Is the Way Australia Funds the Arts a Recipe for Mediocrity?

SYDNEY — In a rehearsal room here earlier this year, actors were doing a walk-through of the stage adaptation of “The 91-Story Treehouse,” a best-selling children’s book. In the magical world the play creates, two well-meaning, if haphazard, protagonists live in a multistory treehouse where they try to write a story, but keep getting distracted by villains.

Australia is a global leader in theater for young audiences — delivering experiences that don’t just educate, but also entertain, with often dark and provocative source material that doesn’t patronize its viewers.

The commercially-run theater company CDP makes theater in this mold: “The 13-Story Treehouse” recently completed a two-month tour across 16 states in the United States and a Dutch-language version is also touring the Netherlands and Belgium until 2019. At home, CDP’s 2015-16 sellout show “The 52-Storey Treehouse” was the most-attended family event in the history of the Sydney Opera House. (Both productions are adaptations of books in Australian author Andy Griffiths’ wildly popular “Treehouse” series.)

Yet as a for-profit company, CDP is not eligible for government funding for its core costs. And despite Australia’s role as a trendsetter in youth theater, funding from government is generally scarce.

The problem is not isolated to youth theater, said Andrew Threlfall, CDP’s director. He and a growing number of artistic leaders in Australia have come to believe that government funding for all the performing arts is simply not enough, nor is it as well spent as it could be.

Last year, Australia had the second highest wealth per adult in the world — around $402,600 — just behind Switzerland, according to a report from the bank Credit Suisse, which showed a steep rise unmatched by most other countries. The Australian economy has been growing uninterrupted for 26 years, the longest in the developed world, while population growth has also soared.

And yet, arts funding has not kept pace, with the most significant form of federal support increasing to around 177 million Australian dollars ($128 million) in the last fiscal year, up only 8 percent from 2011. And experts said they do not expect much growth under Australia’s new prime minister, Scott Morrison, an evangelical Christian elevated this month after a party dispute involving climate change.

The arts in Australia are running “on an emptying petrol tank,” Julian Meyrick, a professor of creative arts at Flinders University, said in an interview.

Worse in many ways, experts say, arts funding is running the same way it has for years — as an insiders’ game.

The vast majority of funding for the performing arts is awarded from the federal government through an agency called the Australia Council. Some grants from the Australia Council are based on assessments by panels of artists, arts workers and industry experts known as peer assessments; the council describes itself as operating on an “arm’s-length” principle, meaning the government can provide policy directions but can’t instruct individual funding decisions.

Still, more than half of the Australia Council’s funding goes to a group of 28 large organizations that are not subject to the same system of peer assessment. Referred to as “the majors,” the group includes theaters, orchestras and ballet and opera companies that have relied on government money for years.

Smaller groups shut out of the club of 28 are becoming increasingly vocal in criticizing the structure. Though state and local grants sometimes help, many smaller groups argue that Australia’s support for the performing arts is based not on merit, but outdated ideas about what makes some art forms more worthy than others.

“The fact that there hasn’t been any change in the group of companies seen as national cultural leaders has been frustrating for many,” said Rachel Healy, joint artistic director of the Adelaide Festival.

Australia has often been marked by a preference for stability over disruption, in its economy, which has tended to favor duopolies, in its politics, which are kept relatively moderate (at least in terms of ideology) by mandatory voting, and in culture.

Cultural cringe — in part, the tendency to overvalue the culture of Europe and North America and undervalue Australia’s own — lingers, many Australians in the arts argue. This, they say, plays into why the 28 majors, who mostly concentrate on traditional art forms and repertoire, are still so revered by those who manage government funding.

Meyrick said that cultural cringe has lessened over the years, as Australia gained more confidence on the global stage. Yet this attitude is “still hard-wired into the administration of culture.” One example is programming. When he was the literary manager at the Melbourne Theatre Company (one of the majors) from 2002 to 2007, Meyrick said the company regularly looked to Britain and the United States for inspiration “rather than thinking what drama of our own can we revive.”

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy: if you’re not putting it on, then you’re not encouraging the supply. And if you’re not encouraging the supply, you’ve got nothing to put on,” he said.

