Up bright and early (or early, anyway) on the first morning of the Australian Theatre Forum in Brisbane, where I’ll soon be joining hundreds of other theatre workers from across the country to discuss challenges facing the industry over the next decade. I did write something last night but it morphed midway through into something way too weird and sad to show the world, so you’ll have to make do with whatever I can write on the fly.
As a critic who sees staggering amounts of independent theatre in Melbourne, I have to say I think our theatre is in rather a good place. Certainly the industry looks more robust and resilient than, say, the publishing game, which is facing nightmarish hurdles, as it tries desperately to keep up with technological change and struggles to develop new business models to cope with it. I wasn’t surprised at all to find that actors are doing much better than writers, economically – there’s much more high quality writing available free online than there is acting.
In a world obsessed by screen culture, where it is possible to live in swift vectors between TV and computer monitor (and does anyone else find the word ‘monitor’ creepy in this context, almost as if the screen were watching you rather than the other way round?) it seems to me that the liveness of the theatrical experience has become the highest sort of trump card. It gives people access to an art that relies on a physical communion between performer and audience, in a society that’s trending away from such connections.
Yet I don’t believe the performing arts can afford to ignore what happens in the literary ones. The liveness of theatre has one important drawback. It is ephemeral, momentary. Once the show is over, all that’s left are the memories of those who attended, perhaps some photographs or video (though these are not, as a rule, a satisfying substitute for theatre itself) and whatever is written about it. That’s why, in a sense, critics are more crucial to the performing arts than other types of artistic endeavour: we memorialise the theatrical tradition, and we’re constantly trying to snatch the fragile beauty of live performance from the jaws of oblivion. - CW, 8:07am, 14/9/11
Certainly the industry looks more robust and resilient than, say, the publishing game, which is facing nightmarish hurdles, as it tries desperately to keep up with technological change and struggles to develop new business models to cope with it.
I assume you mean newspaper & magazine publishing rather than books? I would have thought publishers have reacted with unprecedented deftness to the new models… not just ebooks… simultaneous international publishing heads the list.