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Feb 07 2012
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2010, cultural policy, essays, journalism, overviews, published, RealTime, starred

Cultural policy and the arts

Save Live Music in Melbourne - a petition with 22,000 signatures calling for the the delinking of live music and “high risk” licencing conditions, delivered to the Victorian Government, April 7. Photo: www.carbiewarbie.com, with thanks.

IT IS A COMFORTING THOUGHT THAT AUSTRALIANS ARE GREAT AT ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SMALL-SCALE INNOVATION, BUT LET ME SUGGEST ONE THING WE DO EXTREMELY BADLY: LONG-TERM AND LARGE-SCALE STRATEGIC PLANNING.

IF SUSPICION OF GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION IS RIFE, IT MUST BE BECAUSE WE HAVE VIRTUALLY NO EXAMPLES OF A WELL-THOUGHT-THROUGH, AMBITIOUS AND SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIC INTERVENTION. FOR EVERY INNOVATIVE ECO-BUILDING AND LANEWAY FESTIVAL, WE HAVE A FAILING PUBLIC TRANSPORT NETWORK OR A FORGOTTEN CARBON EMISSIONS SCHEME.

One-person innovation has traditionally been the domain of artists — this is the thinking behind many a ‘creative industries’ policy. The corollary is that artists are perceived as situated outside large systems (ministries, policy frameworks) as subcultural rebels, creating on the geographical, economic and social margins, needing no infrastructural support for their ephemeral creations.

Yet, looking at Australian arts in urban terms, another picture emerges. My research finds almost every arts venue in Melbourne since 1991 clustering in loose clouds around public transport, state art centres and educational facilities, and moving around to avoid the worst of the real estate boom—in music, design and performing arts alike. It is tempting to attribute artistic success solely to individual genius, but there is in fact cultural infrastructure in place, which includes schools, low rents and central locations, on which every artist relies, and this infrastructure is what cultural policy can begin to protect.

the importance of breeding places


It is common in artspeak to talk about defunding artistically irrelevant institutions, as Gavin Findlay does, but it is actually the uncertain funding of institutions that emerges as a bigger problem. For small- and medium-sized companies, flagship buildings to perform in and independent programming venues are a vital link to peers, critics and audiences. Convinced of art’s ephemerality, we forget the importance of ‘breeding places’: spaces and events that yield exposure, attract audiences, house archives, provide education and build social centres for the fleeting world of the arts. They serve their role best when their location and program times are unchanging and predictable—because then they can become meeting points, exchange points, networking points.

When we speak of the ‘independent’ artist, we sometimes forget how much artists depend on each other. Our few remaining theatre archives, the only memory-keepers we have, are tied to institutions with longevity (STC, Dancehouse, arts centres, state libraries); while VCA, Dancehouse or La Mama in Victoria, or Performance Space and TINA in NSW, are actual incubators of ‘scenes’ (social capital, an aesthetic, training), ensuring continuity to the arts. We can myopically boast a long list of important places and events that have ceased operating, from Pram Factory to the Green Mill Dance Project. Our lack of regard for ‘breeding places’ is best exemplified by the treatment of Performance Space, possibly the most important space for contemporary arts in Australia. A living incubator of innovation since the 1980s, having nurtured dozens of our most important performers, it has still not been recognised as a cultural flagship, let alone endowed with a permanent space of its own or operational autonomy within CarriageWorks.

The arts can and do punch back — but only if the issue can be sold in more than artistic terms. As I’m writing this, Victoria’s liquor licensing laws are being tweaked to save The Tote, a ramshackle music venue, from closure. Politicians were more worried about the voting preferences of the 200,000 protesters than the cultural significance of The Tote, granted; but the 200,000 saw The Tote as an indispensable part of Melbourne’s culture, not a den for a handful on society’s margins.

This hasn’t come out of nowhere: at least since Espy, the iconic music pub in St Kilda, was threatened with closure in 1997, live music has been promoted as a key part of Melbourne’s ‘cultural’ specificity. However, there must be a better way to protect cultural incubators than with rallies.

culture as a given

For many arts practitioners, the debate on the national cultural policy may look suspiciously like yet another thing to complicate already-fuzzy KPIs — but it would be unwise to limit the discussion to arts funding, because it is about more than that. To admit to a ‘culture’ is to say that there are things that we do that are important and worth protecting, because they make us who we are, regardless of their economic, health or social outcomes. In a sense it is irrelevant whether ‘culture’ includes media (as in Germany), is defined as “anything that stimulates closeness” (as in Croatia) or is left undefined (as in many European countries that nonetheless have robust cultural policies). It is primarily a principle of protection.

Artists should understand the power of words. At the moment, ‘economy’ is one of the powerful ones. Being good or bad for the economy, vaguely defined, is argument enough to defend or shelve a policy. Agreeing that we have a ‘culture’ would allow a whole new string of arguments to be made and, with due respect to David Throsby, defend the arts not on the grounds of its goodness for the economy, community or health, but simply as important for our culture.

Of course, arts policy in Australia already assumes ‘culture’: our funding of opera is otherwise inexplicable. But let me give you a sense of what else ‘culture’ might protect: in the 1990s Amsterdam initiated Broedplaats (“Breeding Places”), a squat protection policy, recognising them as incubators of creativity. “No Culture Without Subculture” was the mayor’s rallying cry. Formation of ‘alternative cultural centres’ is common throughout Europe, with a kind of light heritage overlay protecting use, rather than the form, of a building. Palach, in Croatia, has been an alternative music venue/gallery/café/performance space since 1968. It has had its dull phases, of course, but a new generation of bright young things inevitably emerged, taking over the same central location and benefiting from access to facilities, a ready-made audience and previous generations of artists. Similarly, the Save the Espy campaign in Melbourne could not rely on existing state laws to protect the beloved music pub: it didn’t qualify in terms of architectural, community or social heritage. After a prolonged fight, Espy was ultimately saved in 2003 because the local council managed to install sufficient protection on the grounds of local ‘cultural’ significance.

