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To market
The Australia Council's fourth Australian Performing Arts Market, held in Adelaide earlier this year, was the largest and most ambitious to date, attracting the broadest field of international delegates in its short history.
Coinciding with the Telstra Adelaide Festival 2000 and the very popular Adelaide Fringe Festival, the market was attended by more than 1 000 artists, delegates and booth holders, including 130 directors and programmers from many of the world's leading festivals, cultural centres, artists' agencies and cultural bodies.
The Australia Council's Philip Rolfe says the Australian Performing Arts Market is now internationally recognised as one of the major events, introducing international delegates to the wealth of innovation and excellence in Australian music, dance, theatre and new media arts, with similar markets held in Montreal, Edinburgh and throughout the United States and Europe.
'The market is now a premier destination for the world's arts programmers and presenters,' Mr Rolfe, Director of the Council's Audience and Market Development Division said. 'This year we saw an explosion in attendance by the internationals, with 130 delegates descending on Adelaide, up from 35 at the first market in 1994.'
International delegates to this year's market included regular attendees as well as many first timers. Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann, from the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, Germany, attended the third and fourth markets, and as a result of her visits, programmed three Australian companies-Bambucco, 5 Angry Men and Ranters Theatre Company-into Berlin's influential Theater der Welt festival last year.
Gie Baguet, from the pioneering street-theatre organisation Frans Brood Productions in Belgium, attended for the fourth time. In recent years he has produced many successful European summer festival tours by Australian companies including Strange Fruit, Chrome and Stalker Theatre.
Other high profile delegates this year included: Josephine Markovits of Festival d'Automne (France); Alexander Castonguay of 21st Century Culture, Columbia Arts Management (United States); Nunally Kersh of the Spoleto Festival (United States); Anne Neumann-Schultheis of International Tanz Festival NRW (Germany); Michael Morris from Cultural Industry (United Kingdom); Mary Shields of the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms (United Kingdom); Louise Jeffreys of the Barbican Centre (United Kingdom); Margaret Lawrence of the Hopkins Centre (United States); Lars Seeberg of the Aarhus Festival (Denmark); Tauras Cizas of the LIFE Festival (Lithuania); Lim Jin-Taek from Passage of Life (Korea); Bill Gee of Canary Wharf in London (United Kingdom); Meinrad Huber of the Ludwigsburger Festspiele (Germany); Guillaume Soulard from the Tjbaou Cultural Centre (New Caledonia) and Linda Shelton of The Joyce Theater (United States).The market also featured live performances from more than 45 companies from every State and Territory, and for the first time included a strong contingent of New Zealand artists.
These artists and companies included: William Yang with Bloodlinks (NSW); Australian Dance Theatre's Birdbrain (SA); the Indigenous music/dance company White Cockatoo Performing Group (NT); toteMMusic by REM Theatre (NSW); Yirra Yarkin Noongar Theatre (WA); Arena Theatre Company's Eat Your Young (VIC); The Song Company (NSW); contemporary jazz group Wanderlust (NSW); the Lucy Guerin Company with Heavy and Robbery Waitress on Bail (VIC); Sonata for Ten Hands by Rock 'n Roll Circus (QLD); and Anthos Theatre's The Odyssey (TAS).
Since 1994, the arts markets have generated more than 150 national and international tours for Australian performing artists and companies, and have returned more than $25 million in touring income to the Australian performing arts sector. The General Manager of the Australia Council, Ms Jennifer Bott, said the rapid expansion and enormous success of the market demonstrates the increasing interest in Australian arts.
'The Council aims to consolidate this international interest by expanding the next market in 2002 to include exhibits from South-East Asia, the Pacific and New Zealand,' she said.
The fourth Australian Performing Arts Market was an initiative of the Australia Council in partnership with the South Australian Government
and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Berlin blitz: the Cortese brothers take Ranters offshore
The Germans, Raimondo Cortese, will tell you, are not shy in coming forward and saying what they think.
