Women Playwrights, Again and More

You may remember back in August of 2011 7-ON was involved in a 'Solutions Roundtable' funded by the Australia Council to debate/ thrash out/interrogate the ongoing lack of representation of female playwrights in Australian stages.

The Roundtable (along with a previous Women Directors' Forum) led to a review of the dilemma headed up by researcher Elaine Lally.

When the Review was released it made front page news in the Sydney Morning Herald, plus a good article in The Age. There's been nothing further in the newspapers since - though we understand that it is possible there may be - but the Review itself makes interesting reading, and sets a pattern for action to take into the future. We hope it will mean that a real commitment to supporting the work of women playwrights equally with their male peers may - at last - happen.

You can find the Review on the OzCo website here.

It includes a link to a survey that will remain live for about 3 weeks, in order to capture the sector’s responses to the report. This will help inform next steps. It can be found here.

The following links should take you to the newspaper articles mentioned above.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/stage/australia-council-finds-women-are-bit-players-in-theatres-feudal-system-20120423-1xhjy.html

There is also a follow-up article on page 9: 

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/struggling-to-break-out-of-a-holding-pattern-20120423-1xh59.html

It’s also on Page 5 of The Age:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/offstage-women-run-second-20120423-1xhc4.html

Further news is that all of the theatre MPAB companies and Theatre Key Organisations are now using the Creating Pathways reporting guide (loosely based on the EOWA reporting mechanism) to identify opportunities being provided or promoted to women directors and playwrights. It’s retrospective reporting, so the first data will be collected in February 2013. The OzCo has also set up an Action Learning initiative, that may benefit some women creative leaders.

Don't forget the playwrights ...

An article in The Australian about the paucity of female directors and the upcoming forum at Belvoir. It's great that this issue is generating so much coverage—perhaps we really are at a tipping point?—but let's not forget that female playwrights are equally under-represented. Pity that Belvoir didn't think to include a writer on tomorrow's panel ...

The Debate Moves South ...

Here at 7-ON we love hearing about other coalitions and groups of artists 'doing it for themselves'. Check out the Australian Women Directors' Alliance, a recently formed non-profit coalition of professional women directors and theatre makers. There's some interesting, probing and provocative discussion on their blog about the participation and artistic practices of female directors, playwrights and performance-makers—and their under-representation on Melbourne's better-funded stages.

You can contact the AWDA here, or find them on Facebook.

And check this out ...

Following on from the last post, check out this article from The Guardian: Leading Ladies Kept out of the Limelight: Conference hears of battle against ageism and sexism.
Only 9% of top films last year directed by women.

On the up side however, another article from The Guardian: Female Playwrights Set to Take West End by Storm. The writers are all young, so let's hope they've got long careers ahead of them.

What is going on here?

If like me, you’ve been following the fabulous Mad Men on SBS, which is set in the early 1960s, you can probably understand why feminism became such a force in the decade that followed. Yes, the men evaluate the female characters in terms of their appearance and sexual availability, but far more insidious is their assumption that women are no-go zones when it comes to the life of the mind.

That’s Mad Men, that’s the 1960s, This is Sydney in 2009, and I’m a tad troubled by something I and a few colleagues, including fellow 7-ONers, are observing. Today we did a bit of a gender audit on Belvoir B Sharp’s 2009 season, and found: Women writers = 0; women directors = 2. Then there was that recent article about Neil Armfield’s decision to leave his position as Artistic Director of Belvoir Street Theatre after some 15 years, in which the talent waiting in the wings just happened to be all male. Speaking for myself, I’ll believe we’ve achieved equality when I read about a twenty-something female wunderkind!

But it’s not only Belvoir. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece about the current popularity of Russian plays and adaptations. The journalist discussed this trend with a number of directors, all male, and although the production Ladybird was referred to, its (female) director Lee Lewis was not named.

Most of us in 7-ON have taught performance writing in various contexts, and in nearly every instance female students greatly outnumber men. So what happens to them? At what point in the process are they being passed over? Do they give up when the going gets tough? Are they perhaps less committed than their male counterparts? Or do they side-step more readily into admin and support roles? Should we be asking those who commission and program to explain their criteria and decision-making processes?

Look, this is a vexed issue. As writers we want to get gigs on the strength and qualities of our work, not because of our gender, cultural background, place of residence or whatever. And I’m personally not in favour of affirmative action initiatives, which despite the best intentions, often end up marginalising rather than opening doors. But isn’t it time we asked: what the hell is going on here?