Audiostage

"When you're trying to deconstruct the dominant structures, it's not going to happen politely, is it?" - Jade Lillie Welcome to the final episode of the season on race, womanhood, and belonging - and you're in for a real treat. To close a season created in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre, we speak with two head ladies of FCAC about the ethos that guides FCAC's work. Departing Artistic Director Jade Lillie, and Head of Programming Lydia Fairhall, discuss white privilege, their personal history with both feminism and decolonisation, and what it really takes to create a community. "I don't know that spending my life attacking power structures is going to be as of much benefit for me, in this life, as trying to cultivate peace and forgiveness. (...) It's a hard thing to think about. I'm the first woman in her family to keep her children. I have that luxury. My mother never did. Should I just be out there? Fighting the big fight? I don't know. It's a constant tension for me." - Lydia Fairhall This conversation was not programmed for WOW Festival Melbourne, but instead was recorded separately a few months after the festival had ended, amidst the news that Jade had won this year's Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and would be leaving FCAC at the end of 2017. We jumped at the opportunity to speak with these two leaders, crucial in the running of FCAC and in shaping the community arts space in Australia. It is an intimate conversation, a reflection on practice informed by years of conversations and collaboration, and a deep, informed closure to a season of uncompromising conversations - a season which, in this year of shocks and instability, has so often grounded us in what really matters. Jade Lillie is a recognised leader in community arts, with a practice grounded in the philosophy that arts and cultural development can bring about systemic change when there is sound engagement with social justice frameworks. After years of work in government and non-government agencies, in Australia as well as South-East Asia, Jade's practice has been recognised with numerous prestigious awards - including Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship. Lydia Fairhall is the Head of Programming at Footscray Community Arts Centre. Starting out as a singer/songwriter, she has worked as a writer, academic, cultural community development worker, festival and event producer, and has worked in a variety of settings, including in family violence and suicide prevention, housing, dance, music, theatre and comedy. Colleagues, friends, changemakers and community builders - Jade and Lydia sat together in the Footscray Community Arts Centre where they have both worked for years to delve deeply into their practice, their work at FCAC, and what it means to belong. Discussed in this episode: what is home after two centuries of displacement?, Stolen Generations, the logical family, sphere of influence, doors that open are twofold, John Howard, lineage, Queensland as the canary in the Australian political coal mine, being homeless but not knowing it, glass ceilings, James Baldwin, big fat asterisks, being a queer woman, dismantling privilege, Buddhist nuns that take us under their wing, righteous anger, decolonisation and breaking bread, hope and solidarity, and how theatre is a vehicle of social justice. Jade: "You were saying this morning that this will be a time that we look back on, when we're older, as being a time of significant change." Lydia: "...but it being the beginnings of things." This was the last episode of season five of Audiostage, in which we looked at belonging through the eyes of women. It was created in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival Melbourne, delivered in association with Southbank Centre London. Audiostage is a labour of love, created by Jana Perkovic and Bethany Atkinson, while the music for this season was created by Louise Terra.

"In Timor, in the school, we have to learn about the Portuguese language, because it's the official language, in our country." "That's not your mother tongue, is it? What's your language?" "Makasai. And my husband's is Fataluku." "Can you two understand each other?" "Yes." "And what language do you speak at home?" "Tetum." In the fourth episode of the season, we speak to theatre director Leticia Cáceres, and performer and writer Lena Caminha, about language and its relationship to belonging. What happens when your mother tongue is not your country's national language? What happens when your husband's mother tongue is not your own? What happens when your teacher cannot pronounce your name? What happens when you migrate to a country whose language you resisted learning in school, because it was the language of the coloniser? "Some places in this country have been bleached white. And it's places where we don't recognise Italians and we don't recognise Hungarians, we don't recognise Argentinians, that kind of make up that whole fabric of this land, and that we're been here for quite some time, building this country together. There's only one culture that's recognised, and one name that's easy to pronounce." - Leticia Cáceres The fourth episode of this season brings you a conversation that was not programmed for WOW Festival Melbourne, but instead was recorded separately a few days before the festival opened itself up to the world. In a large warehouse space around the corner from the festival mainstage, artists from Bangladesh, Timor-Leste, India, Indonesia and Australia were busy developing new collaborative works, critical conversations and creative exchanges to be presented at the festival. This international residency program, called Women, Art & Politics, is facilitated by Footscray Community Arts Centre’s Collaborate Asia Program and Asia TOPA. All the artists had spent the last few days working together and working a part on their respective practices all exploring the intersection of the concepts within the theme Women, Art & Politics, in their local and global contexts and how they impact their practice and communities. Two of the resident artists, Lena Caminha and Leticia Cáceres, took a break from their rehearsal to record in a small room, just out of reach from the group, but just close enough so you can hear magic being created in the background. Discussed in this episode: speaking English, not speaking English, the women who came before us, learning English in Canada, learning English in Queensland, contemporary feminism, Melbourne vs Sydney (but the West is the best!), how providing a platform for women is not the same as belonging to contemporary feminism, our husbands, our children, our accents, giving our children unpronounceable names, and what it means to be understood. "I certainly identify as a feminist. I am constantly challenged by feminism. I respect many people who are resisting it, particularly women of colour, and queer folk who have found many problems with the feminist movement, and I am constantly trying to keep up with all of the ways in which we can make the thing more inclusive, and more sensitive to, or more aware of, the inherent privileges that are embedded in that movement, and have been in the movement for some time. But I can't deny the overwhelming sense of pride that I feel being associated, and standing in solidarity, with women like Lena, and feminists that have come before me, and have achieved the incredible things that they have achieved. And I am also incredibly aware of the enormity of the scale of work that needs to be done, still." - Letitia Cáceres You can subscribe to Audiostage on iTunes or any number of Android platforms, friend us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. This season of Audiostage was created in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival Melbourne,

"Hollywood is the great value-dictator of our time." - Amos Gebhardt The third episode of our season on belonging and exclusion is here, and this month we are conversing across many disciplines, and setting a record with the number of voices featured. Our guests are writer and performer Candy Bowers, artist and filmmaker Amos Gebhardt, and playwright and theatre-maker Chi Vu, three artists who have challenged the dominant narratives of gender, culture, and race both in their work, and as prominent public speakers. In this episode, recorded at FCAC and moderated by RMIT Deputy Dean of Media Lisa French, our guests speak about the female gaze on stage and screen, and what to do with Jill Soloway when being woman-identifying is only one of the parts of your identity. "So I worked on a play called Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee last year at MTC. And I thought what was extraordinary with that play is that - I really don't think Melbourne is at the same level regarding consciousness and dialogue in regards to whiteness and privilege - more than half of the audience saw one play, and all the intersectional feminists saw a different play. Literally, people laughed at different jokes. I read the play and I thought it was so funny straight away, and most of the guys I was working with, including the director, didn't think it was funny, didn't understand it. And I thought: 'This is a really clear case study in the fact that I've lived a life reading between the lines, and they've lived a life on the line. The line has been for them'." - Candy Bowers This panel ‘Female Gaze on Film and Stage’ was originally recorded as part of the program for WOW Melbourne at FCAC, and was presented in partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It’s the very end of summer in Melbourne, it's a lovely Thursday afternoon, everyone is just settling in for an afternoon of discussions. It's a beautiful conversation: it is a rare occasion to hear some distinguished voices of the Australian independent arts speak about the intersectional experience in a space that is safe and expansive, outside of the carnival of outrage and provocation that so often greets those who speak about diversity. Discussed in this episode: decolonising ourselves, Jill Soloway, inclusivity and being included, very small paths, being Best Female Performer for playing a straight man, what is cultural safety?, how bilinguals are not like two monolinguals in the same body, Back to Back Theatre, creating little worlds, what's wrong with make-up artists in Australia?, and the female gaze. "As an artist, creating a culture of safety, however you define it, is the only way you can make work over a long term." - Chi Vu Bibliography: Jill Soloway on The Female Gaze, Master Class, TIFF 2016 Ben Neutze: Candy Bowers on Australian Theatre's White Patriarchy: Burn it Down, The Daily Review, Oct 2016 Ben Neutze: Review: Lilith the Jungle Girl, The Daily Review, Sep 2016 Stephanie Lai: Review: Coloured Aliens by Chi Vu, Peril, Apr 2017 Dylan Rainforth: Amos Gebhardt's Nude Portraiture Celebrates Difference, The Age, Feb 2016 You can subscribe to Audiostage on iTunes or any number of Android platforms, friend us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. This season of Audiostage was created in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival Melbourne, delivered in association with Southbank Centre London.

