Vitalstatistix: 30 Vital Years

Vitalstatistix Theatre Company will spend 2014 celebrating their 30th anniversary. I spoke to current Creative Producer Emma Webb about the company’s history for the Adelaide Review.

As with any small arts organisation, Vitalstatistix’s history has been rocky. They’ve lost – but always regained – funding multiple times over their history, and partially through this, and through the changing tide of theatre, politics, and feminism in Australia, it’s found itself operating in many different guises.

“It was quite feasible that at any point throughout its history that the company might not have survived,” says Webb. “Small-to-medium sized companies have a really hard time surviving.

“Let alone anything else that might affect an arts company’s ability to survive, but on top of that a company that is a feminist organisation, that’s based in a working class suburb like the Port [Adelaide], and that has produced a lot of political work.

“It’s kind of remarkable, in some ways,” she says, “that it’s survived and thriving.”

Read the whole piece here. 

No Plain Jane around the web

On Vitalstatistix’s Adhocracy for the Adelaide Review:

The landscape of the arts in Australia is changing. Increasingly, artists aren’t making works that can be easily defined as theatre or visual arts, etcetera, but instead work across art forms and disciplines. It is in this spirit many of the works at Adhocracy will be developed.

Emma Webb, Vitalstatistix’s Creative Producer, says programs like Adhocracy are part of a “growing movement to engage with how we make art, and art’s position in the world”.

On the excitement I felt of the ‘Australianess’ of Belvoir’s Angels in America for the Guardian:

Angels in America is certainly not a new Australian work in terms of its text, and the production makes no pretensions to be. The story may not be ours in 2013 – and probably never was ours even when Tony Kushner wrote his story about AIDS in a 1985 New York City. But the theatre of the piece feels firmly ours of today.

It’s both surprising and exciting how Flack’s production has this spirit to it, and he has found this largely through an Australian irreverent sense of humour. While Kushner said it’s “okay if the wires show” in his stage directions, in this production Flack’s stage magic is, for the most part, so delightfully rudimentary there aren’t even wires to hide.

A review of You, Me, and the Bloody Sea in the Adelaide Cabaret Festival for ArtsHub:

The Space Theatre for the Cabaret Festival was the wrong venue for You, Me and the Bloody Sea. We needed a pub.

The kind of pub where the wind howls by outside, its salt stinging faces as they hurry inside to where bodies pack under the slightly too dim lighting. As the band plays, we want not so much as to watch them perform but to feel them. To stamp our feet and clap our hands and yell and sing along; or to tightly wrap our hands around another and softly sway.

An interview with Anna Krien about her book Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport for Artery:

Exploration of these themes has lead to a book that is frequently uncomfortable, and I wondered if Krien needed breaks from the material in developing the work. ‘You just kind of wade into it’, she replies.

‘I can’t get out of it. There is no real point in taking a break from it because it kind of consumes me, so no. You just go into that dark place and dig your way out.’

A review of The Comedy of Errors from the State Theatre Company of South Australia and Bell Shakespeare for the Guardian:

[…] scenes happen under the glow of a tanning bed, in 24-hour table tennis halls, and under the flashing strobe of a night club. It’s Shakespeare shown at his crudest and broadest, and his text feels comfortable in this world. At times the language is near impenetrable, at others it feels startlingly contemporary – but Savage’s production finds most success and its biggest humour when it goes beyond the text and into the physical.

And I’ll leave you with these sentiments from an unpublished (big on the One Man, Two Guvnors spoilers – shoot me an email if you want to read it) interview with Richard Bean for Arts Centre Melbourne’s Artist to Artist critical conversations:

“One thing that maybe this play has brought back into the tool kit of a playwright is the aside,” he tells me. “We’ve completely lost that from modern theatre – comedy or drama. There is absolutely no reason you can’t do a very serious play about a very serious topic and have asides. It doesn’t have to be comedic. And I think it’s quite refreshing to see this. It’s not the expansion of the form because it’s always been there, but the recovery of different techniques is going to be with me forever now. Why isn’t the actor talking to the audience?”

“It may have ruined me”, he finishes, thinking he’ll never be able to do a work without asides again. This draws contemplation to thoughts about what other facets of theatre have been dropped for being old fashioned or out dated, and how they can be re-employed in contemporary work.

Winter hibernations

Apologies for the silence around here. I’ve been in a state of hibernation the past few weeks and Adelaide’s also been quiet on the theatre front which, of course, doesn’t help matters much for this blog. I saw a handful of shows in the Cabaret Festival, but I find that genre has its own particular challenges when it comes to reviewing, and with a confluence of factors I never quite got around to writing about any. I’ve got a few projects I’m working on at the moment – both blog and non-blog related, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back into the habit of posting on here a bit more.

Some links from me: A few reviews of Next Wave have been posted on RealTime – the Day Pass and an overview of a few works. A piece in the current Adelaide Review on the lack of rehearsal space in Adelaide. From way back when, the audio of the panel on criticism I did at the AFC, from which I quite possibly disagree with everything I said. Saying things out loud and having to rethink over that really forces you to question your thoughts.

A quick note: Actors’ Equity in the UK has sent a letter to 43 subsidised theatre companies questioning their lack of employment of female actors. I think this is exactly the sort of action which needs to be happening across the sector: change is entirely an action of people drawing things to attention and making questions heard. I don’t, however, agree, with playwright Stella Duffy saying we need to avoid male-dominated plays [UPDATE: Her full argument is here, and much broader than the Guardian’s summary]. Perhaps there is something to be said about making more of an effort to see plays where women take a central role, but the fact I want to see more women represented in theatre doesn’t take away from the fact that their are many brilliant plays which are male dominated. Looking at theatre seasons in Australia this year, there is more than a little deja vu in London critic Matt Truman’s tweet: “If Equity’s gender campaign leads to book-balancing productions of Top Girls & Daisy Pulls It Off etc it will have failed massively.”

