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Articles, Awards and Reviews
YPAA now catalogues articles, reviews and awards garnered by our members in press and electronic media. We rely on the contributions from the membership and public to supply this service, so please forward any and all published information about arts with, by and for young people to info@ypaa.net
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NOVEMBER 2006
GRANDER PLANS FOR YIRRA YAAKIN
As Aboriginal theatre develops, it unfolds like the dreaming, writes Victoria Laurie
David Milroy never expected to see his play WINDMILL BABY performed in French, so he was pleased and mildly amused to find himself in Paris this year watching Moulin Bebe at an international playwrights workshop.
The French translation was presented as a reading at the hallowed Comedie-Francaise, where there was another wry moment. “I forgot to tell them it was a one-woman show, so they had 10 actors up on stage.”
Last week WINDMILL BABY was performed at the Belfast Festival; it has already appeared at the Salisbury Festival in England and toured Canada and regional Australia. The next stop is likely to be the Mumbai Festival in 2007.
It’s an extraordinary trajectory for a modest show about an elderly Aboriginal woman returning to a deserted cattle station after a 50-year absence, a single woman on stage with a laconic guitar-playing sidekick who performs under the flickering presence of the station windmill. It’s also been an important vehicle for YIRRA YAAKIN, the Western Australian indigenous theatre company that Milroy directed for eight years, which first mounted WINDMILL BABY in 2004.
“YIRRA YAAKIN has matured in many ways,” says the company’s executive producer, Sam Cook. “Now we’re spreading the message globally and touring WINDMILL BABY was important for that, where we took it and shared it with other communities.”
WINDMILL BABY has been a winner in other ways; it was the first indigenous script to win the Patrick White Playwrights Award in 2003 and Milroy was presented with this year’s premier indigenous arts prize, the Deadly Award for WINDMILL BABY and for his services to theatre.
YIRRA YAAKIN, which began in 1992 as a theatre vehicle for young Noon gar people, is planning to capitalise on the success of its small-scale productions. Apart from WINDMILL BABY, original shows such as ONE DAY IN ’67, ALIWA and ALICE have variously toured to Sydney, Melbourne and Brazil and raised YIRRA YAAKIN’s profile, confidence and to a lesser extent – funding. The company has received a $135,000 grant from the Christensen Fund, a California-based body that supports indigenous research and artistic and cultural activity across the world.
The money is welcome, but far more will be needed to stage YIRRA YAAKIN’s most ambitious project to date. Cook and co-writer Derek Nannup are working on JILA’s BUSH MEETING, the first big show YIRRA YAAKIN has attempted (although it has previously mounted large-scale Welcome to Country performances at the Perth International Arts Festival). “It will be the first time a work of this scale has been produced by an Aboriginal theatre company in Australia,” Cook says.
The hope is that JILA’s BUSH MEETING might find a future slot at the PIAF, although incoming artistic director Shelagh Magadza (who takes up the role in March next year from Lindy Hume) has not yet programmed her four-year festival run. The show is dauntingly ambitious; a 28member cast and crew, giant puppets, choreographed dance and original music for a contemporary interpretation of Aboriginal legend and custom. It even features an animatronic lizard. “It walks across the landscape and up into the stars,” Cook says. “The animals are trying to make all the noise in the world and [are] knocking the stars out of the sky; and Jila has to put them back up.”
JILAs BUSH MEETING was inspired by the trickster Jila, a clown-like figure that Cook says has a traditional role in Aboriginal gatherings, a kind of crowd-warmer who clowns around and mimics the dancers as they ready themselves for the serious business of ceremony. “He acts as a mediator between the land and the animals and the central characters, Old Girl and Old Boy,” Cook says.
The other character in this show is the landscape: anthills start coming alive and moving around.”
In an online article about Aboriginal theatre in WA, Cook traces its origins back thousands of years to traditional practises such as the use of the KUNDU masks by the Nyangumarta people of the Pilbara region.
“Masks were representations of both animals and spirit and were used in public performance around the campfire at night,” she writes. “At the conclusion of each performance the masks were abandoned on the ceremonial ground.” Cook’s ambition is to metaphorically pick up those masks and their underlying traditions and make highly entertaining, contemporary versions of old stories.
The Jila puppets have been slowly taking shape over several workshops under the guidance of Alan Murphy, a designer with experience on Hollywood films and in West End theatre. Cook will spend three months away next year on a UK fellowship, researching ways that Asian arts company Sampad Arts presents non-text-based performances. When she returns, Yirra Yaakin will host the indigenous HONOURING THEATRE festival in Perth, with visiting Canadian and Maori theatre companies.
Although still loosely a member of the YIRRA YAAKIN family, Milroy has moved on to other challenges. While Cook delves back into the past for storytelling inspiration, Milroy is focussing on the political present.
He is writing and producing a satirical short play called SWINERIVER for an Indigenous group of students at the WA Academy of Performing Arts. “Its to do with mining and Native title,” says Milroy, who is campaigning with his sister, MY PLACE author Sally Morgan, against the destruction of rock art in their traditional country in the state’s northwest Pilbara region. “Mining companies need to lift their game when it comes to heritage. Once all the iron ore dust is settled you see what you’re left with”.
Indigenous playwrights have been political since their plays started appearing in numbers in the 1970s, he says, citing Kevin Gilbert’s THE CHERRY PICKERS and Jack Davis’s trilogy of plays; THE DREAMERS, KULLARK and NO SUGAR. But Milroy senses that Aboriginal theatre will move on from “sociopolitical, kitchen-sink dramas” and scripts that tease out historical events or the impact of government policy.
