APAM 2014: Who enters whose world?

dirtsong - The Black Arm Band

I've been in Brisbane just over a week, enjoying some sun and taking part in APAM - the biennial showcase of Australian Performing Arts.  It's the second one I've attended - and again it's been a great resource for learning what indigenous theatre-makers are up to.  The great revelation for me was The Black Arm Band - an organisation I had heard of but never heard before.  dirtsong was a remarkable experience, with incredible music from performers like Emma Donovan and our old friend Trevor Jamieson, sung in front of poignant black and white film from the communities.  It's very simple, but it's pure artistry.

I enjoyed the other indigenous work too - and there was quite a selection.  Some of it I already knew - in fact Gudirr Gudirr was here - and I was able to connect with lots of friends from the past.  Even Natasha Wanganeen, who I hadn't seen since Bullie's House ten years ago, was here performing in a children's show. Some of the work in APAM is shown in full, some of it in 25 minute excerpts (as happened with Ilbijerri's Corranderk, for example), and some in the form of "pitches".  These last can be surprisingly useful - even though you don't see the production, you get a sense of what may be happening in a year's time.  Things to keep an eye on.

What I enjoy most is this aspect of an artistic community working together towards possibility.  The "market" aspect isn't really my cup of tea - the discussions around it absolutely are.  On day 2, I was asked to host a "roundtable session" on First Nations touring - a job I shared with a wonderful Ojibway woman from Canada, called Denise Bolduc.  It soon became clear that we weren't going to talk about the logistics of how - it's so much more important to talk about why.  What does it mean to tour indigenous arts?  How can this work be enabled to speak to European audiences?  Should it?  These are the big questions we've been asking in Origins - and it's very helpful to address them here in Australia.

There was a keynote session - a panel, not a lecture - which also went, very bravely I thought, into the thorny thickets of cross-cultural collaboration.  Ong Keng Sen was speaking, and suggested that the challenge of intercultural work was that every artist was in fact an individual, and so the idea of them somehow representing their culture didn't work in practice.  I take his point - but it was interesting to hear it challenged from an Aboriginal perspective: in indigenous cultures, the individual self is not as important as the community, the history, the culture.  Keng Sen's individualist standpoint is that of the globally dominant culture: and that's all the more reason why it needs a corrective.  Why, asked an Aboriginal woman in the audience, are indigenous people always expected to enter into the structures of the "white world" (this "market" being a good example), when nobody ever expects white artists and producers to enter into Aboriginal culture?

These ideas grew for me when I spent Saturday afternoon with Wesley Enoch - a very distinguished Aboriginal director who now heads up Queensland Theatre Company.  To Wesley's mind, the lack of any treaty between the colonial power and the indigenous people in Australia (a situation very different from that in New Zealand or North America) means that the relationship between the cultures is stuck in a paternalistic model, with no negotiation.  Aboriginal people have things done for them - with the subtext that they need to become more like white people.  Wesley's example is housing: "My family doesn't need a nuclear family home", he says.  "We all want to live together as an extended family.  We need a compound.  But that doesn't work within the colonial structures."

It's the old problem of homogeneity - and oddly, I felt that APAM reflected this in other ways too.  The dominant culture, with its desire to "market" everything, is so present now across the globe, that it is getting more and more difficult to find anything that is specific and local.  But theatre, to be valid as a live art form, has to be exactly that.  Many of the performances I saw this week were marked by their similarity to work I could see just as readily in London, New York or Toronto.  They all had video....  Of course, I quite like video in the theatre, and I use it myself to address globalisation....  but it seems to me that the real drama of the internet age requires the tension between the global and the local.  Otherwise we just accept a kind of blanding out - a sameness which is generalised and dull.  We need to be working towards theatre that embraces the culturally specific, and places it in conflict with the post-colonial dominance of the West.  We have to have the courage to enter into, and move between, one another's worlds.

Sweden

I´m in Göteborg, and have been since Sunday night. This (at last) is the first hint of the Trilogy project coming together artistically, as I lead a workshop with our Swedish partner company, Teater Eksem. They are a young group, formed from drama school by several actors and a very dynamic producer, Filip Aiello. I found them through colleagues of colleagues when I was putting together the European proposal, and have got to know Filip quite well since (he and his partner Malin even came to Sidcup to see Attempts on her Life in the early part of the year) - but this is the first time I´ve encountered Malin and her colleagues as performers.

It was a calculated risk, I suppose. We needed European partners to secure the grant, and I was intrigued by the idea of introducing a Scandinavian element into this dialogue between Europe and Asia. Luckily, they turn out to be very talented, very open, and full of creative ideas. I feel a bit bad that only two of them will be chosen to work on the show.

The workshop has been far more than an audition process, though of course it fulfils that function. It´s also been the first chance to look at the material through Swedish eyes, and see what they may be able to add to the cocktail. We work on Strindberg (if ever there was a dramatist who had things to say about gender, it´s Strindberg), and on contemporary Swedish attitudes to Asia, to gender, to sexuality. We touch on the notorious porn industry. And, most fruitfully of all, we look at Swedish folklore. Until this week, I had never heard of the Näck. This mythic figure, much painted during the Romantic period, is an androgynous young man who plays the violin while sitting naked in water, and lures women to their doom. Given the Trilogy´s use of music, androgyny, Romanticism and drowning, this is a pretty resonant image for me! We work around the idea of Näck, and it begins to suggest many interactions with other areas of the work. Näck is pronounced "neck", and means "naked". He is a Water Sprite, a Trickster, and the ideal androgyne.

At the flat they've found for me, I spot on the bookshelves a study by Robert Lyons of a production of the Dream by the Götenborg director Eva Bergman. Having recently done the play (it finally closes tonight!), I´m curious to read what she did with it, and discover that she made use of a musician, whose image appears on the cover, based on Näck. Lyons discusses the folklore at some length, and the paintings of Näck by Ernst Josephson in the 1880s. He hints that there´s a further story here, when he says that Josephson "imbued the motive with an extraordinary vitality by channeling his own personal sufferings and conflicts through the figure".

As is this wasn´t synchronicity enough, I was sitting with Filip and Mia (one of the performers), waiting for a meeting, when who should walk into the coffee bar but Robert Lyons, who heads the drama department at the univesity here? So now we have a link to a researcher who has studied this figure in some depth, and is fascinated by the use we'll be making of him.

The meeting was with Birgitta Winnberg-Rydh, who is Artistic Director of the Göteborg Festival, and seems very excited by the idea of bringing the Trilogy here in 2010. It´s necessarily a brief chat, since this is Festival week, but the foundation is laid. It's a good week to be in Göteborg. I've seen Tim Etchells´piece with Belgian children (called That Night Follows Day), and heard him discuss his work at some length in the Open Lab curated by Ong Keng Sen (this being Sweden, the Open Lab can be held in English and nobody has any problem). I´ve also seen Akram Khan´s work with the National Ballet of China, bahok. Like our own work, this is concerned with the nomad, the migrant, with global diasporas and zones of transition. I loved his use of an airport departures board.

Tonight, I shall be staring at one myself, as I head back to London.