The Performing Arts in Australia

What is this lecture about?

The performing arts in AustraliaAn overview of the range, diversity and

achievement in this sectorAn outline of the structure and some of

the ideas that underpin and drive this sector

Provide some appreciation of the great deal of activity that there is in this sector

Australia

British Playwright David Hare said that:

“if you want to understand the social history of the country, you cannot do better than study the plays of the period”.

This can be extended to the whole of the arts.

The performing arts of a country

tell us a great deal about the resources, the interests and the diversity of that place.

The choice of Themes: the stories that are told Content; how those stories are conveyed Characters; who we choose to tell those stories Settings: what places, times and terrains are chosen Designs: realism, naturalism, absurdism, post

modernism, indigenous. Venues: inside or outside: from the Sydney Opera

House to the Darwin Town Hall Ruins

For example

@ La Boite theatre you can see Tender Napalm @ QTC you can see Kelly – a retelling of the

story of an Australian bushranger who represents the ambivalent relationship with Authority

@Metro arts has Under the Radar @ Expressions Dance you can see Dance

Energy @ QPAC you can see Jersey Boys @ the Brisbane Festival Yarrabah! the Musical

Facts and Figures

Australians are keen participants in the arts Nine in ten Australians participate in the arts.More than half of Australians attend live

performancesOne in four Australians go to the theatre, one in

four go to see the opera or classical music and one in six go to see dance.

Australians believe that the arts are an important part of life and should receive public funding

Some facts and figures

Australians attitudes to the arts are overwhelmingly positive, with almost all Australians agreeing that:

“the arts should be an important part of the education of every Australian”

“the arts should receive public funding”“the arts make for a more richer and

meaningful life”

The broader arguments for the significance of the arts

Tourists are eager consumers of Australian art and culture As are locals who increasingly engage through the many

festivals Learning through the arts helps children achieve better

results in school Students who train in the arts use their skills for creative

thinking to support a vibrant Australian economy The creative industries are major contributors to GDP and

jobs The performing arts create jobs and contribute to GDP

The Performing arts in Australia are

A diverse and mix of art form, cultures and peoples – a meeting point for cultures

Resilient in the face of the changing economic, social and cultural lives of people in the many communities.

A dynamic and eclectic mix of the professional, the commercial and the amateur

An important bridge across the lives of many communities socially, economically and creatively

An example of diversity and range

Show from You tube

Marrugeku Burning Daylight

Marrugeku Crying Baby

The Performing arts in Australia

Dance

Music

Aboriginal Music

Popular Music

Classical Music

Theatre

Much of the performing arts underpinned by

Strong amateur traditionsResilient commercial performing arts

sectorConsistent government support over the

past fifty yearsSmall, but active contemporary

performance sector the readings provide examples of the contemporary

sector

Government Funding

The single most influential factor in the Australian arts sector in the past 50 years

Available from all three levels of government

Originally designed to deflect the pressures of the market place as the arts were not seen as being able to support themselves

The arts seen as a public good

Government Funding

Funding purpose often caught between arguments about the intrinsic or instrumental value of the arts

Governments now looking for value for money and want a visible return for the investment: jobs, buildings, improved social conditions

Arts organisation have become very good at arguing the social benefits of making art, the commercial benefits of a vibrant arts sector.

Government Funding

Some see this as occurring at the expense of art making itself

Others argue that too much reliance on funding removes the critical pressure of the box office

Without funding we may not have Les Miserables or Warhorse-both developed in funded situations.

Terracini argues that there should be about 30% funding, 30% coming from sponsorship and the rest of an arts company’s budget earned through box office.

The Literature (some of it)

In Repertoire: Contemporary Performance

In Repertoire: Contemporary DanceIn Repertoire: Performance for Young

PeopleSome of the companies, the

individuals, the productions, the ideas and the images that are and have informed the contemporary performing arts

The Performing arts in Australia

Dance

Music

Aboriginal Music

Popular Music

Classical Music

Theatre

Dance

Classical DanceContemporary DanceA great deal of crossover between

various forms of dance

Classical Dance

Strong classical tradition Strong involvement in dance

throughout the community: many classical dance schools throughout most cities and communities.

