Disrupt – Drastically alter or destroy the structure of…. In this case, theatre. By political apathy, or evolution, time, fashion, apathy, market forces. Like the well-made play of another era, traditional skills of the playwright are out of fashion, no longer needed, set aside. Disrupted. Drastically altered, perhaps even structurally destroyed. I don’t care. Playwriting and theatre-making aren’t the same thing. The playwriting isn’t important. The theatre-making is.
Burnie, on the North West coast of Tasmania was once called Emu Bay. There were actual emus when the Van Diemens Land Company first came, but the emus are extinct now, the cultures of original inhabitants of the land displaced by stern Christianity. The 20th century was about factories, the paper mill, toxic chemical spills, layoffs, financial and social disadvantage. Now the port, the woodchip exports and former senator Jacqui Lambie, Burnie’s beloved daughter (heart-on-sleeve working class political aspirant, xenophobe, bachelorette, battler), live cheek by jowl with academics, greenies, and now ubiquitous bearded baristas, surrounded by a wild landscape of indescribable magnificence.
I am new to the neighbourhood. I’m here to design a festival for this community, and theatre will be at this festival’s heart. My gut tells me that in a place like this, theatre can still matter. Sitting together and telling stories matters. If our theatre is insipid and toothless it’s our fault, and that matters too. Responding to the insidious violence of word weaponry in the world outside is the beautiful violence of word weaponry in theatre.
Words matter. Language matters. Language and words aren’t the same thing. Language is a contested thing for the Traditional Owners of Tasmania’s North West. We will create, choose, design for our festival a theatre language with whatever it takes to connect people. Whatever it takes to welcome, to let conversation flow inside and outside the performance space, to share ideas and feelings, to share time, and breath, and human experience. The language we create for our audiences will peel back our equipoise, show our raw flesh, expose our terrible secrets, celebrate our best selves and the epic in the banal, make visible our nocturnal ramblings, stir us to irrational fury, move us to tears of joy and wound the heart.
It won’t be formal. It won’t be expensive. It won’t be grand. Our festival will be Burnie itself, a meeting place for real people and great art experiences amid local streets, beaches, industrial precincts, workplaces, suburbs and civic spaces. Our theatre languages – not one, but many – will reflect the myriad visual, physical, social, musical and storytelling lives of our place and time, in the local vernaculars.
This is personal, it’s now my neighbourhood too.
There won’t be a playwright anywhere near it. But there will be theatre, and theatre makers everywhere.
Lindy Hume is the artistic director of Ten Days on the Island 2019 and 2021
4 July 2018