I have been involved with the Next Wave Festival here in Melbourne for the past 4 festivals (i guess that means i am old now, too old to be an artist for a young and emerging artist festival anyway!). I have been an artist, producer and supporter of the festival all this time. I think this festival supports work that cannot be seen in other contexts better than any other organisation in the country.
So it was with trepidation that I wade into an already explosive and passionate debate around an article that Jana Perkovic wrote on the Crikey Blog.
Due to me being employed on the Festival, I spent very little time seeing shows, so I can’t comment on the theatre that she is talking about.
However, I am very aware that this festival has been very supportive of works focusing on ‘making work that is true to its own ideas’ i.e works that are in unusual spaces or have small audiences or involve interactivity that is not the norm.
Next Wave cushions these works and allows them to ‘be’ without the worry of box office return squashing the pure notions of the work. This then enables truly Australian work that is experimental and innovative. If there was no Next Wave then where would be no Yelling at Stars, no 2020? by Ash Keating, no Dascshund UN
A key problem with works that have small audiences is that they sell out quickly, creating an insularity, a perceived ‘clubbiness’. Many discussions across Theatre Notes and the comments under Jana’s blogpost have picked up on this as well. The overriding question seems to be ‘Is this a festival for artists and not for audiences?’ (The works that seemed to flaunt this question were FUN RUN and Dachsund UN which both were incredibly open and accessible, both in terms of location and style.)
Curation is always going to be open to commentary and criticism, everyone wants to see the thing they would prefer (see Andrew Bolt’s constant articles against Kristy Edmunds Melbourne Festivals). Indeed it is important that there is discussion around both curatorial decisions as well as the individual works themselves in Melbourne, it breeds better work. And although I don’t necessarily agree with everything Jana has said in her article, I do defend her right to say it (as I do Andrew Bolt).
I think it proves how robust the critique is about theatre in this town that so many people commented so quickly in defence of one of our arts festivals.
But perhaps in this case it is more of a question of ‘who will critique the critics?’.