Save Live Music in Melbourne (SLAM) poster.

cutting across policy areas

Another intervention that only national cultural policy can achieve is the nurturing of systems, interventions that cut across policy areas and require departmental collaboration on the federal level. Many have been picked up in the submissions to Peter Garrett’s cultural policy discussion website: simplification of artist work visas, greater support for regional and overseas touring (having no national culture, Australia has no sustained cultural diplomacy either). To this I would add improvements to arts education, understanding the importance of subcultures and integration of arts institutions into the urban fabric—giving them centrality, advertising, public transport. What was the point of investing millions in CarriageWorks, if it is still sitting next to an underdeveloped train station, in a dark street, untouched by a single useful bus line? A comparatively cheap intervention into public transport would have quadrupled the returns on the enormous investment. Instead, one of Sydney’s most central performance venues manages to remain hidden to most of its population.

But what I would like to see most is some meaningful form of social security for artists. In most countries with ‘culture’, artists benefit from tax exemptions and reductions, access to free health insurance and pension funds, and different forms of income support that usually don’t require active job seeking. It is a measure that gives artists some modest existential certainties, but it’s also an intervention that the Australia Council for the Arts cannot initiate on its own.

art without culture…?

Judging from the way we mangle our strategic policies across the board, there is no reason to assume Garrett’s national cultural policy will get everything right. But defining ‘culture’ as an intangible, but protectable and nurturable good is the first step towards building systems, structures and strategies that ensure longevity for what we’ve got. We need culture if we want to remember, and be remembered ourselves; if we want our art to matter. Without ‘culture’, we’d have no culture wars, true, but also no values, meaning, sense. Without culture, nothing differentiates the arts from any other unprofitable industry. And without culture, there is literally no subculture.

Jana Perkovic is working at the University of Melbourne on an ARC-funded research project titled “Planning the Creative City”, studying the geographical clustering of independent arts in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and the relationship between arts policy, demographics and urban planning. She writes for RealTime on contemporary dance and performance in Melbourne and Europe.

First published in RealTime, issue #97, June-July 2010, pg. 10.

Oct 11 2010
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blog, essays, journalism, multiculturalism, women

Swimming pools, Muslims, and the burqini in Dandenong

Very interesting opinion piece by Julie Szego in the weekend’s The Age on a women-only Ramadan event at the Dandenong pool, at which all women aged 10 or up must be covered from knees to neck if they are to attend. The comments are a predictable mix of people saying “Try and ask for a similar concession in a Muslim country”, “THIS IS A WAR”, “Why aren’t they assimilating?”, “Islam is the only religion that wants to take over the world” on the one hand, and “it’s an issue of equity”, “some of these women are isolated” and “so, according to your argument, I should be able to turn up to my daughter’s wedding in the nude” on the other. The article, however, does try to analyse the issues: women’s rights, the requirements of public pools to serve whatever community they have living around them, issues of equity, and tolerance. It’s up online, for anyone to read.

It is, however, interesting to read the discussion if, like me, you come from a slightly different angle: I have spent years trying to find a proper sauna and swimming pool in Melbourne, ie one that doesn’t require a neck-to-thigh cover for women. All the therapeutic benefits of sauna are cancelled out by sports swimwear, especially of the full-torso female type, and it is not just beyond unpleasant to sit in 90 degrees covered in lycra, it is also stressful on the body, and potentially dangerous. I could frame it as a discrimination problem: if men can get away with tiny speedos, why aren’t women allowed in topless? But I think it is more probably a prudishness problem (see, for example, the case of a Brisbane sauna-as-art). It all gets much worse when I raise the question of mixed-sex sauna: the immediate, automatic answer this seems to provoke is ‘EWW’, or ‘why would you want people other than your boyfriend to see you naked’?

+++

Compare and contrast.

Now, two things. First, it must be clear by now that I really cannot see Australia as the land of freedom to show one’s body as one likes. The whole argument of Western secular liberalism which celebrates the body, or even of some Aussie tradition of baring flesh, is simply not correct. There is a reasonable amount of Puritan disavowal of the body going on, or of sexualising all nudity at all times. As the Finnish artists themselves remarked, “there are cultural differences” between Finland and Australia. And, you know, it would be impossible to argue that this prudishness is not in any way connected to religion. The subject of nudity in the Australian society is so touchy that it’s ridiculously hard to even raise it in polite conversation without everyone getting red in the face and starting to crack jokes about paedophiles. (Which is, frankly, ridiculous. As is the oft-made remark about not exposing children to adult nudity. Children, especially toddlers and very young kids, could not care less.) Compare Australia to Scandinavian countries, to Germany, even France or Italy or Croatia, all places in which such scandalous behaviour as topless sunbathing (and swimming) and mixed-sex nude saunas, happens without much drama.

Second, I am always struck by the disingenuousness of packing together “liberal Western values”, “Enlightenment principles”, “feminism” and “women’s dress rules”. Call me bitter, but it is the same as coupling Capitalism with the struggle for workers’ rights; or, not very correct. Sure, there is a geo-historical link, but to say that one of the essentially Western (as opposed to Eastern, Muslim, or less-developed) projects has been equality of sexes is a gross overstatement, conveniently forgetting the fact that the universal suffrage, equal rights, and women’s lib were fights. As Tony Myers writes in the book I’m currently reading:

The [Enlightenment principle of] cogito [ergo sum] is the basis of the centred subject, or, as it is more commonly known, the ‘individual’. The consequences for this model of subjectivity are compelling. For example, until recently, it was generally accepted (by men at least) that only men were masters of themselves. Women, on the other hand, were supposed to be subject to passions and feelings which they could not properly control. That is to say, women were not centred subjects but decentred subjects. They were, therefore, not ‘proper’ individuals and were treated accordingly as second-class citizens, subject to the rule of the masterful men. In fact, the mastery of women formed part of the larger project to dominate the natural world itself (of which women were held to be a part). The results of this project, which is sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment Project, can be witnessed in the devastation wreaked upon the environment. If it seems a little harsh to rebuke a philosophical model with the destruction of the planet, it is perhaps worth remembering that only a subjectivity which thinks it answers exclusively to itself would risk the destruction of nature and not expect to be held accountable for it.