Ballet companies in most statesThe national classical company is

celebrating its 50 year of operation

Contemporary Dance

Sydney Dance CompanyDance NorthLucy GuerinChunky MoveExpressions Dance CompanyStrong classical technique supporting

work that is innovative and unique

Some examples

Show from ‘you tube’:Sydney Dance Company 6 Breaths

Bangarra Dance Company Terrain

Music in Australia

Classical Music

Popular Music

Aboriginal Music

Classical Music

Symphony Orchestras in all statesThe Australian Chamber Orchestra led by

Richard TognettiThe ACO IS the best chamber orchestra in the world.

They don't come from Germany. They don't play like a German orchestra. They play like Australians, with great energy, enthusiasm AND exciting ideas in their playing (Terracini)

Show from ‘you tube’:The Australian Chamber OrchestraThe Australian Chamber Orchestra The Glide

William Barton

Indigenous man from Mt. Isa with growing national and international reputation

Multi- instrumentalist but most known for his use of the didgeridoo

Works in many classical music settingsHas worked with Australian contemporary

composers such as Peter Sculthorpe

Symphony Orchestra 2011 Grand Finale - William Barton Didgeridoo

Music Theatre

Since its early days Australian stages have been filled with musicals; usually imported they ranged from the British pantomimes and classic American style musicals of the 20th century

The 1980’s saw Australia embrace the world wide movement of musicals led by such shows as Evita, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon et al. This trend had a major impact as many Austrian performers began training to become triple threat performers: sing, dance and act.

Recently Sydney was touted as the out of town tryout for musicals like An Officer and a Gentleman before it made the move to the perilous New York stages.

Contemporary Music Theatre

Contemporary music theatre take many forms and occur in sometimes surprising locations.

It takes chamber opera in new directions, engages with new media and the visual arts in installations, includes innovative musicals and through scored stage plays for adults and young people, theatricalises the concert, transforms grand opera, and looks set to reach a growing audience through television, radio, national and international touring.

IHOS

IHOS is a performing arts company based in Tasmania, Australia, with an international reputation for original music-theatre and opera. Works are multicultural, multilingual and exploit multiple art-forms, blending voice, dance and sound with installation art and digital technology.

IHOS has origins in the Greek-Australian tradition. The company was established in Hobart in 1990, by composer and artistic director Constantine Koukias, and production director Werner Ihlenfeld.

IHOS

The Barbarians: commissioned by the Museum of Old and New

Art, is an immersive and remarkable new opera by Constantine Koukias, inspired by the iconic Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy.

Performed in modern Greek with bilingual narration, the opera is the product of a large collaboration of designers, musicians and singers, with a Greek Chorus of ten men.

From YouTube: IHOS The Barbarians

Opera

Oz OperaTraditional Opera Company stages the

classic opera repertoire Iconic eventsShow from YouTube

Opera Australia Handa OperaSouth PacificYarrabah! The Musical: a co-production

between Opera Australia and the community of Yarrabah in North Queensland

Circus

A long history in circus, both traditional and contemporary

Australian audiences have long embraced Circus Oz, The Flying Fruit Fly Circus and a host of physical theatre companies that

work outdoors, in theatres, in circus tents across the country or, like Legs on the Wall, abseil tall buildings.(Gallasch, In Repertoire)

Some contemporary Circus

Circus OZThe Flying Fruit Fly CircusFrom YouTube

Circa 46 Circus acts in 45 minutesFrom YouTube

Legs on the wall Homelands

Theatre in Australia:

Contemporary

but not so much classical

Belonging by John McCallum

Australia as a continent is a strangely vacant place, in which many people have struggled to find a place.

For the first invaders - convicts and their jailors huddled on the coast – there was at first nothing out there.

Plays were written in a marginal land by and for exiles

Theatre exploring questions of whether we actually belong here

Nowra’s play The Golden Age dramatises the extraordinary complexity of what ‘ome’ might mean in a country full of exiles and the dispossessed.

For people then and now, Australia is a large, seemingly empty continent!

Much theatre was and is concerned with: Alienation and a deep sense of not

belonging/ of worth (early settlers through to present day)

Search for unity / nationhood (turn into the 20th century) – theatre was challenged by how to represent Australians to themselves; used the bush legend to do this;

Many plays portrayed men and women, husbands, wives and families struggling to survive the country, the droughts, the floods and the isolation

Australian themes

Does it define itself in terms of a relationship with this land?

