Notes from the feral edge
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Nicolas Low
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Sunday night ended with a feast of dumpstered strawberries, eaten at banquet tables piled high with bark and leaves; music that might have once been '80s pop lurched through the crowd of diners, jostling sweaty boys with handlebar moustaches and girls in low fedoras. An awkward waiter grated carrot into my lap while, metres from my head, a woman was doused in wine then showered with eiderdown – a contemporary tarring-and-feathering for some unspecified crime. Here at the ‘world's worst theatre restaurant', no one knew what was happening. Half the patrons had left in disgust, the other half were calling their mates and telling them to come down. Another waiter tramped along the tables, knocking meals out of the way, refilling people's glasses with wine delivered from inside the fly of his trousers. The whole thing was horrible; fragmented; about to disintegrate into chaos, and perfect.
Day four of the 2008 This is Not Art (TiNA) Festival, and the mix of bug-eyed rapture and utter confusion on the faces around me suggested we were doing okay. It was a strange feeling to be surrounded by such improvised chaos, yet in some sense being ‘in charge' of it all. To the external observer, this particular show looked like it could collapse in a second – or perhaps already had. But after two years working on the festival, I felt surprisingly unstressed.
I thought back over my day. I'd introduced two of Europe's leading radical publishers to a captivated audience, biked to Newcastle's old jail to check on a five-hour endurance performance that involved performance artist and novelist Fiona McGregor sewing her lips shut, and mediated some verbal fireworks between a young anarchist arts writer and some big-name journalists. One of our panels, entitled ‘Rupert Murdoch is Not a Cunt', had failed to get off the ground – I discovered later that a key speaker had taken too much acid the night before, hammered himself to a Japanese noisecore artist and injured his eardrums – but by then it didn't matter. The festival was already a success. Since landing the job as a key organiser two years earlier, I'd witnessed a few events crash and burn without anyone batting an eyelid. I'd even seen the whole organisation come close to disintegrating and had participated in a massive rebuilding effort as a result. Sitting there in the world's worst theatre restaurant, I knew that risk, experimentation and even the distinct possibility of failure were the festival's life-blood. Things might go wrong, but that was both understood and vital. I brushed the carrot out of my lap and settled in to watch the show.
AT THE TIME OF WRITING THIS ARTICLE, I'm in my final days working on TiNA, an annual creative bender held in Newcastle, New South Wales over the October long weekend. In a sense, TiNA doesn't exist: it's not an organisation or central bureaucracy, but rather a decentred cluster of independent events that combines a writers' festival (National Young Writers' Festival), an electronic arts festival (Electrofringe), an indy hiphop and electronica conference (Sound Summit) and a creative academic forum (Critical Animals). The component festivals share venues and artists and publish a single program that refuses to reveal who's organising what. Each component festival within TiNA is self-contained and run by young, emerging curators and directors. They don't have offices, full-time staff or equipment – or wages. The festivals are put together on the idea of the smell of an oily rag, without any of the top-heavy bureaucracies you might expect. Meanwhile, according to a Newcastle City Council-commissioned research project, TiNA brings well over a million dollars into the local economy every year.
TiNA has outlasted its initial creative impulse because it functions as a kind of artistic ecosystem. Self-contained festivals spring up to harness and amplify new creative, and social and political energy; they can also leave or die out completely, providing a kind of dynamic equilibrium. Over the years TiNA has blitzed Newcastle's walls with a stencil and graffiti program called Strike, brought community radio stations together for a conference, hosted student newspaper editors at the National Student and Emerging Media Conference, and for years housed the country's best collection of dreadlocks at the Earthling environmental activism conference. At present moves are afoot for a new experimental theatre festival to join TiNA in 2009. When the animating creativity moves on, a festival can vanish back into the ether without any significant impact on the overall structure. In 2006 the NSEMC left the building (thanks, VSU). The Earthling environmental activism conference erased itself completely after the organisers decided the premise of a national festival was unsustainable in its dependence on air travel. At some point in the future, I may even argue that the NYWF itself needs to be quietly taken out the back and shot.