Or, as a great man of Enlightenment said:

Since dependance is a state natural to women, girls feel themselves made to obey; they have, or should have, little freedom… Destined to obey a being as imperfect as man, a woman should learn to suffer – even to suffer injustice – at an early age, and to bear the wrongs of her husband without complaint. You will never reduce boys to the same point; their inner sense of justice rises up and rebels against such injustice, which nature never intended them to tolerate.

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, IV: 710-11)

But, the point to make here is that Enlightenment did mark the beginning of a quest for knowledge in which nothing was sacred, nothing was beyond questioning. In particular, tradition. If there is any way in which feminism was Rousseau’s baby, it was in the call to question everything. This is why the ultimate paradox of defending the bikini because of our “recognised tradition of secular freedom” is deeply absurd: if there is anything contrary to the spirit of secular inquiry, it is upholding or banning practices based on how well they fit in with our “tradition”.

+++

I am a little dispirited by the argumentation of both sides in this debate.

On the one hand, I don’t think there is anything particularly logical or reasonable in demanding that women cover from neck to knee in a swimming pool, just like I don’t think there is anything reasonable in having to wear clothes to a sauna. I agree with Szego, it seems to me important to remember that there is a principle at stake here, a principle of the female body not being automatically sexual, not being automatically shameful, and not being required to cover (or bare). Muslim misogyny is misogyny alright. David Gilmore writes, in a sweeping comparative analysis:

Muslim misogyny is really not so much an attack on women as it is a flight from woman “as the source of uncontrollable desires in the male self”. Islamic misogyny, like all others, is a flight from inner conflict over women; misogyny is the psychic consequence to male ambivalance and turmoil. The reification of this struggle that occurs in Islam is similar perhaps to what occurs in Christianity, Hinduim, and Buddhism, except perhaps for the added biographical ingredient of the Prophet’s apotheosis of sexual anxiety into lithurgy. One may say that St Paul and St Augustine played similar roles in forming Christian theology.

(David D. Gilmore, Misogyny: the Male Malady, p.217)

But this treatment of women does correspond to the same sentiments, fears and neuroses in the Australian culture, however secular it may be on paper. There is a corresponding prudishness on the Australian side, that all the talk about “Western liberal values” and “secular principles” cannot hide. In fact, what complicates the debate to such a large degree is precisely the way in which Australian commentators seem themselves unsure of whether there is or isn’t a principle at stake, or whether we are simply debating degrees of exhibitionism. Szego:

The Brimbank spokeswoman explained that [the swimming pools required that the] ”participants should be dressed appropriately, as is expected of a centre used by children and families”.

It seems to me that, until someone remembers what that principle may be, commentators can go hoarse talking about how the burqini “run[s] counter to the West’s more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom” (Szego). In practice, we are bound to get all confused about who is allowed to see how much skin on whom before we all have to blush and go “ooh”.

Jun 07 2010
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Chunky Move, circus, criticism, dance, essays, journalism, Melbourne Theatre Company, middlebrow, New Matilda, programming, Sydney Theatre Company, theatre

Show Ponies for a Young Nation

Show Ponies For A Young Nation

By Jana Perkovic

There’s a thriving, internationally recognised performance scene in Australia — but it’s barely reflected in the programming of major arts companies, writes Jana Perkovic

Beneath the surface of Australian cities bubbles an undercurrent of performance. Artists — both young and old, trained and untrained — are creating small interventions of chaos and beauty, much of which draws on specific local traditions of vernacular theatre: travelling circus, pub music, guerrilla performance, mixed-media cabaret.

It’s easy to dismiss these forms as niche pursuits; and they are, indeed, an ecosystem of small communities. When this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival organised a perplexingly dull launch for McSweeney’s, one of the world’s most innovative young literary journals, it was the Suitcase Royale, a local performance collective, who saved the event with an electrifying gig/stand-up/performance.

If our literature has forgotten joie de vivre, and our cinema is proclaimed “recovered” on the basis of seven good films a year, then theatre certainly ought to be recognised as one thing Australia consistently does well.

Overseas, reviewers rave about Acrobat, Back to Back, Panther and Chunky Move: circus, physical theatre, interactive performance companies producing cutting-edge work in their select fields. They don’t pay so much attention to the companies that swallow the lion’s share of our arts funding: our state theatres.

With the honourable exception of Melbourne’s Malthouse, our major performing arts companies have persistently avoided this undercurrent, opting for programming that lacks flair. Even allowing that 2009 was a panicky year for the mainstream — the Global Financial Crisis bit into both ticket sales and corporate sponsorship — the year’s programs were altogether business-as-usual. Fifty years after Merce Cunningham choreographed to chance music and Beckett put nothingness itself on stage, our theatres still offer a bewilderingly old-fashioned mix of European classics, last year’s Broadway and West End successes, and a smattering of local plays with music (the latter to be distinguished from musical theatre by virtue of being unfunny).

Scavenging through Australia’s main stage offerings in 2003, German journalist Anke Schaefer noted that “every expectation of a German audience of 100 years ago would have been well served by these productions.” The problem is not just that our mainstream theatre is overwhelmingly male-dominated and almost completely white. And it’s not that staging a play written in 1960 is still considered adventurous — it is the abyss between what the bulk of “performing artists” in this country are doing and the work showcased on the well-funded stages.

