Murray Bramwell interviews Andrew Bleby, incoming Program Director, Adelaide Festival Centre Trust.
This year brings some interesting changes for arts administrator Andrew Bleby. After he has finished his third stint at the centre of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival in May he will return to his home town Adelaide, to take up a three year appointment as Program Director for the Festival Centre Trust.
Andrew first worked as Education Officer with the Festival Centre between 1977 and 1982 and in 1981 was the joint co-ordinator of the first Come Out Festival. He also ran the Australian International Puppet Festival in 1982 and ’83 before becoming Assistant Director of Carclew Youth Performing Arts Centre in 1984. Then, in 1986, he worked as Project Manager for the revamping of the Odeon Theatre in Adelaide.
Add to this five years’ association with Next Wave programming and you have quite a few flying hours in arts planning and management, not to mention in the business of predicting the inscrutable proclivities and responses of a variety of audiences. Bleby will have a good chance to test his nose for programming when he takes over from present Director, Rob Brookman, who as Artistic Director for the 1992 Adelaide Festival, now has other things on his mind.
He makes no secret of the fact that he finds the job appealing. “The Festival Centre has a terrific reputation around the country both as an initiator of work that tours and as a place to visit on tour. Because Adelaide is comparatively smaller than Melbourne and Sydney it doesn’t have the same vast infrastructure of things going on. It relies more on imports and it is the centre of it all, not just one of the venues where things happen. So a lot of the interesting ‘stuff that occurs around the country comes to the Festival Centre.
“I guess it has to work harder than some venues at filling its spaces because of the smaller population and the fact that it has to initiate things itself means that the Centre has to take more risks to keep it going . . . From the figures it looks as though the last few years have been steadily improving and becoming more successful. I guess that’s a tribute to Rob Brookman as
much as anyone.”
“It is a great advantage for me to come in to take over from Rob Brookman – things work well, systems run well, so I haven’t been thrown in the deep end. I’ve worked with Rob a lot and we go back a long time. We have similar ideas about the role of the Arts and an Arts Centre-and of the sort of risks you need to take, as well as an awareness of getting audiences in and getting the marketing right so things are well used and well seen. He has also got that sense of adventure that the Adelaide Festival has succeeded in inculcating in people around the Festival Centre. It’s not just a place where you do sure fire hits and car launches.”
In recent years the Trust has had its problems filling houses in the months after the Festival. I asked Andrew whether he thought his task would be a perilous one. “It’s hard to work out whether Adelaide audiences are discriminating or fickle. If you could work that one out you’d really solve the problem. There’s a lot of unpredictability in the theatre -things you think are going to be sure-fire aren’t and other things make it when you don’t think they will. I haven’t met anyone yet who’s got the formula. What you can do is encourage people to take risks -you can let them know that it is an adventurous work if you pitch it at the right level.”
As costs rise and times become harder for many, I asked Andrew whether he thought there was a ‘lost’ audience for the Arts trapped in the mortgage belt. “Unfortunately it is part of the economics of live theatre that, being a labour intensive industry, it is expensive. So to produce a medium-sized show and charge the same price as the cinema is almost impossible unless you pour subsidy into it.
“One of the great things about a place like the Festival Centre is that although there is not actually a lot of subsidy to go into shows -it does quite well out of box office. There is an amount of discretion you can use because you don’t have to make a profit on everything. You get to make some choices about your priorities and what prices you charge so that some shows you budget to break even or make a big profit, or even make a loss, because you think it is important that it be seen.
“I think it is a real problem generally that it is expensive to go out. On the other hand you find people who are not wealthy who still spend a lot of money on theatre because it is high on their priorities. Some people will not blink at spending $50 on wine but baulk at spending $25 a week on theatre. It’s a very personal thing.”
What about programming for younger audiences? “There is a lot in theatre and the performing arts which is not in tune with young audiences but there are also offerings young people could become attuned to but haven’t yet got the background or experience to appreciate and understand. With rock and roll, the media helps them become familiar with the material before they go to a performance, whereas they take a risk on unknown theatre. If there was the same sort of media entree you would find they would readily go along. I think one of the roles the Festival Centre has fulfilled for some time is in connecting young people to the Arts. But it is not just the task of a state government subsidised Arts Centre. It has to be done on a whole lot of levels.
“One of the reasons for setting up the Next Wave festival was to get professional theatre companies to offer some of their work to young audiences and to involve them andconsider them an important part of their public, as well as develop and show the work and energy of young artists. In general, to forge a stronger connection between young people and the Arts so that they feel more comfortable and attracted to the Arts.
“I think the education programs at the Festival Centre and in other Arts Centres around the country are extremely important but they can’t work in isolation. One of my biggest disappointments at the moment is the way in which Education Departments are backing away from their responsibilities with that. The Festival Centre has just appointed a second person in the education section but that still doesn’t match up to some others around the country, especially when it used to be a leader in Australia. People looked to the Festival Centre and the Education Department in particular, as an example. When you compare what Education Departments are doing today with what they were doing ten years ago you find a very bleak picture indeed.
“They’ve chopped Theatre In Education companies, they’ve chopped music and art advisers and drama teachers. The whole thing is slipping back massively. A lot of it is the economic rationalist argument about education. They are saying you do the arts stuff and we’ll do everything else. But it can’t work that way. If the Arts don’t become an integral part of education then we are not only going to have trouble with audiences – that’s by the bye – the crucial thing is that people have to grow up with the Arts to be reasonable human beings. Otherwise we’ll all just be out there making money and killing one another.”
I asked Andrew about his own program preferences and what ingredients he looks for in a production? “I see a lot of shows and some I like and some I don’t and often my opinion is neither here nor there. But there is one class of show which I don’t see very often but which every programmer is on the look out for. It almost hits you physically, something which is powerful emotionally and makes you laugh or cry – I’m a sucker for that. Another appeal is with a performance that is so loaded with energy that you pick up on it as an audience – that’s what I find good about the best young people’s theatre. Another element is an intellectual thing – although not everybody likes to have their intellect tickled. But if a show has ideas in it which you have not heard in other ways, that will strike a chord. That’s getting harder to do as a lot are coming from other media – print, TV and radio.
“Theatre has a great potential for exploring more of these links. The artificial distinctions between artforms are breaking down. This needs to happen to keep the performing arts alive and at the head of people’s thinking. If they’d stayed the way they were before film and TV they would have quickly lost relevance. It is not just a matter of being there live and sharing the experience of the performance – it has to have something more to offer that’s over and above those other media it competes with. Even talking in straight commercial terms – when you get a show on you are not only persuading people to leave their TV and movies, you are trying to drag them out of the dance clubs, restaurants and discos. The question is- can you give them a better time sitting in a darkened room watching something than if they were eating, drinking or reading a book?”
“More than Sure-Fire Hits and Car Launches “, Lowdown, Vol.12, No.1, February, 1990, pp.18-20.