KEYNOTE – MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PROFESSIONAL STAFF CONFERENCE
The Professional Staff Conference highlights best practices, shares ideas and provides personal development and networking opportunities to our vibrant professional staff community.
This is an abridged version.
I come to you today from the lands of the Wurundjeri country people, at acknowledge that MTC sits on the lands of the Yalukit Willam people of the Boon Wurrung and has been a place for performance and sharing of ideas for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It is such a privilege to be continuing the tradition of storytelling and performance on these lands. If the last 20 months have taught us anything is that when there is nothing else - stories, music and art keep us going and help us navigate the dark. So, I pay my respects to the lands on which we perform on - and the first story tellers - our first nations elders, past present and emerging and any indigenous people here today.
Today, I have been asked to offer a perspective on how the arts have reacted, pivoted, changed because of COVID.
It’s a difficult question because I acknowledge that the experience of those working for the larger companies (like myself) is different from those working in the small to medium or independent sector. It’s also difficult because trying to remember anything from the last 20 months feels impossible. I am sure you have all found, the lack of usual structure or things to really look forward to – events and markers that would usually frame our lives – without them it becomes hard to mark time and remember what came before or after.
Thinking back to the before times – as we call them in my household – feels like a million years ago – a time when things were less complicated – a time when (now, looking back) we took so much for granted. I never took my role as an artist, or storyteller for granted – that has always been something I have felt incredibly fortunate to do.
I did take for granted the simple act of a large group of people sitting together in the dark for two hours to share the experience of a story - live.
I took for granted how much being in that collective experience was shaping my experience of the world – how it improved my ability to empathise with others, how it made me feel less alone – more connected, even though sometimes I would go alone – I was connected to the other strangers in the audience through the shared experience of the play we were seeing together. And I am not alone in this experience – this was the overwhelming experience of the audiences who briefly came back between lockdowns. When lockdowns lifted briefly earlier this year, I managed to direct and present two shows. I know! How lucky am I?
I directed Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes by Hannah Moscovitch about a sexual relationship between a university lecturer and a student – which happened to coincide with Brittany Higgins and all the revelations of her assault on the front pages of the paper, every day.
The other show was The Lifespan of a Fact, - an adaptation of the book written by author Jim Fingal and fact checker John D’Agata - an ideological battle over the nature of truth and the value of storytelling – and in the post-trump, ‘algorithmed’ online spaces we are inhabiting – the idea of whether facts are negotiable in search of a greater truth was more prescient than I could have imagined at the time of programming 12 months earlier.
It is also not lost on me how LUCKY I was to direct two shows in between our two lockdowns and two plays - two plays which incredibly spoke to the times in which we live with power.
But - it was the simple act and novelty of sitting in a group of people - in the collective presence of heightened emotions – that was the true gift. Audiences were hungry for a story that was meaningful, that moved them, that made them laugh, reflect – and they wanted to do it together. I’ve heard recent reports in the US as Broadway has reopened after 12 months off stage - unknown actors stepping onto stage are being met with standing ovations. The shared intimacy of a live performance is impactful, and audiences are, by all accounts are loving its return. And after being part of a company which cancelled 4 shows in the last few months, one of them 2 hours before opening night – it gives me hope that people will return with gusto when we can return to the stage.
But there’s that word – Hope. Hope is something that has been a recurring theme for me at MTC over the last 18 or so months – not only hope and optimism for the future and our capacity to get through this incredibly difficult time, but I also think it is our job as artists to provide hope in the work that we create. When I say that, I do not mean a schmaltzy it’ll all be ok in the end stories – I mean, a hand in the dark or watching something virtuosic, or a line that summaries exactly your unarticulated feeling, or being taken out of the complexity of our lives for a moment, to sit in an imagined future or alternate reality, or something that helps you make sense of, grieve, process, digest something from the last 20 months …and even though the arts have been so dark for so many – it is those moments of connection that artists have created even in lockdown , inspiring examples of creativity and ingenuity - that will endure beyond the memory of all this “covidness”.
