* It's all over US newspapers, but I can't seem to find it in any local sheets, at least online: former MIAF director Kristy Edmunds has landed a plum job at UCLA as artistic director of its renowned live performance series. As the LA Times puts it, "Her four years as artistic director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Australia extended her reputation as an impresario with impressive contacts and a flair for the adventurous and the offbeat." Indeed. She'll be a busy woman: for the first year she'll also be continuing her present job as consulting artistic director for a new performing arts program at New York City's Park Avenue Armory.

* Meanwhile, the Melbourne Theatre Company yesterday announced an interim triumvirate of artistic directors, who will program the 2012 season before soon-to-be-former MIAF AD Brett Sheehy takes up the reins. They are Aidan Fennessy, Robyn Nevin and Pamela Rabe. The 2012 season will be annoounced in September.

* Lastly, get your greedy hands on Robert Reid's new Platform Paper, Hello World! Promoting the Arts on the Web. You don't have to be a performing arts nut to find this fascinating: it's an intelligent and broad look at the impact of digital technology with implications beyond Reid's areas of focus. Available now from Currency House.

Robert Musil (1880-1942), the great German novelist and intellectual, observed once that if there was to be real social change of any kind, what was required more than anything else was not idealists nor intellectuals, but managers: those who knew the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining organisations, and understood how to change organisational structures.

It's a view that is not exactly popular among artists, and sometimes for good reason: a dismaying large proportion of the hard-won arts dollar goes, not into making art, but into paying administrators. But nevertheless, there is a great deal of sane wisdom in Musil's observation. One example close to hand is the Malthouse Theatre, the fortunes of which were turned around by a radical corporate restructure. The artistic shift was simply not possible without the remaking of the relationships within the organisation, from the Board down to the bar staff.

One of the most useful weapons in an artist's survival arsenal is a practical understanding of how cultural policy and funding work, not from the narrow view of a practitioner applying cap-in-hand for the advantage of his or her project or organisation, but from the wider perspective of the place of culture in political and financial economies. This understanding is often rare among artists, not least because practitioners are too busy practising to have the time to read government reports. I find all this stuff fascinating, but I quite understand why it might make the eyes of others glaze over. But one simple way to glean some understanding is to subscribe to Currency House's Platform Papers, which regularly publishes overviews of public arts policy.

Getting Heard: Achieving an effective arts advocacy, released yesterday, is a stimulating and pragmatic analysis by Chris Puplick of the way Australian arts funding works. In particular, he examines, from his various experience as a politician, Australia Council Board member and Chair of various arts organisations, how Australian culture depends crucially upon the "kindness of strangers": that is, how policy has been driven by the interest of influential individuals, rather than by any broad-based policy.

As Ms TN gloomily noted in the Guardian after the election, arts patronage is not an exclusive policy of the Left. In fact, the arts have often done better under Liberal Governments than under Labor, and there's no reason to believe that the election of a Labor Government means better times for the arts. And one of Puplick's major points is that good arts advocacy ought to be non-partisan.

He also notes the lack of a peak body for the arts, a major problem in this country, since it means that instead we have a bunch of rival bodies squabbling for their share of the pie, rather than looking at the bigger picture and arguing for a better pie. I thought that the 2020 Summit might herald a change in this - the single most valuable part of the exercise was how a lot of people from differing disciplines were brought together and discovered that they had a lot of concerns in common, both within the arts community and outside it.

Puplick makes some valid (and not so valid) critiques about the 2020 Creative Stream. He discusses the way facilitating directed the conversation, and how this caused a mass rebellion, but doesn't take into account how this same facilitation distorted what was reported. For instance, he says one of the Summit's most disappointing aspects was its "deafening silence" on the topic of "soft diplomacy", or using the arts as other countries do as a key part of international diplomacy. This was in fact a topic to which I was assigned with people like David Throsby and Rupert Myer, and our group came up with at least half a dozen recommendations, including the reinstatement of the DFAT touring fund that the Rudd Government axed and the beefing up of the presently inadequate cultural arms at our embassies, several of them "cost-neutral" (as instructed). * But there we go.

