Hooray, but ...

We couldn't help noticing that PlayWritingAustralia has just announced an initiative to support new playwrights (‘playwrights who have not yet been professionally produced’), as well as the encouragement for Tasmanian playwrights only to apply for the Winter Season development this year. We applaud both initiatives but want to note for the record that the funding for the first initiative would seem to come from the funding that Arts NSW made available to PWA in place of the lost $30,000 prize money that should have been awarded to a mid or senior level playwright in the recent Premier's Awards.

It's great that the Minister made a replacement $30,000 available.

It's great that she asked the punch-above-its-weight PWA to administer it.

It's great to support emerging and regional playwrights (and sorry, Tasmanians, if we're making assumptions here ...).

But, Minister, where do you think playwrights go when they've emerged?

Can we put forward a parallel? When one starts work in the public service one begins at entry level. One serves one's time, takes advantage of training schemes and mentorships and all the possible support options available to further one's practice until - voila! - a a pretty talented and knowledgeable bureaucrat emerges. At this point the bureaucrat nails a good job and begins to make a difference to his/her society. Some even reach a position of significant decision-making. No one suggests, either explicitly or implicitly that, once trained, they should make way for others and instead...get a job as a teacher, or a cleaner or something/anything to pay the bills and work at their 'real job' in between. It'd be a real waste, surely?

What writers do is necessary, and even essential. As the excellent British playwright, David Edgar, has said: "Storytelling is central to our being as humans. Without it we would be constrained within the dungeon of our own direct experience. We would find it hard to plan - to imagine a series of actions and their consequences. And we couldn't empathize, with the good or the bad...By enabling us to imagine what it is like to see the world through other eyes (including the eyes of the violent and the murderous) drama develops capacities without which we cannot live together in societies at all."

At the moment (and there are always exceptions when someone is running hot with both work and profile for a few years) a writer with more than five (should we make it ten or fifteen?) years of experience cannot make the kind of living even a base grade, newby clerk would make in the public service.

Thank you for being concerned about the arts, and artists but ... Don't start what you can't continue. Support all levels of playwriting, or none at all.

7-ONer short-listed

Vanessa's play Porn.Cake, which was in this year's Playwriting Australia National Script Workshop, is short-listed for the 2010 Griffin Award.

The winner will be announced on the 17 August.

7-ON's AWGIE Nominations

Donna and Noëlle are both nominated for 2010 AWGIE Awards. Donna for Mrs Macquarie’s Cello in the Radio (Adaptation) category, and Noëlle for Dark Paradise in the Radio (Original) category.

The AWGIE nominations were announced yesterday by the AWG. Read the complete list of nominees here.

Sustainable careers

The debate about the missing NSW Premier’s Literary Award continues ... and widens. Check out Performance Anxiety, Alison Croggan’s article in the June issue of The Australian Literary Review. And here is a copy of a letter/suggestion sent to Arts NSW and Playwriting Australia by 7-ON.

Dear Alexandra and Chris,

I'm writing as a representative of 7-ON, a playwrights' group of seven established playwrights resident in Sydney (Donna Abela, Vanessa Bates, Hilary Bell, Noëlle Janaczewska, myself, Ned Manning and Catherine Zimdahl.)

We were intrigued to note that when the Playwriting Award was not made this year as part of the Premier’s Awards, a decision was made that the funding would instead be diverted to new playwrights. It is our understanding that the funding was devolved to Playwriting Australia to administer, but that a binding decision has not been made on precisely how it will be spent.

We are in full agreement of playwrights being supported while they are writing their first few plays, but note that the Premier’s Award, for a produced play, was the only direct funding of an established playwright available from Arts NSW (apart from one annual NSW Writer's Fellowship, which is also open to writers of other genres).

This fact is unfortunate but just part of the general state of affairs that makes it extremely difficult not only to start but to maintain a career as a writer for performance in Australia.

In the meantime, the attached opportunity for an UK-based writer came to our attention. We wondered if it might not provide a model for funding an established writer (in tandem with any of the major theatre companies in the state)? That is to say, an alternative use of the $30,000 that would have gone to an established working playwright had the award been made in 2010.

Best regards,
Verity Laughton (for 7-ON)

What we've been doing these past 6 months ...

We’re about to hit the half-way point of the year, so time for a bit of a round up. Here’s what we’ve all been doing outside 7-ON …

Donna: I’m headlong into the first few months of a creative writing doctorate which has brilliantly given me the chance to read read read plays and write write write new things in new ways. I’m having serious fun setting up ‘experiments’, the latest being to write a play a day for the month of June, which is scary and exhilarating and revelatory. Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote a play a day for a year, inspired this somewhat more modest attempt. Other things? There’s a radio play for the ABC inching towards the end of a first draft. And another delay on the start of the draft of The Monkey King for Theatre of Image due to the complexities of international co-productions. And a scriptwriting curriculum to rehash before the start of semester two.

