots of shows etc. Obviously I wasn’t present at policy discussions. But I did enjoy the sheer diversity of its output from Greek classical texts, to Shakespeare, to revitalising modern British/American/European iconic texts from Priestley to Wilde to Bond to Hare to Mamet (& many international writers), providing a platform for new English writing which focused on local politics & events. Aside from actual performances there were Platform Papers with lunchtime talks with local & international directors, theatre-makers, actors, designers, musicians, etc. What appealed to me was the diversity & inclusion of ideas & theatre-making from various areas of the profession. As an audience member I felt catered to. That whatever the shortcomings of a national “something”, it was providing a broad platform of different works providing a huge number of jobs on both sides of the performing platform. This has value all down the line, it creates a history of excellence (in this case) & learning can build on learning, work on work. I have often felt here in this country that because, for example, Ozco determines the financial structures so tightly (because of lack of funding from the top), are so dependent on “demographics”, that we, as audiences, are often deprived of the creative mine-field that is under our noses from our local artists. Who knows how many brilliant shows, ideas, forms, directions have lain dormant & rotted away in obscurity because of such narrow mindsets that unwieldy structures like Ozco inevitably present? They are like dinosaurs stomping on the nourishment they seek because their heads are so far above the ground their eyes can’t distinguish what is below.
So the point I’m making about this particular National Theatre I witnessed was that they fulfilled a very valuable role, that of a creative, energetic, hub. Yes it was more or less text-based, yes it was centralised (though they did tour), but it was identifiable, it had heart, & due to their large budget (never large enough according to them) could afford to do what they did. Whether you agree with its standards, practices, values is another matter. But it gave London an identifiable home & spirit, it encouraged local artists, audiences both local & abroad, & international artists by their presence became unofficial mentors of sorts to younger artists. There were workshops conducted by local directors with local actors often looking at non-text based ways of working & it became a learning & practice hub. It joined with Festivals to create further outreach. And all these are a form of visible practical research that benefits everyone. With many creative spin-offs. Unfortunately it also depends on the disposition of whoever heads it at the top & again this a field for another conversation.
No national anything can be all things to all people, but it did, as I saw it, offer creative value. There are all sorts of positive areas for change here. It is not further evidence of Cringe, which would mean a slavish adoption, but rather a plea to learn what works from other models in the world & instil those life-giving principles. It asks for a different mind-set, that of inclusion of difference itself, it points to broader creative opportunities for lively & positive change toward sustainable artistic practice & funding for lasting benefit for artists & audiences.
PS: can we get some white space between paras?? 😊
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