Artists face an uncertain future

Surrounded by some of the characters that have sprung to life over nearly 35 years of Spare Parts Puppet Theatre shows, Philip Mitchell is rightly proud.

Spare Parts has just wrapped up a Goldfields and Wheatbelt tour of Blueback, its fishy tale based on Tim Winton’s children’s book, before the show begins a school holiday season at its Fremantle theatre next weekend.

The company, recently named Fremantle’s business of the year for 2015, also has sealed a deal to run a new puppetry and visual theatre unit at the WA Academy of Performing Arts to supplement its own in-house training program FirstHand, the only one of its kind in Australia.

Mitchell says Spare Parts is punching well above its weight as artists and cultural organisations around the country face an uncertain future after shock changes to Federal funding.

“We are in a vibrant state of creating new work and touring,” he says. “Unlike our colleagues at Deckchair Theatre, and Fly By Night and Kulcha, all those companies whose business models weren’t robust enough to survive.”

Spare Parts, Australia’s oldest puppetry company, was one of many companies left hanging last month when the Australia Council suspended a new six-year funding program after Canberra stripped $110 million from its budget over four years.

Federal Arts Minister George Brandis has diverted the money — 28 per cent of the Australia Council’s discretionary spending — into a new fund called the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts to be run by his department. Details of how it will work will be revealed next month.

The nation’s 28 major performing arts companies — including the WA Symphony Orchestra, WA Opera, Black Swan State Theatre Company and WA Ballet — have been quarantined from the changes so individual artists, smaller companies and grassroots arts organisations will be hit hardest.

The decision, taken without consultation with the arts sector, has sparked protests around the country and a Senate inquiry. Critics say it will cause needless bureaucratic duplication, threaten the viability of smaller community arts groups, stifle innovation and undermine the long-standing bipartisan principle of arms-length funding to avoid political interference in the arts.

Leading stage and film director Neil Armfield, in Perth to direct The Marriage of Figaro for WA Opera, said the move was outrageous and appalling. “It’s the most significant shift in the relationship between government and the artists of the country in 40 years, since the establishment of the Australia Council,” Armfield said.

“It’s a very difficult thing to set up and maintain a practice of arms-length arts funding and that is a process that requires constant monitoring and shaping as the culture develops.

“But this is effectively a third of the money that is there for small to medium companies, which has just been grabbed by (Senator) Brandis and is being used as what seems to be a discretionary fund.

“Who wants to be critical if you’re dependent on funding, who wants to be critical of the person who’s now got the dough to distribute? It’s thrown the whole industry into a kind of chaos, and particularly those small companies like (Perth’s) Yirra Yaakin ... the companies that are actually doing the most development of new Australian work.

“When everyone is insecure about their own financial viability, it puts everyone at each other’s throats. And the larger companies, those in the major organisations, the so-called major organisation companies, are quite shamefully keeping shtum about it.”

Small companies and independent artists, the backbone of Fringe World and community arts events around the State, are the innovators creating works that might one day become the classics of tomorrow.

Independent artist and producer Sarah Rowbottam has ranged across the “arts ecosystem”, working on events such as the Perth International Arts Festival that attract hundreds of thousands of people and intimate shows designed for just one audience member at a time.

With the help of a $47,500 Australia Council grant and co-curator Kelli McCluskey, Rowbottam will mount the annual Proximity Festival at the Art Gallery of WA in October, Australia's first microfestival of one-on-one performance art.

“I really don’t know if that support is really going to exist in the future,” she said. “I feel lucky to have got it but my main concern is everybody else who comes after me.”

She was anxious to see how Senator Brandis would define “excellence” in his new program. “It is an interesting language to use when you are talking about art. It is an incredibly subjective thing. It brings up so many questions, problems and deliberations around it.”

Senator Brandis said the pot of Federal arts money had not been diminished and the new program would break down the Australia Council’s “monopoly” to open funding to a broader range of applicants.

It would take a sensible middle course between peer-assessed grants at arms-length from government and funds endorsed by him “so the minister can be answerable for it”, he told a Senate estimates committee.

Mitchell said it was very disappointing not to see the six-year funding program go ahead but hoped it might pave the way for a better deal for WA artists in the long run.

A new report for the Chamber of Arts and Culture WA has confirmed that WA gets the lowest level of Federal arts funding of any State, just 6.8 per cent of the total despite comprising 11 per cent of the national population. The State Government had been filling some of the gap with the most generous arts funding in the country, the report found.

“Whatever this national program for excellence does, I hope it is used for greater distribution of Federal funds around the States,” Mitchell said. “It is really the uncertainty around whether WA will have a say in the distribution of this new pool of money.”

Though Spare Parts had applied for six-year funding through the Australia Council, it has become more resilient to financial headwinds after diversifying its revenue base to clear debts incurred when it hosted the UNIMA World Puppetry Festival in 2008.

It now earns a healthy 60 per cent of its income through the box office and had strengthened its sponsorship base through strategic partnerships with Hawaiian, BHP Billiton, the CBH Group and Colgar Wind Farms to support regional tours and the creation of new shows.

“It is hard work but we are finding that matching our projects to a partner is a successful way forward,” Mitchell said. “In the past we have gone, ‘Give us money because we are great’. Now it is, ‘Give us money and we will work in the community that you consider important’.”

The Chamber of Arts and Culture WA report, by arts consultant Barry Strickland, said WA’s second-tier arts outfits such as Spare Parts were delivering a big bang for the taxpayers’ buck but were particularly vulnerable to funding cuts.

The report found that WA’s 45 small to medium arts organisations — whose activities encompassed such areas as health, education, economic development, community wellbeing and disability services — generated $6 for every dollar spent on them by the State Government.

In 2013, they had a total paying audience of more than 1.2 million, with another of 636,600 people attending free events. They generated an income of $61 million from a State investment of $10.8 million but 10 of them traded in a deficit in 2013.

Chamber executive director Henry Boston said the report highlighted the vital role they played.

“The size of the State, the cost of touring large companies and the few major arts organisations located here have meant that the small to medium organisations do much of the heavy lifting,” Mr Boston said.