Aside from the Bill Henson fracas and the much publicised 2020 letter - the subject, incidentally, of a new book by David Marr, The Henson Case, which is due for imminent release - the possibility of a group which speaks for all cultural interests has not materialised. For which I, for one, am sorry. Puplick could have acknowledged too, in criticising Cate Blanchett for being "partisan", that she was the single international movie star who signed the letter, ensuring that it hit the headlines and letting herself in for a lot of wingnut abuse. It's an act which perhaps makes her partisanship slightly more principled and complex. But enough of 2020.

As Puplick points out, one problem with the lack of a peak body is how culture gets hived off as separate from the rest of society, apparently blind to the needs of, say, hospitals or schools, which contributes to the perceptions of the arts community as an out-of-touch elite. This is a strong, if erroneous, perception which artists are very slack about addressing. (Not that media coverage like this helps; let's face it, there's not a lot of interest in the non-arts media in cultural affairs, unless they involve naked girls, scandals or controversial curmudgeons). And he suggests that we are still stuck in the old ways of arguing, instead of embracing the model of the "creative economy". (I'm not sure that's entirely true - the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, is certainly driving that rhetoric).

In any case, Puplick's view of how arts funding works here, even if it makes Australia sound dismayingly like a local parish, is a very clear and useful document. It's full of need-to-know information, including a list of the major public inquiries into the arts that have mostly shaped Australian cultural policy. It's well worth a read.

Watch out too for news of an upcoming forum at the Malthouse on November 10, when Chris Puplick will be here to discuss his paper.

* I checked the Final Report of the 2020 Summit (available since May) and found the relevant bit on "Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy", which follows for anyone interested:

The group discussing soft power and cultural diplomacy was asked to identify strategies whereby Australia could project ‘soft power’ internationally through cultural and other creative endeavours. The concept of ‘soft power’, as enunciated by Joe Nye, was discussed and its elements enumerated—such as arts and cultural exchange, promotion of Australian ideas, and media and other people-to-people contacts. Better projection of Australia’s creativity and cultural strength should augment Australia’s international credibility and influence. There would be domestic benefits within Australia because such a strategy would send to Australians a strong message about the nation’s values, achievements and confidence.

Indigenous culture was acknowledged as especially relevant—indeed, ‘central’ to international promotion of Australian culture given its distinctiveness, quality, high impact, international appeal, and importance to Australian identity. It was emphasised that it was ‘hard to curate a national vision’ or to choose the themes for promotion internationally. Australia’s international image and engagement was a composite picture, influenced by many factors. There was some criticism of the government’s decision to cut the funding provided to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for its international touring and other cultural programs, and there was a call for more cultural attaches to be placed in Australian diplomatic missions and consolidation of resources allocated across various departments and agencies. (Italics mine).

The group endorsed the value of cultural exchanges and residencies such as those arranged by Asialink, noting the importance of casting the net widely to include relevant institutions such as universities in these programs. There was discussion of the role of arts festivals in Australia and overseas in developing productive international links between Australia’s creative community and international counterparts.

The economic dimensions of international cultural promotion were canvassed. One speaker highlighted the export potential of Australian culture, arguing that other economic activity often followed cultural connections overseas. Another participant raised the challenges faced by Australian writers given the continuing British dominance of the international book-publishing market by virtue of its possession of British and Commonwealth rights from US publishers. Globalisation was seen as raising other challenges, such as displacement of Australian cultural activity by international products and other influences. Others saw new opportunities for outward looking engagement in a global domain. The key was to strike the right balance between national and local on one hand and international on the other.

Your faithful blogger is back is town, with a baroque case of laryngitis incubated on the long-haul flight and an even more spectacular dose of jetlag. Yet for all such minor discomforts, I feel refreshed and revitalised. I had a fantastic time, which reminded me of some important stuff that is all too easily eroded in the hurlyburly chaos loosely known as my life.

I spent the final few days of my visit at the SoundEye Festival of the Arts of the Word in Cork, a completely brilliant and unique event which showcases, if showcase is the word, some of the most exciting things happening under the radar in contemporary poetry in Ireland, the UK and the US. There simply isn't an event in Australia like it (I'm not sure there's an event anywhere like it). It's one of the most intense, exciting and fun engagements with the possibilities of language that I've experienced. I plan to blog Soundeye a little more fully, to see if I can give you any sense of what it was, so watch this space theatrenauts, especially if you're interested in performance and language together. (And no, I'm not talking about performance poetry, but poetry as performance, which, I earnestly assure you, is quite different).

