Writer’s Note: Fuck Your Funding

My dear fellow artists,

I’ve spent the past month putting off inviting the arts minister to Fuck Your Funding, a play I wrote about a bunch of angry artists who take the arts minister hostage.

Given we open in a couple of days, I don’t think I ever will send that invite.

Sorry, Vicki.

As my friend and collaborator Cynda Jace Beare says about this show:

“If you are trying to speak to the oppressor, that isn’t gonna be useful unless … the oppressor is going to be in the audience. Political theatre that is speaking directly to the oppressor is only useful … in a really clever way.”

So maybe it’s best that this show doesn’t have to try to be clever and make Vicki fix Creative Vic before the government goes into caretaker mode. I’m not sure I could write a play clever enough to pull that off anyways.

And besides, one of my favourite playwrights, David Finnigan, says that “If your audience think you’re clever, you’ve fucked up.” David writes these grand meta-plays about climate catastrophe which I’ve been obsessed with ever since Kitty Malam airdropped me a PDF of Kill Climate Deniers on the floor of my first share-house in Narrm. David says that:

“You don’t want the audience to think you’re a genius. You want the audience to feel that they’re a genius.”

This is why I fuck with David’s theatre so fucking much. Too many artists are out here making work for themselves, and at least in David’s plays you know you’re gonna see a play made for you.

So what should a play for artists about the funding crisis do? What should it say to you, my fellow artists? And what’s left to be said that hasn’t been said more articulately by folks like Kate Larsen, Amrit Gill, Richard Watts, Erica McCalman, Ben Eltham, Wesley Enoch, Simon Abrahams, Alison Croggon, and Esther Anatolitis?

For one, I think folks of my generation have a different perspective on what it means to be in crisis.

At a recent theatre symposium I attended I was struck by the differences between how the younger and older attendees spoke about funding drying up. Older folks framed this moment as a loss—an aberration from the norm. They seemed to think that there was something we could do to return things to how they were—when the grants were there and you (allegedly) could make money in the arts.

Meanwhile, me and the youths™ struggle to frame this moment as a blip in time. Crisis is all that we know.

I graduated high school a year after the Brandis raid. La Mama burnt down the week I moved to Narrm. I spent my third year at uni campaigning for my drama school not to be shuttered. I’ve never gotten a grant over $2,000. I’ve never been paid LPA rates to make theatre. I’ve never known what my calendar looks like more than 6 months into the future. I’ve never felt like applying for grants was worth it, I’ve never felt like I could trust the institutions because I know they’ll become dust the second the wind changes.

What I want older artists to understand about my generation is that we have never known an arts sector that wasn’t teetering on the edge. One of my earliest lectures at uni, given with an unforgettable zeal from Felix Nobis, taught me that ‘theatre is always dying.’ I mean for fuck’s sake, 30 years after Shakespeare’s death, theatre was banned in London for 20 years!!!!

The idea that theatre was ever doing just fine in this colony feels totally apocryphal. I don’t believe it happened, and I don’t really believe that if we say the right things to the right men in suits we can make it all ok again. It’s capitalism and colonialism, after all, that is dooming our future. Theatre’s never going to work under this political and economic reality.

And so that’s why my first draft of this play ended in a massacre.

I thought artists would want to see a maniacal arts minister gunning down everyone in Solidarity Hall. And I thought we’d end the show with a flash forward to a world where Trades Hall had become a memorial and the Arts Centre an office building. That was easy, and obvious: ‘art is dying… that’s horrific.’ I don’t know what I thought it would do. Catharsis? Was it to remind each other that what we do matters? Because Art is always so important, after all. Soooo important.

Of course, that’s the same disingenuous and self-serving defence of the arts that makes my skin crawl, whether hearing it from leads at MTC or the latest crop of VCA students with big ideas.

Art is not important because it is art. Art is important if (and only if) it has something to say. There is nothing morally just about storytelling. Ask anyone with a marketing degree.

Director Mark Wilson gestures at this lacklustre state of affairs in this gorgeous feature in The Guardian:

“A lot of rightwing theatre is made in this country that we pretend isn’t rightwing. There’s that old saying: if you think you’re neutral, you’re on the side of the oppressor.”

It’s clear this play needs to say something. Something big and bombastic and something that artists of all ages need to hear. Because god knows no one else is listening. So what do I need us to feel together?

There’s the grief of seeing venues and organisations I love shutting down. There’s the fear of seeing people I love get hurt at venues that should be shut down. The sorrow of seeing arts funding get slashed. The admiration of seeing artists band together to do something about it. The comfort in seeing artists share resources, defend each other, and put into being the world that I want to live in.

There’s the numbness of seeing artists leave the sector. The devastation of seeing artists accept less than they deserve. The anger of seeing artists normalise and justify their own exploitation. The seething rage of seeing artists wade into advocacy with no context, nuance, or desire to build bridges. The terror of how quickly we jump to anger, how reticent we are to listen to each other, how quickly we can burn it all down. I’ve sat in rooms and heard artists say that advocating for a better funded sector ‘isn’t their fight,’ that their issue is solely with whatever underfunded arts organisation has attracted their ire today.

Why are we so committed to fighting for scraps? Why do we all refuse to come to the table? Why do we cut each other down? Why are we so carceral? Why do we gobble down the capitalist propaganda, pat our bellies, and politely ask for more? What would it take to show up differently? To work differently? To find a new way for theatre to fit into our lives?

Maybe, just maybe, this profit-share will have the answer.

Maybe it’ll be a 55-minute-long chance to feel our way through the mess that is arts advocacy. On the other hand, maybe the government will get a whiff of indie theatre makers out for blood and shut us down.
Maybe they’ll cut Melbourne Fringe’s funding.
Maybe worse.
Maybe they don’t care.
Maybe we’re the only people left to save us.
Maybe.

show details

Fuck Your Funding opens this Wednesday, running at Festival Hub: Trades Hall for 5 nights only from 30 Sep – 4 Oct. Join my newsletter and I'll email you a code for 25% off full price tickets.

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To everyone who’s booked a ticket already, thanks! I hope you have the best night. I can’t wait to see you in a foyer or random hallway in Trades Hall very soon. Let’s talk about our sector and how we fix it. I love you! x