Such frankness is what Raimondo and Adriano Cortese discovered in Berlin when Ranters Theatre Company performed at the influential Theater der Welt Festival in June last year.
Ranters was one of the companies picked up at the 1998 Australian Performing Arts Market in Adelaide.
Formed in 1994, the Melbourne company is a tight ensemble with a close working relationship between Raimondo and his director brother Adriano, and a core group of actors and production personnel, which allows for an in-depth process for each project. All of the company's productions are developed over several years, with extended development and rehearsal periods.
Ranters took to Berlin their acclaimed production Features of Blown Youth, which was a hit at the Melbourne Festival and later in Sydney (The Performance Space) Raimondo, Ranters' resident writer, told Artbeat that at the 1998 Market, he and Adriano talked to people about how the company and the two brothers collaborated.
'This generated quite a bit of interest. From that the Theater der Welt Festival booked Features of Blown Youth which they hadn't actually seen. But they had seen a small piece we had developed for this year's Adelaide Festival, Roulette, which is a series of eight short pieces, and in 1998 we performed one of these small pieces at the Fringe.'
To get an overseas booking for a production sight unseen was very rare, Raimondo said-'a one in a million'.
So how was the trip to Berlin?
'It was great. When you are doing a show in any different city you always get a completely different reaction,' Raimondo told Artbeat .
'What was really good was that we had strong support from a lot of younger theatre-makers that I met in Berlin. The older generation, I think, thought it was quite vulgar, and they had quite a negative reaction towards it. So it was very divisive. We got a fantastic response from the audience in terms of curtain calls-we had about five or six curtain calls each night.
'Germans are generally very up front about what they think about things. They are not backwards in coming forward.'
Given that German theatre on the whole is very formal, the mixed reaction was not surprising.
'We're interested in trying to get rid of all the standard conventions of what makes theatre, really.'
'It's almost a kind of anti-theatrical style we are working with, and it involves a lot of improvisation between the actors, so the performances are very different each night and also very loose. And we have a simple structure that gives the actors a lot of freedom. That's very different to most theatre you see.'
Raimondo and Adriano attended the market again this year, as part of the Spotlight program. As a result, their latest production, Roulette, will tour to Sydney, and to Portugal for the Festival of PoNTI in the city of Porto, which is the European Capital of Culture for 2001 (in partnership with Rotterdam). In Porto they will also be conducting workshops with Portugese playwrights.
They will take with them what they learnt from the Berlin experience-not to focus too much on language, and to make it 'more engaging, more visual'.
'We've probably got too much reliance on language,' Raimondo said.
'Also, while people are familiar with English they don't exactly know "Australian". They can't hear it. There's only got to be a slight slurring of words and they lose it. It's just not quite precise enough. They are attuned to hear American and English accents but they are not attuned to hearing Australian, so that can create immense difficulties.'
Finally Artbeat asked Raimondo if, in his opinion, the Performing Arts Market works.
'Certainly I do think the market works,' he replied.
'Obviously it has huge benefits in terms of getting recognition for Australian theatre. Most people overseas haven't got a clue about Australian theatre, and we're a long, long way away from the main centres of North America and Europe. And really for them to buy a show from Australia, it's a lot more money, and they have got so many other things they can buy. So it creates a profile which just hasn't existed in Australia. It's not because the work hasn't been good, it's just because they don't know about it and generally don't really care.'
But he does have a warning: don't become too obsessed with getting overseas if you don't have the fundamentals in place.
'You get a lot of young people going there [to the market] with huge expectations that they are going to get picked up,' he said.
'And it causes a lot of anxiety and disappointment. The best thing to do is to actually have a very long-term strategy about where you are trying to pitch your work, and incorporating overseas touring into it if it happens. But the main focus should be on developing your work in front of a local audience because that is really the most important thing for any theatre company's survival. If on top of that overseas festivals are interested in buying, well that's all well and good, but I don't think it should be the overall aim.'