Vanessa: My new play Porn.Cake has been selected for this year’s National Script Workshop, I’m looking forward to rubbing shoulders with Lally Katz and Jane Bodie and other writerly folk in June. New short play Small Hard Things is floating in the ether. Was shortlisted for the AWG RomCom script competition with Love Struck Juliet, lovely to be one of five but no cigar there. I’m currently immersed in my final draft for my episode of series 3 EastWest101, and as soon as that’s off my plate other deadlines will be crossly bashing on my door. Plus, ongoing war with headlice and preschool, can I talk about that? No? OK then. That’s me!

Hilary: I’m working on a big sprawling epic of a play for Black Swan in Perth, inspired by John Bailey’s non-fiction book, The White Divers of Broome. I’m also collaborating with Julian Meyrick and Paul Capsis on Angela’s Kitchen, about Paul’s Maltese grandmother, to be performed at Griffin in November. I’ve just returned from Adelaide, workshopping Take Up Thy Bed And Walk, with designer Gaelle Mellis and three fabulous performers, about nineteenth-century fiction concerning ‘wheelchair-bound’ girls. And next month ABC Radio will record Beautiful Hands, written with composer Phillip Johnston and inspired by Charlotte Gilman-Perkins’ Gothic horror-story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Noëlle: Been immersed in the world of weeds, working on a feature for ABC Radio called Weeds Etc (goes to air 31 July) and researching one of the 2 projects I got an OzCo Literature Board grant for. The other Lit. Board project is Bounce, a monologue about my journey to the Amazon and my father’s through Parkinson’s disease to our last ‘great unknown’—death. (It’s funnier and not nearly as grim as it sounds from that description.) What else? A poem won a prize in Scotland, Smashed, a short about binge drinking developed with Year 11 students at Springwood High School, goes on in Penrith early July, and then there’s a return to the commission for Melbourne’s Eleventh Hour: a sequel to The Merchant of Venice—sort of. Set in Berlin during the winter of 1946/7.

Verity: Joshua’s Books, a radio play of mine, was broadcast on the ABC in March this year and since then I’ve been working on two other projects. Crate of Souls, is a semi verbatim/semi magical realist piece to be produced as the graduate show for the 13 third year acting students at the Adelaide College for the Arts. My other script, What Has Been Taken, was written for a Literature Board grant in 2008 and deals with, among other things, political terrorism in Pakistan. And in October this year a play written some years ago, The Sweetest Thing, is to be produced in an upcoming indie-curated season here in Sydney (details out soon!).

Ned: My 2010 ‘Actors at Work’ shows are currently touring NSW schools. Rehearsals for the Vic/Qld/Tas and the SA/WA/NT teams begin in July. The shows will play to about 10,000 school kids throughout the country. My new play Alice Dreaming is about to be published by Cambridge University Press (July). I am currently working on a Drama textbook for schools to be published by Cambridge. I am also working on a new play for adults. My radio play, an adaptation of Women of Troy is with the ABC. I am hopeful (always hopeful!) of a workshop of a new play which I have been developing with Wayne Harrison some time later in the year. As well as this my screenplay for a kids film is doing the rounds and all my fingers and toes are crossed!

Catherine: Working very hard on ‘Primary Maternal Attachment’. Forthcoming ABC Radio National productions of A Day Too Great (adapted from the stage play) and The Fox, based on an Inuit Folk Tale.

Afterthought

A bit off topic perhaps, but just riffing on from the last post and comments. In The Culture of the New Capitalism, sociologist Richard Sennett discusses how we have moved from a culture that valued craftsmanship and experience to one in which potential is paramount. What he terms 'the specter of uselessness' now shadows workers across the board—multi degree-holding professionals and manual labourers alike. This is also an idea explored by one of my (this is Noëlle writing) favourite sociologists, Zygmunt Bauman. Over-simplifying here, but essentially ZB's thesis is that globalisation has given rise to a fluid life (liquid modernity) in which our central anxiety is the fear of being dumped or pushed aside.

You can read an interview ZB gave in 2005 here on OpenDemocracy.

How does this relate to theatre?

Well, on a personal note, I find ZB's ideas really interesting; I'm working on a piece which draws on them—still in its early stages. But secondly, and more generally, the decision of Arts NSW and the judges of this year's play entries to reallocate the $30,000 prize money from an award that recognises achievement to a development program seems bang in line with what Sennett and ZB are saying.

Playwrights are the homeless of the arts

There was an interesting discussion on today's ABC Radio National's The Book Show about the judges' decision that none of the (approximately 25) entered plays deserved the $30,000 NSW Premier's Literary Award for 2010. Listen online or download here. Michael Gurr's passion on the subject was great. Go Michael!

The info on the Arts NSW website says that the unawarded $30,000 will go to supporting 'new playwrights'. Given that these kinds of prizes are usually won by established and/or mid-career writers (yes, it’s a gross generalisation), this reallocation represents a noteworthy shift of emphasis.

Why is this country so hopeless when it comes to supporting its established artists?