Tasmanian Theatre Company Artistic Director, Charles Parkinson, Robert Jarman (actor), Jane Longurst (actor), Guy Hooper (actor), Katherine Johnson (author), Iain Lang (actor) at Michael Beresford’s adaption of Katherine Johnson’s novel, Pescador’s Wake to a full house at Hobart’s Backspace Theatre, April 19.
Late last year, a group of curious Tasmanians boarded a small bus to take a vertiginous six-minute trip up Hobart’s Porter Hill, traversing a steep, narrow road rife with hairpin bends. Perched on the peak 1km away was their destination — Fort Nelson House, an architectural masterpiece high above Sandy Bay built on top of an abandoned fort by modernist architect JH Esmond Dorney in 1978.
Driving the loaned schoolbus was Charles Parkinson, the intrepid artistic director of the Tasmanian Theatre Company. With no home venue and little in the way of operating funds, Parkinson, a theatre industry veteran whose previous posts include directing shows for the Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide festivals and five years as artistic director of the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, had hit on the idea of staging the cash-strapped company’s new show, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in the lounge room of the tourist attraction, billed as one of the great modern houses of Australia.
Parkinson did that 12-minute round trip three times that night, as well as on succeeding evenings over the 10-day season, patiently picking up waiting theatregoers at the carpark at the foot of the hill: “It was a bonus if they got up there early because they’d be able to admire the view, the best in Hobart, and have a quick stickybeak around the house before the show.” Once all were seated around the sunken conversation pit — the stage for the evening’s performance — the four actors would launch into Albee’s tense family drama.
This pop-up theatrical production was the latest in a series of unconventional venues embraced by the company (and many other independent theatre ensembles facing a funding crisis on the island state) …
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For Parkinson, it’s been an intense, often sapping lesson in the resourcefulness required for artmaking on a small island. He says there’s a stark disconnect between Tasmania’s wider public image as a rich, fertile arts hub — fuelled by the successes of David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art and its thriving literary community, spearheaded by Man Booker Prize-winning local Richard Flanagan — and the reality.
Look deeper and you will find an arts community floundering in a parlous economic climate (“the Tasmanian economy is crippled, plus we are at record low levels of state funding”) and fearful of the potential consequences of former federal arts minister George Brandis’s proposed radical reconstruction of the Australia Council funding model. The state’s Liberal government has been among protesting stakeholders making submissions to the Senate inquiry into funding changes, and new federal Arts Minister Mitch Fifield has flagged changes to the draft guidelines of the controversial National Program for Excellence in the Arts.
Inevitably, the community is also beset by all the problems of an island ecology: a small, widely dispersed population, a creative brain drain (Parkinson is thrilled that, for the moment at least, young gun Kruckemeyer is still living in Hobart “although he is commissioned from around the world”), and the lack of corporate and philanthropic support.
Parkinson cites the company’s loss of its Cascade Brewery sponsorship after the beer company was sold: “It’s all very well for the federal government to say the arts need to find more corporate sponsors, but I don’t know anyone outside of Ten Days on the Island and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra who are getting any kind of serious cash sponsorship.”
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Parkinson points to the tenuous situation of Terrapin Puppet Theatre, an internationally acclaimed group that relies heavily on multi-year funding for international touring. “As its chief executive Kevin O’Loghlin said at the Senate inquiry, there are kids in Queenstown, Tasmania, who are seeing the same show that kids in New York are seeing. They’ve been one of the great success stories of the small-to-medium sector and it would be criminal for them to not get funding.”
Tasmania’s visual arts sector has the support of philanthropists such as MONA’s Walsh and Penny Clive, as well as schemes such as the Collect Art Purchase Scheme, a 12-month, interest-free loan scheme to enable the purchase of contemporary local art from participating Tasmanian galleries (“It’s been brilliant, a lot of work is sold through that,” Parkinson says).
But theatre has no white knights or generous schemes. “One of the things is that it is bloody expensive, and it’s ephemeral — it’s not like a sculpture you can buy or like public art, which a politician can launch and put a plaque on it.”
There is negligible commissioning money to be prised out of flagship events such as the Ten Days on the Island festival (renamed the Tasmanian International Arts Festival this year): “It’s the baby festival of Australia,” Parkinson says. “To run a state-wide festival on $2 million a year is not very much.”
He says MONA’s success is a double-edged sword. It brings vital tourist dollars but it also tends to suck up the state’s tiny, specialised creative labour force when it hosts its MONA FOMA and Dark Mofo festivals: “We know not to program anything which coincides with these events.”
He also says that MONA’s international success masks the not-so-glowing state of the rest of the island’s art scene
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Sharon Verghis, Arts Reporter The Australian, Sydney