"Familiarity with suffering makes you very strong." - Paola Balla In the second episode of our season on belonging and exclusion, created in partnership with FCAC, cross-disciplinary performance artist Carly Sheppard and PhD researcher, artist and curator extraordinaire Paola Balla speak about Australian Aboriginal women's perspective on intersectionality, motherhood, contemporary feminism, and making art. We are so privileged to be listening in. "I think a lot of people don't realise that it's embedded white supremacy that's the problem, it's not necessarily the white people. And until they understand that they carry the scars of colonisation as well... Obviously, they don't carry the scars that we carry, we're a different set. But they haven't yet owned their own set. They don't even know what they are." - Carly Sheppard This episode was recorded at Women of the World Melbourne, amongst the hustle and bustle of the festival. There were so many complex and interesting ideas and generosity of sharing going on that we wanted to catch ideas as they landed. The conversation was recorded following a discussion on motherhood, which is reflected in the conversation between our guests. As usual, we gave our guests some general questions we were curious to hear about, but otherwise we just listened. Discussed in this episode: white women explaining things on behalf of black women, sitting with conflict, giving birth at 21, postnatal depression, contemporary feminism, life as a white-presenting blackfella, not understanding the conflict you're born into, the oppression of being ladylike, what does it even mean, having it all?, how sometimes you need a safe landing, and listening to the silences of trauma. "Matriarchy has been around for tens of thousands of generations. And we had our roles in our culture: we never felt inferior to men. That was never a thing. That's a colonial construct." - Paola Balla If you wish to know more: Jana has written about Carly Sheppard's work in RealTime, which had appeared at Next Wave 2014's BLAK WAVE; here is another review, in The Conversation. If you are curious to know more about Paola Balla, have a look at the exhibition 'Sovereignty' she recently curated for ACCA, read her 2016 interview with Il Globo, or watch this ABC video. You can subscribe to Audiostage on iTunes or any number of Android platforms, friend us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. This season of Audiostage was created in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival Melbourne, delivered in association with Southbank Centre London.

"I wasn't prepared to be anybody's mother. I was prepared to be a revolutionary." - Elaine Brown Welcome to season five of Audio Stage, a very special season for us. For this season, we collaborate with Footscray Community Arts Centre to bring you a series of conversations by black women about belonging and self. We have wanted to do this for a long time. We wanted to talk about race. We wanted to talk about Australia's racism. We wanted to talk about dispossession, about family and intergenerational trauma, about microaggressions, about what it means to be an artist when your voice, the fact of your voice, is in and of itself a danger to the status quo. We also knew that we wanted to listen, not talk. So here we are. In the next five episodes, we are listening in on some huge, important conversations about what it means to belong in a society that perhaps never wanted us in the first place. We record from a country in which so many of us are constantly reminded that we do not belong here. "For me, being black, being a migrant, my parents migrating to Australia out of need, and personally having that same experience... Not wanting to speak my language for a long time, because I just wanted to speak English, like everybody else in school. I had to re-teach myself, I'm still in that process, of the language that I've lost. I don't think it landed for me until I was much older - when you're around your people, and you have that mirroring moment, and you just realise what it is that you've subconsciously, or consciously, left behind. For survival." - Alia Gabres In our first episode, we are bringing you the conversation between Melbourne spoken word artist and cultural producer Alia Gabres, and former Black Panther Party member Elaine Brown, now an author and activist. This precious, beautiful conversation was a part of the program at Women of the World Festival Melbourne at FCAC in March 2017, and we recorded it there. Discussed in this episode: being a mother vs being a revolutionary, how words are beautiful but actions are supreme, how every woman needs her own football team, wanting to be white, the mirroring moment, you can't be a vegan in the 'hood, clicktivism, white supremacy, parenting in the Black Panther Party, not knowing how to braid your daughter's hair, and how revolutionary women don't cook. "White supremacy is not really the issue. All white people are not our enemies, obviously. Because this is a sophist concept, where you say, 'you know what, if the white man is my oppressor, then all white people must be aligned with that'. That is not true. We learnt, ultimately, class analysis. But as a child, I grew up knowing that black people were poor, and I don't want to be poor." - Elaine Brown You can find out more about Elaine on her website, or follow her on Twitter. Alia Gabres tweets here, while you can read more about her work here or watch her spoken word poetry on YouTube. This season of Audiostage was created in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival Melbourne, delivered in association with Southbank Centre London.

"We're just a whole group of people swirling around together, trying to get on with our lives, not knowing that we've been traumatised." - Matthew Todd Our final episode of season four, #queer, takes us to London, where we speak to the author of perhaps the most extraordinary book of 2016: Matthew Todd. Matthew Todd is a sometimes stand-up comedian, and a playwright, whose play Blowing Whistles, described as one of the most popular gay plays of recent times, has had sellout seasons in the UK and Australia. A long-time editor of the UK gay magazine Attitude, and a person who has actively participated in, and even helped shape, contemporary LGBT culture, Matthew has recently published a stunning book under the title Straight Jacket: How to be Gay and Happy, in which he takes a critical look behind the shiny façade of this culture. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, and part polemic, the book asks if gay people are as happy as it seems, and as happy as they could be, and as happy as the LGBT culture depicts. If not – why not? In an unflinching, honest conversation about crystal meth, bullying, and fascination with divas, we cover everything that straight people rarely know, and the LGBT people rarely talk about. "Being gay is more complicated than we have thought. ... We've presented it as if it's just like: 'some people have blue eyes, some people have brown eyes'. ... I think to be LGBT is really different, actually, and that goes against the grain of what we've been thinking over the last 10-15 years, that it's exactly the same... Even if you go into a gay bar, it's very different from going into a straight bar: the way people behave, the way people look, sometimes, the way people dress. There's nothing wrong with that. If we can't think about that, investigate that, and ultimately accept that, how can we feel OK in ourselves?" - Matthew Todd Jana picked this book up randomly in a bookshop in Brussels last year, intrigued by the title. Hours later, bent over the tome, told to leave because the bookshop was closing, she bought the book and thus began a year of recommending it to all her friends. Straight Jacket is a polemic about the health and well-being of gay people. It draws connections that are unexpected, intellectually courageous, and controversial: between bullying and attachment theory, childhood trauma and addictive tendencies, casual sex and self-soothing, the rhetoric of 'pride' and internalised shame. Owen Jones called it brilliant - and disturbing. It is a brave book, an uncomfortable book, and a book with a huge motherfucking heart, that deserves to be read by every queer person, young, old, or other. It is always a pleasure, however, to be able to converse about LGBT issues in a calmer climate. We recorded the conversation in London, in Attitude offices, surrounded with the rule of law, with smiling LGBT faces, with an infrastructure of dignity and protection of human rights, just as Australia was embarking on a ferocious, uncivilised debate about whether to have a plebiscite on gay marriage, as if there was anything alright with the notion that the majority should decide about the rights of minorities. The groundedness of our surroundings, we hope, are felt in our conversation. And thank you, Matthew, for important and timely insights. Discussed in this episode: The Wizard of Oz, 'the gay play', the role of fantasy in coping with trauma, Chem Sex the infamous documentary, Byron Bache, George Michael's spending sprees, challenging sex positivity, rape and consent, Brokeback Mountain, bullying and Prince William, the role of gay media in a changing world, the gay equivalent of Bridget Jones' Baby?, the role of community in overcoming depression, and how perhaps we need to talk more about the LGBT realities. "To me, it's not enough to dress up as a woman, pretend to be a woman, and be mouthy, and gobby, and rude, and put people down a lot.... That's not interesting to me.

