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.
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