Veda Popovici's Revolutionary Gear

One thing I have learned about criticism is that critics often fail. Trying to meet a work requires such a difficult tight-rope exercise combining poetry, the act of writing, contextual research and so on, that it's a miracle when it actually works - when these things are actually singing together properly.

Veda Popovici's feminist work Revolutionary Gear evoked a particularly sharp feeling of inadequacy, as I totally failed to meet the work's demands. I am excused slightly by the fact that her demands are so rigorous and extensive - to actually critically engage this work would take years, I don't think that's an exaggeration. To this end, I recommend reading her own theoretical writings and tidbits, in which she tries to formulate and develop her position, some of which are available here.

Or if you want to read a hopelessly inadequate response to all of that, published on Arta Magazine Romania, it's available here.

Bucharest Art Week and Public Speaking

Over the next two weeks I will be writing from Bucharest, where I am on residency as part of Bucharest Art Week and Atelier 35's Public Speaking program.

More soon!

A funny thing happened on the way home, or Platform 8

I sometimes work as a critic. I am learning that this is a very complex role, involving shaping a written reponse from a total chaos of culture, social relations, economics, institutions, ethics, critical and performance traditions, and so on. You are never good enough - after all, your analysis can't possibly take in everything. All you can do is take a position, and try to write - I guess - actively. You become reliant on a particular, mystical kind of poetic energy - a channeling of this complex mass into some sort of articulated statement, something 'good'. Whatever that means. Something which helps, I guess.

There are times when this task is very difficult. It requires, for one thing, an endless, exhausting self-critique: 'is this position correct? Can I argue this?' Mostly, the end result will be an assumption anyhow, based on my limited understanding of 'stuff'. Which leads to one subsequently asking - what's the point? If it's just going to be a claim anyhow - if it's just an opinion, then why do the work at all? Why bother sweating over tiny details, staying up at night thinking about a particular social or ethical problem, punishing yourself because you didn't get an actor's name correct? Why bother - if it's inseperable from the hate speech posted on the next blog?

There are no clear answers to this, and indeed, I ask myself these questions regularly, especially in the context of today. This is very much about capitalism, the global system and what it is doing to people. I am aware, and I have been told, that for a critic, my writing is more than usually subjective, more than usually activist, more than usually non-neutral. It takes a particular position, that position is informed by certian phenomena and a certain reading of the global system and its local manifestation in politics, the ways in which both are oppressing people, and by its ultimate compromise of being written by a writer-perfomer(-director).

What has suprised me since I began writing this blog is the lack of objections. You would think that someone writing from a subjective position - in fact, with little or no instutional authority - would be cut down fairly quickly. The opposite has been true. People have, for the most part, been, somewhat worryingly at times, agreeable. Performers, especially, have taken things I have said about their work to heart, but not as negatives - as shortcomings of their own. I know this because they have told me. Even when I have claimed to them that, no, they must be mistaken because the response was so personal, so based on my own specific critical frame - they have (mostly) corrected me.

If this sounds like self-flattery, I cannot explain to you how useless it all feels when faced with a Metro Station filled with refugees. Part of my critical stance, and also my art work, maintains that the future is defined by massive-scale humanitarian crises, caused especially by climate change - but other factors stemming from the new, self-erasing ethics of capitalism. This is not an opinion. If you want, you can also do this research, or I can argue it in dialogue. In short, although you can put it different ways, capitalism removes excess time, excess energy, and excess money from people, in order to force the individual to comply with its dominant ideology, which can then be manipulated, and prevent them from ever acting collectively and changing their conditions. Not a new idea - but it hasn't become less true in the last two decades, although it has all but disappeared from public discussion.

Patos OFF11, Smederevo

I like small theatre festivals in small places, precisely because they seem to represent everything that theatre is - a struggle against something impossible; an attempt at engagement in an impossible situation.

Smederevo is a historically significant town - once a key strategic location of the various conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and Hungarian/Serbian/Austrian interests in Europe. Today, it's perhaps most known for its now-dormant aluminium plant which smelted raw metals sourced from Bosnia - now the source of various conspiracy theories after it was purchased by a US conglomerate in 2003, only to be sold back to the Serbian government for $1 in 2013 and all but closed down. Was it a strategic salvage operation for steel left over from the Bosnian War, as some locals whisper? Today it is certainly operating at reduced capacity, as the government searches, apparently without much enthusiasm, for a partner to run it. Regardless, Smederevo does have many conventional signs of a once-thriving Eastern European town, now swimming persistently against a tide of rampant and unregulated investment which characterises an aspiring EU member (but seems, for reasons of proximity and regulatory environment, particularly characteristic of Serbia).

Amongst this, Patos operates its youth theatre activities from the sanctity of the ground level of the town's grandiose cultural centre - a 300-seat emblem of the soviet era, once holding performances equal to its vast size, and now maintained seemingly as a matter of town pride. A town like this is the perfect place for locating the zeitgeist of Europe today - caught between an optimisn based on unquestioning embrace of capitalism, and patches of something resembling a genuine community spirit. This is not a matter of pride or lack thereof, it is absolutely context. As young people grapple with the problems of unemployment, high rents, corruption, and general lack of stuff to do, the town experiences a slow bleed of its talent, its life and its energy, with those left behind looking whistfully at what their life might have been.

So the first thing to say about Patos OFF11 Festival is that, almost regardless of what it creates, it's kind of already winning. But the sheer level of participation from locals and in particular the local youth of Smederevo is clear testamount to this festival's achievement both locally and on an international scale. That it all seems to have been done on a shoestring is once again no accident, and absolutely testment to a a few hard working individuals and a menagerie of volunteers. Again, this is how theatre functions. Not from grants, not from politics - absolutely from the energy of people.