"We try to pose ourselves impossible questions." - Emma Valente In the episode four of season four, on queer performance, Jana and Beth are joined by the extraordinary Emma Valente of the performance collective The Rabble. Self-described as "an on-going conversation between its Artistic Directors Kate Davis and Emma Valente about aesthetic, space, gender, theatre and representation", since 2006 The Rabble have created a small, but distinguished body of work. Their eleven performance pieces to date always put the female experience at its centre: sometimes through excavations of our iconographic unconscious, sometimes by shredding to bits canonical texts such as The Picture of Dorian Gray or Story of O. Today we talk about feminism, iconography, and queering our visual heritage. "Yes, I think [the canon] is male-dominated, without even getting into the content, and what gaze it sits through. The repetition of the male voice over and over again through history, and then legitimising it, is undoubted." - Emma Valente The Rabble are, without any exaggeration, one of the most important contemporary performance outfits in Australia. Their work has been a study of all sorts of feminine outside of the narrow confines of the Australian norm, becoming more radical in parallel with the increasingly uncompromising tone of Australian feminism. In 2012, a mere fortnight after Julia Gillard's by-now famous Parliament speech against Tony Abbott's misogyny, Alison Croggon saw The Rabble's Orlando and wrote: "It's not that a work like this makes everything better; it manifestly can't. It's not that it teaches you anything that you don't know; it doesn't. It's that it is something. An uninhibited howl of laughter. A scream of grief. A forthright act of unshamed beauty. Female desire in all its violence, perversity and monotony, its repetitive assault on the self, its redemption, its dolour, its breath-taking, liberating lust for life. Orlando is, most of all, a work of theatre: a performance that explodes, with the white-hot fission of its full meaning, into the present moment." Listen to Emma as she gives a huge shout-out to the feminist queer art of our times, from post and Zoe Coombs-Marr to Zoey Dawson and Rachel Perks. Discussed in this episode: queer as advertisement or queer as a political project, our visual commonplaces, violence against women as always true and inevitable, Rihanna and Rosie Batty, masculine and feminine ways of making art, having an ensemble, cages and liberation, Alison Croggon, the 'fuck it' moment in making art, the rise of the Melbourne indie scene, rolling pins, how pornography can be so, so boring, having a coffee with anyone who asks, Story of O, the importance of context in staging a provocative work, and how backing an artist means giving them three shots. "There's so many boundaries. If you look at the kind of work that is on the big stages, from what was happening five years ago, it's pretty similar. There has been slight shifts in acceptance of form, perhaps, and slight shifts in ideas of who can be at the centre of the work, what is interesting content, and there's been many many things contributing to that shift, but I think it has been slight. When the funding crisis happened, with Brandis, there was a shrinking of courage to try new things. And I think that people of colour, and women, and queer work, got pushed out to the edges again. They're being incorporated back in, but still treated as Other." - Emma Valente Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Polly Borland: Smudge series Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence: The Cells Alison Croggon: Melbourne Festival: Orlando, Theatre Notes, October 2012 Julia Gillard's misogyny speech, October 10, 2012 Sarah Lucas: Self Portraits and More Sex Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills Gertrude Stein: Sacred Emily

"Maybe doing nothing for a while is the best way an activist, an artist, or an academic can do anything." - Matthew Day In our last episode of season three, on dance and value, Jana and Beth are back in the studio together, this time joined by co-host Audrey Schmidt, to talk with choreographer Matthew Day about affect, physical touch, and how we can be queer outside of queer theory. Matthew is one of the most interesting among the younger generation of Australian choreographers, appearing seemingly out of nowhere at Next Wave 2010 with THOUSANDS, a work of fully formed brilliance which would later form part of his Trilogy series. He has recently completed a Masters of Choreography at the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, and is about to present his new work, ASSEMBLAGE #1, as part of his Housemate residency at Dancehouse. Whoever has seen the Trilogy series – described as “a suite of visceral eviscerating works” of searing minimalism - would find it hard to imagine that, as a teenager, Matthew was a ballroom dancing champion. Audrey Schmidt is a writer, curator and editor of contemporary art publication Dissect Journal. Her continuing research focuses on contemporary art, gender, biopolitics and identity in late capitalism, and her writing about Australian queer art has underpinned this series. "I feel like - forget theory for a minute - I feel like, hanging out with my queers, that's where I learn. I didn't learn this stuff from reading books. My queer education was on the street - it was in bars, it was organising, it was going to buy beer, and squatting places, and putting on parties, and fucking up, and getting lessons, you know? For me, it's messy, it's always been messy, it's never been binary. And embrace that mess, you know?" - Matthew Day Matthew Day has been another person that we've been wanting to speak with for a long time. His Trilogy series is one of the most extraordinary choreographic works to have come out of Australia: there is something profoundly new about it, a felt embodied-ness, an authenticity of affect that it brings to the audience experience, a sense of space and naked togetherness. It is not European. It is not American. It could never be. It is Australian and queer and somehow it can only be those two things together. We came together to speak about how choreography can be queer, but looking at it through Matthew's work meant that we had to go to the felt experience of being individual, of being a subject, letting categories behind - because, if there is one thing that Matthew does as an artist, it is to restore a sense of radical subjectivity to us all. Discussed in this episode: THOUSANDS making audience members nauseous, Judith Halberstam, the uniform of ballroom dancing, a whole lot of Deleuze, the queer education of the street, 'the revolution', Sara Ahmed, what the body can do in late capitalism, micro-identifying hyper-identities, is it queer if it isn't representational?, how doing nothing is sometimes doing something, and capital-P Politics in the art. "Viruses? Ideas? Yes. But revolution? That's just a way to turn around on the spot." - Matthew Day Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Jana Perkovic: Matthew Day: Intermission (Dance Massive 2013), RealTime 114 Judith Halberstam: The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 2011 Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Duke University Press, 2006 Dissect Journal: Issue 3 - Biopolitics (upcoming), 2016. This series of AUDIOSTAGE has been commissioned by DANCEHOUSE as part of the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award Public Program and was generously supported by the Keir Foundation.

