Wrestling with community-engaged practice
My time working with Queensland Music Festival
It’s ten pm, and a dozen people are gathered around a small dining room table. There are another four who have given up trying to find a spot and instead have dragged a sofa from the lounge room. There are dinner plates everywhere and half-filled wine glasses. We’ve all made quick work of the Thai takeaway.
We’re having a production meeting in my temporary home: a three-bedroom house that usually accommodates miners. I’m sharing with Music Director Steve Russell and Production Designer Josh McIntosh. Everyone in the team has identical accommodation. Next door are the two Assistant Directors and the Associate Producer; on the other side of the dirt road are the technical staff and the conductor. We’re a little creative neighbourhood, surrounded by young families using the houses as transitional accommodation until they find more permanent quarters in town. When you get a job with the mines, things happen fast. Workers tend to say yes to the handsome pay packet and come running.
But we’re here for an entirely different reason. We’re putting on a show. It’s a week away. We all landed yesterday. Most of us are from Brisbane, but some flew in from Melbourne, Sydney and Byron Bay. Now we’re in Mount Isa, a town still part of my home state of Queensland but feels remarkably different. We are closer to Uluru than to Brisbane. The earth is red. The sky is an unblemished blue. The ‘Winter’ weather doesn’t see the mercury drop below twelve degrees centigrade.
It’s hard work, but it all feels like an adventure. We’re about half an hour into a complex conversation. The wine and exhaustion aren’t helping. I’ve asked if we can move the piano to a more central spot for the classical solo that happens near the climax of the show. Can we move it forward and then back?
Moving it back is tricky. The solo segues into a symphony, and then straight into a pop ballad, and then a rock song. There won’t be time to move it. The rock song is accompanied by fourteen motorbike riders leaping across the stage. The piano must be moved back by then, or else it will get a face full of dirt from the bikes.
‘Unless…’ Warwick, conductor, muses, ‘we move him to a more central spot near the woodwinds for the entire show so we don’t have to move him at all.’
That triggers a lengthy conversation about orchestra placement on the stage overall, which is still a controversial point. We’re (mostly) not working with professional musicians. This is a community orchestra run by a local volunteer committee. And there has been much to-ing and fro-ing about placement on stage and the abilities of the players. The committee is run by people who take their job very seriously and aren’t too sure about us - this Queensland Music Festival mob - mucking with their system. At times, negotiations have felt akin to a United Nations-mediated peace treaty. It has called upon our diplomatic skills to maintain a positive relationship. We have succeeded, but further changes to seating may cause problems.
The point is likely moot anyway, says Will, our sound technician, as his microphone plan is getting past the point where we can make changes. Warwick and Will then disappear into a conversation about the merits of swapping the brass and woodwind instruments, and I start to lose focus, contemplating how a noodle ended up in the bottom of my wine glass.
Trying to help, Josh, the Production Designer, tears apart a wine box and quickly sketches the stage plan (to scale, mind you), on the back of the cardboard. He throws it at the table. Now we’re playing chess with the orchestra. Twenty or so minutes later, Producer Kate Wilson makes eyes at me, and I speak up.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘forget it. All good. The piano player will just play from that spot we had to begin with.’
Jeff, the Production Manager, leans over to me. ‘We still haven’t talked about the cow shit, but I hope to have more information for us tomorrow.’
Great.
Let’s go to bed.
I lie awake thinking about cow shit.
About halfway through the show, forty head of cattle will stroll across the stage. We will throw colourful chalk on them so they look like ‘rainbow’ cows. It’ll be great. But how long do they take to walk across the stage? Who knows? How much shit will they deposit, and how long will it take for our stage management team - which may also include me - to collect it and get it out of the way before the bikes then tear across the same area? Will our orchestra end up with a face full of dirt and cow shit?
I’ve become completely obsessed with these questions in some of the most fulfilling artistic work I’ve ever done.
These were the Queensland Music Festival (QMF’s) signature community works. I was involved in one every couple of years between 2012 and 2019.
A group of metropolitan, professional artists fly into a regional or remote community and build a show with the locals. It’s a dialogue between professional and amateur that usually bubbles along for twelve months or more, culminating in a free, outdoor, spectacular. Cast sizes number in the hundreds. Audience sizes are many thousands.
