Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
1- REX I want to begin by respectfully acknowledging the Boonwurrung people as the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. I also acknowledge the other tribes of the Kulin nation and pay my respects to their elders, both past and present. I’d like to thank the Rex Cramphorn committee for this honour. At what has turned out to be such a critical juncture for theatre in Australia, with leadership changes to 4 or 5 major companies, it felt timely to contemplate what that might mean… The following wanders through some possibilities, but also aspires to take stock and look squarely at where I believe we are as a theatre culture. “Professional stock-taking” was an expression that Rex coined – it seemed fitting to appropriate it here. A disconcerting revival of the 1980’s is happening at the moment. I feel like I’m being surrounded by my university days in a series of unsolicited flashbacks - dragged back to the future: 21 year olds are listening to music that I was when I was 21.There are leggings and spotty stockings that I used to own, bangles clanging around and boys with sharp haircuts…Except there was one big, defining difference - a cloud hovering that kept casting a shadow right across our dance-floor…It kept pushing its way into our thoughts, kept us vigilant and careful. It was AIDS. One of my abiding memories of the 80’s is driving along in a taxi with Rex past Taylor Square and hearing him say: “they’re dancing on people’s graves”. Rex was the first AIDS victim I was acquainted with –the first of many experiences of robbed talent and goodness that we all had to live through. He was also the first real, living artist that as a young 21 year old I could claim to know, let alone observe, document, assist. If you were lucky enough to be around Sydney Uni at this time and you were doing a course through a language department, you would have to end up in the realm of semiotics at some point, and that - in an idiosyncratic way- brought you right into the study of theatre. In my case it suddenly meant that I could apply what I was doing in SUDS [Sydney University Drama Society] with a number of really sustainable, nourishing premises. The idea of doing a thesis, then getting a scholarship to do another was really for me, just a way of supporting myself through a series of observing gigs – a way to watch professional directors at work. I’m probably the last of this new generation of Artistic Directors to have known Rex. I can’t really say I knew him well –isn’t it the thing as a twenty-something-year old white middle-class student to take your good fortune for granted? But I certainly knew the environment well…And there is no doubt that Rex’s great supporters, people like Gay McAuley, Kim Spinks, Derek Nicholson, Tim Fitzpatrick, my own peers Ian Maxwell, Chris Mead, Laura Ginters – other visiting directors like Lindy Davies…they made it a place that allowed me to think in my own quiet way. If anything, that time at the Theatre Studies Unit taught me to identify and to value those essential features of theatre: the incredible communicative power of three-dimensional space, the live experience and communion between artists and audience, the use of metaphor and the non- literal, the fact that a packing crate can be a car, that an actor can play a dog…Those basic things that belong to theatre and to no other medium. For me personally, Rex’s contribution had to do with process - in particular it was about “otherness” or alterity: questioning what we do in relation to a vast set of
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
alternatives…expressed in so many ways - imagining a way to work outside the mainstream, adopting a different view of hierarchy. It was also about questioning the status-quo, looking beyond our Anglo traditions - just in a way that was curious about what other people had to offer, and more importantly that searched for what transcendent art might be created from that encounter. It was humbling to read through these lectures and take stock of the contribution our artists have made since then - to read Jim Sharman paying homage to John Summner, to hear Nick Enright’s voice again as if he were in the room. It made me think about the really big changes that have happened within my time as a professional… I would have to single out Neil Armfield and the visionary way in which he championed Indigenous artists and their work – an almost total change to the way we think about our culture with ripple effects that send positive messages way beyond theatre. l’d have to include an unsung hero - Chris Westwood, who also thought outside the square, not just with Sue Hill and their Belvoir achievement, but for being such a pro-active force for female artists then and beyond. She did an enormous amount for women directors and designers – the fact that no-one really ran with the ball enough isn’t her fault. During her tenure, she made STCSA a testing ground for first–time artists. For a while there it was where we could get our first main-stage gigs. It was a “pathway”. I don’t know that Rex, West or Neil ever set out with these ambitions stated. They didn’t write them into business plans. They weren’t coordinated about this. They were embedded in the work and emerged from the work...They were made in the course of everyday decisions, by being open and alive to all sorts of currents and crosscurrents, by answering needs as they loomed before them. This is what I hope we can expect from a new generation of Artistic Directors at the starting blocks. As one of my colleagues said: “Beware of projects. Kevin Rudd had a project”. At base, we have to roll with the realities of working collaboratively and respond with our values.