"We talk a lot about white guilt, and it is a real phenomenon. ... That guilt is kind of like the wages of privilege. But I'm interested in reframing it through my work, not as guilt, but as shame. Which is a different thing. It is a profoundly different thing." - Sarah-Jane Norman In the fourth episode of season three, we discuss the politically explosive work of Sarah Jane Norman, Aboriginal Australian, queer, non-binary, cross-disciplinary artist. SJ's whole body of work traverses performance, installation, sculpture, text, video, and sound; it is anchored in a multitude of physical disciplines, as well as the written language. SJ has presented their work at Venice International Performance Week, Spill Festival of Live Art, Fierce Festival, In Between Time, Edinburgh Festival, as well as Performance Space, Next Wave, the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, and Brisbane International Festival. A proud Indigenous Australian of both Wiradjuri and European heritage, SJ grew up in Sydney and regional NSW, but today divides their time between Australia and Berlin. Most recently, SJ Norman was one of the artists In Residence with Marina Abramovic in Sydney, and has presented their Unsettling Suite at Melbourne Festival, as part of Dancehouse's Dance Territories program. Looking through their rich body of work, we discuss inheritance of history, continuing transgenerational trauma, and the value of dissecting the effects of the politics of colonization with the artist’s body today. "It's a huge amount of emotional labour that I have to do on a daily basis, not just as an artist, but as a person. But, you know, it's the same kind of emotional labour that every person of colour or Indigenous person has to do, living in a white-dominated society. That is invisible labour. Part of my practice is to make it visible. And to make it clear, the imbalance that exists in the cultural expectations, that we're the only ones who have to do it, and that we're the only ones who have to carry and hold back history." - Sarah-Jane Norman It is hard to speak about this episode, harder than most. Whilst we like to keep our conversations light, perhaps to demistify and disarm the inquiries we posit, it is hard to find a space of levity when we talk about the weight of history that we all carry, some more, some less. "I'm really interested in complicity," says SJ, when describing the artistic labour she performs: "I'm really interested in blurring the line between guilt and complicity." It is a conversation we are very proud of; but oh, how heavy the history can be. Discussed in this episode: is Marina Abramovic a racist?, the futility of guilt, shame as an embodied sensation, Unsettling Suite, fetishisation of oral languages, being fairer than a whitefella, the emotional labour of confronting our colonial past, when people lose it, political performance, the logocentric West, Andrew Bolt, the kids who parrot the biases that their culture teaches them, contemporary Australia, and how there is no context for racism except racism. "Witchcraft, that's how I do it." - Sarah-Jane Norman Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Sarah Jane Norman Responds to Marina Abramovic, SBS, 25 August 2016 Performance artist Marina Abramovic calls Aboriginal Australians 'dinosaurs' in unpublished memoir, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August 2016 Dance Territories at Melbourne Festival, 14-16 October 2016 Jessi Lewis: What The Water Gave Me, TAGG, 11 October 2016 For more information about Sarah Jane Norman and their work, check out their website. This series of AUDIOSTAGE has been commissioned by DANCEHOUSE as part of the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award Public Program and was generously supported by the Keir Foundation.

"The weird thing is that LGBTIQ exists as a category of being, that’s designated by mainstream culture, when actually it’s unbelievably fragmented. And there’s so much intra-group conflict because everyone actually has really, really different aims, and different objectives, and their struggle doesn’t mirror that of the other groups at all.” – Declan Greene "You find these little things that help... 'If I can channel Judy Garland, If I can channel the strength of this survivor'... For some reason, it usually is a female survivor, because you don't want to identify with the straight men that are making your life hell, or that you don't relate to. You relate to the women who are outsiders as well." - Ash Flanders In the third episode of season four, we discuss what queer is and isn't with playwright Declan Greene and performer Ash Flanders, who together make up Sisters Grimm, Melbourne-based queer performance collective par excellence. Sisters Grimm have risen through the ranks of Melbourne's independent theatre with a series of extremely well received shows, very quickly progressing from backyard performances for friends to sold-out shows at Malthouse Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney's Griffin Theatre and Belvoir. By now, they have, together and separately, performed in all of Australia's major theatre houses, and won an incredible number of awards. They have been described in The Age as 'treading the line between the frivolous and the furiously political better than anyone in Australia right now'. And it is their brand of frivolous, furiously political queer theatre that we talk about today. Drag, the way it speaks gender as a foreign language, and its undercurrent of dissecting, enabling, and owning, victimhood, as well as its central position in queer culture, is one of our great topics. Drag features prominently and aggressively in the Sisters Grimm oeuvre, which features every kind of cross-casting imaginable, most notably when appropriating Euro-Australian colonial narratives. The queer eye is particularly suited to dissecting national and colonial myths because it is an outsider eye, say Ash and Declan, giving numerous examples of the ways in which the queer individual grows up interested in aesthetics, in surfaces, in the performativity of identity, and the way in which oppressive power is exercised through cultural myths - and perhaps becomes particularly fluent in ways to dismantle that power. "I think you develop critical facilities, as a queer person, because you learn to question the texts that you receive culturally... You know that those narratives don’t articulate your experience of being, so you have to figure out how to dismantle them, and to insert yourself into them in order to identify with them.” – Declan Greene Today's conversation was yet another slightly ridiculous endeavour, recorded between Melbourne and a handmade recording teepee in a house in Brussels. It was also a feat of scheduling: we have been talking about recording a conversation for over two years, but Declan and Ash have been so busy making excellent theatre across Australia, sometimes together, sometimes separately, that finding a time when we are all in the same city was harder than trying to synchronise the schedules of four busy divas. As their new show, Lilith: The Jungle Girl, opened at Melbourne Theatre Company, Declan and Ash found one free evening to join us for a conversation, and for this we are immensely, immensely grateful. The conversation you are listening is very dear to our hearts, and not only because of the punk spirit in which it was recorded. These two men are dear friends of the Audio Stage team, extraordinary theatre-makers, and brilliant minds. While Sisters Grimm are easy to like for the dazzling wit and deceivingly effortless cool of their shows, there is real rigour in the thinking behind their work. It comes to the fore as they speak,