The question of belonging / insider or outsider

To distanceTo historyTo the suburbsTo classTo naturalism

Australian Theatre

There is a national pattern of theatrical activity based on these structures:

a mainstream theatre company in each city, a strong alternative theatre company in each city a commercial theatre based on high-quality

productions of imported musicals and emerging local scripts

a number of smaller, independent theatres servicing the specific needs of either conservative or adventurous audiences

Vigorous community theatre movement

Australian Theatre

Consistent commitment at all three levels of Government to supporting the arts

A network of venues throughout the country Plethora of academic & private arts training

entities Ever improving standards of acting, design and

production 21st century culture: cross art/ form

collaborations/ New ways of making and producing theatre and performance

Some examples

From YouTubeLa Boite What if La Boite didn't exist?

From YouTubeBelvoir St Theatre ‘death of a salesman

Key Influences on performance making

Festivals & Fringes (360 in Australia, approx.)

Brisbane Festival Sydney Festival Adelaide Festival Perth Festival Melbourne Festival Darwin Festival Alice Springs Festival Ten Days on the Island

Fringe Festivals

Adelaide FringeAlice Springs Beanie FestivalDesert Mob

Other Voices

Wesley Enoch:‘Time for the arts to show society a way

forwardThe arts are important for the health and

vitality of a community Indigenous arts offers such vision and

leadershipCultural, political and social leadership are

all manifested in indigenous arts practices’

Jim Sharman says that:

Australian theatre began with the corroboree, a ritual dance-theatre integral to the lives and culture of its community.

The notion that theatre, and art in general, are divorced from life and its rituals, as a diversion from life, took root with the arrival of European culture

Jim Sharman says that:

Storytelling would also have been and is part of traditional culture.

In the legends and tales crucial to any society is a direct connection between past and present

It's a small step from the tribe clustered in a cave around a storyteller silhouetted by a camp-fire's reflected flames to our modern tribes gathered in a theatre, or in that labyrinth of caves known as a cinema-complex.

Aboriginal Theatre

Underpinning much of the theatre is a desire to inform and perhaps find a way forward - reconciliation

A way forward to heal and move onmuch of the underlying purpose of

Aboriginal theatre seems to be about a ‘cultural leadership’

Bran Nue DaeA Turning Point in 1989

o Twenty years of social and political activism began

o Emerged from the 1960’s Aboriginal Civil rights movement

o Writers, political activists, actors, dancers and song writers began to contribute

o Used the mass media to promote their message

Some Key contemporary organisations

Bangara Dance Company in Sydney

Ilbijeri Theatre Company in Melbourne

Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre Company in Perth

Stalker Theatre Company/ Marrugeku.

Elcho Island Dancers N.T.

Tjapakai Dance Theatre in Cairns

- And maybe the Chooky Dancers!

The subtle influence of this important tradition remains in fine theatre pieces such as

Terrain or Matthina by Bangara Dance Theatre

Jandemarra by Steve Hawke Namatjira and Ngapartji Ngapartji by Big

hARTWaltzing the Wilarra by Yirra Yakkin Mimi by MarrugekuShanghai Lady Killer by Stalker Theatre\Coranderrk by Ilbigerri Theatre

Deborah Cheetham

A Yorta Yorta Soprano, composer and author Commissioned to write a piece by the Olympic Arts Festival

(1996) and the Festival of the Dreaming White Baptist Abba Fan, is an autobiographical account of

Deborah's life and includes arias by Handel, Puccini, Catalanni, Dvorak, Gounod and Addams.

In 2010 she wrote and produced an opera Pecan Summer: performed by a cast of Indigenous and non-Indigenous singers,

The opera tells the story of the 1939 walk-off of 200 Yorta Yorta men, women and children from the Cummeraganja mission in southern New South Wales, across the Murray River into Victoria.

From YouTube Indigenous opera takes shape

What was this lecture about?

The performing arts in AustraliaAn overview of the range, diversity and

achievement in this sectorAn outline of the structure and some of

the ideas that underpin and drive this sector

Provide some appreciation of the great deal of activity that there is in this sector

Finale

Namatjira and Ngapartji Ngapartji by Big hART

Ngapartji Ngapartji From YouTube

Nothing Rhymes With Ngapartji

Thank you.