2- QUEST What is true of these people is that they used theatre to imagine the world they wanted to shape. They used their practice as the embodiment of their values. They understood that the act of transformation invokes the notion of choice: that theatre is - at heart- about agency. One of my favourite Shakespeare quotes is an unassuming one that can easily slip by - from Hamlet: ‘We know what we are but know not what we may be”… To me, this hints at one of the greatest features of theatre - the fact that as audience members, we’re invited to imagine and interact with the most optimistic and most terrifying versions of our selves. Those, and the full spectrum of possibilities, behaviours and actions in between. Theatre allows us imagine a different reality, and in so doing to know that it can be one of our own making – that we can be both its creator and a character within it. We have in ourselves, the power to make choices about who we want to be, to shape the kind of world we want to live in. This constant dance between subjectivity and objectivity is where the difference between audiences and artists disappears – where the line smudges out into a much more diffuse and complex relationship. It’s not the realm of “certainty” or of dicta. It’s where theatre becomes the place of our collective imagining - where it unites us in a
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
kind of an ongoing quest to feel out the edges of who we are….an attempt to identify what we value. Children say “I am Superman”. They don’t say “I’m pretending to be Superman”… this projection of themselves into another is what puffs up their chest. By and large we want to be bigger human beings than we are. This is the relationship I want to have with the theatre –not one that tells me what to think or feel- one that allows for that perspective to keep shifting. It follows that I want as many people as possible to be part of this. I want children to be part of it for precisely the reasons I’ve just mentioned: because as they pick their way through a complicated world, they can be given the interpretive and creative skills to apply to their own lives. We talk about the importance of physical risk-taking in kids– the idea that we need to let them dangle upside down from monkey-bars to develop and extend. In the theatre they’re allowed to venture into conceptual territory that is new and exciting, sometimes frightening and on the whole, because we are responsible parents and artists, celebratory. “The Book of Everything” that performed at Company B last year –had many parents in the school yard sucking in their cheeks, because it’s about domestic violence. My daughter’s friend, when I took them said “it’s about how hard it can be to stick up for the people you love”. The empathy and the sophistication in the way her 8 year-old self had grappled with the material and extracted this, is what we’re after. But it’s also about chucking hundreds of green ping-pong balls all over the stage and calling them a plague of frogs. There are other things I value. As Lee Lewis reminded us in her Platform Paper a couple of years ago– if our stages are meant to express our collective imagining, then it is just perverse that it isn’t more pluralistic. I want to get a sense of cultural possibility when I go to the theatre. Whether I can achieve it immediately or not, I’d like for more than one language to be heard on stage. This isn’t from a desire to be “correct” –it’s just from a desire. It’s just about the kind of world I would enjoy living in… so let’s conjure it up. I want women to stop being burdened by the many voices that question their legitimacy and erode their faith in themselves. Why are we being made to hold meetings and form alliances which place even more scrutiny on us? It’s essential that we do it, but I resent having to. But more importantly how can we get this to stop being an issue? It goes right back to the question of agency. How can women have an impact on the world around them if they are never allowed to imagine one on stage? Or if all they see on stage is one that re-enforces the dominant paradigm and almost teaches them to value what they’re not? This idea of theatre as the place where we vent, explore, deliberate, imagine who we want to be needs to be at the heart of the company’s work. I want it to be reflected in the collegial and collaborative way I work, not set out as some kind of charter. It needs to be borne of what we do in the rehearsaI room, to extend and permeate through the company’s culture in everything from our Education Program to our HR practices. It needs to be felt by our audiences, not told to them, it needs somehow to seep out of the bricks and mortar of our building.
