Paris Balla is used to having the rug suddenly pulled out from under their plans.
When they were 10, their sights were set on studying theatre at Melbourne University.
"For years, I was like, 'I'm going to go to Melbourne Uni because this place is magical'. And then they cut their double-degree program," Balla says.
Balla then settled on Monash University and the Centre for Theatre and Performance (CTP), an interdisciplinary research and teaching program, ranked 20th in the QS World University Rankings for Performing Arts.
"When I was going to some of the other universities that seemed like it was a privilege for you to be able to enter that building," Balla says.
"Whereas it felt like the CTP staff were just so excited to share the knowledge and share this world of thinking that they were creating."
Balla faced a few more hurdles over the years — including the university cutting the Bachelor of Performing Arts in 2013, and its decision to combine theatre and performance into a single major during Balla's studies.
And while Balla is now about to finish their honours at CTP, with a thesis exploring how theatre can be used to empower young people's climate activism, their plans for postgraduate study are in disarray.
Monash University has decided to close the centre, as a result of COVID-related budget pressures that are forcing it to cut 277 full-time staff members across the university (public universities are not eligible for JobKeeper).
Balla's story, of the ground beneath their creative ambitions constantly shifting, isn't isolated.
It's part of a pattern of cuts that are posing an existential threat to the already narrow pathways onto Australian stages.
'A skill in every area'
Prominent theatre-makers and leaders including playwright Patricia Cornelius and Malthouse Theatre artistic director Matthew Lutton have submitted statements to the Save Our CTP campaign to testify to the importance of the CTP in Australia's performing arts ecology.
Unlike more focused courses at prestigious drama schools like Sydney's National Institute for Dramatic Arts, students say a major in theatre and performance at the CTP is well-rounded and interdisciplinary.
"I went in thinking that probably I was an actor, along with most of my peers ... [but] by the end, I don't think anyone in my cohort called themselves an actor," Balla says.
"Rather we're theatre-makers who have skills in every area."
CTP is also the only major performance school that doesn't have auditions as part of its admissions process.
"We are completely inclusive," says former CTP director and current professor of theatre practice, Jane Montgomery Griffiths.
First-year student Evita Bonis says that "allows people that are very anxious and stressed out and maybe have some other issues, to partake".
Bonis chose Monash and the CTP because it was the only tertiary institution where she could major in both education and theatre and performance.
But once the university folds what remains of the CTP (it's proposed that 75 per cent of full-time, ongoing staff take voluntary redundancies) into the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, its theatre and performance major will be reduced to a minor.
Third-year theatre and psychology student Alex Bartaska had planned on studying his honours at CTP, with his sights on becoming an actor, director and forensic psychologist.
He's now concerned for his future, as well as the futures of prospective CTP students finishing their year 12 studies during a pandemic (the same students who are also facing doubled costs on their humanities degrees).
"This is not only frustrating for us having our education compromised, it's watching this crucial opportunity get stolen away from the future generations of storytellers," he says.
Monash says the changes were necessitated by a drop in revenue due to the pandemic, and consultation was an essential part of the process (though Balla, Bartaska and Bonis all say they were not consulted).
"The University will work with every student to ensure their major or minor completion is mapped out and they are aware of their options in advance of the re-enrolment period," a Monash spokesperson said.
'A self-fulfilling prophecy'
Theatre Works general manager Dianne Toulson has described the CTP — whose alumni include cabaret artist Mama Alto, Greenroom nominated director Daniel Lammin, and Max Afford Award-winning playwright Fleur Kilpatrick — as "a vital pathway for emerging artists".
The Australian Theatre For Young People (ATYP), another key part of the performing arts pipeline, is also being forced to recalibrate.
The Sydney-based organisation was amongst the 49 small-to-medium arts organisations that lost out on Australia Council for the Arts operational funding earlier this year.
From 2022, ATYP will lose more than 50 per cent of its funding, and there will only be three federally funded youth arts companies, down from 21 in 2007.
ATYP alumni include actors Nicole Kidman, Toni Collette, Rose Byrne and Rebel Wilson, as well as playwright Lally Katz.
Artistic director Fraser Corfield says they weren't given any reason why their application hadn't been successful.
"This sounds farcical, but it's true. The feedback was, there was nothing wrong with your application. There just wasn't enough money to go around," he says.
"What I take from that is that the Australia Council are saying 'We need help to get funding'."
ATYP — which plans to return to the newly-renovated Walsh Bay arts precinct in 2022 — will be looking to both the state and non-arts-funding bodies (focussing on the social benefits of their work) to fill funding gaps.
But if they aren't able to secure that, the national youth theatre will have to cut back on programming, including the subsidised programs that bring disadvantaged young people to theatre, and instead focus on more lucrative activities like workshops.
"We become a self-fulfilling prophecy: they say the arts are elite, and then you strip all the funding away, you're not able to engage communities and disadvantaged people in it. So the only people that can access it are people that can afford to pay for it," Corfield says.
