 The performing arts in Australia
 An overview of the range, diversity and achievement in this sector
 An 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

British Playwright David Hare said that:
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This can be extended to the whole of the arts.

 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

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@ 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

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

Australians attitudes to the arts are overwhelmingly positive, with almost all
Australians agreeing that:
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“the arts should be an important part of the education of every Australian”
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“the arts should receive public funding”
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“the arts make for a more richer and meaningful life”

The broader arguments for the significance of the arts
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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

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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

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Show from You tube
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Marrugeku Burning Daylight
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Marrugeku Crying Baby

Dance
Music
Aboriginal Music
Popular Music
Classical Music
Theatre

 Strong amateur traditions
 Resilient commercial performing arts sector
 Consistent government support over the past fifty years
 Small, but active contemporary performance sector
 the readings provide examples of the contemporary sector

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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

 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.

 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.

(some of it)
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In Repertoire: Contemporary Performance
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In Repertoire: Contemporary Dance
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In Repertoire: Performance for Young
People
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Some of the companies, the individuals, the productions, the ideas and the images that are and have informed the contemporary performing arts

Dance
Music
Aboriginal Music
Popular Music
Classical Music
Theatre

 Classical Dance
 Contemporary Dance
 A great deal of crossover between various forms of dance

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Strong classical tradition
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Strong involvement in dance throughout the community: many classical dance schools throughout most cities and communities.
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Ballet companies in most states
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The national classical company is celebrating its 50 year of operation

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Sydney Dance Company
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Dance North
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Lucy Guerin
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Chunky Move
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Expressions Dance Company
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Strong classical technique supporting work that is innovative and unique

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

Classical Music
Popular Music
Aboriginal Music

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Symphony Orchestras in all states
The Australian Chamber Orchestra led by
Richard Tognetti
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The 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 Orchestra
 The Australian Chamber Orchestra The Glide

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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 settings
Has worked with Australian contemporary composers such as Peter Sculthorpe
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Symphony Orchestra 2011 Grand Finale -
William Barton Didgeridoo

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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 20 th 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 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 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.

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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.
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From YouTube: IHOS The Barbarians

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Oz Opera
Traditional Opera Company stages the classic opera repertoire
Iconic events
Show from YouTube
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Opera Australia Handa Opera
South Pacific
Yarrabah! The Musical: a co-production between Opera Australia and the community of Yarrabah in North Queensland

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)

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Circus OZ
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The Flying Fruit Fly Circus
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From YouTube
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Circa 46 Circus acts in 45 minutes
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From YouTube
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Legs on the wall Homelands

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)
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Search for unity / nationhood (turn into the
20 th 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

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Does it define itself in terms of a relationship with this land?
The question of belonging / insider or outsider
To distance
To history
To the suburbs
To class
To naturalism

There is a national pattern of theatrical activity based on these structures:
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 a mainstream theatre company in each city, a strong alternative theatre company in each city
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 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

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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
21 st century culture: cross art/ form collaborations/ New ways of making and producing theatre and performance

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From YouTube
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La Boite What if La Boite didn't exist?
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From YouTube
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Belvoir 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

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Adelaide Fringe
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Alice Springs Beanie Festival
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Desert Mob

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Wesley Enoch:
‘Time for the arts to show society a way forward
The arts are important for the health and vitality of a community
Indigenous arts offers such vision and leadership
Cultural, 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:
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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 cinemacomplex.

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 on
 much of the underlying purpose of
Aboriginal theatre seems to be about a
‘cultural leadership’

o o
Twenty years of social and political activism began
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

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
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Terrain or Matthina by Bangara Dance
Theatre
Jandemarra by
Steve Hawke
Namatjira and Ngapartji Ngapartji by Big hART
Waltzing the Wilarra by Yirra Yakkin
Mimi by Marrugeku
Shanghai Lady Killer by Stalker Theatre\
Coranderrk by Ilbigerri Theatre

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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.
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From YouTube
Indigenous opera takes shape

What was this lecture about?
 The performing arts in Australia
 An overview of the range, diversity and achievement in this sector
 An 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

 Namatjira and Ngapartji Ngapartji by
Big hART
 Ngapartji Ngapartji
 From YouTube
 Nothing Rhymes With Ngapartji

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