To be fair, there have been some improvements over the past few years. The Lawler Studio is a not-yet-properly-funded baby stage for the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) with a small, but promising season, and the Sydney Theatre Company’s maturing Next Stage program brought in Perth wunderkind Matthew Lutton — and will present the abovementioned Suitcase Royale in 2010. But for every innovation that reaches a big audience, there is a scathing critical attack from the likes of Peter Craven that we need better-made plays, not avant-garde tinkering.

Craven typifies the deep conservative current in our theatre commentariat. While aficionados have organised themselves in the blogosphere, forming a reliable network of guerrilla arts reportage, the mainstream patron is limited to the opinions of the mainstream press, which consistently criticises any departure from pleasant digestive after-dinner theatrical fare.

The understanding that permeates theatre criticism, funding policies, festival curatorship, even the design of performing arts venues, is that theatre is an expensive toy to show off to our international visitors. It helps prove that here, at the arse end of the world, we have a functioning high culture. Arguably, we build “world-class” arts centres, fund show-pony opera and invest in international arts festivals because we fear being mistaken for a subcultural backwater. A national ballet ensemble — like a broadcasting network, a flag, an army and a giant ferris wheel — is a sign of a serious nation.

Hence the currency of theatre as an impossibly highbrow endeavour, something that excludes large swathes of the population who claim not to attend for the pricey “elitism” of arts events. Yet, when we leave the realm of the ethereal and the literary, of The Nutcracker and King Lear, it is often hard to distinguish performing arts from fairgrounds and other dubious entertainments.

Our mainstream arts funding reflects this confusion. Theatre is sometimes a flagship investment, and sometimes a failing commercial sector in need of subsidy. If we give it money, it better demonstrates its market relevance. Most of our state festivals were set up as tourism initiatives, providing world-class this and gold star that — but they are also judged on the extent to which they animate the city.

State companies are thus in a double bind: they ought to stage excellent interpretations of classics, but they also need to keep their subscriber base with populist programming. The media and the funding bodies do not question populism. Here the Peter Cravens, Andrew Bolts and Paul Keatings of the nation join voices to demand in unison that we fund some quality orchestras before sponsoring avant-garde wank.

So, while Opera Australia can cross-fund its season with My Fair Lady without reprimand, Kristy Edmunds’s edgy curatorship of Melbourne Festival was viciously attacked as — you guessed it — “elitist”: insular, pretentious, niche. But young audiences responded and artists found her choices inspiring.

This year, under Brett Sheehy’s artistic direction, the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) broke box office records — mainly due to the sell-out performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra — and gleaned glowing praise for restoring mainstream common sense to the program. Yet the local theatre community has criticised it as too white, too European, too predictable, focusing on big-ticket events at the expense of smaller, braver shows, and — yes — “elitist”. In this equation, elites, like hell, are always other people.

It is a scavenger hunt for audiences. Where the audience preferences lie is not so clear. The MTC may have the largest subscriber base in the country but it is rapidly aging. Programming for the middle-class, middle-suburb punter may rely on unwise mathematics: audiences are not developed through insistence on a 19th-century understanding of highbrow. For all its success at the box office, often I felt off attending MIAF 09 performances surrounded by an audience thrice my age.

Melbourne Fringe featured no Philharmonic and managed to break its box office record in 2009 — despite the GFC — showing how robust specialised audience loyalty can be. TINA and Imperial Panda, independent arts festivals in NSW, have also done well, as has the inaugural Dance Massive, dedicated exclusively to contemporary dance. Perhaps mainstream programming should acknowledge these “passionate communities” and “creative laboratories” that make up the solid core of the arts audience: they, after all, nurture its most vibrant new developments. Even fans of well-made plays, we should recognise, are increasingly becoming a niche.

Rather than trying to stretch nation-making dinosaurs over an increasingly diverse nation, we should focus on nurturing smaller, specialised festivals, and recognise that our cultural excellence may lie not in opera but in grungy circus. Our current funding model is completely unsuitable for this task. Audiences will not develop through programming that blends the safest aspects of all our arts into a soup that, in attempting to please everyone, pleases no one. What we should do, instead, is encourage the continuing exploration of the many vibrant art forms thriving under the radar: they count as culture. And statehood? Aren’t we too old to worry about that?

Originally published on 31 December 2009, on NewMatilda.com

May 15 2010
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bookmarks, journalism, sex

Let me finish the sentence…

Excellent article (book excerpt, more precisely in The Age today about unconscious sexism. It compares the cases of two Stanford biologists, both tenured professors, both transgender, and both have undergone sex change late in life:

“Ben once gave a presentation at the prestigious Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A friend relayed a comment made by someone in the audience who didn’t know Ben Barres and Barbara Barres were the same person: “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but, then, his work is much better than his sister’s.”

Ben also noticed he was treated differently in the everyday world. “When I go into stores, I notice I am much more likely to be attended to. They come up to me and say, ‘Yes, sir? Can I help you, sir?’ I have had the thought a million times, I am taken more seriously.”

Before sex change, Joan Roughgarden’s research career was based around exploring radical ideas in biology. But, when the now-female researcher suggested that Charles Darwin’s theory of competition between the sexes was wrong:

THE scientific establishment, Joan said, was livid. But in contrast to the response to her earlier theory about tide pools and marine animals, few scientists engaged with her. At a workshop at Loyola University, a scientist “lost it” and started screaming at her for being irresponsible. “I had never had experiences of anyone trying to coerce me in this physically intimidating way,” she said, as she compared the reactions to her work before and after she became a woman. “You really think this guy is really going to come over and hit you.”


Joan is willing to acknowledge her theory might be wrong; that, after all, is the nature of science. But what she wants is to be proven wrong, rather than dismissed. Making bold and counter-intuitive assertions is precisely the way science progresses. Many bold ideas are wrong, but if there isn’t a regular supply of them and if they are not debated seriously, there is no progress. After her transition, Joan said she no longer feels she has “the right to be wrong”.