When asked about pathways for young people in the performing arts, Corfield is frankly bemused.
"The idea of career pathways at the moment in the arts is kind of ludicrous ... it's really difficult for established and mid-career artists, let alone trying to set up a pipeline to get there."
'Stepping stone'
Sydney's PACT centre for emerging and experimental art is the kind of place graduates straight out of CTP (or fresh from majoring in theatre at the University of Newcastle, another course now suspended) could land.
But it's now under threat of closure.
It was amongst the 65 small-to-medium arts organisations that lost out on Australia Council for the Arts four-year operational funding in 2016 — a decision that came in the wake of then-arts minister George Brandis controversially siphoning $104.8 million away from the Australia Council into a discretionary arts fund.
In August, the company found out that it won't be receiving multi-year operational funding from Create NSW.
That leaves the 60-year-old organisation without certainty of funding for its core operations — for the first time in 20 years.
PACT had only recently been funded by Create NSW to trial a new leadership structure — a five-member artistic directorate of PACT alumni that includes dancer/choreographer Amrita Hepi, artist Nat Randall and artist, writer, researcher and performer Malcolm Whittaker.
Whittaker says he was first exposed to PACT as an audience member, when he was a university student.
"So first and foremost, it broadened my horizons as a young person," he recalls.
After finishing his undergraduate studies, PACT, as well as places like Eveleigh's Performance Space, became his "playground for a number of years".
Whittaker was part of the ImPACT Ensemble in 2008 and made a work titled Kansas (with Georgie Meagher) at PACT, which toured Australia, the UK and Finland in 2010.
Other PACT alumni include comedian and theatre maker Zoë Coombs Marr (Bossy Bottom), actor, writer and director Grahame Bond (Aunty Jack) and film director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock).
But Whittaker is hesitant to quantify and qualify the value of PACT through alumni and their works, instead focusing on how the Erskineville organisation "is so rich and wonderful in terms of the sort of community it forms, the learning experience, the fun that's had there, as well as the challenges".
He teaches theatre at the University of Wollongong and he says PACT is "a place that I send the students straight away".
If it didn't exist, he says students "would be without a significant stepping stone for their careers".
Beyond career pathways, Whittaker says PACT is an equally important location for artistic development; a place for artists to stay engaged with their artistic practice through residencies and workshops.
"There is always work to continue to refine your methodology, your practice, what it is you do," he says.
"That's not going to come to you overnight. Universities have a particular remit that we fulfill and places like PACT are there for the next stage."
Is this a doomsday moment for the arts?
PACT executive producer/CEO Nuala Furtado describes the organisation as "niche, nimble and responsive to the sector and the needs of artists", but says the loss of operational funding means it won't be sustainable into the future.
It's the artists who need PACT the most who will be hardest hit when it must scale-back programming and provide fewer opportunities for residencies and workshops than before.
Furtado says: "When you cut off smaller organisations that serve communities in ways that bigger organisations can't, quite often you're only servicing artists that have support networks already, that come from privileged backgrounds."
The federal funding cuts experienced by PACT in 2016 and ATYP now are not unique.
There has been a contraction in the number of small-to-medium arts companies receiving four-year operational funding from the Australia Council.
Prior to 2016, 147 small-to-medium arts companies received operational funding, but only 128 companies secured 2017-2020 funding, and this year only 95 organisations secured funding from 2021.
Corfield says these funding woes combined with the pandemic wreaking havoc on the entire arts industry have left him and his colleagues concerned for the future.
"We've been saying for years that we're approaching a kind of a doomsday moment with the industry. And I think we're there," he says.
Corfield says the only way out is if, in the next 18 months, there is a political shift that recognises how the arts has helped through the lockdown and "that participation in the arts is really key to a whole bunch of fundamental elements of Australian society".
In terms of the future of youth arts, Corfield wants the government to recognise the role that the arts play in the mental health of young people (who are being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19).
"The only thing that sort of seems to be stopping the arts from becoming part of this pathway forward is this ideological opposition to it, at the moment," he says.
Dreams of a future that's better
Back at Monash University and the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Balla says they are concerned about the future, but taking solace in the root of their research — which is in a theory known as "queer futurity".
"It's the idea that the current world that we live in is not good enough, and that we have to fight for and dream of a future that's better and make a future that we want to live in," Balla says.
"And I think that I can't possibly do that research without thinking that there is a future of theatre."
Balla, Bonis and Bartaska all have fight left in them.
"It's almost expected that at some point in the life of a creative arts person, you'll experience some kind of institutionalised adversity like this, it's almost like a rite of passage for each generation," Bartaska says.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMicGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTExLTE0L2F1c3RyYWxpYW4tdGhlYXRyZS1pbXBhY3Qtb2YtY292aWQtMTktZnVuZGluZy1jdXRzLXlvdXRoLXRoZWF0cmUvMTI4NzE2MDTSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTI4NzE2MDQ?oc=5
2020-11-13 21:35:00Z
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