Response to review of Corporate
by Robert William Doran
I write in response to the review of the independent production, Corporate.
In her review, Ms Cotes has drawn a long bow in her effort to defame, through association, The Actors Workshop, a leading private provider of training for actors.
Firstly, let’s deal with some facts.
Half way through her review, Ms Cotes makes the statement “Almost everyone in the cast is a product of The Actors Workshop.” This view is drawn from an obviously lazy and cursory review of the program.
Of the eighteen cast members, only three are graduates of the theatre program for the college. Each of these individuals, talented as they are, committed their skills to minor chorus and cameo roles. A further three cast members were current theatre students of the college, taking the opportunity to apply their formative skills in the public arena. This is called “work experience” and generally accepted as a rite of theatrical passage.
Of the remaining twelve cast members, six of them have no association with the college whatsoever and the final six are part time, film and television students. In other words, these dozen cast members have drawn on their theatrical training and experience (or lack thereof) from other prominent Brisbane arts organisations, each of which are clearly denoted in the show’s program, yet notably absent in Ms Cotes’ condemnation.
Anyone who bought a program would note that The Actors Workshop was a minor sponsor, not the producer, evident by the relegation of the corporate logo to a small corner of the back page and the citation of its name through cast bios in a variety of misspelled and wrongly punctuated versions. Yet Ms Cotes suggests the show is a direct product of the college. By this reasoning, every dismal failure bearing an Arts Queensland logo on its poster, lends credence to the argument that the department has failed in its agenda. Yet still it continues to be the font of social security for the local theatre community. Go figure.
Ms Cotes goes on to assert the lack of professionalism in theatrical training at the college. It is worth noting that from its inception until early this year, the theatre program of the college has been delivered by one of Brisbane’s most prolific, independent directors, a leading academic in theatre and a current theatrical reviewer for a national broadsheet. To imply a lack of credible tuition is to assert a disparaging blight on one of Brisbane’s finest theatrical lights. One celebrated, I might add, by the Matilda Awards, for which Ms Cotes takes founding credit in her own bio.
Further, Ms Cotes draws comparison of the production to that of a “graduation night of an expensive talent school”. Herein lies yet another long perpetuated untruth, propagated by the chattering jaws of green room gossip circles.
Yes, the clients of the college make a substantial investment in their training. They also receive a greater return on investment than from any other training provider. In this statement I include all other private sector players as well as the hallowed halls of our tertiary (read: tax payer funded) institutions. With the current and growing HECS rates and the hidden real costs of tax payer subsidies for tertiary tuition, The Actors Workshop (as an independent, non-funded college) can boast a lower per hour training cost than any other provider.
In addition, it is the only provider that offers fully integrated training for both the live medium (theatre) and screen (film and television) throughout the duration of training. It is for this reason the college has received both the Queensland Training Award and the Kinetone Award, from the training, film and television industries respectively.
In the ten years the college has been operational; it has produced a little over one hundred graduates. Far from the client base akin to the exploitative, commercial monster it is asserted to be by ignorant critics. This is due to the founder’s recognition that employment opportunities in industry are limited and to flood the sector with graduates would be disingenuous.
Ms Cotes’ further reference to the cast as “pretty prancing ponies” is an absolutely outrageous offence. Some of these young people commit dozens of hours a week to training in their craft and spend the rest of their time working part time jobs to support and educate themselves. To dismiss them in such a manner exposes Ms Cotes’ lack of appreciation of how hard young artists work and the sacrifices they make, let alone the potential contribution they can offer to the industry in the decades still ahead of them.
Further, having attacked the college as the progenitive source of the production, Ms Cotes then goes on to encourage the actual producer to go forth and create. After taking the opportunity to defame an entity with no responsibility for the show, she wishes all the best for the latent and undeveloped potential of the actual author of the event. It is here that Ms Cotes exposes the bias which has so skewed her review. But more of that later….
As anyone, who has suffered the slings and arrows of emerging in this industry knows, any developing creative who demonstrates and exercises potential in all three key creative roles of writing, producing and starring, in a single production, is bound to compromise each contribution. Such was the case in this show. Even more reason to tip our collective hats to the young director, who saw the show through to a successful season in the face of such obstacles.
I am in full agreement that the show left much to be desired. It stretched a potential 60 minute sprint of cabaret comedy into a 2 hour, marathon exposition, of a bottom feeding sub section of our society: the legal fraternity.
Yet, even as I cringed (as no doubt did Ms Cotes) at the most offensive parts of the play (picture: the office Playboy crooning about fornication to woo a naive paralegal), the crowd surrounding me doubled over in their seats with laughter, like a Mexican wave struck with polio. If the purpose of theatre is to hold up a mirror to society, then there can be no denial of the dramatic irony in a full house of lawyers, corporates, paralegals and partners, whooping in delighted recognition of their own base nature. It would be akin to a crowd of public arts workers, wetting themselves at the high camp antics of “Run for your Funding” or “Whose Grant Is It Anyway?”
