Carving in Snow

( Published in The Courier-Mail , 10 October, 2019) The great Australian sport is criticising the Grand Final pre-match entertainment. OneRepublic was caught offside before the NRL match, after Dean Lewis missed the mark at the AFL. Daryl Braithwaite and Paul Kelly saved the days. Arts criticism is alive and well. On AFL Grand Final day, I played my own grand final. The whistle blew on my fifth and final Brisbane Festival. It’s been a privilege to be captain of the team, and to curate 3,000 performances and 30 world premieres from 7,000 artists. This year, we broke our box office record for the third year running, topping $4m. More than 1.2 million people turned up, many of them tourists.   But hey, arts and sport aren’t in competition. We can be passionate about both, and on the same day. In fact, people encounter the arts more than sport, mostly without knowing it. Every time you mouth the words to a song in a supermarket, or are attracted to an image o...

Brisbane Festival wound up on Saturday night after 22 days.   There were 540 performances, 60 productions, around 20 venues, five world premiere commissions, 11 Australian premieres, and more than 1,400 artists from here and around the world, including those from 28 Queensland arts companies. Those artists, through their skill and insight, shared wonderfully different ways of living in and looking at the world. We broke lots of records: the biggest box office ever, the biggest crowds at our hub at Treasury Brisbane Arcadia ( mostly enjoying free shows), our largest ever Theatre Republic, the most number of performances. At Treasury Brisbane Arcadia alone, around 300,000 people engaged with the Festival – that’s an average of 15,000 people for every day it was open. Amazing. Saturday night's massive festival finale was Sunsuper Riverfire, Australia's longest fireworks display, drawing around 500,000 people to the edges of the winding Brisbane River and a great many mor...

( This article was first published in The Courier-Mail on 24 August 2017 ) I HAVE just returned from the world’s largest arts festival. I travelled down many paths searching for work to include in next year’s Brisbane Festival. The Edinburgh Fringe offers 3600 different productions from every corner of the globe. Its open access philosophy – anyone can be part of it, if you’re prepared to lose money – means that much of the work is pretty rough. But taken as a whole the event provides a fascinating snapshot of the things that are occupying the world’s artists. Right now. There are many shows about Trump, democracy, Brexit and migration. There is an Arab Arts Focus and the transgender experience is the subject of a number of very good shows. The arts can explore complex things in ways that surprise us. We all live in echo chambers of some sort, and that’s not always good. The arts extend our contact with the world beyond the boundaries of our lot. This is part of a greater...

[A version of this piece was first published in The Courier-Mail on 5 September 2016]  More Australians go to art galleries each year than go to AFL and NRL games combined. The creative industries employ more people than agriculture, construction or mining. Around one million people will experience this year’s Brisbane Festival, Brisbane’s international arts festival. Theatre, dance, circus, music, stand-up? With almost 500 performances across three weeks, it’s all on the menu. How do we value this love for arts and culture? A festival is a remarkable thing. People relax and become more receptive to the unfamiliar. It’s all in the name. During the festival of a holiday or the festival of a dinner party, we let our guard down and allow ourselves to absorb new ideas and experiences. It’s also when artists reach for things at the very edge of their imaginations. You could say that ‘‘why not?’’ is the festival spirit. Part of it is making sure people have acces...

An arts festival is an opportunity for artists and audiences to take risks. It’s a chance to experience new forms and new ideas and to lift our gaze beyond the everyday. The arts enable us to walk in the shoes of another for a short while, to experience a different kind of exhilaration or disturbance or reflection or joy, and it has always been my simple hope that those experiences might make us more empathetic, more generous, more valuing of things outside our daily selves. Brisbane Festival is part of that huge ongoing human project, and it gives me hope that making a difference is possible. This year’s Festival, my first, tied together work from five continents and many, many hundreds of artists, all of whom had something to say. These voices spoke powerfully across the city, sharing with us views and experiences of the world that were both challenging and refreshing. Sometimes our securities were shaken, and often our hearts went out. I found myself particularl...

Politics and the arts are family. Both are concerned with the affairs of the people. Whenever anyone questions an accepted reality, it becomes a political act – and many people do that most days, whether they think of themselves as artists or political or not. Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and vocal critic of his government, goes further: “Everything is art. Everything is politics." It’s easiest to see this in the extreme. The success of any revolution depends on a rupture with the past. In February this year, ISIS burned 100,000 books in the central library of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. UNESCO called it “one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history." Look at any revolution – French, Boshevik, Chinese and so on – and you’ll find a similar pattern. As Orwell reminded us, “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Wars against a people always go hand in han...

Today I gave the Commencement Address at the graduation ceremony for the Creative Industries Faculty of the Queensland University of Technology, held in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Here is what I said: I really don’t know why I’m here.   I think you've been fooled into thinking I'd have something interesting to say.   But no. I’m a fraud.   Standing here, I remember my late friend Nick Enright. He was a great Australian theatre artist. As a playwright he gave us a few classics –  A Property of the Clan, Blackrock, Good Works  and an adaptation of Cloudstreet . As a librettist for musicals he gave us  The Boy from Oz  and  The Venetian Twins . As an acting teacher at NIDA he taught Mel Gibson and Judy Davis and a raft of other big names. He was loved, and a great mentor to many.   He was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for George Miller’s film  Lorenzo’s Oil . Nick and I ...

The Democratic Republic of Congo sits in the very heart of Africa , in the cradle of all humanity . It is the size of Western Europe with a population of 75 million. It has an astonishing history. But what do we know about it? Arts festivals are made for illumination. In September this year, Brisbane Festival offers a series of brilliant works from or about the Congo.  Why shine a light here? Because the Congo has helped form the history of the world. In more ways than you might think… Congo's Curse The Congo is blessed with more natural resources than almost any other country on the planet. A Congolese legend has it that God , tired after creating the world, stopped at this part of the earth and dropped all his sacks of riches. And these riches have helped make the world as we know it. When the world needed rubber for the tyres of the newly invented motorcar, the Congo was there with half the world’s known supplies. When the world needed copper ...

Like most Artistic Directors, I’ve always tried to balance the needs of artists and audiences. In history, of course, these needs have never perfectly aligned, and nor should they ever. But the gap between what artists want to make and what audiences want to see is now wider than I’ve ever known it. Part of this tension arrives because we live in an era of participation . The audience, or the general public, is no longer just the consumer; they are now co-creators. We don’t buy albums anymore; we create our own playlists. We don’t watch TV passively anymore; we tweet our responses and vote. Anyone can make a film; you don’t even need film, just your phone. Anyone can compose music; just download an app or upload your song to YouTube. Anyone can write a novel and distribute it on the net, bypassing the traditional publisher. This blurring of the border between consumer and creator unsettles many, for it signifies the destruction of the comfortable distinctions between profession...

The plays of Philip Ridley: the Marquis de Sade meets Liberace. That's not me, that's an American critic whose name escapes me, but it's not a bad description. I begin rehearsals tomorrow for Ridley's Tender Napalm , for La Boite Theatre Company and Brisbane Festival. To think of Ridley is to think of violence and beauty. His first play, The Pitchfork Disney (1991), produced at London's Bush Theatre, included images of cockroach eating, finger breaking, snake frying and penis scraping. It's a brilliant work, and heralded what later became known as 'In-Yer-Face Theatre', a whole genre of mostly British '90s playwriting that includes work by Antony Neilson, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, Martin McDonagh and many others. World-beating theatre.          I have never found violence in Ridley's plays to be pointless. Ridley himself has pointed out that travelling Indian magicians would rip the heads off live birds while, at the s...