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
Before this begins to sound too maternal, there are many things that I would gladly remove from the discourse, that are unhelpful. The idea of “theatre as family” is one that I find particularly nauseating. The idea of a director Patriarch or Matriarch but (rarely the latter!) and the ensuing family metaphors generally play right into the worst of theatre’s hypocrisies…its pre-disposition to favouritism, fashion, selfcongratulation and worthiness. As I said to a friend at a launch when the artistic director was gilding the lily: “Nothing like banging on about family to make you feel like an orphan...” How can you practically value inclusion, egalitarianism, diversity, democracy in these “special” and restricted settings? We’re too small a culture to have big enough families for this…The metaphor draws on all the nostalgic positives (security being the most ironic one) without following through to its dysfunctional extension. Or worse, it embraces and excuses those dysfunctional elements: “you were my favourite son until this next one came along…” “you have to leave home now, we can’t feed you anymore.” I am a mother, I don’t need to come to work to be one. Sure, we share a language, and sometimes that gets better, the better we know each other. Obviously we need to feel extraordinary trust and be able to expose ourselves emotionally and psychologically to each other in a rehearsal room. We need to have loyalty and defend each other when it’s tough. But why can’t we do this as colleagues who are brought together to work? Who may have plenty to share, but may have completely different aesthetics and processes - who may intersect only once but magnificently – before going on to inform other encounters? Isn’t one of the great things about theatre that we can exercise choice about who work with? That we’re not thrown together by virtue of some genetic accident? As one colleague said – surely theatre’s the way to avoid your family! Just as there is no homogenous life experience, there is no one valid way of making or experiencing theatre. There is no family crest. The zeitgeist collects many of us in its stride and there are interesting patterns, trends and themes that we can theorise from - but on the whole we need to make sure that these aren’t just the expression of a small universe – that galaxies don’t exist just beyond our gaze. I’m more interested in the paradigms that emerge when we look beyond the relative unanimity of our immediate circle – both as the artist and the audience member. When we invite others in - when we truly entertain the idea of alterity. 3- CONTINUUM None of the people I just mentioned before achieved without their fair share of failure. Neil championed Indigenous work but this most important and truly visionary contribution eclipsed the company’s absence of women directors. Chris Westwood might have helped them, but the Australian Playhouse project was -on the whole –a failure. Rex’s ongoing investigation into Measure for Measure, the project that I met him on, failed - not in the eyes of anyone involved, but generally in the eyes of the public and the critics. Their achievement over time, became the more important thing… Theatre work needs to be seen as part of a continuum, and we need to develop a culture in which failure is actually - not just verbally- recognised. Our failures are always the launching pad for new ideas and alternative courses. And we always bounce back. It’s difficult for a company to reflect this when it produces work that has to show results, where the impact of each production has real consequences that overshadow anything too long-term. It’s one of the challenges that we all face as
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
incoming ADs. We talk about ensembles nostalgically as though they have been and therefore should be the answer to creative fulfilment. The world has changed and by and large the circumstances for actors haven’t been ameliorated, so they’ve adapted and strengthened their survival techniques…working in many different areas. For the most part, ensembles are impracticable unless they evolve organically or in very particular circumstances. For those who do manage it in this environment (rarely a major org), it’s a complicated set of propositions. Generally though, when we talk about ensembles, I think we’re alluding to something else…to a yearning for this kind of continuum, for an acknowledgement that a group of people assemble to search for something that is continuously elusive – that may always escape our grasp. For all sorts of reasons, the ensemble that Rex so successfully created may be impossible in this day and age – it could barely exist then. But that doesn’t mean that some of the ideas that underpin the ensemble and perhaps even informed them can’t work, or that the idea of a collective and ongoing quest is doomed. What I do believe in is the idea that theatre companies (rather than production houses) sit at the heart of this investigation. They can bring many artists into that environment and with strong leadership, with a core artistic team that is open and optimistic, they can keep articulating the discoveries that are the next questions. They can reach into areas of the community and probe the zeitgeist. They don’t pretend to BE the zeitgeist... it’s a model that allows for greater access, greater diversity, a greater sense of the “other”. The world becomes something that starts to take on a rich and interesting shape – a shape that has dimensionality, inconclusive but multi-angular. But for that to happen, we need to be more than production houses…and in particular, we need to re-emphasise process. We can’t live or die by one play or even one season. Audiences won’t find representation in every six month season or even across the year. We have to ask for both rigour and trust - not only in relation to each show but to the bigger cultural “project” that we are all taking on. I want to claim a few years for those differences to begin to be felt. We need long-term investment from our audiences, from our boards and from each other. 4- RISK What we have to demand of each other is that we keep taking the sorts of creative risks that keep us in an energetic, dynamic relationship with the contemporary world that we test the elasticity of our practice and ride the limits of our expressive range that we be true to our DNA as artists –our inbuilt need to flirt and dance with danger. I return to the idea of alterity: in the end, a celebration of difference, a desire to reach beyond our known limits and a willingness to venture into the unknown are how I define creative risk. Michael [Kantor], with Stephen [Armstrong] and Catherine [Jones] along side, ventured into the unknown – a great dance that took us in its sweep,( lurched around occasionally but) spun us back, breathless and ready to go again. They did a great thing. In five years they managed to carve out a space of audacity and daring in what was otherwise an exceedingly conservative environment. This was particularly true of MPAB [Major Performing Arts Board] sector. When I first had a conversation with Michael and Stephen about doing Venus and Adonis – I felt incredibly buzzy. When I contemplated this, I realised what it was….They spoke to me as the artist I aspired to be rather than the one I was. I’ve