Some of the majors — such as the pioneering Indigenous dance company Bangarra and the Australian Ballet, both of which regularly create new works — are celebrated globally. Others, critics say, routinely underperform, staging artistically stagnant productions despite — or perhaps because of — their privileged standing.

In more than a dozen interviews with leaders in the performing arts, companies including Bell Shakespeare, a theater company based in Sydney; Opera Queensland; and Circus Oz, a Melbourne-based circus dating back to 1978, were consistently named as low achievers. A 2016 review in The Australian newspaper of Bell Shakespeare’s “Othello” concluded: “Bell’s latest is so shockingly bad, one wishes that the plug could be pulled.”

Yaron Lifschitz, artistic director of Brisbane-based circus company Circa, said that the government is entrenching a culture in the Australian performing arts of “overfunding mediocrity.”

Circa has been applauded globally for its avant-garde mixture of high art and daring acrobatics. Shows such as “Opus,” in which 14 acrobats performed around a live string quartet, was critically acclaimed around the world.

Circa has received around $1.4 million in government grants this year. Other money, the vast majority, is raised through ticket sales, fee-based consultancy work and a circus training center.

“I see a young vibrant culture with stories to tell and things to offer the world — and I see a group of extraordinarily courageous and hardworking artists,” Lifschitz said in a recent interview during one of the company’s rehearsals. Onstage, a man was balancing on a woman’s calves while Mozart blared. “But I see them not having the resources to do that to their full capacity,” he added.

In a speech last year at Sydney’s Museum of Contempoary Art, Lifschitz put it more bluntly, implicitly comparing Australia’s arts policies to the thickening of artery walls that occur before a heart attack. Many of the majors, he said, are “arteriosclerotic — playing heritage works to aging audiences.”

Fundamental to the debate over funding is that Australia as a nation prioritizes sports over the arts. The last federal budget allocated nearly $75 million more to the Australian Sports Commission than to the Australia Council. According to a 2017 study by the broadband network NBN, Australians watch around 60 million hours of sports at home per week — about 2 1/2 hours per person.

By contrast, some Australians regard the arts with suspicion, said Christopher Tooher, executive director of the annual Sydney Festival. Fifteen years ago, he said, the newly elected head of the government in the state of New South Wales felt the need to reassure the public that he was “a footy man,” referring to Australian Rules football, the national sport, “not an opera man.”

His message was that the arts “were something that ‘the other’ did,” Tooher said.

“Australians like to think of themselves as sportsmen,” David McAllister, artistic director of the Australian Ballet, said in an interview at the Sydney Opera House. “We don’t revere people for their intellect or their artistic pursuits,” he added. “But if they win a gold medal we want to put them on the front of everything.”

This has resulted, said Karen Therese, artistic director of Sydney’s Powerhouse Youth Theatre, in “a significant amnesia about who artists are and what they give to the world.”

In 2016, the federal government’s National Opera Review revealed that Opera Queensland, one of the 28 majors, had been operating for years at a loss.

But instead of removing Opera Queensland from the list of major performing arts companies, Australia Council funding has been increased. In February, the government in the state of Queensland also committed an extra $1.6 million over four years. “You think: That’s nuts!” said Jo Caust, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne who researches arts funding. She questioned why the Australia Council did not remove Opera Queensland from the list of major performing arts companies “and put in another company that is doing really well.”

Caust put this down to entrenched ideas about what is artistically valuable, namely traditional forms such as the ballet or opera, which are often at odds with more popular art forms. “Funding of the arts is seen then as rewarding elite arts practices,” she said in an email. “While it is evident that arts practice is generally embraced by the majority of the population, the ‘high’ arts are not necessarily understood as the kind of arts practice that the majority support.”

“It assumes a certain type of cultural hierarchy. There are big questions that are never asked because they are too hard and to change the pattern of funding is extremely difficult. There are also forces that will fight it to the death,” Caust said.

Patrick Nolan, who became artistic director of Opera Queensland last year, is adamant that the company should still receive funding as one of the major performing arts companies, despite its patchy record. In an interview, he said Opera Queensland responded to the review with an “extensive process of investigating our funding structure and the way the company is operating. As a result of that process, we received an uplift in our funding.” One of the goals of the extra funding, he added, is to build audience numbers and to put on more productions.