Some thoughts sparked by the festival are gleaming through the fog of jetlag, colliding with further thoughts emerging from the conversation under my review of Chris Goode's ...Sisters, which seems to have melded with attacks on Dan Spielman and Max Lyandvert's Manna, (on this week at the STC). And these thoughts then wandered on further and bumped into other thoughts which have been circling for some months now about the literary and intellectual culture in this country, and how unfruitfully it meshes with our theatre.

I have long suspected that our writing is the weakest part of our theatre, and it strikes me that the reasons for this go much deeper than a simple analysis of institutional structures and practice can reveal. Although I'd claim proudly that many elements of our theatre - performance, visual and sound design, technical skills and so on - stand with world's best practice, writing is too often like a poor, rather dim cousin on the fringes. And this has deep and worrying implications for everything else.

I'm not alone in my concerns about Australian theatre writing, although my thoughts are of a different timbre to most. On my desk when I came home was this month's Platform Paper by Chris Mead, artistic director of PlayWriting Australia, from Currency House: What Is An Australian Play: Have we failed our ethnic writers? I've glanced through it, and will give it a proper read in the next week - I hope - (on my floor is a huge boxful of scripts that I have to read this week as part of a panel for the RE Ross Trust Playwrights' Awards). But superficially, Mead is addressing the Anglocentric focus of Australian theatre culture, and how it marginalises minority writing. It looks interesting, and certainly deserves close attention.

But I suspect my own concerns go deeper than Mead's. It seems to me that any writing that steps outside a lamentably narrow paradigm is marginalised here, at a cost which is felt most deeply in our mainstream, but which reverberates all the way through the ecology of literature and theatre. The marginalisation of ethnic writers is only one of the symptoms. This is because the writing that kicks a culture alive is always the work that is rigorously doing something different, that questions basic assumptions, that won't fit - whether or not it exploits recognisable formal attributes - with what has gone before it.

We (excuse the rhetorical "we" - blame the jetlag, but I'm going to get stentorian now and shout in generalities) think in cliches, and this is where we betray most seriously our colonial mindset and stamp out most enthusiastically all signs of cultural diversity. Because literary thought (and I mean literary thought) in its broadest senses is marginalised in our culture, we lack an intellectual context in which new writing of any kind might be recognised. We are frightened (or simply ignorant) of the possibilities of language. And without a rigorous intellectual context, we will be stuck with half-baked experimentation or half-baked realisations of conventions, because any writing, conventional or not, that passionately addresses the possibilities of theatre will be greeted with hostility or, which is worse, total indifference. And this applies to Henrik Ibsen as much as to Sarah Kane, who is yet to have a mainstream production of her work in this country.

Can we find that context in Australian literary culture? I greatly fear that we can't. Theatre's where much of the most exciting Australian art is happening, and the more interesting reaches of our own contemporary writing are basically invisible, drowned in the sludge that here passes for literary culture. We're hamstrung in so many ways by what the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger tapes as the inevitable link between "mediocrities and delusions". That why we can't distinguish genuine experimentation from sheer wankery, or even recognise a good play, and turn to tired Anglocentric modes of writerly practice with timid squeaks of relief. If we want our theatre to matter, we have to be smarter. That means a lot of things. But maybe the first thing is to address our own incuriosities and illiteracies.

Currency House has published another must-have Platform Paper: a lucid and fascinating examination of the vexed question of arts funding. A Sustainable Arts Sector: What Will It Take? is written by Cathy Hunt and Phyllida Shaw, and is compulsory reading for anybody interested in the nuts and bolts of culture-making.

(It's particularly interesting in the light of the current funding row taking place in the UK, where the Arts Council of England has mystifyingly transformed an injection of 50 million pounds into a high octane public crisis.)

Hunt and Shaw begin with the proposition that a "sustainable" arts sector means much more than a measure of the fiscal health of individual companies. They convincingly make the point that, like education or public health, the arts sector is, in the old-fashioned term, a "public service". Not that they use that phrase.

It's well worth threading through the complexities of the argument: it may sometimes be a little dry, but it's packed with useful background, and is an illuminating survey of government arts policy, both here and in the UK. At base, this is a passionate advocacy of the place of the arts in contemporary society, and an intelligent argument for a more holistic and multi-dimensional approach to arts funding. (We're talking private as well as public investment). In particular, arguing that we should attempt to think more long-term about our arts ecology, Hunt and Shaw propose that the Federal Government consider setting up a Future Fund for the Arts.