Where she used to be a member of Stanford University’s senate, Joan is no longer on any university or departmental committee. Where she was once able to access internal university funds for research, she said she finds it all but impossible to do so now. Before her transition, she enjoyed an above-average salary at Stanford. But since her transition, “My own salary has drifted down to the bottom 10 per cent of full professors in the School of Humanities and Sciences, even though my research and students are among the best of my career and are having international impact, albeit often controversial.”

Well worth a read. The comments, of course, are too.

May 12 2010
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ethics, journalism

Of dogs and people

On Mother’s Day, Maria Tumarkin wrote what I thought was a beautiful, heartfelt and effective plea for a less hysterical immigration policy, describing aptly what a horror it was not to be able to take care of your parents. It was published in The Age, SMH and on National Times.

The comments have since closed after reaching the count of 82, and they depict a truly frightful Australia. Even subtracting a large number that must have come from Andrew Bolt’s blog (he called her confused about who has actually done the abandoning), the sheer concentration of vitriol, xenophobia and selfishness shows a society that appears to have truly lost its moral compass. One person called it an expression of “a very australian thing: to put money ahead of not just compassion but human decency”, and I would love to defend my adopted country, but in the face of this it is very hard.I am writing about it not to add much commentary, but because we are living in truly frightening times if reactions like these are not worth dwelling upon, reactions I would call obscene.

Tumarkin’s biggest rhetorical mistake was to take for granted that family bonds matter:

“Kevin Rudd can argue that the family is ”the most critical social institution of all” but be blissfully unaffected when the institution of ”migrant” family is ripped to shreds by the children’s inability to take care of their parents – a sacred duty in most cultures, perhaps even in Australia’s.”

But the comments show another, very different place, in which people proudly boast of not giving two hoots about their own family, let alone someone else’s. It’s a collection of statements ranging from the garden-variety selfishness of my-problem-is-not-your-problem/why-should-the-taxpayer suffer (“old people are expensive, and living longer” and “I dont want your parents, I want my own kids”), to the proud assertions that other people don’t matter, not even when they’re one’s own family (from the highly privileged “[i] would not presume to impose my elderly parents on Australia. If I feel the urge to care for them, I’d go back to America to do so” and the “People who accept citizenship to Australia should be ready to accept to costs, and they should let their citizenships of their former countries of origin expire” to the curious “The relatives can visit and go back. My child was very scared from some of them dressed in a tribal wear on a few cases”). As summarized by one of the commentators:

“The ties to one’s parents are not sacred in Australian culture, nor is it dinned into our heads that children’s lives are predestined to be spent looking after them. Far from it. Perhaps people wanting to come here should think of that first. The friend mentioned here sounds like a case of the youngest daughter being expected to act as unpaid carer/companion for the parents – something that died out in Anglo-Celtic culture decades ago.”

If the picture of Australia presented on this website is anything to go by, then it is of a place in which the social contract holding people into something resembling a ‘society’ has truly fallen apart, and all we are is a bunch of small-minded, selfish individuals interacting with each other just to the bare minimum, through a shared legal system, taxes, traffic and supermarket inventories. No wonder it’s a country in which every moment of your everyday life in public is legislated – what guarantee is there that we would function on consensus and cooperation otherwise, by our own free will?

How different this is from a country like Croatia, in which the Constitution makes a note that “every member of the society must take care of the young, the elderly and the needy” – providing that fundamental benchmark against which certain behavior, such as not helping a person attacked on the street, can be judged morally wrong. The presence of such clauses in European legislation probably explains the fact that they are missing the entire complex of public risk and safety laws that plague Anglo-Celtic countries, with their ‘long-ago died-out’ social ties. If everyone is supposed to look after the children crossing roads, the ill, the pregnant, the elderly, because they too fulfill a role in the society, then the whole question of who is responsible if something bad happens to them becomes superfluous. If we have collective responsibilities, we also have collective faults and collective achievements. If we don’t, like we apparently don’t in Australia, then there is no collective fault for, say, Tampa or the Stolen Generation, and no collective achievement of, say, excellent public schooling or universal maternity leave.

We become just a lot of people who don’t like their neighbours, their relatives, their fellow citizens.

It is symptomatic that this article comes a mere week after Catherine Deveny’s column for The Age was replaced with Graham Reilly talking about the transcendent joy of owning a dog, a hobby which costs Australians about $25,000 per dog in total, the same newspaper recently reported. What makes that sum somehow understandable, rather than wasteful of our scarce resources (because of which we cannot take more useless people on board), is that the bill is footed privately. You can have meaningful relationships with whatever form of life, as long as you pay for it yourself, the moral of the story seems to be.

But if you are trying to include your family in this, sorry, you are just not being Anglo-Celtic enough.

Nov 29 2009
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bookmarks, brief notes, collage, journalism

Review: Africa

“There are four big problems that emerge from aid. One is the obvious one: the corruption, the fact that you’re giving somebody something for free, no strings attached. The second problem is aid dependency, which is the whole notion that you create a society heavily burdened and laden with bureaucracy, which is very inefficient and essentially kills off the entrepreneurial culture. The third problem has to do with this economic term called ‘Dutch disease’, although they usually call it the oil curse. It actually applies to aid as well, where you have these large inflows of capital which really kill off the export sector. Then finally, disenfranchising the middle class; governments become beholden or responsible to report to donors and they don’t have any obligation to report to the domestic citizenry.
 ”
-Dambisa Moyo in The Africa Report

“In addition it was clear how little say not only the citizens have, but the governments have. You hardly ever saw participation from domestic policymakers in designing and discussing what was, essentially, our future – Africa’s future. I mean, there are so many classic examples of people’s lives essentially being shaped and designed by policy that’s not domestically constructed.” She cites the donor who refused to give any aid unless an entirely new town be built in Zambia, despite the government’s protests that they would be left holding the baby, as indeed happened; or George Bush’s requirement that two-thirds of the $15bn he was giving to fight Aids had to go to pro-abstinence programmes, and none could go to any establishment that provided abortions. ”
- The Guardian interviews Dambisa Moyo

