Article: Artists are no longer mavericks at the fringes of society

by NEIL PIGOT

The Age, September 14, 2009

Shakespeare wrote in Measure for Measure that “Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.” Shakespeare was a man who knew a thing or two. So what is the truth of Australian theatre? It's in decline. It's been in steady decline for most of the past two decades and, for some reason, policymakers cannot see it, and the industry and its audience have chosen to ignore it. Theatre in this country has, for too long, been trapped in a limited reality, a white middle-class sport both on stage and in the auditorium, comfortable in its homogeny, creatively self-referential and, it seems, almost determinedly culturally unrepresentative.
To fully understand the problems that surround the theatre, you must first look at the historical record with respect to arts policy.

It is clear that governments do not know how to position the theatre arts. We have to have them because . . . well, we have to! As a result, we are left with an almost obsessive desire to bureaucratise theatre arts. Since the early 1980s, theatre has increasingly been viewed by government as a publicly funded commodity, and so policies have been formed seeking to mandate its meaning and focus cultural practice towards a largely economic agenda, while at the same time finding increasingly more sophisticated ways of trimming subsidy. With major subsidised theatre companies now established on almost commercial footings, ticket prices have risen, cast sizes have shrunk, and programming has become inevitably less adventurous — affecting audience development and creative diversity. Mid-range companies have all but disappeared, leaving the development and staging of more audacious work largely to an under-resourced and often dramaturgically illiterate fringe. It's a program of fiscal strangling so dexterously handled that the Australia Council's most recent policy initiative “Making it New” may truthfully be called “Making it Cheap”.

With these changes has come a steady shift in the position of the performing artist. We are no longer the mavericks at the fringes of society. Subsidy has made us a part of the system. And whereas, in the clear light of day, performing artists should see their art form as a forum for ideas and social benefit, it seems we have become unwitting apologists for our governments' dysfunctional funding model, drunk on the lure of public acceptance and the false sense that a successful funding application means the work we are doing is creatively validated.

We as artists must take some responsibility for this distortion of the creative prism. For while most of us don't agree with arts policy, more often these days our only genuine engagement with it is to make an application for funding, complain of a lack of it, or attack another artist as undeserving of it. We have begun to think like accountants, and in our delusional, sometimes desperate and always marginalised state, our creative independence has been hijacked, and that tiny, unfundable thing that we could perhaps call our creative spirit is being lost.

The situation is further compounded by misconceived theatrical reporting. Reviewers often misunderstand live performance in the same way that governments do, rarely engaging with the creative ideas driving a project and more interested in the perfect or imperfect nature of the outcome. Too often reviews appear that are an expression of a reviewer's personal feelings rather than an overview of public response to a show or a critique of its place within the contemporary theatrical and social landscape. Important work is regularly dismissed, mediocre work often celebrated.

And in all of this we are losing our audience. Or at least, we're not developing new ones. The public have begun to view the theatre as a creative distraction, an increasingly expensive one, devoid of higher meaning and almost culturally redundant.

The performing arts are a tradition that has kept changing over centuries because the social and political issues that it addresses keep changing. More importantly, they are a relationship, and like any relationship, imperfect, requiring effort and acceptance from all those involved. Intellectual apathy within the profession, a warped political conception of theatre, self-indulgent reporting and a public that sees theatre as a series of increasingly expensive cultural diversions have combined to temporarily stall the form, leaving it loitering without intent. The desire is there to have a flourishing performing arts culture, and we have the facilities and the expertise. Melbourne sees it as integral to its international identity.

But if we don't collectively restart the ideas car, soon the journey back to cultural relevance will become exponentially more complicated. There is a very real possibility that the theatre as we know it will slide away from us. And that is the truth.

Neil Pigot is an Australian actor. He will appear in the Melbourne International Arts Festival's production of When the Rain Stops Falling.


For the record I nicked this article from this web page: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/artists-are-no-longer-mavericks-at-the-fringes-of-society-20090914-fms3.html
Kudos to Erin Voth for spotting this article in the first place and posting it on her Facebook profile (which is where I saw it). On Tuesday I posted a blog that was partially inspired by this article and partially inspired by a couple of quotes from Don Watson’s book Death Sentence. You can find my blog here: http://dangerousmeredith.blogspot.com/2009/09/death-sentence-for-arts.html

On the whole I agree with much of what Pigot has written. The only thing that stung a little was the reference to “an under-resourced and often dramaturgically illiterate fringe”. It is true that some Fringe artists could be thought of as dramaturgically illiterate but there are many who aren’t. Any dramaturgically illiteracy is often, in my view, a result of underfunding (Pigot rightfully pairs these 2 ideas in this one phrase). Too many artists not only create work but have to produce it as well and this puts them under terrible time pressure. Younger artists who do not have a developed practice can end up sacrificing rehearsal time to develop work so that they have time to work on administrating and producing their show. This hurts their work dramaturgically. However this is not the case with all Fringe artists. The Fringe festival here in Melbourne has just started and among the many shows on offer there will be a number that have been developed to a very high standard. The tragedy is that they will play to audiences of maybe 10 people a night and neither you nor I will ever hear of them.