Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
Arts Hub Australia, 18th August 2008
Darwin may the Northern Territory’s big daddy but it can rest easy in its sweet 16th spot on Australia’s most populous Statistical Divisions countdown. Given its size, it is one of Australia’s most culturally diverse metropolises and has the highest proportional Indigenous population of any capital city. Perched askew and simmering away at the Top End, it all too readily calls into slavish service the term “cultural melting pot”, yet it is difficult to find a superior option.
The program for the current Darwin Festival (14 – 31 August 2008) is testament to the upside of isolation; travel expenses and a prohibitive climate for much of the year stunt the growth of an arts industry that must instead rely on self-motivation, resourcefulness and, beneficially, collaboration. Perhaps the growth of festivals such as Darwin do not mirror the spangled, stellar trajectories of larger cities, but growth there is – if not up then out, to encompass a community celebrating its own differences and achievements rather than looking ever outwards for inspiration.
Anne Dunn, Darwin Festival’s General Manager and herself a full-time Darwin resident, concedes that conditions necessitate an alternative approach, however this does not preclude fare of a calibre that audiences might only have expected to find elsewhere.
“It is a really different model and I think the Festival inhabits a slightly different role here than it does in other places,” she says. “I think the artistic isolation is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it means that companies will tend to benchmark locally rather than nationally, which can have its drawbacks; by the same token, it does promote a unique expression of a local lived experience because you tend not to follow dominant trends.”
Dunn stresses the advantages of relying on local resources, not the least of which is a greater direct reinvestment of the fruits of the local arts community’s labour into the wider population. The arts act as a powerful means by which to disseminate essential messages on issues such as health and social cohesion to the local community as well as providing an opportunity for Territorians to raise their voices to the rest of the country.
“When you look at the representations of the Territory in the national media, they’re often quite negative,” Dunn says. “The arts represent a vehicle for really positive stories; there are these amazing things going on up here and the arts are a really good way of sharing those.”
Attendance at last year’s Festival would certainly indicate that locally at least, the formula works. Seventy thousand people turned out to Festival events, a per-capita ratio to trump even the larger metropolitan festivals. While audiences are keen to take in international offerings, the greatest response is garnered by local artists telling local stories, and the program reflects this. Performances such as this year’s appearance by Indigenous musician Gurrumul with East Timor’s Ego Lemos, or collaborative works such as Liberty Songs – the juxtaposition of the work of Indigenous singer/songwriters Shellie Morris, Leah Flanagan and Lou Bennett with the music of Darwin’s Liberian refugee community – are hugely popular. Territory artists form the core of the Festival, however in 2008, Artistic Director Malcolm Blaylock has shifted the focus slightly to take in works both traditional and modern from much of Asia and the South Pacific.
The volume of music and traditional dance on the program is striking and constrasts with other capital city festivals, with their greater capacity for elaborate staging. Distance, cost, logistics, serviceable venue shortages and an industry at the mercy of an unforgiving climate all restrict the ability of Territory arts companies to produce works requiring a high degree of technical support. In a community out of touch with its traditional arts, these would be significant stumbling blocks; for many artists living in Darwin and surrounds however, they are merely easily-avoided bumps in the road. Many Territorians practice and perpetuate their traditional arts as they do any other facet of their lives, and music and dance in particular lend themselves to organic development within a community. This ease of creation and projection garners a response from audiences as warm as if they were witnessing it in their own backyard.
Dunn cites Nabarlek, a group from the central Arnhem Land community of Manmoyi that blends traditional, rock, reggae, country and gospel music, as a classic example of this natural approach to performance-making, so prevalent at the Darwin Festival.
“They might come in and not have rehearsed together for six months because they didn’t have any instruments, then they pick them up and – bang! Especially with the Indigenous artists, the dance and the music are happening as part of their day-to-day lives and cultural maintenance. All we’re doing is bringing it in, giving it some production values, putting it on a stage and giving them an opportunity to showcase what they’re doing,” she says. “Music really crosses seamlessly over boundaries of such diverse audiences and cultural groups.”
Certainly Nabarlek’s tag line, “The garage band who never had a garage”, wryly encapsulates Darwin’s necessarily proactive take on artistic and cultural pursuits.
Their appeal also points to Darwin audiences’ distinct preference for those productions offering a reflection of their existences. While Dunn says that traditional theatre productions certainly have a place on the Darwin Festival program, they simply do not elicit the same kind of enthusiasm. Festival-goers find less to relate to and entirely apart from considerations of content is the fact that sitting inside a darkened theatre appeals far less to local sensibilities than sprawling on a blanket on the grass, or sitting under whole constellations at the Star Shell while the dry season replicates most people’s idea of a celestial air-con unit.
Ideally, each city’s festival should occupy a distinct place because it is a reflection of the tastes, aspirations and priorities of its citizens. As Dunn reasons, “Each festival very much needs to find its voice in its local community. It is appropriate in somewhere like Sydney or Melbourne, where there is a much broader pool of multimedia-funded companies… that are already producing those local stories, that when they bring in the bigger international companies it is a new experience for those audiences.
“Darwin Festival’s identity is very distinct… because we’re a very distinct place. The international companies coming in are amazing and they do offer local audiences these incredible experiences.”
Darwin’s international focus may seem narrower but it is sharp. Companies from across Asia and the South Pacific contribute to a dynamic program and to the cultural development of the city, by entering into collaborative relationships with local artists.
Within the artistic and cultural community of Darwin itself, collaboration is an integral cog in the machine, and not a vast stretch given that the majority of arts companies are grouped around two buildings and prospective projects can be discussed over brewing tea.
While limited funding for Territory arts leads to under-resourced projects and the consequent tendency for artists to think medium rather than big, the Festival has been growing at a healthy rate, tripling in size over the past five years. Dunn says that it now feels in a position to help galvanise Darwin’s arts community into greater action than it may previously have thought possible.
“We’re looking at how we fit into the local arts community and can work with them to lift the quality and the profile of territory arts in general,” she says.
“The industry needs to realise that now is the time to speak really articulately… to government, corporations and audiences about [arts] in the broader social platform – that [we] have a role in notions of health, social cohesion and education and that the arts as a tool for getting positive experiences through is really valuable.”