Most importantly, it's an example of what we need badly in this country, and especially now under the new Labor Government: intelligent and pragmatic arts advocacy. A Sustainable Arts Sector deserves a close read and serious discussion: it's a significant contribution to a crucial public debate. Hunt and Shaw will be speaking in February at public forums called Rethinking Arts Policy: Putting the Artist First, in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, so watch out for those dates. And let's hope that Peter Garrett picks up a copy.

As a bonus, this Platform Paper also includes responses from Nicholas Pickard, Julian Meyrick and Neil Armfield to Lee Lewis's controversial paper on Cross-Racial Casting, which, as some of you might remember, caused some blogospherical fireworks last year.

Last night, Lee Lewis' Platform Paper on Cross-Racial Casting was launched at the Beckett Theatre with vim, espièglerie and lashings of after-launch conversation lubricated by copious amounts of wine. Among a crowd of 30 to 40 interested people were Stephen Armstrong and Michael Kantor (respectively executive producer and artistic director of the Malthouse) as well as a notable blogger presence - Matt from Esoteric Rabbit, Ming from Mink-Tails and Daniel from Our Man in Berlin.


An hour and a half flew by. Or it did for me, anyway. Platform Papers editor Dr John Golder was MC; I spoke briefly (see below) and then Lee talked with lively passion about her paper and responded to questions from the audience. Topics covered included: the reasons why she decided to investigate this issue; the responses so far to what she has written; the influence of the dominance of naturalism and Lee's conviction that the first step should be aggressive cross-racial casting of the classical repertoire; the present conservative political climate that has so inhibited experiment on main stages and, perhaps most interestingly of all, Lee's interrogation of her own practice and ethics as a director. Peter Brook turned up once or twice, although sadly not in person.

Conversation afterwards flowed through many byways (the differences between Sydney and Melbourne, Dr Who and Harry Potter, blogging, the general theatrical discourse, the inhibitions that surround discussions about race, and so on...) One major question was how to extend the conversation about cross-racial casting into a general ethic in theatrical practice. Ming - whom I'm sure will write further about this - was bothered that such an important issue was considered by many of her peers to be a minority concern that doesn't affect white people. There was a notable sense throughout the evening that this issue is not about "worthiness" and rather has everything to do with the task of making exciting theatre that engages with the Australia in which we all live.


It was all, as my kids used to say, very fun. Let's hope the conversation does continue: I'm with Lee in thinking it one of the vital questions in Australian theatre. If you haven't read it, buy the book - I assure you that it's a fascinating, smart and stimulating read - and maybe subscribe to the Platform Papers series, which is well worth your attention.

Here's what I said in launching the book:

I’m honoured that Katherine Brisbane asked me to launch this book, and would like to thank her in absentia. It seems to me that Lee Lewis’s paper, Cross-Racial Casting: Changing the Face of Australian Theatre, is an important contribution to the continuing conversation about theatre in Australia, and I’m delighted to be here today. The editorial board at Currency House is to be congratulated for this series of Platform Papers, which has for the past few years provided a valuable and sorely-needed space for extended and thoughtful analyses of Australian performing arts culture.

This particular paper has already generated a lot of comment and discussion, some of it excited and positive, some of it hostile. Perhaps, as Lee Lewis ventures so fearlessly into such a delicate and complex area, this is only to be expected. But I’d like to begin with some negative theology. There are a number of things that I think this paper is not.

This is not an accusatory paper. It’s not an argument that blindly points the gun of racism at theatre directors or writers or artistic institutions. It is not concerned with apportioning blame. As Lewis quite rightly says, “Little is served by this discourse of blame beyond encouraging inertia”.

Rather, I think Lee does something much more interesting and much more positive. She intelligently and sensitively identifies a complex problem that she perceives within Autralian theatre culture, and then, without ignoring the minefields that surround the issue, she suggests a possible approach towards its resolution.

What is the problem? According to Lee, the diverse ethnic make-up of the Australian population is not reflected by a similar diversity on our stages. Sydney main stages – and by extension, mainstream stages in other Australian cities – remain "reprehensibly White". Not reflecting this diversity, she argues, means that theatre is missing a huge opportunity to re-imagine our national identity, that we are unwittingly participating in implicitly colonial practices that privilege the White over every other kind of identity.