Hope is something that has been severely lacking over this time for artists. Not only have they experienced the general pandemic angsts – which I am sure you all know well - feeling trapped, lack of control, despondent, lonely, lethargic, ‘languishing’ – artists in the performing arts have also been feeling this pervasive sense of worthlessness – for while people have turned to books and music and Netflix over this time – there is a disconnect between that content and what artists do and how that work gets created – the live-performing arts are a key part of that ecosystem and for so much of the pandemic they have been left out of the conversation.
I know from speaking to actors, creatives and people who work in production not only have they lost multiple contracts – watching them fall like slow dominos – they have fallen in the cracks of the funding/support models and with a lack of their plight being part of the conversation at a leadership level - with it has come a sense of purposelessness and an existential dilemma –And in conversations I have with had - the same phrases appear -
“is what I do of value? Because no one seems to care.”
“Maybe what I do isn’t important”
“I just can’t do this anymore.”
And I know that this isn’t just the experience of the arts sector – I am keenly aware that Universities too have been largely ignored with dramatic impacts. In the arts one of the biggest problems in the future will be a shortage of workforce. This year in particular has seen a significant exodus, particularly off-stage - in production and creative roles .
Returning to hope though – What keeps me hopeful is the experience I had of theatre’s reopening earlier this year and the impact those shows had on the audiences who went and the team involved in realising the work - and - something I read from Historian Anslem Heinrich who wrote about how the performing arts not only survived the 1918 pandemic and first world war, but also came out stronger - with the arrival of the avant-garde. From life threatening crisis - the arts sector was reinvigorated with new people and new ways of creative expression. And we are in the midst of this dynamic shift in the arts right now.
And that takes me to some of the exciting work that has been happening in the arts sector over the last 18 months. What MTC and Malthouse, the Melbourne Fringe, the Arts Centre, the ballet to name a few have all been doing is interrogating what we do, how we do it and like everyone figuring out what we can do online or socially distanced – and the pressure of the pandemic has created an environment where companies – like every business - have needed to take action on their digital strategies. MTC prior to 2020 had been working towards lots of very exciting digital outcomes but Covid meant that the money, support and focus were redirected towards digital. Our outlying Education department was up front and centre, because it was the department innovating beyond our core product. And just like in the past when pandemics or political censorship or war placed pressures on the live experience – we have been attempting and testing how to innovate the form of live-experience.
MTC were in a bit of a spin when COVID hit last year – and the pressure to move online NOW was intense. But we started small – we had no shows that we could record and there was the general consensus that archival recordings were a less than satisfactory way of viewing a performance.
We had a number of digital outcomes that we redirected our energies towards.
Firstly and possibly most simply, our Marketing Department did an extraordinary ramp up. We upped the game on our Enews, making it a place where there was interesting content about our history, interviews with actors and creatives, we shone a light on the people behind the scenes who make up the company – the milliners, and producers and production staff that don’t get seen often.
We decided to work with writers, actors and directors creating audio experiences – One of the projects I worked on was a series of Great Australian Speeches. I felt at the time there was something to be learned from the likes of John Curtin and Faith Bandler. They were speaking of hardship and sacrifice with inspiring oratory that was significantly lacking from our own leaders.
Our education department was busy creating a host of online resources for schools including virtual theatre tours and my personal favourite interactive set-design tours Berlin by Joanna Murray Smith – with explanations of why the designer had chosen various elements, the stage craft and practicalities that informed the design choices. And a bump-in time lapse video.
Education were also busy running all their programs for young people online – which had the side benefit of increased accessibility and attendance. They Ed Team also spent much time working on their online resources and I am very proud to say that the quality of this content is so good it has become a resource for tertiary acting courses.
We also created documentaries about process – for example realising a show from a directors perspective.
There was backstage banter – informal interviews with actors about what they do and how they do it - a great way to employ artists and also provide fun content from MTC’s most loved performers.
And behind the scenes we dived into the development of our commissioned works, over zoom. A project, very close to my heart was the development of Pandora by Kylie Trounson, with Don Hany and Naomi Rukavina. We were developing this work on zoom, and usually at the end of a development you would have a live-showing, I decided that this piece could work as a zoom showing - a window into the development and a work in process at MTC.