"Artists lack political education." - Bojana Cvejić In the third episode of season three, on the price and value in dance, we speak with Bojana Cvejić, performance theorist and dramaturg extraordinaire. With degrees in musicology and philosophy, Bojana works with performance-makers and choreographers ranging from Jan Ritsema to Xavier Le Roy, and has been teaching at prestigious institutions, from PARTS in Brussels to SNDO in Amsterdam. She has published a number of seminal books on contemporary performance, investigating it from the perspective of practice, labour, and social organization. And that's what we talk about today. "There was a moment around 2000, where single authorship was contested on artistic grounds. Then it was re-valorised, politically, economically, in relation to the value of the contribution of the dancers themselves. Now we're in a moment where it seems that spectatorship, audience, reception decides - and programming relies on the judgement of the audience." - Bojana Cvejić Today's conversation was a feat of present-day technology, recorded as a conversation in real time between Jana and Bojana in Brussels, and Angela and Beth in Melbourne, using Skype, mobile phones, online telephony, instant messaging, email, five computers, and four microphones - with the great help of our friend Carl Corcoran, who welcomed us into his stylish studio. (It is nice to find little homes for Audio Stage around the world.) And what a conversation it is! For this season, on dance and value, Angela has put together all of our biggest brainy idols, and possibly no one more so than Bojana, whose thinking combines an easy fluency with philosophical concepts with an equally nuanced approach to ethics, together with a humbleness that is completely unwarranted. There is a glow in the conversation, a little bit of sunshine, that you might just be able to hear: we are sitting around her, Angela and Jana, and enjoying the way Bojana's words are making the world come alive in a new way. Discussed in this episode: Marx, dance in museums, who authors dance?, Xavier Le Roy's early works, creating new values, dancers associated with certain choreographers - are they 'damaged goods'?, collaboration vs collectivity, Marcel Mauss and social choreography, "I've done Vietnam, I've done the Paris Ballet Conservatory, I've done Wall St.", the high-paying executive who gives it all up to find out who he is, 'selfie-expression', choreography as a cottage industry, YouTube, and remember when we used to think we could decide to make a viral video? "Today we experience the truth of ourselves through the body. Perhaps the ideology of individualism, on which capitalism relies today, needs the body, to, on the one hand, confirm the feeling of success, and on the other hand intensity, as the proof of reality." - Bojana Cvejić Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Bojana Cvejic: Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in Contemporary Dance and Performance (Performance Philosophy), 2015, Palgrave Macmillan Bojana Cvejic: Interrupting the City: Artistic Constitutions of the Public Sphere (Antennae), Antennae Social Choreography - a lecture by Bojana Cvejić Bojana Cvejić: Collaborativity? You mean collaboration?, at RepublicArt Bojana Cvejic: Six Notes on a Society of Performance For more information about Bojana Cvejić and her work, check her website. This series of AUDIOSTAGE has been commissioned by DANCEHOUSE as part of the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award Public Program and was generously supported by the Keir Foundation. Photo credits: Tomislav Medak

"Feminism is still, in most circles, seen as radical... What you're really saying is, misogyny is equatable with normativity." - Rachel Perks And the fourth season of Audio Stage continues with the question: queer? What is queer? What is not queer? How does queer exist in performance? How does queer performance exist in the world? What is its political power, and what its aesthetic urgency? In the second episode of the season, Jana and Beth talk to Rachel Perks, Melbourne-based performance-maker who has, in only a few years, created a whole series of acclaimed shows that explore a woman's experience of this world: ANGRY SEXX, We Get It (with Elbow Room), and now Ground Control. As we speak - from the comfort of Jana's bed - Rachel has only just closed Ground Control, a courageous new work developed for Next Wave 2016, and there is an exhaustion and exhilaration, a tiredness and hopefulness, as we talk about love, about being female, about cyborgs and myths, and about how sometimes love is a duty. Trigger warning: This episode contains mention of sexual assault and our experiences with it. "In Australia, we feel that emotions are a totally invalid place to speak from, invalid in general. They are also associated with femininity, feminised." “I think you can be a women or I think you can be an ally and still put on really problematic non-feminist work. It’s very easy to just slip into stories that you’ve seen or that you’ve received, repeating those stories, repeating those tropes, repeating that normatively. I think you have to be actively trying to pursue a feminist narrative in order to realize it: because essentially we’re having to invent them. We don’t have familiar storylines to assume, we don’t have rules, there's no guidelines - I'm making this thing up as I go along." Discussed in this episode: that Cyborg Manifesto, I Love Dick, femme invisibility a.k.a. what a lesbian should look like, The L Word, being angry while a woman, sexual assault in our circles and what can be done about it, the validity of emotions, queer emotions, emotions in Australia, and 'Why do people think that women are debasing themselves when we reveal the conditions of our own debasement?' “Women’s relationships are so trivialized and so ignored and also incredibly underrepresented- women’s relationships with each other but also women’s relationships with themselves and the world.” Stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Donna Haraway: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Paradigm) Rachel Perks at Separating Hydrogen from Air Photo credits: Sarah Walker.

"I remember the first time I went to a funding meeting, and the guy who was responsible said: "Can't you get a boyfriend without a festival?" - Zvonimir Dobrović And it's time for a new season of Audio Stage! The question we are asking is: queer? What is queer? What is not queer? How does queer exist in performance? How does queer performance exist in the world? What is its political power, and what its aesthetic urgency? In the first episode of the season, Jana is talking to compatriot Zvonimir Dobrović, curator of Queer Festivals in Zagreb and New York. For the comfort of our listeners, the conversation is NOT in Croatian! We talk about his controversial curatorial policy, the power of norms, and how Queer Zagreb developed out of the anti-war activism in 90s Croatia. When you have fear in the public sphere, you can do anything with people. You can manipulate, because it plays with the basic notions of safety. Conservatism always plays with fear, and it's always fear of the other. And anything can be that 'other'. ... This education, constant education of acceptance and tolerance of the 'other', can't be forgotten. You have to do it with every generation. It should be in schools from the earliest age." - Zvonimir Dobrović Zvonimir was in Australia to give a lecture at Performance Space in Sydney and see some work at Dance Massive in Melbourne, and we jumped at the opportunity to talk to him. Queer Festival was very important in Croatia, both as a very visible part of the LGBT activism in the 200s, and for decisively redefining the notion of queer away from the narrow LGBT question and into a broader political gesture of resisting normativity. In this episode, we take time to talk about formative experiences, about being young, and about how arts festivals are so conducive to falling in love. Discussed in this episode: what we did in the 1990s, James Welshby's HEX, what is gay and what is queer, the tabloid press, teaching tolerance in schools, barebacking in Australia, BalletLab's Kingdom, Jerome Bel makes queer art!, single mothers are queer, heteronormativity, the monochrome Western uniform of LGBT sexuality, pulling flags out of your pussy VS lesbian pottery, whether art can really change the world, and how, if you must be gay in patriarchy, at least don't be a bottom. "Queer is everything outside the norm. It is subversive, but never violent." Stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: 2015 INTERNATIONAL LECTURE SERIES: Zvonimir Dobrovic, at Performance Space Oral History of Homosexuality: Preface, by Zvonimir Dobrovic and Gordan Bosanac For more information about Zvonimir Dobrovic's work, visit the official pages for Queer Zagreb and Queer New York International Arts Festival. Photo credits: Daniel Moss.