Bottom line: Loulabelle Productions sourced corporate sponsorship, independently staged a season of new work and sold their product to an eager and appreciative market. The show was a sell out. This is more than can be said for many “legitimate” theatre offerings cited by Ms Cotes as reputable benchmarks. The reader knows the story: full houses on opening night where the usual suspects accept a free ticket, quaff the champers and snicker snide gossip at the failings of the event. Followed by a couple of weeks performances where the absence of an audience echoes off the venue walls and taunts the tortured performer at every line.
What a shame it is that commercially successful arts ventures are derided for their lack of integrity by the “authorised” arts community. Who cares if it isn’t Ms Cotes’ cup of tea? Not the hundreds of patrons who happily dipped into their own pockets to enjoy the show.
Thus we come to the real disease at the root of this issue.
In her defence, Ms Cotes is simply symptomatic of the ill that grips our arts culture. As her own bio notes, she has been a proponent of arts criticism for over twenty five years. This means she has ridden the highs and lows of our creative culture for the best part of the past three generations of public funded arts enterprise.
Thirty odd years ago, arts funding came as a euphoric relief to those who sacrificed all to be creative. Today, our potential artists learn how to apply for public funding as a core subject at university and the presiding attitude is that if you are not suckled at the teat of the mother ship, Arts Queensland, then you can’t possibly expect to be taken seriously.
This is exactly the ignorance and discrimination that The Actors Workshop has faced at every turn of its evolution. From its formative years as a tenant of Metro Arts to its award winning success as a leader of its field, the college still suffers snickers and diatribes from the ignorant, public arts sector, most of whom have never even visited the college, met the proponent, or taken advantage of the opportunity to view the prodigious, creative output of its initiates. (The college holds public performances as assessment benchmarks three times a year, all of which play to packed public houses: standing room only.)
Why? In an arts culture that propagates the philosophy that “real” art can’t be commercially successful, an arts training venture that demonstrates creative integrity balanced against commercial viability, is clearly a threat. Deep in the collective unconscious of the creative community lies the repressed truth that arts for the artists’ sake is an unsustainable proposition. Van Gogh lacked the dole of an arts department. His survival was at the pleasure of benefactors who appreciated his craft enough to keep him alive. He found his market. Does this mean he was a sell out?
Yet the water wheel of tax payer donations continues to dip. Even as our arts community circles it wagons and sits around the campfire, deploring the broader community’s lack of artistic taste and propagating policy to educate the general public about art, the rest of the nation goes about its business, donating taxes involuntarily to the public arts benevolence fund and spending private dollars to watch a pig skin punted around a playing field.
So, Ms Cotes, with your “Fred Astaire” quotes and your weeping lamentations for Helen, Greer and other pioneering women of the past century, consider this: the Theatre is perennially in the cycle of death and rebirth. Let it die and let it live and get behind the future. To demand perpetuity of baby boomer values is to deny the future of the craft and to expect the current and emergent generations of artists to prescribe to a last century point of view. If you are appalled by commercially successful shows, however base: don’t go. Proxy your criticism to a younger reviewer with the scope to recognise that, if the public value it with their votes at the box office, then no matter how hallowed the arts intelligentsia point of view may be, public demand must always hold more value than public policy.
I have no doubt the cited “thousand unique visitors a week” to this website will contain a vast number of publicly sponsored initiates and veterans, as keen to demonstrate their passion for high art as they are to prove their credentials to the arts managers they hope to impress. I invite them to respond directly to me and not repeat the ugliness of Ms Cotes behaviour in making an unjustified attack on a college with no responsibility for the subject of review.
I have had the unique opportunity to work with the founder of The Actors Workshop over nearly a decade, in evolving her college into the essential resource it is today. (Amongst other things, it supplies over a thousand work hours each year to community, tertiary and industry initiatives, free of charge.) I have held this position as a stakeholder of a private beast in a public zoo, allowing a unique perspective of the public arts community, in all its faults and follies. In particular, the arrogance, ignorance and obtuse attitudes constantly shown to the college by public arts workers, from tertiary undergraduates to celebrated artists, lining up for their dole.
Finally, having recently ceased employment with the college, I am now free to express an independent point of view, no longer restricted by the grace and good character of the founder of the college, who has always favoured turning the other cheek to discrimination and ignorance and who would no doubt be appalled by my direct response to Ms Cotes. In short, the views expressed above are mine and mine alone. Any respondents should aim their grievances at me directly.
In closing, I add this. Any other media that publishes to the public domain is bound by a fiduciary duty of care to print corrections or apologies where content is found to be false or misleading. I hope the editors of this website hold their responsibilities in such regard. At the very least, the invitation to contribute “conflicting reviews”, “opinion columns” and “feedback” would suggest a forum for the views expressed above to be made available to subscribers, so they might make a balanced decision on the nature of the view expressed by Ms Cotes.
Written in good faith and with the utmost sincerity,
Robert William Doran
adlib_amalgam@bigpond.com
7 May 2006
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