Partly, of course, it’s about power, and purse-strings; partly, she believes, it’s a PR issue, “there are many well-spoken, smart African leaders who should be on the global stage”; very largely, given that so far not many are, it’s a case of who gets to do the talking, and increasingly, it is people like Bob Geldof and Bono, the most visible representatives of what she calls, in a thrillingly withering manner, “glamour aid”. “There are African policymakers who are charged with the responsibility of creating policy, and implementing policy. That’s their job. Long, long lines of people have stood in the sun to vote for a president who is effectively impotent because of donors or because glamour aid has decided to speak on behalf of a continent. How would British people feel if tomorrow Michael Jackson started telling them how they should get out of the housing crisis? Or if Amy Winehouse started to give the US government advice about the credit crunch? And was listened to? I think they would be perturbed, and worried. I mean, they’ve completely disenfranchised the very people we’ve actually elected!”
- The Guardian interviews Dambisa Moyo

Jun 05 2009
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journalism, news, performance, politics

The Hunger Artists of St Petersburg

Writes Dmitry Vilensky on the global arts newswire:

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On May 15, the young contemporary artist Artem Loskutov was arrested
in his native Novisibirsk and charged with possession of a narcotic
substance (marijuana) by the local branch of the Interior Ministry’s
notorious Center for Extremism Prevention (Center “E”). Loskutov and
his supporters claim that the police planted the marijuana in his bag
in order to incriminate him. As one of the organizers of the annual
“Monstration” — a flash mob street party in which young people march
with absurdist, non-political slogans — Loskutov had long been an
objection of the Center’s attentions. At a pre-trial custody hearing
on May 20, it was revealed that the Center had been tapping the phones
of Loskutov and his friends for the past six months. In April and on
May Day itself, Loskutov had been summoned to the Center for
“discussions,” and his parents had been called and told that their son
was a member of a dangerous sect. The circumstances of the case and
the way that he was arrested thus point to a campaign of intimidation
directed both at Loskutov and his fellow “monstrators” in Novosibirsk.

The Loskutov case has sparked a massive outcry in Russia’s activist
and art communities. In the past three weeks, artists, activists, and
ordinary concerned citizens all over Russia have carried out a series
of pickets, protests, and actions in Loskutov’s defense. The most
inspiring of these actions has been a “plein air” hunger strike
organized by several young artists in Petersburg, now in its second
week. The artists encamped themselves in a park next to city hall and
began producing paintings and drawings whose central theme is the
increasingly brutal police repression of social activists and
left-wing artists in Russia. The hunger strikers have issued three
demands. First, they want a criminal investigation of the mass arrests
by riot police of a group of young anarchists on May Day in Petersburg
despite their having obtained official written permission to march
with the other columns of demonstrators. Second, they call for the
creation of a public commission to monitor the work of Center “E.”
Finally, they ask that all charges against Artem Loskutov be dropped
and that he be released.

Although the Loskutov case and the Petersburg hunger strike have
become one of the hottest topics in the Russian blogosphere, there has
been a near-total blackout in the mainstream Russian press, especially
television. That is why we ask you to read the article linked below
and learn how you can join our campaign of solidarity with Artem and
his artist comrades in Petersburg. We have called an international day
of solidarity actions for June 9, a day before Artem’s next hearing in
the Novosibirsk Regional Court.

An injury to one is an injury to all. Free Artem Loskutov!

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/free-artem-loskutov/

http://www.demotix.com/news/artists-hunger-strike-drags-international-economic-forum-looms

Artists hunger strike drags on as international economic forum looms

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Follow on the Chto delat? blog. Thought I’d mention.

Oct 15 2008
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journalism, LITERATURE

Journalism, exquisite journalism:

Michail Gorbachev did not make a public appearance until nine days after the accident. Was this embittering?

You know, journalists always ask the same thing. Were you lied to? The Soviet power never told the truth. That was nothing new! What interests me is something else. The pause.

The pause?

In the zone helicopters were taking off, technicians were running about in their thousands, but no one had any explanations. It was a new reality. It was forbidden to sit on the ground. It was forbidden to stand under a tree for any length of time. Fishermen said they couldn't find any worms, that the worms had bored a meter and a half down into the earth. Nature had obviously received signals. I find this fascinating. People reported they'd not only seen a fire, but also a raspberry-coloured glow and that they'd never thought death could be so beautiful. Former Afghanistan fighters were flown in with helicopters and machine guns and were asking: What good are our helicopters here? An entire culture collapsed, the familiar culture of war.

(…) There were no boundaries after Chernobyl. Spaces dissolved.

I continue to be amazed that people have failed to understand Chernobyl as a new way of seeing the world. Chernobyl changed space, but politicians still talk about things in terms of today, there, nearby, foreign. It's so strange. What does near or far mean when the cloud was hanging over Europe on the second day and over China on the fourth? Even a country that doesn't build reactors will be hit by the fallout from another country.

You can read the complete conversation with Svetlana Alexievich on signandsight.com.

Jul 20 2008
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Croatia, dance, journalism, LITERATURE, reviews, starred, travel

Riječke ljetne noći: Penelope / Song of songs

A version of this text was published on vibewire.net.

…practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside. As Cocteau writes: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one's “true” being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.
- Susan Sontag, On Style

I wonder whether love is really as trite a subject as we are often made to think, on the basis that everything has been said. While it is easy and common to view life as a supermarket of choices, better or worse-stocked, one's life as an empty thing to be filled with Content, at its most basic life simply evades this. One's fundamental life experiences are not to be chosen: birth, deaths of parents, having children, illness. Love, of course. The main answer, not only to the incessant proliferation of love-themed artworks, but to the fact that we still readily fall in love, knowing the endpoint of the experiment, it seems to me, is that the problem we are trying to solve is essentially one of style, not content (to use a dated division that, however, is still going strong in theatre). “What new can be said?” we ask about the three-minute love song just like we could ask about a marriage proposal, forgetting that we do not stop falling in love just because we know how it ends. Life is an attempt at formal innovation, not a statement made in the form of life, to paraphrase Sontag yet again. This is why the plots are so few, and the artworks so many; why so many people do the same things all over again.

And if so, I wonder whether dance may not be the purest, crispest realisation of love on stage. Dance which, in itself, has been largely liberated from the struggle of form and content. With inexistent texts the execution is built only out of the performance itself, and a prescribed thing like classical ballet may be the closest in western dance where the rift is even possible, where one can be accused of stylistically disrespecting the content, of hanging a curtain between themselves and their matter of discourse. Everything else is pure expression.

Penelope / Song of Songs (Penelopa / Pjesma nad pjesmama), a diptych on love, is a collaboration between Portuguese ballet ensemble CeDeCe and the National Ballet of Rijeka, with the choreographers swapped. In Penelope, thus, Louis Sousa directs and choreographs HNK dancers, while Staša Zurovac creates Song of Songs on the CeDeCe bodies. The uniting element is music, by Macedonian Marijan Nećak, a semi-classical landscape for a mini orchestra (strings quartet, bass, timpani, clarinet, oboe, horn, trombone, guitar and piano) and a handful of vocal soloists. It is a strangely de-classicalised new classical music, fragmented, contrasting, open to noise yet overwhelmingly melodic.

Sousa may have had a harder job, as Zurovac and Nećak have collaborated in the past and clearly share artistic sensibility. Penelope is a strangely straightforward piece of dance, programmatic in literalised narrative detail. Contemporary ballet is a type of dance this spectator rarely has a chance to see, and always enjoys for its straight lines, its clean technical bravura and near-literary purposefulness, of which Penelope too had plenty. Sousa brings a Portuguese simplicity of means to the mise-en-scène, creating individual tableaux full of grace and strength: gripping birth of Telemachus, the nightly tearing of the daily weaving work, Penelope's mourning after the massacre of suitors and servants. But the narrative, as familiar as it is to us from The Odyssey, is often the invisible key to much trite stage movement, with no purpose other than somewhat obscure story-telling. The soloists, particularly Marta Voinea as the Helen of Troy, fill their straight lines with passion and engagement, yet the mannerism of ballet, of story-telling, keeps the emotional potential of the piece restrained.

If there is a key to this neoclassical exercise, one that may need to be spelled out to an audience less familiar to CeDeCe, Sousa keeps it all to himself. But, I wonder, how purposeful may it seem to a more knowledgeable eye? The subtleties of the second piece, perhaps, would be utterly lost to someone less familiar with his sources.

Song of Songs opens in a mental hospital, and immediately expands its field of reference by jumping from the Bible to the homonymous poem by Janko Polić Kamov, Croatia's most precocious avant-garde author, a raging, nihilistic, pre-expressionist, whose freely structured prose was at complete odds with the early 1900s' preference for harmony, finesse and nobility, and reappraised only in the recent years. The iterative praise to love of the biblical original is transformed into a rhythmic chant of Kamov's lyrics:

The world is dead, my love, and it's so dark in its boredom;
the people are dead, my love, and dreamy is their song,
the silence is insane, my love, and silence is their speech;
look, they're sleepy and yawning is their day's music;
their soul's as empty as the whores' laughter, and their laughter as lifeless as the law;

their sun is as pale as the death candle and the walls are their forest;
it is so desolate, dark, my love, and their days are like their thoughts;

there's no blood in their body and their soul is empty like God.

The piece does not attempt to locate its figuration in Kamov's intensely short and tragic life, yet it resonates very strongly with the themes of his rather autobiographical oeuvre: unrequited love to his best friend's wife, the possible illicit child, his desperate refusal to denounce his love, his pain and his radicalism to the comfy morality and the vapid lifestyle of the fin-de-siécle middle-class Austria-Hungary, down to his untimely death in a Barcelona hospital in 1910, at the age of 24. Song of Songs rejects any plot other than the infinite tragedy of love, any characters other than the collective lost to reason.

Zurovac's choreography is highly responsive to Nećak's music, blending over and echoing the musical variations, the motifs. Both develop in a counterpoint between abstraction and articulation of concepts, following an impressionist logic that stresses the felt, the emotional over the logical and the rational. CeDeCe dancers respond with enthusiasm to Zurovac's movement, developed in filigree detail yet potent and focused, grotesque yet often rather pretty: a pas de quatre of madwomen, a duet of The Lost Ones, the final persistent loneliness of the Little Girl, who tears a feathery white pillow on the dancers only to end the show curled up on a still warm, empty bed. Choreographically, it is rich in contrast: unison groupwork interrupted by lone soloists, duets merging into mass chaos, unbridled orgy of thrown limbs and gentle, restrained motion. It is both resolutely bleak and bursting with ecstatic energy. Lovers lose each other among the deranged bodies, wander off and on stage in their bare white insanity: they are alone in mass and alone when together. It is love as a nightmare, wringing out all the emotional detritus with the nihilist urge and desperate grip akin to Kamov's writing. There is nothing in this madness that isn't enormous pain, it says, yet they would not give it up for anything in the world. Even as their agony is presented as an entrapment, an illusion resisting disillusion, Song of Songs shows the emotional landscape of love with enormous compassion. Ultimately, it returns to another one of Kamov's thoughts:

I lay naked before a woman and we both remained cold, for we felt neither shame nor passion… The shame that broke one mankind into two sexes was dead and – to the new temple, to the hospital, where all people are brothers!

