The Adelaide Festival Centre Trust is gearing up for a sort-of off-peak festival next month. After all the debate about whether the Adelaide Festival should be an annual or biennial fixture, Trust administrator Rob Brookman is packaging a series of performances plucked from the Sydney and Perth festivals for those sybarites tired of January’s excess and those committed enough to music and dance not to notice the near-molten state of their credit cards.
The three main events being presented are the La La La Dance Company from Montreal, Groupe Emil Dubois and the Philippe Genty Company. You will notice a certain Gallic aspect to the programme. Not surprisingly because now that it is 1989 it is the 200th anniversary of the Bastille and French culture, as Brookman observes, is having the same kind of international outpouring as our Bicentennial Oznost last year. This French connection is to be welcomed, however, because if we make enough fuss about their last revolution they may be encouraged to have another. (A rerun of the terrible events of 1789 is not the sort of thing this publication wants to encourage. Ed)
The Summer Season is receiving generous sponsorship from The Advertiser and Brookman is hopeful that a high public profile will widen the ticket-buying audience. ‘Times are tough for regular theatre-goers. We are trying to spread our net a lot wider. We can’t rely on the people who have formed the core audience to the extent we have in the past so we have to try to programme and market more. We can’t keep hitting up the same 2% arts-committed people who are around.”
“This season will still cater for those people, but we are hoping that something like La La La which has very · eclectic appeal will be easily appreciated by the rock and rollers as well as those into performance art. It’s Laurie Anderson territory, the crossover between performance art and pop. Edward Locke, the leader of La La La comes straight out of the Canadian avant garde but he has decided to take his work to the dance floors.”
Groupe Emil Dubois with choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta will present two programmes, Mammame and Docteur Labus. Brookman places their work somewhere between Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp although, he adds, they are not as dark as Bausch or as flip and throwaway as Twyla Tharp. “I suspect Gallotta has a very eccentric imagination. He uses everyday movement and exaggerates and transforms it in various ways to create a choreography of everyday experience.”
The Philippe Genty Company is familiar to Adelaide audiences. They first toured their extraordinary blend of slapstick and poetic puppetry at the 1978 Adelaide Festival where their ostrich dance became their hallmark. This time the company will present an all-new show entitled Desirs Parade. Brookman sees them as another winner and is regretful that they will only play a seven day season before touring interstate.
“I believe there is a huge audience ready to go with contemporary dance – with jazz ballet and aerobics, kids in school, the video clip generation – dance is the area, more than theatre, where young people will go from TV to the performing arts.”
The music programme features two very different performers, both of whom have been keenly sought for festivals over the last ten years or so. Ewa Demarczyk, known as ‘The Black Angel of Song’, has been compared to everyone from Edith Piaf to Joplin and Patti Smith. “I can’t promise that people will go away humming, tapping and whistling,” Brookman smiles, “It’s not exactly a fun night, but she’s a very powerful performer and she’s big on passion.”
French pianist Pascal Roge will also be giving just one recital in early March. “He’s one of those pianists who is still given the prodigy label even though he is a mature performer aged thirty-seven. I’d put him in the same ranking as Andras Schiff or Lazar Berman. He specialises in the French repertoire. We’ve taken two bob each way with a mixed programme of Debussy Preludes – he’s a renowned interpreter of Debussy and Poulenc – as well as works by Beethoven and Schumann. I expect this performance to attract a lot of interest because it may well be the only international piano recital Adelaide will see this year.”
The Living Paintings are something entirely different. “I couldn’t resist them,” admits Brookman, “they are definitely exotic, something really off the- wall. I wanted to set the tone for what we are going to call the Artspace, previously known as the Festival Centre Gallery and the Bass Box Office, that funny space left over by the architect on the Plaza level. We want to re-launch that space as an area not just for visual arts but mixed media projects and these guys are perfect for that. They hang up on the wall in special harnesses and they are actually painted with acrylic paint and blend in with the canvases which tour with them.”
Brookman assured me that even if they hadn’t read Goldfinger they have worked out how long they can live covered entirely in acrylic paint. “Their leader Stephen Woodrow Wilson is a well-known performance artist in Britain and they have set attendance records in galleries all over the UK. People don’t just come for a gawp, it is an otherworldly experience to have the chance to look at people in a totally objectified way.”
The presentation and marketing of this season is a significant step in establishing and holding an audience between festivals. The Trust has had its troubles with some of its more recent ventures. Orphans, Cho Cho San, the Wars of the Roses, all did very dodgy business and, with huge advance bookings for The Mogs, the Cats Factor could swamp anything else that is offering although Brookman doesn’t think so. The Advertiser season he sees as horses for rather different courses. “But there is no doubt that some of our difficulties in the latter part of last year were price-related. It’s only logical when interest rates go up and tax cuts are always next year that times will be tough for those with kids and those in the mortgage belt.”
“We are trying to keep top prices low- so that whereas Twyla Tharp was $34 La La La will be $25. And after the huge success of the $10 previews we are trying to establish realistic concessions. So now they will be half price, not just a few dollars off. Tickets for students and other concession holders will now be around twelve or thirteen dollars.”
Brookman is the first to admit that there are risks here. “Whereas traditionally we would budget at 30% capacity with top ticket prices now we have to budget 80%. So it is a very big gamble. But there is a greater emphasis on encouraging people to plan and anticipate and we are reducing the risk factor by putting our imprimatur, as we have this season, on works of festival quality. We need to find contexts for things rather than hasty single promotions. We have to build sensibly on our marketing information.”
Murray Bramwell
“Another festive season” The Adelaide Review, January, 1989.