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
proceeded to see them do this, time and time again. I don’t think it’s something they even notice they do and I’m not saying it’s been experienced by everyone. But the impact it made on me personally was significant. This is not something I’d known from any other Artistic Director – they (for good reason or not – it’s complicated, I know) either wanted me to do what they wanted, or what they felt I was capable of, or what I’d already proved I was capable of. And the more you prove this obviously the more you become limited to it in their eyes…(I’m talking specifically as an artist coming from the outside not generating projects from within) What struck me about Michael and Stephen was that they were prepared to gamble as much as I was. As producers, they were ready to stake as much as the artist. And if you can do that for every artist you programme, then - apart from having the confidence in your audience - you’re putting your faith in the very thing that makes us tick, the creative daring that is part of who we are, and that is actually an essential condition (not the only one, granted) for what makes things work. I want to make sure firstly and fundamentally that MH remains that gravitational force - a first port of call for artists who are drawn to performing the most daring feats imaginable. I have to applaud Michael and his team for achieving that- for getting all of his stakeholders to believe in the importance of this, for spreading this message so successfully throughout the industry, for shaping an incredible company, for inspiring and caring for such a gifted staff, and for leaving me, the privilege of working in such a thriving environment: their legacy to audiences is palpable and enduring. Audiences, they have shown, are pretty much prepared to come on any adventure. They’re not the ones holding us back. They are up for anything – they are risking, they’re gambling their hard-earned cash time and time again on something that is going to pull them into that zone that I talked about earlier. And yet our programming in main-stage contexts is all too often about second-guessing them. Reducing their choices and experiences to what we believe will please, be comfortable, be palatable, make them vote for us. We’re starting to spin our artform. People go to furniture shops to find comfort, or to a restaurant to feel replete (perhaps) but they have other expectations of theatre, way more difficult to analyse – and therefore way more difficult to articulate. Focus groups will have limited use here. In this like many other things, leadership is important. I think we need to give them more of that immeasurable, inexpressible stuff. They want to take that journey into the unknown with us – they want the same things that we want because we are involved in this together. They feel cheated when we pull up short, when they can smell our fear and the fact that we’re letting ourselves down. They also hate having the wool pulled over their eyes. They can sense laziness, obfuscation and wank. They will accept risk, but not lack of rigour or care. 5- RIGOUR If we want to keep working at this level – if we want to perform daring feats, we need to give ourselves the wherewithal to do so. If we want to lead in the area of innovation, then we need to articulate research and development as an absolute necessity and condition in the equation. You don’t launch a new rocket without making sure it can actually take off …This needs to become a priority. In any other field it would be unacceptable to launch a brand-new cutting-edge product without adequate r and d. There is a general understanding that risk needs to be calculated
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
and mitigated by providing adequate support. In any other endeavour vibrancy and innovation is measured by the size of its research and development arm We need to change the way we make work in the MPAB sector and beyond. In twenty years of professional experience, I haven’t met a single artist who believes that we are creating work to the best of our abilities, that we are “optimising” our talents. And if they do, they aren’t getting paid for it –in any case, rarely if ever, is it in the context of a major performing arts company. The way we make work enshrines mediocrity. The small to medium sector has understood this better than elsewhere and has acted upon it to the extent it’s able. Companies like Ranters, Black Lung, My Darling Patricia are finding their modern equivalents to ensembles and more satisfying ways of working. But how often do we see the brilliance of an idea undermined, not by the limits of our imagination, or our lack of talent but by the pressured environment of its creation, by insufficient interrogation, lacklustre thinking? I often see work on stage that has almighty aspirations but hasn’t had the right kind of support to reach fruition…work that wades around in the shallows of its own big ocean. What we do to performers is almost culpable… we keep sending our performers and our work out to get hammered. We ask them to perform triple somersaults (degree of difficulty 10) and watch them almost get there... Performers show incredible resilience and faith –they pick themselves up and do it again and again with barely anything more than their unwavering commitment and steel to hang onto. We have these aspirations, we are exceedingly capable but we aren’t giving ourselves anywhere near the wherewithal to achieve. It’s not talent that we are missing, it’s certainly resources in part, but it’s more generally that we’re stuck in anachronistic ways of working. Our aspirations are out of whack with the way we’re proposing to achieve them. To use more corporate terminology, our strategies aren't aligned to our goals. This has often been said – we’ve often reached a point of frustration but we’ve never started to articulate a plan of attack…we’ve never said: we are doing it all wrong… we made some fundamental mistakes when we professionalised our artform… we made a whole heap of assumptions that were misguided. For a start, we modelled our process on someone else’s way of working. We didn’t look to our own incredible happening (culture) as a guide and means of expression. We looked at the way other people made shows that weren’t even in our repertoire, that had no relevance to the brewing energy and complexity and force that was to become us. We are still trying to capture this irrepressible culture in a shape and size that was made for someone else, for a culture that may once have bottled all our colonial dreams, but that is in the end, not us. We never developed a means of expression that allowed us to hold the gaze of who we are - let alone of who we are becoming. This is just a recipe for further frustration. We look at our colleagues in dance, who have 12 weeks creative development. We keep looking at European models - oh to have three months’ rehearsals… in some situations that would be great, but in a sense that’s just another expression of our colonial inferiority complex, a way of deflecting attention from the real issue – which is to grow up and decide what we need to do for ourselves.