In order to develop her thesis, Lee examines the social construction of Whiteness and the broader implications of the marginalisation of what she calls Third World Looking People. And she takes a searching and not unsympathetic look at how this plays out in the complicated culture of theatre.

The solution, she says, by no means lies in simplistic identity politics. TWLP actors are not, for example, granted the same possibility of transformation that White actors are: a White actor is considered neutral and able to be protean, whereas a TWLP is forever trapped in the biological reality of his or her ethnic origin.

I think Lee’s identification of the problem is pretty much unarguable. On the whole, our mainstages are, as Barrie Kosky said while casting his eye over the STC’s Actors Company, very “white bread”. And actors who do not identify as White are very seldom seen on our main stages outside ethnically-specific roles. We recently had an Indigenous Othello in Melbourne, but we are yet to see a Black Lear or an Asian Hedda Gabler. And, as Lee points out, even if cross-racial casting began to happen routinely, this could only be the beginning of a complex and exciting shift in our cultural dialogue.

I hope that Lee’s paper does lift us past the discourse of blame to a more positive recognition that there is a problem, and more, to further discussion on how it might best be dealt with. I declare this book launched and now pass over to Lee to talk more about her ideas.

And then she did...

Nicholas Pickard's blog report on the Sydney launch here.

Pictures: Top: Lee Lewis speaks at the launch. Bottom: Some of the later conviviality: (L-R) Brad and Sarah from the Malthouse, David, me, Matt the Esoteric Rabbit (front), Stephen from the Malthouse, Ming from Minktails. Photos: Brett Boardman

Yes, I know, Ms TN has been blogging like a maniac. Rest assured, I'll calm down over the next few days - I have a quieter week ahead. But some things of interest demand the attention of my tired little fingers.

Don't forget the Cross-Racial Casting Launch and Forum at the Malthouse tomorrow afternoon, where I will be launching Lee Lewis's controversial Platform Paper for Currency House. Join us, as they say, for a chance to discuss this landmark paper and maybe even buy it for yourself if you haven't seen it yet. The event is free, at 5.30 for 6: details at Currency House.

Which gives me an excuse to point to Outlier, the blog of Australian playwright Noëlle Janaczewska, who has recently posted some stimulating thoughts about the whole question of representation on our stages.

Meanwhile, partly in response to the fierce debate my review of Sleeping Beauty unleashed on these pages, Malthouse dramaturg and co-creator of Sleeping Beauty Maryanne Lynch answers her critics in Arts Hub in a fascinating essay about the ideas behind the show. "What is it about using music, popular music, that has created such fierce commentary?" asks Lynch. "Or, more positively, why did we make this artistic choice?"

What our critics have found hardest to deal with is using such music as the narrative of a theatrical work and how this might accurately reflect the journey of a young girl from childhood to adult life. Underlying both issues is that hoary old question “but is it theatre?”

So, the nay-sayers say, Sleeping Beauty was nothing more than a tarted-up Year 12 Eisteddfod, we’re just a bunch of theatre artists who don’t even know what’s contemporary for teenagers, and most interestingly that the work failed to engage with the real-life experience of real-life young women.

Lynch goes on to explain the thinking behind their choices of music, what they did with it theatrically, and why they were playing with ideas of entertainment. Popular songs, says Lynch, are the contemporary equivalents of fairy tales.

Just as a culture takes on other influences and moulds them into its own, [Sleeping Beauty] tries on first this and then that idea of female identity, attempting to find out who she is as she works it out. There’s a musical parallel here too. Indigenous Australia has embraced Country and Western, and we all know the origins of white rock and roll but always these sources are reconfigured by those who appropriate them. Our Sleeping Beauty knows these songs, the same songs our critics know, but she receives them from where she’s at, for better and worse, and does the same to them.

She wanders through a dreamscape of her own making, and she inhabits but must discard all these versions of herself as she goes on. Instead, she faces life as a journey, navigated by choice and circumstance and culture, with no clear destination.

Popular music tracks the pathways she could take but knows, as theatre does, its own limitations in embodying the rich confusion of the journey. It satisfies us because it pins us down and we in turn take it up and spin it around. Like a record; like a tune in our heads.

The Arts Hub link is here (registration required). Well worth checking out, if you can get there.