This work was adapted from my doctoral thesis.
‘I want to get very, very clear.’
The voice at the other end of the phone is serious. That’s unusual. Sean is normally very light-hearted. He’s on speaker, and about four of us are gathered around a plush boardroom table, listening. After a moment for added gravitas, he continues:
‘What is our intention?’
Silence.
Beside me, the producer clears her throat before replying. ‘Yes, that’s a question worth asking. We’ll ask Liam when he comes in.’
Liam (not his real name) is the CEO of the major performing arts organisation for which Sean and I are currently working (I’m writing, Sean’s directing). Liam authorised and programmed this project, so he should have an answer.
It’s the very beginning of this project. We’re to create a large-scale community event.
Ten minutes later, Liam rushes in from another meeting. We summarise our conversations, which haven’t departed from fundamental logistic and operational concerns. We haven’t made it to artistic discussions because we hit a dead wall with Sean’s question, which he repeats for Liam now.
Liam pauses and leans back in his chair.
‘That’s worth pondering,’ he says eventually. ‘We need to get clear on that.’
There was no cohesive answer by the end of the meeting. The production was only two months away, and the question didn’t come up again in any of our production meetings in the weeks that followed.
The event comes and goes without anyone understanding why the hell we were doing it in the first place.
What was our intention? I don’t know.
So if Liam didn’t have an apparent artistic reason for putting the work on, why did he program it in the first place?
There are easy answers, just ones he clearly didn’t feel at liberty to share in that meeting. The production was a plus for the organisation because it gave them a ‘community’ event. It was a visible demonstration of them connecting with locals. As a state subsidised body, it helped them fulfil their charter. It allowed them to connect and showcase ‘diverse’ artists.
To put it bluntly, they were doing it because they had to.
Don’t get me wrong—the show was a success—at least, until you actually ask what successful means. It engaged with the community. Hundreds of locals were on stage, and thousands were in the audience. Because of its size, it felt significant.
But the lack of a clear intention meant a dramaturgical hurdle that was difficult to overcome. In the rush to get the event on, I offered a half-arsed thesis in the show’s opening moments. Sean and I didn’t have time to move beyond that first draft. The resolution of that thesis was to be answered within the music set of the show’s musical climax: a set of songs from a big-name Aussie music star.
But the star, while kind-hearted and wonderfully talented, was time-poor. So they attended a sound check an hour before the event and then performed an isolated set of four songs. This didn’t matter to Liam, who wanted a big name to give the production an aura of legitimacy and some marketability.
Now, this intention was successful because it was clear. The star gave the show a great poster image, and everyone loved their set on the night. But an attempt to integrate them into the show was always doomed to fail. Because they were a ‘star’, it felt wrong to put them at any other place aside from the final half, around the end of the night. Dramaturgically, audiences expect a show’s ending to tie to its beginning. It answers a question that has been asked. But the star was left just to do what they do - that’s what audiences had paid for - and so no tremendous dramatic arc took place.
And look, I’ll be frank - no one cared. Everyone had a lovely evening, including me. But Sean’s persistent question pin-pointed something for me that is fundamental to the playwright’s mission in any community production. Out of everyone on the creative team, it is the playwright who must address a project’s reason for being. In the aftermath of this particular event, I wondered why they had bothered hiring a playwright in the first place. I certainly felt redundant by opening night. I detected a hint of anxiety from the producer, provoked by Sean’s question. I sensed that the event didn’t have an artistic intention, and there was a small hope that a writer might be able to create one.
But in community performance, this is a mistake. Playwrights with a Vision (with a capital V) are implicitly tied to a hierarchy that places them at the top. The show’s intention must come from the community itself.
I was asked about this project just two months before show time. Relationships between all the major players had already been set. I infer that the producer, sensing a kind of hollowness to the production overall, sought out a writer to give the evening shape. If I did my job correctly, I could provide some nice words and a rough outline for the music, but I could never fix the underlying problem. It was too late…and it wasn’t my job.
It’s boring and not particularly sexy, but artistic success depends on the arts managers - those who program, produce and set up critical relationships before the artists step in to create an event.
Often, those arts managers are ferociously underpaid, overworked, and fighting for time with artistic leadership, who are equally overwhelmed by the job at hand. In a rush to meet multiple stakeholders with limited resources, artistic cohesion and purpose become a marginal concern. But this all but guarantees artistic mediocrity and a lack of innovation and creativity - going against the very things that an arts organisation needs to cultivate to garner sustainability.
The system, then, is broken. It takes governmental policies and persistent (and knowledgable) boards to ensure artistic rigour is given priority. It means developing a strategic vision that is clear, practical and exciting (not drowning in weasel words and out-sourced to a corporate communications company).
It means everyone - from top to bottom - really sitting and answering the question, with honesty:
Why are we doing this?
Hit a nerve? Leave a comment.
Feeling attacked right now. 😂
Love your truth bombs Dave. I bailed from the industry because the business of ‘making art’ bored me to the core of being being. I literally couldn’t stomach the faux, performative art-making process that so much of the industry was preoccupied with. The ticking boxes and filling seats. The calling cards and inward looking obsession with whatever trending form/style/ genre was hot right now. Struggling artists working their arses off to meet the artistic tastes of the boomers (the only ones who could actually afford tickets) and art students (getting comp tix). It was a literal circle jerk. I honestly don’t think good art can be made under the condition of meeting KPI’s. Or maybe it can but rarely and something miraculous has to happen and I didn’t have enough social energy in my bank to show up to opening nights and kiss arse to make it happen.