PLAYING POLITICS AT THE FESTIVAL

JACQUELINE MARTIN & WILLMAR SAUTER

The 2002 Festival of Arts in Adelaide, turned out to be very controversial. For the first time in its history, the Festival Board had engaged a non-Australian artistic director. The choice was , an international celebrity in the field of the performing arts. This star director did not intend to bring all the latest from the ‘West’ to Australia, as had been the fashion in Adelaide since 1960, when the biennial festivals began. Sellars did not intend to bring the world to Australia, but wanted to show Australia to the world – and most importantly to itself! How did he go about it? He studied the local scene and realised that Adelaide was a landmark of Indigenous culture. The place was full of cultural memories, most of which were quite painful experiences. Sellars decided that one of the themes for his would be Reconciliation – one of the hottest political issues in today’s Australia, as witnessed by the opening of the Olympic Games in 2000. In November 2001 – four months before the beginning of the Festival – he was dismissed (or did he resign? It is difficult to know) as artistic director and was replaced by one of Australia’s foremost festival organisers, Sue Nattrass. This chapter examines the relationship between power, finances and politics as it was played out at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 2002 and how this was addressed at the succeeding festival – the Adelaide Bank Festival of the Arts in 2004. We will be following the model for analysing a theatrical event (See Cremona et al. 2004) which is outlined in the introduction to this book: Playing Culture; Cultural Contexts; Contextual Theatricality; and Theatrical Playing.

PART 1 – THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS 2002 Our Experiences Flying from Brisbane to Adelaide on Monday morning, checking into the hotel and rushing through the city, looking for the entrance of the 98 Jacqueline Martin & Willmar Sauter

Festival Playhouse – the whole area appeared to be devastated by an earthquake – we just made it to the beginning of the first performance we wanted to see. In this way, this was a perfect opening and the performance corresponded perfectly with the topic which we were investigating at the festival, ‘cultural memory’. There were still some empty seats in the auditorium when The Career Highlights of the Mamu started. The frame of this performance is the wish of the author and main performer, Trevor Jamieson, a good-looking 30-year-old man of aboriginal descent, to explore his own past. Before we get to know this, a spectre surprises a group of sleeping aborigines, who wake up scared, but are tough enough to tease the strange figure, touch it and leap around it, without aggression, whereupon the spectre quietly disappears through the auditorium from whence it came. This figure is called the Mamu and symbolises the spirit of the past. While Jamieson explains the purpose of the performance to the audience, his family – that is his real-life family – father, mother, brothers, cousins, aunts, etc. settle down on stage right. Among them is also a Japanese woman, assisting the members of the family, videotaping during long sequences of the performance, but also playing on an organ at certain moments. On the other side of the stage there are two musicians accompanying the episodes on cello and percussion including a big xylophone. Occasionally these musicians also participate in the dancing on stage. Then a number of free episodes follow, presenting scenes of domestic life – young men throwing spears after a toy train, symbolising the railway track, which was built when the spear throwers’ grandfathers were young. Some dances are interspersed, while we follow films and stills on three screens in the background. The middle screen projects at times the enlarged images, which the video camera catches on stage. The peak of the first part comes as a surprise: Jamieson interviews some survivors from Hiroshima, on location. He speaks to a brother and sister about how they were rescued on the 6th August 1945. This encounter depicts the aftermath of the bombing in all its horrors and is very moving, and also justifies the presence of the Japanese woman on stage. The second act turns the political issue towards Australia. The mission, close to which Jamieson’s family lived in the 1950s, was closed on government demand. The homeless members of the family