And to just join every feminist on the internet this week, some words from Nora Ephron:

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.

Restoring the balance

This article was originally published in the June Adelaide Review. 

A recent report has found that women are underrepresented in key Australian theatre company roles such as writing and directing. But why?

Not one of the eight plays the State Theatre Company of South Australia (STCSA) announced for their 2011 season – in late 2010 – was written by a woman. Indeed, from 2001 to 2011, women have written less than a quarter of the plays the company has mounted.

Come their 2012 program, there is now a female writer or co-writer on five of the eight productions. While outgoing Artistic Director Adam Cook told The Adelaide Review(‘Bright Future on the Stage’, October, 2011) this programming was a “coincidence”, the shift speaks to a much wider national acknowledgment of the underrepresentation of women in the key creative roles of writers and directors in our funded theatre companies.

While conversations about this misrepresentation have been occurring for years, they reached tipping point in late 2009, when several high profile theatre companies announced seasons of work with exceedingly few women. When Company B (now Belvoir) in Sydney released a season of works with only one female playwright and one female director, the first significant waves of awareness occurred in the debate.

First reported on the blog of Sydney playwright Joanna Erskine, who called it an “unacceptable gap in statistics”, the debate quickly spread through theatrical blogs, and began to focus on the underrepresentation of women in many of the country’s highest funded organisations.

This April, the debate came to a crux with the release of the Women in Theatre report from the Australia Council for the Arts. Compiled by academics Elaine Lally and Sarah Miller, the report casts an unflattering light on the theatre sector.

The report looks at the qualitative statistics to get an overview of the true position of women in funded theatre companies; and takes quantitative data through a series of interviews to try and shine better light on the causes of the issues.

One of the key findings of the report focused on the major performing arts companies in the period between 2001 and 2011. These eight theatre companies, of which the STCSA is a member, are the highest funded theatre organisations in Australia. The report showed women make up only 21 percent of the playwrights and 25 percent of the directors working for these companies. At 36 percent, the proportion of productions with at least one woman in the key roles of writer or director is no less dire.

Below the funding levels of the MPA companies, the Theatre Board Key Organisations are a collection of companies funded by the Australia Council with multi-year funding. Typically classified as in the ‘small-to-medium’ sector, Key Organisations represent a larger number of companies than the MPA companies, but each with typically lower outputs of work.

While the report showed greater representation of women in these companies, the proportions are still significantly below parity, with women writing 37 percent of the productions, and directing another 37 percent.

Raised in interviews Lally and Miller held with artists and stakeholders, the reasons for this continuing disparity between gender representations are complex.

While some of these reasons will be familiar to women in many industries, including the structure of employment pathways and the challenges of balancing a career and family, some are unique to the nature of the arts. As one interview respondent told the report, “all new work is risky but women’s work is perceived to be riskier”.

In 1984 the Council endorsed the paper Women in the Arts: A Strategy for Action, which was the first comprehensive look by the Council at the underrepresentation of women in the sectors they fund. While many strategies were implemented, the current statistics paint a concerning picture for how little things have changed.

That same year, Vitalstatistix Women’s Theatre Company was founded by artists Margie Fisher, Roxxy Bent and Ollie Black to champion the work and stories of women in theatre. While the Port Adelaide company has undergone many incarnations over the years, no longer presenting with the word women in their title, gender-aware programming is still a core part of their mission.

In response to this new report, current Creative Producer of Vitalstatistix, Emma Webb, said while the face of the industry is changing, “both statistical and anecdotal evidence shows there continues to be barriers and cultural issues that affect the career advancement of women in the arts”.

“Changes comes in stops and starts, peaks and troughs; the national debate around women’s leadership in theatre over the last few years, and reports like this, ensure the discussion around women in theatre is not some kind of historical survey but rather are in the here and now,” she said.

While the long-term effects of any response to the new report are yet to be seen, radically fast changes in programming at major companies like the STCSA gives hope for a changing industry face. Hopefully, the 2013 seasons will show us the only way is up.

What’s new Tuxedo Cat?

This article was original published in the January 2012 Issue of the Adelaide Review.

Adelaide’s “cultural boulevard”, North Terrace is home to heritage institutions the State Library of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the Art Gallery of South Australia but the 2012 Fringe will add pop up venues to North Terrace’s list of must see destinations.

Greg Clarke and Jennifer Layther at the first walkthrough of the new Tuxedo Cat. Photo Gary Cockburn.

This festival season a new cultural venue will open on the southern side of North Terrace, the latest incarnation of the Tuxedo Cat. Since 2008, the Tuxedo Cat has established a reputation as one of the most loved Fringe hubs for independent performing
arts work.

Established and run by Bryan Lynagh and Cassandra Tombs, the Cat, as they affectionately call it, started as a rooftop venue in Synagogue Place off Rundle Street, running for three Fringes before the building underwent development. For the 2011 Fringe they opened in Electra House opposite Town Hall, also sitting empty in preparation of development. In 2012, they will be operating in Club 199 and the iconic 200 North Terrace.

“We feel like it’s our best address yet,” says Lynagh over a drink. “I think it’s a good mix having the Art Gallery and Library and Museum just across the road from a grassroots arts venue.”