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
This isn’t just a matter of lengthening rehearsals, although in many cases that would be a good start. I’ve sat in a French company and experienced the creative complacency and lethargy - knowing that these were directly connected to the three yawning months stretching before us. Arguably this was exactly the right process for a cultural enclave that is essentially solipsistic and needs an endless quest to validate itself in the eyes of itself. We are not like this – we don’t want to be like this. I get back to the fact that we can use theatre to work out who we want to be…If we’re creatively independent, we’ll be politically independent. I hate reductive attempts to define national attributes – we are or should be in a constant state of becoming BUT - if we’re to make any kind of simplistic appraisal of our vast, rich, pluralistic culture we could say that among other things, Australians are characterised as curious, irreverent and brave…This is about as close as you can get to personifying innovation. We have been brazen innovators in so many other fields: in engineering, in ophthalmology, we have laid the ground, set the parameters, chucked them out and re-framed the question – we have by and large invented the way to serve the invention. If there is an ambition that I have for Malthouse, it’s to apply this to our field. I really want to change the way we make work in this country. There has never been a better opportunity at least to envision a complete overhaul and describe what it looks like. For that, we have to look at processes that take place long before rehearsals even begin…from the moment a writer has an idea…. or a designer sees an image, or a director has (what Peter Brook called) a “formless hunch” about a set of propositions. We need to recognise firstly that even at this early stage, there are broadly different ways of conceiving of a work for the theatre. And that no one kind of artist has a monopoly on that. In the time and in the place we are standing, in the world as it exists and as it provokes us and demands of us a range of expressive possibilities, that work may well start with a word, or an image, an ancient myth or an anarchic set of rule-defying emotions. If we’re serious about wanting to explode form then we need to start with a genuine embrace of possibility. The idea that one discipline has “primacy” over another can’t pre-date the impulse. The impulse comes first, then let’s draw it out, begin to hone it and ask the entire next set of questions as to how we develop it. Then we have the whole under-resourced, under-valued, pressured area of creative development etc. What should be one of the most stimulating and exhilarating times as an artist is often the most frustrating. Where an impulse has been articulated, where a number of directions have suggested themselves, where possibilities are dizzying, and where there is protection from the relative pressures of production. The audience is still theoretical, the realities are imagined. Intense, effortful, productive and short. Until recently if you were a director (generalising) you would work out your production alone then brief a designer and spend some time with them. You might have a separate conversation with a lighting designer. You might then meet the actors on day one and present your vision. I’ve refused to work this way for a long time. By hook or by crook, the creative teams I’ve worked with have scraped together a few consecutive days here and there to sit down and bang heads together. But this happens by stealth. It’s due to sheer will-power and professional good-will: it is not the expectation that is articulated through our structures… through our fee set-ups,
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
through our crazy scheduling. More often than not, I have left the development process breathlessly cramming things in, pressured to come up with ideas- (come-on we need two more good ideas before lunch) - and yearning for more. I generally hit rehearsals with less than adequate answers, or rather, less than adequate questions. This may be my own deficiency. But I don’t think it’s unique. If you’re a writer, you’re usually expected to write a treatment or a draft in complete isolation, before you even have a conversation with a director or designer: this - for a three-dimensional, spatial form. You don’t get to hear your words unless you get a workshop, and that’s really dependent on what happens, when the said draft arrives on our desks, we fold our arms and decree its fate. This sets writers up to fail. It sets artistic directors up to be resented. This model exists for a type of theatre that I don’t believe we are really trying to create, and a way of working that is divisive and essentially non-collaborative. Even the most solitary of writers I have spoken to want to collaborate from earlier on in their process. They recognise that a designer has unparalleled visual skills and can be an extraordinary resource. They yearn to hear whether their dialogue sings or clunks along the ground... But they don’t have access to any of this - until in many cases, it’s already written….and then judgment has been cast. It’s your classical catch twenty-two. If you’re a designer, you’re one in a tiny minority struggling to initiate work and to have your ideas for projects taken seriously. It is too expensive, it’s too abstract, we have no real