"I have not seen anything in the US as extreme as what I have seen [in Australia] in the past week." - Deborah Jowitt In the second episode of season three, Angela, Jana, and Beth speak to Deborah Jowitt, legendary dance critic and the idol of everyone in the room. A long-term critical columnist for The Village Voice (1967-2011), Jowitt has created an immensely influential body of work that includes four books - the latest of which, on Jerome Robbins, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2004. Having lectured at Princeton, Barnard, and Tisch School of the Arts, and recipient of two Bessies, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Deborah Jowitt is one of the seminal voices of and for the 20th century dance. "People were concerned, there seemed to be disaster all round: enmity between countries, the possibility of bombs falling. I really thought: we're going aerobic. We're going to tone our bodies so we can run all the way from New York to Westchester county without getting hit." - Deborah Jowitt The conversation took place during the Keir Choreographic Awards, as we were recovering from an intense week of seeing Australian emerging contemporary dance, discussing contemporary dance, and making contemporary dance happen, and there was a sense of intense camaraderie in the room. It was really beautiful, being able to speak about the value of criticism, the worth it creates, by drawing on the experiences of someone who has seen half a century of dance go by, who wrote its history, who taught us how to see dance when we had no storyline, no character, and no balletic vocabulary to hook onto. This was very, very special. Discussed in this episode: it's not 'the body', but 'the dancers'; the 1960s revolution against elitism; incorporating the building janitor into a choreography; pilates; Keir Choreographic Awards, and where is the dancing in contemporary dancing?; ideas that cannot be physically fleshed out – what fuels it in Australia?; the overuse of the word 'ephemeral'; how to legitimise a new form; Judson Dance Theater; how criticism creates desire; and that not being a good artist doesn't mean you're not a good person. "The work reveals itself to you, if you’re open and receptive." - Deborah Jowitt Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Deborah Jowitt: Time and the Dancing Image Deborah Jowitt writes about her Australian visit Deborah Jowitt: Carolyn Carlson—From France to Jersey; Russell Dumas—Up From Oz Deborah Jowitt Archive on Sarma.be For more information about Deborah Jowitt’s work, and to read her contemporary writing, visit her blog DanceBeat on ArtsJournal. This series of AUDIOSTAGE has been commissioned by DANCEHOUSE as part of the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award Public Program and was generously supported by the Keir Foundation.

"I think that equality comes with assymetry and that it's not necessary for roles to be symmetrical for there to be equality." - Chrysa Parkinson In the first episode of season three, Angela and Jana speak to Chrysa Parkinson on the creativity of the dancer: the work of dance, the authorship of the dancer, and whether excessive praise is how we pay artists in lieu of a living wage. After many years in New York, working with Tere O'Connor Dance among others, Chrysa Parkinson now lives in Brussels. In Europe, she performed initially with Thomas Hauert and David Zambrano, and later with Boris Charmatz, Rosas/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jonathan Burrows, Mette Ingvartsen, Phillip Gehmacher, Eszter Salomon, John Jasperse, Deborah Hay, Meg Stuart. She is an esteemed pedagogue, teaching annually at PARTS, and currently serving as Director of the New Performative Practices MFA program at DOCH/Uniarts in Stockholm. Chrysa Parkinson would say that her current practice is performance. "I don't really like the idea that there's 'the body'. I don't know what 'the body' is: there's this body, my body, your body... there's no 'the body' disenfranchised from its psyche and its context. It doesn't really exist." - Chrysa Parkinson This, first episode of season three, was very special to us: returning after the summer break, recording in Kieran Ruffles' new studio, with a distinguished international guest. Chrysa was in Australia as part of Adrian Heathfield's project Ghost Telephone, presented by the Biennale of Sydney, and invited to Melbourne by Dancehouse, as part of the Keir Choreographic Award public program. Chrysa floored us with her humility, and the articulacy with which she defined the agency of dancer - going beyond being just a 'material' for a choreographer's mind. Discussed in this episode: dance as manual labour, choreography as middle management; working with Deborah Hay; Richard Sennett arguing with Hannah Arendt about the importance of handiwork; the split between thingliness and beingness; who owns a choreography?; teaching as 'trafficking in procedures'; differences in audiences between New York and Europe, where afterwards at the bar other artists just say 'hi'; and can praise replace a living wage? "I am always attended by what I called the 'art dog', which is just there: pretty big, at my shoulder, a little bit of a nice wet nose, it's kinda looking around, it sees: 'that's life, that's art'." - Chrysa Parkinson Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and stimulating conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Moriah Evans: Interview with Chrysa Parkinson (SARMA) Chrysa Parkinson: Self-Interview on Practice (Vimeo) For more information about Chrysa Parkinson’s work, visit her webpage at DOCH. This series of AUDIOSTAGE has been commissioned by DANCEHOUSE as part of the 2016 Keir Choreographic Award Public Program and was generously supported by the Keir Foundation.

"Risk is not so risky. It’s a necessity. It is how forms develop, how we find new audiences, new artists, how cultural conversations happen." - Angharad Wynne-Jones In our momentous final, fifth episode on responsibility, Fleur and Jana speak with two great women of the Australian performing arts: all-round cultural leaders Angharad Wynne-Jones, Artistic Director of Arts House Melbourne, and Esther Anatolitis, Director of Regional Arts Victoria (formerly CEO of Melbourne Fringe). In an emotional, grounding ending to the series, we touch on some important, often neglected questions: how do we create an ecology that supports the artist, as well as the arts?" "The independent arts is a hell of a lot stronger than any arts minister in any doomed-to-fail attempt to politicise the ways that art gets made.” - Esther Anatolitis This is a very special episode. As Angharad and Esther spoke with an authenticity and feeling that is rare in public discourse. We felt very privileged to have them with us, and we all left in tears. Discussed in this episode: George Brandis, being a person with a 'decision-making potential and capacity to be confused', the future, 'creating new artistic frameworks for established arts companies' and what that could possibly mean, the difference between advocacy and lobbying, audiences, the importance of having rigorous conversations about art, being accountable to the rate-payers of the City of Melbourne, bushfires, Kat Muscat, burn-out, and what is cultural leadership anyway?! With this episode ends our season on responsibility, Fleur's baby, a season which has taken us some very deep places. We will take a short break now, to recover from the rollercoaster and consider what to do next. But stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Keith Gallasch: Interview, Angharad Wynne-Jones, RealTime 109, June-July 2012 Michael Short: Esther Anatolitis enters The Zone, The Age, April 25, 2011 Richard Watts: Kat Muscat's life celebrated at emotional Melbourne farewell, ArtsHub, August 4, 2015 see Angharad Wynne-Jones speak about FOLA 2014 estheranatolitis.net.

“There’s a consciousness that needs to be put around the way that we behave. We can’t just keep patting ourselves on the back or excusing it: ‘We’re creating art! It’s not real!’ It is also really happening to somebody.” - Sonya Suares This week we return to the topic of 'Responsibility'. Fleur speaks with Sonya Suares and Jolyon James on how this concept relates to the actor: the responsibility of the actor, of the director to the actor, diversity in casting and the potential impact of not providing a multiplicity of stories and voices for our stages, and the responsibilities of creating work for children. "The worst people to ask about what kind of work they want are young people, when you’re making work for young people. But the best thing you can do is find out how they think and what they do." -Jolyon James Discussed in this episode: Finding the 'truth' as an actor or lying about finding it, 8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography, creating a sense of safety in the rehearsal room, onstage nudity and vulnerability, We Get It, drama schools, bullying in the rehearsal room, actors learning to say 'no', sexual abuse within creative exploration, experiences of acting and casting as a woman of colour, the transformative body of the white actor, racial dramaturgy, Arena Theatre Company, creating work for children. "The White Body in our racial dramaturgy is the transformative body. So when it suits our purposes, we can go 'Oh you know.... Race is irrelevant! Why can't someone who is Eastern European play this role?' Okay well they can but there are just so few roles being written for this particular ethnicity. Why take one off the table when it's been written onto our stage?" - Sonya Suares Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast Bibliography: On Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography by Declan Greene On vulnerability and onstage nudity: School for Birds Our Vision: Arena Theatre Company

