“I’ve never believed the bullshit about how audiences don’t like risk. They actually really do. I’ve seen it. I’ve been in enough audiences that are asleep and I’ve seen them wake up when there is something that unsettles them… I think an audience is dying to be offended.”
– Patricia Cornelius
And… we’re back! Fleur and Jana are talking to theatre-makers from Australia and abroad, with Kieran behind the mixing desk. Our second season is Fleur’s proud baby, and will tackle the topic of responsibility. Over the course of the next ten weeks we will be in dialogue with various practitioners, programmers and thinkers about what ‘responsibility’ means to them and how we remain ethical in art.
Our first guests are playwrights Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves. We talk about responsibility in playwrighting: the words we use, the stories we tell, the people we stage, and the playwrights we give money to.
Discussed in this episode:
Andrew Bovell; academic research and ethics procedures; Aboriginal and white theatre-makers; rulebooks for making ethical art: Y/N?; telling real-life stories: ‘how did you know my first wife was a hair-dresser?’; Diane Brimble; identifying with characters; the whitest story ever told about Kenya; Steven Sewell; why white women are so much more concerned about their responsibilities than white men; why a lion is always played by a black actor; Jana’s students at the VCA; Myall Creek Massacre; George Brandis; and Melbourne Workers’ Theatre.
“I remember reading this fantastic poem by this Aboriginal woman, and it said: ‘If you’re writing this because you want to help me, you know, just fuck off. But if you’re writing this because your liberation is bound up in my liberation, then, you know, go ahead, come with me’. And it was a beautiful invitation.”
– Melissa Reeves
New episodes will be released every 2 weeks, and we have made quite an effort to make them as accessible as possible, on a variety of platforms. There may be some issues with iTunes while we have to remind them that we are still here, but the episodes will be reliably published on this blog, Fleur’s blog, and the official website. Stay tuned and enjoy!
Listen to the episode:
You can subscribe to Audio Stage in iTunes or Player FM, or listen on the official website.