The artistic ethos of the entire thing is simple enough: we are creating a show for, by and with a specific community. This is the spiritual blue print of many community artists working on whatever scale, all over the world. Facilitators working with a dozen participants from disadvantaged backgrounds, teachers devising new work with a classroom of students, or just an artistically interested bunch of people wanting to put on a show: this is community arts.
The QMF projects were bold in their ambition: take community arts out of community halls and school gyms and place them in highly public centres of discourse, and invite an entire town to participate in building and viewing the work. Most provocatively, they suggested that community arts is worthy of such economic and aesthetic investment, and could achieve levels of artistic ‘excellence’ usually reserved for metropolitan stages and expensive ticket prices.
There was a lot going on as a result. Questions of community well-being sat alongside mind-boggling operational problems.
In a tiny outback mining town, for example, a rehearsal with a microscopic choir is quickly followed by a scheduling meeting. How can we rehearse everyone when they’re spread across a geographical area the size of Tasmania? Or in the more urban centre of Logan, how can we make sure each of the hundreds of different multicultural groups is represented? How can we make sure we’re representing them authentically, without resorting to toothless displays of tokenism? And how on Earth do we get them all to rehearse together? They’re all volunteers, and we must schedule around their school, family and work life.
And in all of these questions, always, is a chief concern for me, the playwright.
How can I, a metropolitan white guy, create a script that feels representative of an entire town?
When I stepped on board the QMF projects in 2012, they’d already existed for a decade, most frequently under the Creative Directorship of Sean Mee, my mentor. His knowledge and practice, and those of my dozens of colleagues who have been a part of making these works, run the risk of disappearing into the Queensland outback and going unrecognised by the sector at large. The very nature of community work is that it is temporary; it is built for a community at a very specific time and a very specific place. As the productions necessarily move into memory and the artistic professionals who built them move onto other gigs, the institutional knowledge on how those productions were created may vanish.
Community artists are the frequent underdogs of the arts sectors. There is a bias, both internalised and externally projected, that the field is more stagnant than other forms. Community arts will do whatever community arts does. Get amateurs together and have a nice time, while leaving the serious business of real art to the symphony halls and MainStage theatre stages.
There’s no reason for this prejudice. There is no reason why community arts can’t be just as innovative and vibrant as any other art form. It is, after all, how the vast majority of the great unwashed general public will interact with the performing arts. Most Australians won’t attend a world-class ballet performance, symphony or opera, but many will watch their child in a school play, help out with demonstrations and exhibitions at their annual Show or participate in a church service as a musician or speaker. A symphony is a wonderful thing, but I dare say it will be incapable of moving them in the same way that their local school musical would. Community arts is not a younger, cuter sibling to other art forms. It’s an art form in itself.
There’s a revolutionary air then, to being involved in community arts projects at an enormous scale. Because they are essentially saying that a community’s culture is just as worthy of performing arts infrastructure as the classical canon. Yes, our local cattle should share the same stage as our celebrated classical pianist. Our local dirt bike club are worthy of the same audience as an internationally renowned didgeridoo player. The table is big. Everyone is welcome. Take a seat.
It is helpful to be clear about the community and civic art I’m not talking about.
I am not talking about a concert. For QMF, the finished product was likely to include songs, but the notion that these projects were narrative or script-based is essential. They told a story. Of course concerts are perfectly capable of having an implicit narrative arc, but this is different to an explicit plot. Plots arrive pre-packaged with all of the perks of a written script: allegory, symbol, and a structure defined by the character’s actions.
Neither am I talking about a re-staging of a pre-existing musical or play. Almost every community centre produces an annual musical, drawing on the canon of London’s West End or New York’s Broadway. But for the QMF works, I was commissioned to write a piece that felt authentic for a very specific community at a very specific time. Normally, a community foregoes narrative relatability for the ease of a tried-and-true work, bypassing the dramaturgical heavy lifting of thrashing out a story (and being optimistic that members of the general public may be happy to attend a production with name recognition such as Grease or Cats, even if they don’t know anyone in the cast). A writer is also an expensive addition to bring onto any production and a developmental bottleneck. If a writer stuffs their deadline, everyone suffers. It is undoubtedly easier for a project not to engage a writer.