  “Reading about theatre is a weirdly incomplete experience. Reading about other things is similarly incomplete but it doesn’t have to be the whole experience because if you read about it, you can get hold of it as well. Even with a poor representation of a picture – an artwork – you at least see what it looks like.” - Andrew Haydon This week we are taking a brief pause from our 'Responsibility' season. This is a bonus round from Berlin. Jana speaks with independent theatre critic, Andrew Haydon, about audiences, histories and European vs English theatre. This episode opens up the topics discussed on our show and examines them in a global context. Andrew is one of the few British theatre critics who regularly travels around Europe to see new work, and who is conversant in contemporary European theatre (and not just what happens on the British Isles), approaching it with a distinctly British, but never parochial, perspective. In his writing for The Guardian, Time Out, Exeunt Magazine, and in his respected blog Postcards from the Gods, Andrew has long championed unusual work, difficult work, and has often argued that the British theatre is unnecessarily conservative in terms of form and interest. "I always wonder what it would be like to get a hardcore German theatre theoretician in to watch a load of the really hardcore naturalistic productions that still exist in Britain but just tell them “it’s all a concept” and they are not allowed to go “oh, you’re just being British”. They have to believe that it’s a metaphor. How that would read? I’m sure there’s actually some really creative thinking if we didn’t all just go “urgh! It just looks like a room. It’s meant to look like that.” If we actually thought about it more creatively. There’s probably better ways we could understand what’s going on. There is craft in the way these things are put together, obviously. But craft and possibly not philosophy." - Andrew Haydon Discussed in this episode: 'Live art' and its global history, stage metaphor, the white male default, new writing and authorship, national identity, what defines a 'national theatre history', the demographics of theatre goers, the importance of arts writing, the fallibility of the critic and can theatre ever just be bad? "It is interesting where the history counts. If it’s a history of ‘English Theatre’, if you’ve got a director like Katie Mitchell (who I think did make a domestic production last year but made five or six bits of work elsewhere) does one try to include these because they’re a British director? Or do you include the infinite number of stagings of Martin Crimp, Denis Kelly and Simon Stephens’ plays? Do they count because they’re British playwrights? I don’t think it’s particularly futile to limit a theatre history to a national border." -Andrew Haydon Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Next fortnight we will return to the topic of Responsibility.

"I am very interested in the question of who's allowed to say what in Australia." -Roslyn Oades In the third episode of our season on responsibility in art, Roslyn Oades, director, actor and a pioneer in the field of headphone verbatim theatre joins hosts Fleur and Jana. We talk about responsibility in the field of verbatim theatre: what it means to represent someone else's story, building a right of reply into your work, ethical eavesdropping and how the response and willingness of the individual participant does not necessarily reflect the response of the community they are a part of. "A boxer wrote on a boxing forum: 'Who is this stupid slut Roslyn Oades who thinks she knows something about boxing?'... The word had spread in the community. He hadn't seen the show, he didn't know me, but he had heard that a woman was making a show about boxing, and he was offended." - Roslyn Oades Discussed in this episode:  The manipulative power of the voice, whose allowed to say what in Australian society, the actor's body as a piece of documentary, authenticity and the illusion of authenticity, verbatim theatre and the responsibility an artist has to their participants, Brecht and alienation, Ugly Mugs and the reaction of the sex worker community, community engagement. "I'm always very aware that I get more out of the scenario than the participants and that's a responsibility. I have to trust my moral compass and hope that its good enough." - Roslyn Oades Stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Caroline Wake, The Politics and Poetics of Listening: Attending Headphone Verbatim Theatre in Post-Cronulla Australia (Theatre Research International, Volume 39, 2014) Richard Watts, Sex Workers accuse Griffin, Malthouse of exploitation (Arts Hub, 13 August, 2014)

"I think being part of the community is key to being a good critic." - Jane Howard "My rule of thumb is, if they've been to my house for dinner, or I've been to their house for dinner, I'm not going to review them." - Richard Watts In the second episode of our season on responsibility and art, our guests are Jane Howard, SA-based theatre critic whose work appears in The Guardian, Kill Your Darlings and Meanjin, and Richard Watts, host of SmartArts for 3RRR, national reviews editor for ArtsHub and long-term champion of Melbourne arts. We talk about responsibility in arts journalism and criticism: how much of it is advocacy and how much critical reflection, ignorance and how to avoid it, and how to avoid becoming friends with artists! "One of the things that got me into reviewing in the first place was going to the theatre and hearing critics in the foyer afterwards loudly complaining about a show and then seeing a very lukewarm review, a blandly critical review published the next day. I thought “No, it’s important to actually be critical.” As much as I admired Margaret Pomeranz’ passion for Australian cinema, for example, I thought that by going soft on Australian film she did the industry and the audience a disservice." - Richard Watts Discussed in this episode: processing difficult art, writing about famous people whose work you have never seen before, conscious and unconscious bias, Cameron Woodhead, feminist comedy, how bad art can make for a very good review, seeing Atlanta Eke, Strictly Ballroom, drunk Saturday night crowds that laugh at anything, Margaret Pomeranz, Priscilla Queen of the Desert the Musical, whether being a feminist reviewer will harm your career, so many white voices!, issues of race and gender, and whether 200 words could ever be enough. "One of the interesting things about theatre criticism… is the breadth of works that theatre critics are supposed to see…. A literature critic isn’t going to review 50 Shades of Grey unless it’s a joke. Most of them aren’t reviewing commercial fiction; they’re reviewing literature. But theatre critics must review both small, independent, artistically difficult work - and we review musicals." - Jane Howard Stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Lyn Gardner: Theatre review: Menopause the Musical (The Guardian, 20 April 2007) Fleur Kilpatrick in conversation: Cameron Woodhead on The City They Burned, hetero-normativity, the bible, how i got it wrong (School for Birds, 23 September 2014) Fleur Kilpatrick in conversation: Gabriel Comerford on critical culture in Brisbane dance (12 September 2014)