“The biggest untapped aesthetic, if you like, in Aboriginal theatre is its [traditional] imagery. I could see in the future there being less text and more imagery, like in JILA.
But other work may move in an entirely new direction, he adds. “quite abstract, avant garde stuff along the lines of [Italian Director] Romeo Castellucci”.
“We’re not necessarily finished with the political movement, we’re not dropping the ball and moving on to something else, “he says. “You’ll still know it’s Aboriginal writing but it may not be so overtly political. It’s a bit like the Dreaming, it’s still unfolding.”
THE AUSTRALIAN - VICTORIA LAURIE - MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2006
AUGUST 2006
AN INVESTMENT IN YOUTH IS VITAL FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE SECTOR
Society's acute economic awareness is being focused on cultural and human capital, writes Matthew Westwood
AUSTRALIANS, it's said, are more attuned than most other people in the world to economic matters. After all, we're a nation of shareholders, anxious about the next offer of Telstra shares and jittery about interest rates.
"We're driven by economic thinking, for better or worse," says Catherine Baldwin, chief executive of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. "And Australians are particularly literate in terms of their economic awareness. Look at the response to interest rate (rises), and the people who will comment on the impact on their lives."
Baldwin's day job is to bring together sharp thinkers from business, government and academe to discuss ways to improve our material wellbeing.
But in a previous life, she was an arts administrator and ran her own artist-management company, Catherine Beall Management, with clients such as Bangarra choreographer Stephen Page and Australian Ballet leading man Steven Heathcote.
She has recently returned to the cultural sphere by taking the chair of Young People and the Arts Australia, an umbrella body that represents Australia's youth arts groups.
Economics, Baldwin says, is "the language of our times". She refers to comments made by Ian Macfarlane, in which the then Reserve Bank governor drew attention to our national preoccupation with money matters.
"There's a lot more to life than worrying about interest rates," she says. "But it is a language people understand, and it is a political environment that responds to economic drivers."
The language of arts administration has adapted to this economic culture. Increasingly, and not only in Australia but around the world, arts subsidy is couched in terms of its benefit to the wider economy, to social cohesion or public health.
It can rankle with those who argue that art shouldn't have to justify itself. But Baldwin says that speaking the same language as policy-makers - by expressing the benefit of culture in terms of "human capital" - is one way to begin to influence policy.
"That's where people on (arts company) boards, who are business people, can help: to craft the message and translate it into terms that might at least open doors to the next conversation, which then becomes about the (cultural) experience," she says.
Having access to decision-makers as head of CEDA will benefit her new role as chairwoman of the youth arts body.
"Maybe I can advocate for the benefit of the arts experience for young people in an environment where I see some key leaders are starting to become aware of the potential for investing in people," she says.
Before she crossed over to the corporate world in 1998, Baldwin had made her career in the arts. She grew up in Adelaide and studied piano and electronic music with the composer and electronics pioneer Tristram Carey. University radio stations and theatre groups also occupied her, but she came to realise that her abilities were in management rather than on stage.
"I really don't like performing," she says. "I really admire artists and their capacity to get up on stage, but it's not something that I love passionately, and you really need to. It's a calling."
Her first jobs were in Canberra, with Jigsaw Theatre Company and Canberra Youth Theatre. "It was a very '70s thing: a women's theatre group, a reverse-cycle garbage depot where kids could come and get arts materials, and the two professional, funded companies, Jigsaw and Canberra Youth Theatre."
Her CV features her work with the Australia Council, the Australian Dance Council (NSW) and the indigenous dance school whose graduates include such prominent names as Page and Christine Anu.
Later, Baldwin represented Page and other dancers with Bangarra Dance Theatre through her management company.
In 1998, she came to a crossroads and had to decide whether to substantially invest in her business in order for it to grow. Instead, she "pulled up stumps" and, after 20 years in the arts sector, took a job with the Institute of Actuaries.
"I guess the constant challenge was lack of resources for the artists, and that can be disheartening after a while, even for the most committed of us," she says.
"And I had chosen to work with new and emerging artists rather than big companies. I found the entrepreneurial challenge was there for me.
"Having developed a whole set of management skills, I wanted to test whether, as a manager, I could cut it in a job outside of the arts. So I dipped my toe in the water and here I am now."
Last March, she joined CEDA, which represents some 800 organisations. Many of the people with whom she comes into contact enjoy cultural pursuits in their private lives. "There are so many links to the arts community," she says. "It surprises me that we don't have a stronger vote for the arts. Maybe it's a matter of time."
Baldwin, who has a 15-year-old son, was named chairwoman of YPAA two months ago. The body - which promotes arts for, with and by young people - will be one of the hosts of an international gathering of youth arts in Adelaide in 2008. The ASSITEJ World Congress and Performing Arts Festival - the acronym refers to the organisation's French name, Association International du Theatre pour L'Enfance et la Jeunesse - has been called the world's most eminent youth arts event. The congress will be hosted by Adelaide's Come Out youth festival, the South Australian Youth Arts Board and YPAA, which is organising the professional-development program, Baldwin says.
As YPAA chairwoman, she will act as a conduit between youth arts organisations and the business community. Financial support for youth arts is comparatively small, she says.
"It's like a lot of things to do with children and young people: they come last, whether it's in funding decisions or policy frameworks. I think it's to do with awareness. If people are brought to answer for decision-making, they will always say, 'The youth of Australia is terribly important'."
THE AUSTRALIAN - MATTHEW WESTWOOD - TUESDAY 29 AUGUST 2006
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