culture for this kind of thing. It is not actually about time or money though these are at the pointy end of the issue, always the most visible symptoms. It is as much about our own conservatism -our inflexible assumptions about creative roles and the fact that we have built this inflexibility into our infra-structures. We pay people and we schedule people, we work with people as if they’re doing the job they used to do – as if our artform hadn’t developed and as if we weren’t exacting from each other a more sophisticated and complex contribution. It’s as if our lighting designers are there to do lights. It’s as if our sound designers are providing scene change music. These artists carry a much greater and highly specialised conceptual responsibility. On a positive note, one of the great things about Melbourne is that its companies are more willing to talk to each other- or so it seems. There is dialogue between a major organisation like Malthouse and smaller companies and independent artists. Michael and his team have helped this by bringing a whole cross-section of independent companies into the building. This in itself begins to crack open conventional models and work with greater diversity. It becomes - for all of us- a more vibrant and dynamic way of working. A late addition to this speech - Thyestes, the production that opened last week in the Tower is a case in point. This production came about through Malthouse’s resident company program: here, an independent company is supported to create a work of its choice within the venue, leaning on Malthouse’s infrastructure to meet a number of production requirements. Most importantly though, the company in question is given support to pursue its own particular process. In the three years that this program has been running, each production has been a knock-out… Each one, from Black Lung’s Avast, through to My Darling Patricia’s Africa, and now Hayloft [Project]’s Thyestes has had overwhelming audience, critical, and industry response.
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
It also had - I don’t think Simon [Stone] would mind me saying - a fairly idiosyncratic process and eight weeks’ rehearsal. A bit of dilly-dallying and uncertainty… uncertainty is after all flipside of any genuine innovation… not knowing what you need…even a little disorganisation - that’s not uncharacteristic of artists. This can be tolerated for an outcome that is actually this tight and this disciplined. Good ideas are often borne and bred this way….in a way that isn’t linear, that is sometimes tangential - certainly never in a way that you can second-guess or can legislate…as I said before: “Beware of the project”. This third show starts to suggest a pattern. Two shows and it may be a fluke, three shows in a row and you have to question what you’re doing right. The irony here is that we’ve been able to get support for Hayloft’s process - but we would never have been able to support our own. We can’t fund ourselves to do this yet.,. I’m happy that we can at least help other companies. But we, as a leading company and with all the incumbent expectations that brings with it - we should be the ones doing the leading - banging the drum louder and more effectively than anyone. It’s our responsibility to find a way of working together for proper periods of development, to acknowledge the importance of an early contribution. Let’s assemble strong teams according the needs of they key artist involved and the idea they’re trying to bring alive. And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the unhelpful binary that is text-based or non-text based theatre. The idea that there are two kinds and that the world is divided along those lines is symptomatic of the rigidity I’ve been talking about. There is no one valid way of making theatre, no one valid way of experiencing it. We can’t begin to imagine what theatre might be if we are so rigid about what it is. I guess I come back to the point that a great idea does not in itself, make good art. A work of art is created in the time and space between an idea and its realisation. Its potency is the measure of how an idea is tested, developed and supported over time. While we have permission to fail, we have the right to create the best conditions for success- the strongest platform from which to leap.
6 – PRACTICALITY Understandably, the refrain from many people is: but how are you going to fund it? Well, in much the same way we fund anything else in the Arts: with great difficulty. We need to advocate and lobby for it, We need to make our stakeholders understand that in the end this is what will give us the platform to excel. That the results will be palpable – that this is exactly where the question of vibrancy in the major performing arts sector can be answered. Firstly- we should acknowledge that we are already close to doing it. We know there is wide-spread support for this because there is wide-spread evidence of invention and will, of artists trying to achieve this even within the current constraints that we face: Venus and Adonis is the example I keep coming back to, not because it was perfect, but because its process left me and audiences (generally) satisfied that we were heading somewhere. Over eighteen months to two years it had three creative developments, each of one or two weeks each. The first was funded by the Major Festivals Initiative, the second and third jointly by Bell Shakespeare and Malthouse.
