H_ME W_RK
On thinking about audiences at an abstract level
Nithya
I think of a creative process in the same way I think of my spiritual practice. It is one of seeking and always being in search of truth. I think if you can orient yourself and your team to invest in the pursuit of that central question or provocation as truthfully as possible through your craft, that will translate to a very wide audience. That will have a kind of universality. I'm not necessarily thinking about the audience in a very literal sense i.e. who is in the room at the very beginning. But I think that the amount of integrity that underpins the pursuit of truth in your process will equate to its universality. On a practical level, as an audience member who experiences a lot of work in a lot of contexts, I love to see the clarity of an artist’s vital force or driving question or voice in the world. I absolutely hate theatre’s bad habit of spoon-feeding audiences, of undermining their intelligence. It allows for a laziness while seated in the dark and creates an unequal power dynamic where all the labour rests on the shoulders of the artists. Ultimately, it destroys public imagination which is central to engaged citizenry.
Zainab
As a producer, I think of audiences very differently from you. If the artist knows what they're making, why they're making it, and for whom, it's my job then to make sure the work meets its intended audience. I think about audiences from the beginning – not as an afterthought a few weeks before the show opens. It’s important for me to consider what is the relationship of the audience to the work? How can I build that relationship from the beginning so they journey alongside the work? When you can do that, then you have people who feel personally invested in the success of a work. That's the psychological buy-in that you want. That’s how you build community – when the relationship between the work and its audience goes beyond the transactional. During Layla Majnun, I held storytelling events with the lead creative for two years to get a Perth audience familiar with Mojadedi’s work, to develop a relationship with the venue we were going to present in, and for our regular theatregoers to find a way to get to know him. When the show finally premiered it was a beautiful explosion of celebration and community. It sold out with audiences who had never heard of the story, and those who had never been to the theatre gathering together to witness the magic of live performance.
At present, we are making a new work together built on our foundational trust as artist-producers. It is a one-woman show about coming of age in a culture of abuse set between Chennai and Sydney, and inspired by true events, co-created with theatremaker Liv Satchell and a wider creative team including dramaturg S. Shakthidharan, actor Vaishnavi Suryaprakash, sound director, composer and musician Marco Cher-Gibard, violinist Bhairavi Raman. We have been thinking about the audiences from the very beginning of this work. As the work focuses on intimate partner violence and the systems that allow it to continue without any respite for women in South Asian communities, we are very clear that we want South Asian audiences from the diaspora, here and globally to engage with this work. It is first and foremost for them.
While violence against women is a global condition, to arrive at the holy chalice of liberation, we need to be asking tougher questions of ourselves and our own communities. As a team, we have spoken at length about the work, meeting young people, teachers, lawyers, journalists and survivors of domestic violence as intended primary audiences. We also regularly speak to what can exist in dialogue with the work, considerations of how audiences will enter the foyer and leave the space and public programs that can illuminate some of the central themes of the work. We have a Safety Adviser who has been advising on psychological safety of the room and eventually of audiences as we build the work from the ground up. These are not answers that are easy to arrive at from the beginning of a process. It usually takes the oxygen between development blocks to arrive at responses so as not to dilute the answer to “this work is for everybody”. Of course, all successful work is for everybody, but first and fundamentally it must be for somebody.
Back in 2002, The New York Times wrote that 80% of people believe they have a book in them, which means that most people believe they have a story to share with the world. We are interested in projects where artists cannot resist the urge to tell that story. Both of us have portfolio careers in the arts. Our work spans art-making, facilitating space for others to make art, platforming artists to share their art, teaching at regular intervals and advocating for structural change. This enriches our 360° view of the sector and provides a clarity of the pipeline for new voices and new works. There is no easy way to demystify the process of making new work and there are no templates to follow to make new work, particularly if the forms are experimental. We mine the material to choreograph a duet of form and content in all works we make, and this is the process we hope to share with the next generation of artists so we decentralise power. In doing so, we also build capabilities within environments where these formulas are typically solely accessible to those with formal education in the arts: How to write a grant application? How to structure creative development? How to build a community engagement plan? This kind of institutional labour brings with it ascendant forces such as institutional racism, invisible labour and the burden of representation which we are consistently negotiating, sometimes well and sometimes leaving much to be desired. In Legacy Russell’s 2020 book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Russell states ‘The glitch challenges us to consider how we can penetrate… break… puncture… tear the material of the institution… [to become] a revolutionary catalyst.’ In this pursuit of catalysing change, we remind each other and ourselves not to take ourselves too seriously – to always make room for curiosity, for play, for error and to always reserve the right to keep our own counsel.
Table of Contents
Part One
We never talk about God in the theatre. Or, spirituality. Why?
On thinking about audiences at an abstract level
On taking work to audiences outside of traditional spaces
Zainab shares her process of producing Black Brass
Nithya on co-creating Outwitted! for Happenstance festival
Part Two
In conversation with Jay Emmanuel
In conversation with Ravi Jain
In conversation with Shahid Nadeem
In conversation with Jacob Rajan
In conversation with Durga Bishwokarma