I’m biased, but I think writers on a community project are great.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these productions were not advertisements. They were not blindly evangelical statements about why a certain town or community was fantastic. The playwright was commissioned to write a play, and Western plays demand conflict. The conflict also must be authentic to the community. An audience (or cast) would sniff bullshit from the first five minutes if the play’s foundations were not firmly rooted in the reality of the place. That likely meant works that talked about race, health, resources and economic interests.
Thus, for QMF, we have ascertained that a playwright is tasked with creating an original musical theatre piece that is authentic to the community where it is set. I would go so far as to list these elements as three essential ‘rules’ that govern my actions and craft on these productions (and have spilled over into my artistic practice overall):
1. I am the playwright.
2. It is an original (musical) theatre piece (and in the case of the QMF shows, one that must involve spectacular elements).
3. It is authentic to the community where it is set.
These three rules are gospel, and they are likely to be challenged in a community context.
We are immediately challenged on the first point, for example. These productions maxims, as I’ve explained, were works created for, by and with the community. That’s a neat turn of phrase and philosophically accurate. Regardless, I was employed as a playwright. I would ultimately work with a director (who sometimes, in an existential crisis, is also me) to create a production. So everyone has a seat at the table…but we were at the head.
That confession makes me uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. I aimed to be as generous in my scripts as I was able. Cast members were always able to change their dialogue to lines they felt more comfortable with. If someone had a major objection to a story beat or character, we sought out their opinion and did our best to make sure they felt they’ve been heard.
Nevertheless, it’s easy for a writer’s ego to run wild on community productions. The fascist community theatre leader is frequently satirised (the film Waiting for Guffman being the most brilliant example, or the tragic drama teacher ‘Mr. G’ in Summer Heights High). Certainly in mainstream theatre practice, a playwright is (hopefully) given plenty of room to express their ‘vision’. But in these productions, the potential tyrannical nature of the first rule is offset by the tight formulae inherent in the second (it is an original musical theatre piece), and the messier democratic nature of the third (it is authentic to the community where it is set).
While my job is to be a playwright, it would be a mistake to say I have a vision in community projects. In all aspects I consider myself answering to the call of the community as best I can. I am at the head of the table because someone has to be, not because I am bestowing a holy text upon those gathered.
In practice, this simply means that I would change the script (and I am the only one, apart from the stage manager, who could physically change the script) only if it didn’t contravene rules two and three. Let’s look at some real-world examples.
A cast member offers up a genuinely funny gag for a scene. We would like to put it in. But the comic tone undermines a broader story beat that the scene is trying to make, thereby skewering rule two. It is a musical theatre piece, and so needs to tell a crafted story that holds together and takes itself - at least to some extent - a little seriously. So we try to find another, more appropriate place for the gag, or we let it go.
An actor is worried about the size of a lengthy monologue I’ve given them - can they cut out a paragraph? Ordinarily yes, but I know that that monologue is timed out to assist getting a dozen junior string players off stage, and bringing on a quartet of singers on the back of a ute. Again, we’re contravening rule two, so the monologue stays.
A (Caucasian) chorister is upset with how an (Indigenous) actor is representing their story on stage. The chorister fears it is too upsetting for children, who will be in the audience. For me to ‘water down’ the Indigenous actors story flies in the face of rule three. It’s also ethically inappropriate, given that I am white. Nevertheless, the chorister is also part of the community, and their opinion needs to be taken seriously. In quiet and quick diplomacy handled during a rehearsal’s lunch break, I ask the chorister to explain her concerns. It comes down to a single line in particular. Funnily enough, the line itself turned out to be half-improvised as the actor forgot his lines, so the point was moot. The actor and the chorister ended up talking and sharing a laugh about it. They left knowing each others names when they hadn’t before. But even if this hadn’t been the case, I would like to think I would’ve been able to take the concern about the particular line to the actor and engage all parties in a conversation that would’ve netted a reasonable result. It’s these types of conversations, while difficult, that are actually at the heart of community arts practice.
On first inspection, one might think that the third rule - that a script must be ‘authentic’ to a community - is the most problematic to dance with. I’ve found the second, the creation of an original musical theatre piece, to be the most fierce. I can understand the wariness around the third, given the example above. Of course there’s no single ‘truth’ in any community, but any playwright worth their salt has endless ways to show multiple truths, or multiple aspects of a community. Showing the messiness of ‘truth’ or reality is, in fact, a playwright’s job. Theatre is one of the most ancient instruments humans have in holding contradictory ideas in a single place.
