http://www.nationalculturalpolicy.com.au

the uk opera screenings have been an unqualified success, no doubt about it. and australia’s (so called) major arts orgs are way behind yes. but I would suggest this exercise in audience development is not the democratisation of a form anyway, merely the democratisation of its distribution.

rather: there something called “The Australian Opera” and it is a significant investment (millions of $s, gossip, sponsorship, marketing, advertising, pr, buildings, touring structures, acres of column inches f it so much as farts…&&&..) so therefore it must “represent” something about us … either by design or default..

then why wouldn’t we invest in/support an organisation say, just to pick examples the Australian Network for Art & Technology or the Australia Arts Orchestra or an Indigenous art org(making no value judgments here, simply comparing art forms) at the same level ?

if we wanna be smart and unique and innovative and all that creative stuff we spend money on getting vast government reports into…just imagine….so why don’t we? what stops us taking our actual contemporary culture as seriously as we take everyone else’s culture? where is the equity of forms, the balance of old and new?

i would suggest this is something to do with the ancient politics of cultural status and its power is deeply complex and for some, a virtually religious issue…but we should take it on… if not the operatic arts why not the digital arts…and distributing the operatic arts via digital systems (orchestras in second life, opera on the big screen et al) is not digital arts…its just distribution.

could it be then, that culturally, the forms, we use or “allow” to say something about us are manipulated and constrained by something/one else? or are they manipulated and constrained by our own fear of self?

do we find our own culture so “revolting” that we hide it?

I dunno how, or from when, but I have emblazened in memory Lee Marvin in ‘Iceman Cometh’, Zero Mostel in “rhinoseros”, Alan Bates ‘butley’ and Stacy keach ‘luther’ … I guess the ABC must have shown the American Film Theatre series sometime. They’re terrific.

If I can source them one of them will be every second one of our monthly backyard cinema program for next year.. I’ll let Gary K. know and he can pass the message on if you’re interested.

OT, but if you want to see an amazingly well-shot play, check out the American PBS recording of “Into the Woods”.

d

I’m with your distributor in that audiences can be forgiving of technical limitations, it’s the content that’s the value proposition. A salutary lesson for me was the fact that one of the most successful docos ever, Ken Burns’ ‘Civil War’, had nary a moving picture in it, being mostly archival stills with a voiceover ( Mind you his genius was to make the stills move, now he has an Effect named after him, a standard transform in editing software)- it got the PBS network its biggest audience ever. With some audiences, and I reckon theatre ones are like this, its the bandwidth between the ears that counts.

And I agree, it wouldn’t negatively affect box office, making screen editions available, quite the opposite. Have a look at clips of OurGeoffrey’s Tony best leading actor winning performance, and tell me you wouldn’t prefer to have been in the audience, especially the earlier belvoir street one rather than Broadway tizz. It’s not an either/or proposition, more like: this, then that. Why waste a great show on just the local bums on seats?

Whatever you do, don’t miss the 2010 reprise of his “Diary of a Madman” virtuoso one-hander. After 20 years it’s still top of my list.

It just makes me think why don’t the local major arts companies take advantage for the local appetite for this sort of stuff. The STC is overseas at the moment with ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ with Our Cate and apparently doing well. There would be a decent sized market for this to be broadcast into cinemas. It wouldn’t negatively affect the box office for the live version as it sold out. The STC could earn money and reach more people who haven’t got a hope of seeing the play.

I’ve done shoots of live theatre for documentation purposes and it’s devilish tricky getting camera angles and lighting and audio as you’d like without interfering with the show’s lighting design, ( low lux cameras help but its a compromise) the performances ( stage actors being conscious of cameras), and the cameras interfering with audience experience etc. That’s what makes it interesting as a craft.

Rock’n'roll on the other hand is relatively a doddle, I haven’t had a band yet that’s said no to ‘You wanna go live to the internet?…. but I’d like to add a bit more light … oh and could you tell your crowd not to dance in that area unless they don’t mind being seen online’ .. You can probably guess what usually happens. Broadcasting live into a chatroom interface and working the room in text is a hoot. There’s even a sort of ascii text dancing that goes on if it’s that sort of number. I managed to get that little series of escapades documented in a (part) OzCo funded DVD, but not in the new media program, rather community cultural development, so in a very small way, a long time ago (2002) someone in the Australia Council did ‘get digital culture’, a bit, at least one aspect of it.

And Fine, these London Theatre shows you speak of, do you know if they went out live as well as getting recorded and re-screened? If they are what I’m thinking of they did. At the recent Brisbane music festival ( I think thats what it was) they simulcast a live show from thursday island to a biggish screen in queen street mall, and tho I think they used satellite, conceptually it’s the same as if we had a high enough bandwidth NBN to use as the carrier, that presumably make it a ‘digital culture’ phenomenon.

We’ve seen it done before with sport: eg live australian open tennis on the Fed square screen, so if sport qualifies as culture, we do do it, repackage live performances for screens. And therein the answer lies as to why we don’t do it more in the yartz: there’s bucket loads of money in sport compared to other performing arts.
Do you really thing Australian’s would reliably line up in such numbers for a potted screen version of a play with say, OurCate, in it, like Brits will for TheirHelen? I reckon there’s a better chance Brits will line up for a potted screen version of something with OurCate or OurGeoffrey in, and IMO that’s where opportunity lies.

everything, from the majority of the buildings we make “art” in to kind of art we send overseas (coals to newcastle) to which arts companies can actually afford to advertise, is desperately self conscious and bears no relationship to the living culture

This, along with Fine @ 18, is why I think Australian opera would fare so much better socially, creatively and possibly commercially if Opera Australia itself were broken into state-based organisations. Naturally this would lead to smaller-scale projects, but also more relevant and invigorated ones.* At the moment with a national framework, they’re treating opera essentially like McDonald’s. The marketing, the productions, etc is all nutted out on a single narrow level, and even when they’ve finished the gigs only ever do Mel/Syd and are then substituted with a god-awful G&S musical (a musical!) for Adelaide/Perth/Wodonga.

I daresay there’s also so much more talent in areas ranging from technicians to the voices themselves than the ‘national’ company is able to exploit, due to both its own elitism and reasons of pure logistics. City/state companies could soak a lot of this up quite effectively.