"I think [the larger companies] should be forced to take more risks.” - Melissa Reeves “Nurture the audacious. The works that you remember are works with audacity.” - Patricia Cornelius And... we're back! Fleur and Jana are talking to theatre-makers from Australia and abroad, with Kieran behind the mixing desk. Our second season will tackle the topic of responsibility. ‘Responsibility’ is a word that comes up a lot in art but its meaning is as multifaceted as the artists who use. It can mean ‘duty of care’ to your fellow practitioners, ‘responsibility’ to deliver the product the subscribers are paying for or not traumatising an audience who did not consent to be traumatised. But it can also mean responsibility to be brave. Brave enough to tell the hard stories. To press on wounds that need pressing. Sometimes the old adage that art ‘holds a mirror up to society’ is far to passive. Sometimes that mirror needs smashing. In this, the second season of Audio Stage, we are talking ‘responsibility in art’. Over the course of the next ten weeks we will be in dialogue with various practitioners, programmers and thinkers about what ‘responsibility’ means to them and how we remain ethical in art. Our first guests are playwrights Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves. We talk about responsibility in playwrighting: the words we use, the stories we tell, the people we stage, and the playwrights we give money to. “I’ve never believed the bullshit about how audiences don’t like risk. They actually really do. I’ve seen it. I’ve been in enough audiences that are asleep and I’ve seen them wake up when there is something that unsettles them... I think an audience is dying to be offended.” - Patricia Cornelius Discussed in this episode: Andrew Bovell; academic research and ethics procedures; Aboriginal and white theatre-makers; rulebooks for making ethical art: Y/N?; telling real-life stories: 'how did you know my first wife was a hair-dresser?'; Diane Brimble; identifying with characters; the whitest story ever told about Kenya; Steven Sewell; why white women are so much more concerned about their responsibilities than white men; why a lion is always played by a black actor; Jana's students at the VCA; Myall Creek Massacre; George Brandis; and Melbourne Workers' Theatre. "I remember reading this fantastic poem by this Aboriginal woman, and it said: 'If you're writing this because you want to help me, you know, just fuck off. But if you're writing this because your liberation is bound up in my liberation, then, you know, go ahead, come with me'. And it was a beautiful invitation." - Melissa Reeves Stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Ben Neutze: Who's Afraid of Patricia Cornelius? (The Daily Review, May 27, 2014) Simon Caterson: Cold War Confidential (The Age, 17 February 2007) If you are interested in Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius, you can read their plays at AustralianPlays.org: Melissa Reeves' plays here, and Patricia Cornelius' plays here.

In episode 5, Julian Meyrick, theatre historian, cultural policy analyst, and Strategic Professor of Creative Arts at Flinders University, joins Fleur and Jana in the concluding conversation on theatre histories and documentation. We talk about his controversial essays on the history of independent theatre in Melbourne, his historical analyses of arts funding in Australia, and on what mistakes have been made, again and again.

"At the end of Keating's prime-ministership, he was talking about embracing complexity and multiculturalism, and the difficulties there. Howard's masterstroke was to come in and say: "I want Australians to be comfortable about their past, their present and their future." Which is to say, "we're not going to talk about this anymore." And I feel like, since that period, we have not had a robust national conversation. Where is the cultural discourse about any of this stuff? We've had the apology, great; but that is not the end. Kevin Rudd's apology should have been the beginning of this, kind of, great evolution in the way Australians see themselves. But I think that's failed." - Mark Wilson "I would characterise the Australian experience as, unfortunately, having to reflect a majority, and a popular view - more than art is required to in other cultures." - Marcel Dorney In episode four of Audio Stage, our studio is full. We have gathered some of our favourite people, to talk about what it means to work in contemporary Australian theatre, and operate without history. Fleur is away for a wedding (luckily, not hers!), but the magic of technology, and Kieran's amazing production skills, keep her present. Meanwhile, Jana is joined in the studio by: Marcel Dorney, Artistic Director of Melbourne independent theatre collective Elbow Room Productions; John Kachoyan, Co-Artistic Director of MKA: Theatre of New Writing; and Mark Wilson, independent theatre-maker and dramaturg. "[The ruthlessly contemporary adaptations of classics] reflects - in a strange way - a kind of fantasy that white Australians have about themselves: that we can be the subject of great drama without coming to terms with our history." - Marcel Dorney Discussed in this episode: the first European play ever performed in Australia, Oriel Gray's The Torrents, the 'state of the nation' play, John Howard and Paul Keating, the curse of the binaries of 'Australian' and 'unAustralian', watching theatre for information, Barrie Kosky and all our greatest theatre exports, being allowed to fail, generational warfare, Sisters Grimm and Declan Greene, killing art with egalitarianism, Lally Katz, and the theatre-enhancing properties of cheap airfares. "I find it interesting that we know more about a theatre culture that is so different and so vast, and so removed, than we do about 10 years ago. [It creates] people that think they've invented the wheel. Every 10 years a generation stands up on stage and applauds itself for inventing, I don't know, postdramatic theatre, or moving away from the text, or rediscovering the text." - John Kachoyan Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Julian Meyrick: Trapped by the Past, Why Our Theatre is Facing Paralysis (Platform Papers, Quarterly essays on the performing atrs, No 3, January 2005) Photo credits: Sarah Walker (Wilson), Ponch Hawkes (Dorney).

"Making art is a sedimentation of layers. What we make today indirectly reflects what was done before. Maybe it comes as an opposition, or a continuation, as an echo, but we need to be aware of that. And I do think that in Australia we are not aware of what's been done." - Angela Conquet In episode three, the Artistic Director of Dancehouse, Melbourne's home of contemporary dance, Angela Conquet, joins hosts Jana Perkovic and Fleur Kilpatrick. We talk about contemporary dance in Australia, what makes it particular; about the urgency to preserve it, and whether Australia, being such a young country, is not aware of the forces of impermanence. Discussed in this episode: Russell Dumas, how much space Australian pedestrians take, reinventing hot water, RoseLee Goldberg not getting Australian dance, what it means to have or not have a revolution, Merce Cunningham, the historical importance of being seen at Avignon, and much else. "As the in-house Australian here, I apologise on behalf of us all for our extravagant use of space." - Fleur Kilpatrick Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Julian Meyrick: Trapped by the Past, Why Our Theatre is Facing Paralysis (Platform Papers, Quarterly essays on the performing atrs, No 3, January 2005) Peggy Phelan: The ontology of performance: representation without production (in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance) For more information about Angela Conquet's work, visit Dancehouse (also in person). Photo credits: Alfred Mrozicki.

“There is a good side to not being crushed by culture. I think in Europe you're really aware of the centuries and centuries of Western culture and it has all been done. One of the beautiful things about Australian writing, culture and performance is this sense that that's not hanging over everybody. I think at its best there is a tremendous freedom in Australian performance, a huge intelligence and a kind of disrespect that's really healthy.” – Alison Croggon In episode two poet, novelist, critic and commentator Alison Croggon, joins hosts Jana Perkovic and Fleur Kilpatrick. We talk about the place of the review in art documentation and how one balances the responsibilities that the critic has to the artist, the audience and to history. “What there mustn't be is one singular discourse saying 'this is how it was'. That's what I've always felt most hostile towards,” says Alison. “(We are now) letting go of the fiction that I think happens less and less, that critics are the objective judges of whatever art happens around their feet and entering much more into the flux of the moment. The moment passes. It must pass. Because it is mortal. That is true of all art but it is why theatre and performance are so extraordinary and so beautiful.” Discussed in this episode: the mutual dependency of blogs and independent theatre, Robert Brustein, when reviewers are incorrect, Requiem for the 20th Century, internet trolls (all men!), and the cowardice of anonymity. "There was always some very brilliant work going on under the skin in Australia. In other places that work would get noticed, and in this country it just didn't. And I suppose I felt really strongly about that, because I saw so many artists who were kind of destroyed by that - that they simply might not have bothered." - Alison Croggon Enjoy and stay tuned: we have more exciting and intellectually rigorous conversations to come. Podcast bibliography: Julian Meyrick: Trapped by the Past, Why Our Theatre is Facing Paralysis (Platform Papers, Quarterly essays on the performing atrs, No 3, January 2005) Alison Croggon: On reading time and memory (Overland, 214 Autumn 2014) Alison Croggon: The problem of praise (Requiem for the 20th Century) (November 25, 2006) For more information about Alison Croggon, visit her on Theatre Notes, her archive on Tumblr, her personal website, or Twitter. Photography credits: the amazing Sarah Walker.