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
By the time we arrived at day one of rehearsals proper, we had explored and nailed some really strong ideas, we felt we were working from with the right foundation. You could say in fact that we also had over two months rehearsals all up. Sappho, that I was involved in recently at Malthouse had had a previous production. Small-scale and very different - but a production nonetheless. Jane Griffiths came to rehearsals with many a discovery made, many re-writes later. I didn’t feel I could take full directorial credit for the show partly for this reason, but in the end - does it matter? The show was better for this process. These are two of the most satisfying works I’ve been involved in, in the last little while. Secondly (and by extension): we can share development costs a little more with other companies. We are great at co-producing. We can do a hell of a lot more cocommissioning and co-developing. This (apart from the development opportunity) can open avenues for much greater cross-fertilisation- collaborations between artists, art-forms, companies, cultures. Thirdly: tailor-make process better. We can ask better questions of what’s needed and throw out standard templates - a much more laborious demand on our producing and administrative colleagues, but one that I’ve seen talented people throw up instinctively in response to artistic needs. We need flexibility and an open mind more than we need resources. Fourthly, if needs be, we can achieve it by doing less. Finally we have to come out and say that that’s what we need to do, so that’s what we’re going to do. Saying it is well on the way to doing it. Simply putting aside the time in the calendar is making a commitment to it. We can do it by formalising our basic requirements, by saying that if our work is to gain in depth and rigour, we have to do this – and if we fail, we fail, but we just have to screw our courage to the sticking plate and we won’t. It’s difficult to talk about rigour and depth of interrogation without sounding like I want to send everyone off to boot camp. In all of this emphasis on development, we can’t forget for a moment that instinct rather than intellect is our greatest friend, that spontaneity and whimsy, and imaginative flashes and serendipity are as vital as ever… that endless questioning can be deathly. As one of my colleagues said (quoting another) “if you dissect a frog all you end up with is a dead frog” If anything, I’m talking about the need to extend this time of playfulness and freedom, to open it up to all sorts of other influences and possibilities. I can’t speak for my AD colleagues, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t support these ideas, at least in theory. In a sense this is an invitation and an offering to them. I think we can all win here. MALTHOUSE: So in Malthouse’s ideal future, all of these ideas will find some concrete form of expression. Some of the things you might expect are:
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
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A small team of artistic associates – people to think with, people who ask questions as part of their practice and who are aesthetically and creatively aligned to these goals. These people will spread their tentacles into all areas of the theatre community and bring a range of artists and ideas under our roof.
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Four months of our year in 2011 will be quarantined and dedicated to development – the building will be alive and busy, with works co-produced and the many partners who inhabit this building with us - but our core artistic team and the artists we are supporting will be behind closed doors, in the kind of “engine room” that feeds the operation. The results of this work may not be seen for a year or two but I’m convinced that they’ll emerge from there with better offerings for our audiences.
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We want to provide two six month internships – a brazen commitment to Affirmative Action - an acknowledgment of the barriers that some members of our community face through no fault of their own, with no aspersion about their talent. In 2011, these might be female directors, designers, lightingdesigners. They might observe, assist, tour, get inside the working of a company… the day to running of a business. They’ll become highly visible contenders for jobs in their profession.
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We want to think seriously about our regional responsibility and the fact that this extends beyond Melbourne. Placements of artists in communities and ideas borne of those experiences taking place there, rather than us visiting our culture upon them….
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Strengthening our dramaturgy and literary management dept so that we have a more meaningful interaction with writers, build teams and start working on ideas collaboratively and from much earlier in the process.
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Create two or three moments of high concentration in the year events in the year that expose us to curated works in other genres, artforms. An extended moment of theatre for young people that is supported by an imaginative Education Programme; a Festival of Dangerous Ideas that becomes the focal point of our Things on Sunday. The Dance Massive model, extended. New and diverse audiences as a result.
These are just some of the things that we hope to achieve – some of them are long-term- ideas. Others are already well and truly in the pipeline. My first concrete announcement ahead of the launch in November (I can’t wait until then) - is that Matt Lutton will be joining the current team as Malthouse Associate Director. In what many colleagues have described as a real coup, Matt will come on board from July next year. For those of you who don’t know Matt’s background, he has run his own company Thin Ice, which he started up at the ripe age of 23 in Perth. He has worked for most theatre companies in Australia and even made inroads into Germany. One of Matt’s first big breaks was when he took over for Michael Kantor on the production of Tartuffe. I regard this as something that connects him very deeply to Malthouse.