But the second rule is deceptively complicated. A theatre piece demands a clear structure, with a defined beginning, middle and end. A musical theatre piece demands that you do all of this while also incorporating songs and dance numbers. A playwright must stay true to the third rule (this group of dancers have hearts of gold and really want to dance on stage) while also staying true to the second (but they’re crap at dancing and don’t have the skill to execute what the story demands of them).
In practice, I’ve found almost the entirety of my job comes down to balancing those two rules. Ultimately, the driving question becomes, how can we be authentic to this community while also delivering on the promise of an original musical theatre spectacular? In my unfortunate examples of the dancers above, we would need to find a way to get them on stage in a way that sets them up for success. This may involve simplifying pre-existing choreography especially for them, formulating new choreography for them, or creating an entirely new moment. Often, these challenging decisions create some of the most special moments of the show anyway.
We were in Middlemount, a dusty, tiny regional town, when we met an eight-year old boy who loved to dance. He proceeded to put on dubstep for us and go absolutely ape shit in the school gym. His dancing involved a lot of running, jumping and aggressive air punches.
He became the centre piece for an entirely new moment of the show. We put out a call for any enthusiastic eight to twelve year olds who wanted to learn a dance. Every month when we flew up, our choreographer worked with them to create their moment, filled with mad energy. We put them in bright neon. More kids heard about it and showed up to rehearsals. I made it a ‘party scene’ in the arc of the show (crowbarring it into the first third so the kids didn’t have to wait too long backstage and they could sneak out to the audience once their moment was done).
By the end, we had 150 kids on stage. Prior to that moment, many hadn’t seen a stage, let alone been on one, and none had had dance training. Plus, the moment legitimately worked in the arc of the show.
There is another part of these projects that too much commentary misses.
In all of my actions as a playwright on these productions, I was incredibly aware that I was a contracted employee of an organisation. Because I wanted to feed my family, I want to be employed by them again. The organisation - in this case QMF - had all the foibles of any medium-sized arts organisation. Incoming and outgoing artistic directors, executive directors, and board members. All of whom saw the projects as part of a larger statement about what their organisation delivered to the sector.
I was also aware that I was part of a team of professionals, and worked intimately with musicians, designers, choreographers and producers to make the event happen. These works were necessarily intensely collaborative.
This triangular relationship for the playwright, between community, employers and collaborators, was the focus of my doctorate in a community-engaged arts context.
The cow shitting wasn’t that big a deal.
Forty head of cattle turned up four days before show time. They were rounded up just behind stage, adding a certain dusty milieu to our production week. When I asked them if they enjoyed our lighting plot, I didn’t get much of a reply. In fact, they were downright skittish of me and just about anyone else that approached. Their lack of confidence shot mine dead. We’re going to put these guys in front of thousands of people, under lights, with rock music, but they’re scared of me approaching gently in daylight?
The wranglers assured me it’d all be fine. These guys were used to performing. They did the rodeo. All good.
The big moment came in our technical rehearsals. Our stage manager called the queue (just guessing randomly as to where such a call should happen). Out they lumbered, curious but calm, safely managed by their team of expert wranglers. They walked across the stage, happily taking to a ramp that would be used later for motorcycles, before being ushered out…all just in time for a spoon solo (yes, you heard me), in the song.
Perfect. They did it again in dress, and for each of the three shows that followed.
There was no poo. Nothing. Cows don’t tend to poo as they move and they weren’t exactly relaxed under lights with a thousand people looking at them, so they held, um, tight.
By the final night a few did take the opportunity, spurred on by the adrenalin rush of being on stage, to attempt to have sex. The audience thought it was hilarious. We did too, to be honest.
The moment worked because we trusted the community experts (the cattle wranglers). I worked with them to set up a moment where they could travel safely, with lighting that would suit, while also maintaining the integrity of the entire show. And then, the cows did what a lot of community participants end up doing: having been given permission to shine, they shone, and ended up improvising on the moment anyway, providing a much more interesting result than any scriptwriter could ever imagine.
This is a rewritten part of my doctoral thesis, originally proposed as an introduction to a book. The full thesis is publically available, and the plans for the book turned into a collaboration with Dr Sarah Peters: Verbatim Theatre Methodologies for Community-Engaged Practice.
Great piece Dave, so many great memories! It was truly amazing work, which, like you, I will never forget