The formal intelligence of the choreography comes with a fierce emotional skeleton that in this case deserves to be called romantic. Not merely the romance of love-as-madness, the eternal allure of the lost mind. Watching the performance, I was reminded of literary impressions of Goethe, of Wagner. The forceful delivery of unashamed emotion must have felt as intoxicating as it did to me. (The audience, for the sake of reporting, was rather delirious.)

Where this diptych fails is in the way Penelope, with its cool perfectionism, driven by narrative and uninterested in but most formalised of emotion, seems somewhat oblivious to the secret understanding between Kamov, Nećak and Zurovac. Song of Songs, on the other hand, is dramaturgically as uninterested in plot, character or metaphor as it is attentive to all senses: the visual free association of costume and mise-en-scène; the close relation to music; the textures of movement, from hard to soft, full and deep to lithe and fragile; the freewheeling emotion. (Love, I have said already, is an underrated subject.) The result is a sensual and emotional feast of the highest order, a dance for dance gluttons.

Penelope / Song of Songs premiered on 8th July 2008 on Riječke ljetne noći, in Tvornica papira Hartera, Rijeka, Croatia.

Penelope. Choreographer and director: Louis Sousa. Costumes: Sandra Dekanić. With: Paula Rus, Andrei Kőteles, Marta Voinea, Ashatbek Yuzupzhanov, Kristina Kaplan, Irina Kőteles, Anka Popa, Sabina Voinea, Roberto Barbosa Pereita Junior, Svebor Zgurić, Vladimir de Freitas Rosa.

Song of Songs. Choreographer and director: Staša Zurovac. With: Benjamin Duran, Catarina Correia, Haruka Fukuizum, Camila Moreira, Erica Gawley, Joana Puntel, Vanessa Vieira, Alia Crutcher, André Zachery, Miguel Areias, Marco La Perna.

Music: Marjan Nećak. Set Design: Žorž Draušnik. Costumes: Joao Taborda. Lighting design: Boris Blidar and Antonio Rodrigues.

Jul 09 2008
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collage, Croatia, formal inquiry, journalism, theatre, travel

on form and theatre; vignette

My most cherished discovery has been a generation of very young Croatian theatre-makers, absolutely fearless. This year, Gordana Vnuk, the iron lady of Eurokaz and an uncompromising believer in new forms of expression, pulled out these kids that haven't even graduated yet, and what beautiful things they have shown. I have seen so much brave, crushing, beautiful form on Eurokaz 2008, so much of it absolutely riveting.

Point one. Marina Petkovic.

Black box. Four actors wearing black. They describe exactly who they are, what they do. I am Gertrude. From here to here is my bed. It has four pillows on it. I sleep here alone, when I'm not performing my marital duties, in which case my husband, the king, sleeps here too. There is a double door here, a window over here, and a long red curtain covering it. I am wearing a white nightgown. I am Hamlet. I am wearing black, with a dagger hanging here. I am Polonius. I am hiding behind this curtain.

Gertrude and Hamlet sit down, chair to chair, holding pages of Shakespeare's text, reading as neutrally as they described the setting, the costumes. Hamlet gets up, stabs Polonius, and comes back. Gertrude, still neutrally: Oh what you have done? Argument; neutrally. Meanwhile, Polonius is dying in a most naturalistic way, shaking and curling on the floor. About five minutes. Hamlet is getting upset: he stammers, misreads his lines, sweats, has to repeat the words multiple times. Slowly, minutes passing, Polonius drags himself to the two chairs, grips Hamlet's leg. Hamlet chokes, tries to shake him off, still reading from the pages, very upset. Gertrude gets up, pulls, sits on Polonius, keeps reading. Both very upset now: words are mangled, phrases interrupted, repeated. Sweat. Polonius dies. It takes them time, cooperation and physical combinatorics to carry him out, through the double door. End.

Point two. Same performance.

Claudius, Gertrude and Horatio describe the setting of a ceremonial hall in great detail, each focusing on the parts that matter the most. This is my throne, because I am the king. Here hangs my portrait, 7×7m… No, 9×9. My throne is made out of gold, with a big sphere here, all covered in gems. My throne is a bit smaller. It's made out of wood. It has a golden sphere here. My portrait hangs with the king's. 6×6m. The hall is really big and spherical. If I stood here , and the actor leaves the performance space through the side door, walks out in the middle of the courtyard, I would be in the centre of the room. It feels good and comfy, like a church. Here is where Hamlet and I used to play when we were little. Now we're not allowed anymore. Then Ophelia. There is a river flowing through here. Break. She creates, with words, a natural landscape on top of the ceremonial hall. She describes her daydreaming in the forest. End.

This is all fantastic to watch. The rise or fall of this kind of theatre – of any kind of theatre, I believe – is in the extent to which they can engage their audience. Not merely for entertainment value: engagement improves attention, concentration, focus. Yet to qualify why something is engaging theatre, and something else fails to engage, is near-impossible. Finally, Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it was a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secret of the universe.

I am sure that these two essays did not attempt to give the answers I found. They were results of a workshop around Gavella, a Croatian theatre theorist and maker, whose writings I have never read. The first was almost certainly not a critique of text-based performance as promulgated in Anglophone countries, although it was the single most powerful critique I have ever seen. The second could not have been a reply to the West End Whingers, regarding the absolute mimicry of life in the direction of the ugly one by Ramin Gray, performed at the Royal Court in London. It may have been a demonstration of how little theatre needs to create setting, a mise-en-scéne, and how easily the audience can juggle in mind multiple, contradictory sets of signs, but it probably responded to Gavella instead. And yet, I cannot forget these two scenes. They were simple, minimalist, and unforgettable.

My sister, a 14-year-old with no experience of experimental theatre, not only sat through the 120 minutes of this black narrativeless experiment, but excitedly quoted moments from the performance days later.

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