I have been working on the development of a new play– Laurinda - an adaptation of the novel by Alice Pung. I have been co-adapting this with Diana Nguyen for presentation in our season next year since July last year. Diana and I have been working via Zoom and Google docs to collaborate on this work.
Flash forward to 2021 and the digital strategy was for MTC partner with the broadcast team at Arts Centre Melbourne to record 4 of our plays this year, with a focus on new Australian work. Unfortunately, because of the lockdowns in the second half of this year it meant that only Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes and Joanna Murray Smith’s play Berlin were recorded for streaming. These were hugely successful shows in their own right, garnering great houses - but the online uptake has been something of a surprise for MTC. In limited seasons online these shows sold over 3000 tickets and counting and have been included in tertiary curriculum. Our market research tells us that most viewing this material are doing so in at least groups of two. So that is an audience of over 6000 who saw the works – which with the competition for online content over this time, was I thought kind of extraordinary. This means that MTC will pursue filming and broadcasting at least some of their season each year for the foreseeable future.
For me, working with another director on a filmed outcome of live show was a really different way of working and an incredible collaboration. Lillian Yau from Arts Centre was tasked to realise this work in a 2D form. Her background was in editing sport – so working in a live space was completely natural for her – but watching her navigate the shots live, was pretty impressive. Lillian was so generous in the way that she worked with me and we created the online version together. We recorded 2 shows, live-cut in front of an audience – one of which we used for the broadcast version. There was lots of preparation which meant the actual filming was as seamless as possible. Then some minor edits and some colour grading before we took it to our audiences.
Prior to 2020, MTC was planning to exploring the potential of a live-streamed digital experience of a full length work. In 2021 we were so keen to pilot the live-streaming of a performance – an attempt to capture the liveness of theatre in the digital realm. Unfortunately, lockdowns this year stymied those efforts. It is something we are going to pursue next year. This is of particular interest to our education team, who find that opportunities like this are of great benefit to young people in regional settings or with access needs. It literally makes theatre affordable and accessible.
In fact, thanks to 2020 and 2021, MTC sees an opportunity to become a leader in the digital theatre field in Australia. The covid-induced dedicated focus on the digital experience means we have begun a solid library of resources, and in the coming years a growing catalogue of shows.
Indeed, dreaming into the future – and not too distant future I might add – those online resources may include a 360-degree interactive rehearsal room – literally placing the audience in the centre with the actors and director – so the participant can get a sense of what it is to be like on stage or placing them in the action of the performance.
OR using gaming technology to enable a theatre artist to be in the same virtual space as the participant – the number of people who can be in that virtual space is only limited by the number of gaming headsets. It’s about creating an interaction – that shared experience I was talking about before – telling a story in the virtual world in a new way – the kinds of new work that could be created in this way feels limitless and very exciting. A new form is emerging. It’s the modern equivalent of the 1918 avant-garde movement. We’re not there yet, but covid has forced us to reimagine what a ‘theatre’ or live experience could be.
That not only gives me great hope for the future but also charges me with energy.
And the other thing that fills my cup and makes me so grateful and hopeful for the future of live-performance is that although we have felt largely ignored from the political conversation - our community has rallied.
When MTC’s development team reached out to our ticket buyers and donors with an urgent call last year they saw the biggest and most generous response they have ever seen and an influx of new donors – people who had never made a donation to MTC before – wanting to give and support theatre in Melbourne. We weren’t sure if those new donors were going to return and give again this year - but they have, again, generously donated. Which has had a direct impact on MTC being able to keep its doors open and people employed.
To me this speaks to a community rallying around us and shouting that they value what we do, they see the importance of connection and empathy – these donations came from a real desire to want to let us know that they did care and what we do is important.
So I am left with a great sense of hope for the future – even though much of this year I have not felt that way and Melbourne Theatre Company is losing millions and the future is uncertain, I am buffeted by the people in our community who have helped stave off insolvency (and the government support which has recently been announced). I am, Inspired and excited by the potential of digital and the evolution of what we will be able to do into the future. And comforted by the fact that when we do return to the theatre people will be hungry for the stories that we tell and excited to share them together because for me – nothing beats that.