“I have a lot of issues with this whole ‘us’ and ‘them'” Nolan said, noting that Opera Queensland collaborates with other small and medium-sized performing arts companies, including Brisbane’s Expressions Dance Company and the Blue Roo Theatre Company.

“If you do dismantle the majors, it is going to have a really detrimental effect on the entire ecosystem of the arts,” Nolan added, pointing out that for each production, Opera Queensland hires up to 200 artists and crew members.

But for Lifschitz, the system is fundamentally unjust: “If you’re in one of the major companies, if you run up a deficit, you run up a deficit. If we run up a deficit we don’t exist — no one is going to bail us out.”

So what are the alternatives? One is a system of philanthropy and private funding, as favored in the United States.

Wesley Enoch, director of the Sydney Festival, said he thought some of the country’s major companies could go commercial. The Australian Ballet, for instance, receives only 10 percent of its operational cost through federal funding.

That funding provides a cushion that allows the Australian Ballet to take risks, said McAllister, the company’s artistic director.

“That sense of being able to afford failure” allowed the company to produce the best works, he added. Funding should be allocated on merit and individual companies should add to it by raising donations and commercial sponsorship, and selling tickets, he said.

Arena Theatre is following a different model: In March, the youth theater company relocated from Melbourne to become a resident company in Bendigo, a small city about 100 miles from Melbourne. A grant from the state of Victoria provided assistance for the relocation and the Australia Council gave $75,000 to support a year of programming. In return, Arena Theatre will run programs with young people in the city, and will also create new work to take on tour.

“The sector is viewing this with a great deal of interest — it’s a pretty bold move for a company that tours nationally and internationally to make its home in a regional area,” said Arena Theatre’s former executive producer Sheah Sutton. On a sunny morning recently in a hip neighborhood in the city of Brisbane, David Morton and Nicholas Paine, founders of Dead Puppet Society, were showing off the mechanics of a large green lizard.

The lizard is one of forty puppets created for their critically acclaimed production about Charles Darwin “The Wider Earth.”

Dead Puppet Society relies on one-off grants from government for individual projects. It also partners with larger organizations (Queensland Theatre in “The Wider Earth’s” case), and runs an educational program that brings in money for the company.

It hasn’t applied for continuing funding from the Australia Council, a decision Paine described as “strategic.”

“We love how nimble we can be,” he said. “With constant shifts in cultural policy and organizations losing core funding, we like knowing that we are able to operate by drawing on a variety of support rather than relying on government only.”

“It is invigorating,” Morton said. “The game is always on, there is no pattern to fall into.”

Without state funding, Dead Puppet Society has had to build strong partnerships: “The Wider Earth” was developed in Cape Town at Handspring Puppet Company, known for “War Horse,” and at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the performing arts center in Brooklyn, New York. That opens doors, particularly in a geographically isolated country like Australia.

“The Wider Earth,” for example, will start a six-month run in London’s Natural History Museum in October — the first time a theater of its size has ever been erected in the institution.

“We were hoping to make a work that could have an international appeal,” said Morton, who added that in Australia there is a tendency to “rely on an ‘art class'” of wealthy, educated patrons at the expense of the wider populace.

In this environment, support for government funding of the arts is declining. A survey by the Australia Council found that the number who backed public funding had declined 19 percent between 2009 and 2016, from 85 percent to 66.

Wesley Enoch from the Sydney Festival said that this was because many of the major companies mounted productions that appeal to well-educated, wealthy, white audiences. “Where are the strong working-class voices?” Enoch asked.

“Indigenous voices or political voices” were also neglected, added Enoch, who is Indigenous. “We can sometimes have a very narrow bandwidth for cultural expression,” he said. Funding should go to a broader range of companies, he added, to allow groups to “explore new and interesting stories.”

Morton said that “there is a degree of heritage that is important to preserve,” when it comes to supporting the 28 majors. On the other hand, “maybe it does not provoke innovation — if there is an expectation or a degree of comfort, there’s no need to struggle.”