All this is a far cry from the multitude of Jurassic arts bureaucracies that have staked out their patch, paid their rent, paid their staff and spend their time desperately searching for the action. Organisations can't create creativity. They can support and amplify pre-existing creativity, but they will rarely conjure the genuinely new out of thin air. There are exceptions – Chunky Move's ‘Two Faced Bastard' is an excellent recent example – but many arts companies and organisations are bound by their formal structures. The risk-aversion that size and stature entail leaves them in a frighteningly expensive holding pattern.
TiNA has the ability and the willingness to create and shed entire festivals as they are needed and, as long as no one component or person becomes too dominant, individual failures can be absorbed and even feed into the overall health of the organism. As I found out at first hand, this presents its own set of problems and stresses. But it does mean artists can try out new ideas and young organisers can take a punt on a new direction or philosophy of curation. Taken together, these elements produce a creative environment that enables risks to be taken at every level. As Anna Funder wrote in The Monthly in October 2007, the resulting atmosphere is ‘engaged, hopeful, electric'.
IN SEPTEMBER 2004, IN A CAVERNOUS RAILWAY SHED with a tin roof, I lost my mind. The Bedroom Philosopher, a guy with a reputation for clever lyrics, climbed on stage holding a wooden fish and a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. He looked stressed; drowned by noise from the bar and the relentless drumming of southerly rain, he took one look at the assembled crowd then, without warning or premeditation, proceeded to destroy the stage. I won't attempt a blow-by-blow account of what happened (largely because I can't remember much) but I will say that the racing section of the SMH somehow attached itself to his glasses to form fish-like gills; he lost a violent wrestling match with a microphone stand; and at one point he stopped and deadpanned an interview with himself about the nature of comedy. It was one of the most inexplicable and hysterically funny things I'd ever seen and was born entirely out of the fact that the festival club acoustics were unworkable. The whole thing was a total, glorious fuckup.
This was my first experience of TiNA. As a twenty-four-year-old fresh-off-the-boat Kiwi, it was a revelation. The festival had a radically down to earth nature, bringing me into conversation with hundreds of the most creative people I'd ever met. I'd previously worked as a graphic designer, but buoyed by the TiNA community's enthusiasm, writing, organising and art-making seemed not only possible, they seemed like the most natural acts in the world. From my first taste as a punter in 2004, I got involved in a huge range of projects and by the end of 2006, found myself flying up to Newcastle with fellow punters Tom Doig and Kelly-lee Hickey to be interviewed for the job of running the NYWF. We lay on Nobby's Beach and talked through hundreds of different scenarios in preparation. We thought we were ready for anything.
I'm looking now at a photo taken when we found out we'd got the job. We're out of focus, my eyes are closed, all three of us are wearing a look of sunburned ecstasy. We'd just inherited a festival with a long, proud history. I couldn't wait to find out how it all worked.
Over the next twelve months, it became apparent that it didn't work at all.
The 2006 NYWF directors had all quit a couple of months out from the event, leaving us – the 2007 directors and a collection of hastily assembled volunteers – with roughly six weeks to scramble together something for that year. The first agenda item from a meeting held nine days out from the 2006 festival reads: ‘Damage control – what we can do to make it happen and stay sane.' The festival did happen, though there wasn't much sanity. We somehow pulled it together using a more extreme version of decentred organising – the terror-cell model, where nobody had a clue what anyone else was doing.
When the dust settled from 2006, we discovered the festival we'd inherited owed over $10,000 to creditors, the previous operating body the Octapod had temporarily ceased trading, and was being investigated to work out what had gone wrong. The lack of support for previous young NYWF directors meant that many had collapsed in a heap the minute the festival was over. As a result there was barely any documentation or process relating to the NYWF, and little to show that the festival had been done eight times before. We found some old funding applications which bore only passing resemblance to the actual event, and a large box marked ‘NYWF'. Inside were staplers, scissors, butcher's paper and felt-tip pens. All the tools needed to run a lunchtime play session at a kindergarten. Perfect. We'd inherited a great big black hole. The chaos that was so enticing when I first encountered the festival was now my own personal nightmare.