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
I first came across Matt’s work when I saw Don’t Say the Words at Griffin - a collaboration with writer Tom Holloway - a project that so clearly demonstrated the partnership and process that I’ve been talking about. I then started to develop a work with him through Mind’s Eye at Bell Shakespeare - this proved to me just what a creature of the theatre Matt is... if you cut him he would bleed it. He is to my mind, the most interesting director of his generation. Matt brings this experience, along with his curiosity and generosity of spirit to Malthouse. And in a sense, he takes Malthouse closer to Perth. There’s a lot of traffic between Melbourne and Sydney. I’m personally thrilled that we are opening up the flight paths and emphasising the broad national dimension of our profession. Malthouse will have two productions performing in Perth this year Lucy Guerin’s Human Interest Story and Matt’s production of The Trial… Without anticipating next year, I would suggest that Matt may well be back home at some point… . CONC These are some of the things that you can expect of this particular Artistic Director. In venturing something about the others - acknowledging all the while that I’m not speaking for them, that these thoughts are very much refracted through my own lens… I would have to express great optimism. I have really high aspirations for Australian artists and audiences - a delineation which (as I said before) I find almost academic. When I sit in rehearsals everyday I am an audience member - I watch and admire and recoil and laugh - I rely on this form to sing my hopes and name my fears and I’m really disappointed when it doesn’t. Most artists are too. We create a kind of seal around that place and that experience for as long as it lasts - until one of us, either of us, any of us, chooses to break it with our applause. I’ve witnessed those colleagues we’re talking about Wesley Enoch, Ralph Myers, Cate and Andrew (a little further along the AD path) talking about audiences in this way - without the ‘us and them’ thing; without the - ‘I just create art, like it or lump it” thing; but with an unabashed and unforced love for the experience of participating - beyond doing or watching: for just being there in that room. We also talk to each other. We’ve had conversations about projects, about seasons, about brochures - and actually about stuff that extends way beyond our own individualistic approaches, beyond our own artistic visions, our aesthetic differences. I think we all recognise that we have a collective responsibility to this artform - that we have to grow our audiences together rather than compete for them. We will be, I think, collegiate and pragmatic. We’ll share a desire to raise the bar… to think beyond the immediate needs of our own companies, but not by blanding out into some form of artistic consensus. I think we understand that differences are desirable and need to co-exist: and I don’t think we are interested in punishing others for their aesthetics, styles, forms just because it’s not the way one of us might do it… Audiences should have choice.
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Marion Potts - 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture Merlyn Theatre, The Cub Malthouse, 26 September 2010
I don’t claim to speak about their aspirations - except I know they have them - and they too will cross-fertilise. Personally I want to look at process. They’ll do other things… In the end our job is to back our own subjectivity. What I’d like us to agree on is that we’ll celebrate what we do and the myriad of people who do it. We’ll make it less marginal, less peripheral because we’ll promote the success not the failure, the positive statement rather than the apologetic one. We’re comfortable on the whole, in our skins, we feel strong being artists, and we’re ready to greet the time. Some people have already heard me talk about this moment - I’ve mentioned it before. I was sitting on my deck at home last summer with a sound designer. In the course of conversation he sat up and bent his ear to the garden and said -: “did you know Marion, you have five different varieties of frog in your garden all croaking at the same time, right now.” ….Wow. That’s the skill of a scientist. When you walk from one end of this building to the other… you find in our workshop people who can talk about welding, turning, canter-leavering, rigging. There is a person detailing a ceiling piece like it’s the Sistine Chapel. There is bar management figuring out how to support small Victorian wineries, through to people just next door who can cut and sew anything from a wedding dress to a bear suit. Upstairs people are modelling the kind of marketing savvy that would pay them twice as much in the corporate sector. And then there are some people under the hammer every single day of the week…who perform the numeric back-flips to make it all work. All of these people are theatre people- it’s really a big cross section of skills, expertises, backgrounds. We aren’t a breed apart. We all live fairly and squarely in the world. Our centrality to culture is a powerful currency. It trades more strongly and in more unexpected ways than anyone else might acknowledge….I think our generation needs to be really clear about that. If we believe in these things I’ve talked about ….growth, choice, a sense of ‘other’, depth…If we want these things for our culture, we can make some really clamorous arguments. By way of conclusion - I have to remind everyone that Paul Keating was the last Prime minister to have attended the performance of a major organisation. Or perhaps that’s not a conclusion but an incitement to discourse… in any case we invite Julia Gillard to a theatre nearby, anytime soon. Thank you. M
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