The five days I spent at Smederovo were doubtless magical, filled with relentless work, foyer conversations, and general glee. Settling into the routine of 10am starts, during which me and the group of critics called THINC defined our common ground and our differences. I was particularly blessed with my participants, coming from Novi Sad, Belgrade, and Smederevo, who fought hard in the right way and for all the right things. As with any great dialogue, it was constant, exhausting, and relentless. The criticism we created will pale into significance in comparison to the fights we had.

Just a single review was produced by me - the Teatar Rubikon's Pulse, below - but happily there exists a willing team of critical voices to pick up the slack undoubtably caused by pure exhaustion. Congratulations to the participants, volunteers, and organisers that made this wonderful event happen.

Pulse (Titraj)

Sometimes a show really upsets you, for no other reason that, despite its obvious quality and technical skill, (or perhaps precisely because of this), it operates directly against your own objectives for theatre.

As a spectator, I want certain things from theatre, and they're not rocket science. I want to feel human again. I want to understand human struggle. I want to feel empathy. I want to learn. I want to be free - even if it's just for a moment - from the restraints and oppressions which govern me. I want someone - if they are going to perform for me, and make me sit there in silent contract - to do these things on my behalf. Or to try, in a human way.

As a spectator, I want these things. As a critic: I demand them.

Pulse is an experiential light and projection performance from Teatar Rubikon, from Rijeka, Croatia, exploring physics and the limits of the human being's understanding of nature. The audience is taken on a journey through oceans, through outer space, through the history of art, and deep within the mysteries of the human body. All areas unexplainable. Presented as images, as spaces, as objects, these elements of the unknown collapse, wobble, and fold in on each other like a mutating virus, or perhaps one of those floating multi-coloured boxes that made up Windows 95’s standard screensaver.

Coming up: Patos Off Iranjie Festival, Smederevo

From the 26-30th of August, I will be writing from Smederevo, Serbia, for the Patos OFF11 festival - a festival featuring local and regional artists.

During the festival, tossing aside my regard for time management in the true spirit of the festival, I will be running a workshop with local Serbian critics, as well as trying to squeeze in two performances.

So suffice to say this is about all I have time to write at the moment. More soon.

Australian Artists: Submit to the Senate Inquiry but understand its futility and greater potential

Note: I have a self-imposed embargo on writing about Australian arts when not in the country, which I am (again) breaking to write this due to the extreme nature of the government cuts and their wider implications. I am conscious that taking pot-shots from afar is not ideal, and no attempt is being made to capitalise on this position.

~

Reading Alison Croggon’s self-published submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Arts Budgets of 2014-15, which is reviewing a reallocation under direct government control of almost 50% of Australia's major arts funding body's budget allocates to artists, one can make some casual notes which result in an alarming whole. Putting aside Alison’s undeniable authority on the issue established in an intimidating autobiographical introduction, the irrefutable nature of the argument is its most shocking component. Some statistics presented are alarming to those new to them: that the Arts sector is nearly as big as Mining, that it is a far greater employer, that it receives substantially less government subsidy than mining, not to mention benefiting to Australian life in terms of education, togetherness, and identity. These arguments are not new to Croggon, who has been championing these statistics for some time to anyone who will listen.

Nor, unfortunately, is it news to the Australian government, which has full access to this data. They know how big the arts sector is, they know how big an employer it is. They have mapped out precisely how the cuts will affect everyone – as Alison puts it, "individual artists, who already substantially fund the arts through their unpaid work, will be forced to compete in a diminishing pool", moving overseas or opting for different careers to keep off the dole queue. This is not an accident, it is precisely the point. As ad hoc and reckless as the Abbott government’s strategy may sometimes seem, the cause and effect has been fully mapped, and it is certainly not something drawn up on the back of a napkin at Rockpool Seafood Restaurant over a few glasses prior to a helicopter ride home to Double Bay. The reality is not casual - it is much worse.

The question that naturally arises from Alison’s argument is as follows: why would any government, especially one from a party nominally interested in economic prosperity (at least historically), want to smother a sector that is seemingly performing so efficiently and productively – employing so many people with so little government expenditure? The answer to this question lies in their overall electoral strategy, which involves marginalising target groups and decimating their influence on the political narrative.

Removing the real opposition

Among the greatest threats to the Australian government at the next election is the potential for communities and collectives of critical thinkers to collectively emerge in opposition to it and form coherent counter-narratives. The money from Arts Council Grants is one of many methods of support and growth for these communities and can indirectly feed critical public dialogue. The free time that people from these communities have to be active – many of which, it should be noted, are still in fledgling stages and are still defined by individualism,  career-driven and institutional objectives – is removed when you starve them of money. Furthermore, cherry-picking certain artists to receive funding allows the government to distribute the flow of finance only towards those artists which are not likely to even inadvertently feed this community. The comments from the CEO of Opera Australia, Craig Hassall, that he was “delighted” and that “my first thought is that I am relieved and delighted that major performing arts companies' funding hasn’t been cut […] I don’t really have a view on where the money comes from, as long as the government is spending money on the arts” should be read in this light – further, not only will Opera Australia benefit from the changes through its funding being maintained, it will directly benefit from the removal of its primary competitors in the marketplace, which includes small and independent organisations thriving on some sense of collectivity, community and solidarity. Furthermore, the beneficiaries of the cherry-picked funding – Brandis’ own Artists Army if you like - are likely to be classically-trained artists from wealthy backgrounds, who include most of Australia’s opera singers, it being an expensive activity, further benefiting from another individual source of funding.