Theatre practitioners united?  

Imagining the future of theatre

Last month, theatre practitioners, producers, presenters and commentators from across the country descended on Melbourne for an industry-wide event probing the health and exploring the future of Australia’s theatre sector.

Two hundred and sixty delegates, including artistic directors, CEOs, dramaturges, playwrights, critics and producers attended the Australian Theatre Forum (ATF) 2009 [http://www.australiantheatreforum.com.au/], held over May 14-16 in Melbourne’s Arts House Meat Market.

But why was it held? And what were its outcomes?

According to the Sydney-based Director of Theatre at the Australia Council for the Arts [www.australiacouncil.gov.au], Lyn Wallis, “the idea of this Forum was really that it be generated out of the industry”.

“It also was generated out of an Australia Council report … called Love Your Work, which came out of research here and was about trying to create stronger connections between the small-to-medium and major performing arts companies,” Wallis says.

“That was actually the impetus for the Forum, to work out how you get greater interaction between those layers of industry; and so from that point of view it was really interesting, because the industry hadn’t got together for 20 years.”

For Chris Bendall, Artistic Director of Fremantle’s Deckchair Theatre [www.deckchairtheatre.com.au], one of the main benefits of the ATF “was the way it brought us all together, talking, sharing ideas over different formats”.

Having recently relocated to Fremantle from Melbourne, Bendall says, “the sense of geographic isolation has become clear, and so opportunities like this, to try and find ways to combat that sense of isolation, to be able to get both the work to tour on a more regular basis and find ways for regular co-production, to find more like-minded companies [and] to make those connections, was particularly key for me.”

“The other bonus,” he continues, “was that it was ideas being shared about the future of the industry, about the way we practice the art as well as the business of making the art. Most of the time when groups like this gather, we end up forgetting about the artistic hat that we wear and thinking about the business hat, just because of the nature of the industry at the moment.”

The art of failure

Bringing together so many theatre practitioners at an event where they could focus on things other than the financial imperatives of selling and touring work, or lobbying government, resulted in some frank, fresh and unusual discussions about the current state of the Australian theatre industry.

As Bendall observes, “There were particularly useful discussions about the importance of taking risks in theatre, in the performing arts; of ways of making space to allow risk and creativity.”

Exploring one such risk – the risk of failure – was a concept that lay at the heart of the Forum.

As the event’s curator/director, Angharad Wynne-Jones, declared on the Forum’s website: “The forum aims to enable a context in the Australian theatre sector in which innovation (and therefore failure) of all sorts, personal, systemic, organisational, technical and artistic can be shared and discussed so that the critical learning, research, development and unexpected outcomes that result from both innovation and failure can be better understood beyond the benchmarks enforced by our current modes of cultural production.”

This notion of exploring and discussing failure – often a verboten subject in the cultural sector – in this context was one that greatly excited Stephen Armstrong, Executive Producer of Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre [www.malthousetheatre.com.au], and one of several speakers at the ATF. (Extracts from some of the speeches made at the Forum can be streamed on the Australia Council website.)

“Being asked to talk about failure for 20 minutes was a pretty special moment,” Armstrong laughs, “and as I was increasingly aware who I was going to be talking about failure with, it got even more interesting.

“If you think about the number of speakers there were at the event – I think there were as few as five speakers on the first day, and then one organized, curated, open forum with five of us on it [on the third day] – now that’s not a lot of topics; and for one of them to be [about] failure, I think was fantastic. That was not like anything I’ve been invited to do before.”

Speaking alongside Armstrong was Kristy Edmunds, formerly the Artistic Director of Melbourne International Arts Festival, and now Head of Performing Arts at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of the VCA and Music.

As she sees it, the risk of failure is an integral component of the creative process.

“You would find that if an artist, or a colleague, or a creative professional, or stakeholder, or a collaborator was not willing to posit that a failure could occur in order to generate innovation, a new approach, and so on and so forth – that’s where things collapse,” Edmunds explains. “The exact same line can lead to an overwhelming success and be a grand slam, but it’s the same process [as can lead to failure]. It’s the ability to pursue that integrity of process that actually causes things to evolve and deepen and grow, you know what I mean?”

Open space

A key element in the success of the Australian Theatre Forum was the way its structure mirrored the creative process.

As Stephen Armstrong sees it, “I think that whole process that we went through [at the Forum], which was all about doing it for yourself – it really was a DIY kind of event – is so reflective of the practice of making art.”

The DIY element of the Forum was facilitated through the use of Open Space Technology, a self-organising process developed in the USA by Harrison Owen after reports that the most productive conversations at conferences happened in the bar or over coffee, outside set agendas and conference structures.

The second day of the Forum was devoted to Open Space discussions.

The many subjects talked about on the day have been compiled in a 249 page document (posted in an online forum on the ATF website in late May) in which some 80 issues and 21 actions are outlined, including conversations about risk, creativity and audience involvement; and recommendations for long-service leave for theatre professionals, and the establishment of an action group around the issue of climate change and the Arts.

“One of the really amazing things about Open Space, it didn’t allow people to fall into [personal] agendas,” Lyn Wallis explains. “You could not actually run an agenda; the structure of Open Space doesn’t support that. If you wanted to have a conversation about something, it happened, you know? You ran your little session and people could come, and if no-one came it meant no-one was interested in it, so maybe you should get over that topic!” she laughs.

Although there were many highlights of the Open Space discussion, including calls for establishing a National Theatre Festival, Wallis singles out a discussion around cultural diversity as one of her personal highlights.

“That conversation was had in many different ways, in terms of racial diversification in casting and what that means; and how that issue might be attacked, because I think there is absolutely an issue there.

“We also talked about how you find bridges with those companies that are actually creating cross-cultural work and really engaging communities; how you incorporate that into the mainstream without appropriating work; and how you actually build really genuine bridges; and of course it’s still our small companies and our community companies who seem to take responsibility for that,” she says.

While agreeing that there’s a risk the Forum could result in all talk and no action, Wallis believes that much good will come out of the event in the next few years.

“I think in this case that … looking at some of those little action plans, they are manageable. That was the comment that was made at the end of the Forum, that maybe some of them weren’t the biggest ideas but they were ideas that people thought they could get a hold of now and run with; and I actually think that’s more important, because I think a lot of the big topics, you know, things don’t get done. They fall in a hole because we’re too busy, we’re all overworked, but the great thing about the Forum is that there were manageable outcomes,” Wallis concludes.

www.australiantheatreforum.com.au