This week, Noises off has birthday cake for everyone. Yes, it has been exactly a year since Kelly Nestruck gave birth to this column, which has, for the last 12 months, been charging round the blogosphere like a hyperactive toddler. Yet this is not the only blogday that the web has seen recently. George Hunka has recently been looking back over a whopping five years of his site which he initially christened Superfluities and then renamed Superfluities Redux.
This has been a major project for Hunka, and as he says: "Superfluities has changed my life in countless ways ... not least in that it has brought to me a few new friends who have broadened my world and my imaginative life, and whose acquaintance I cherish ... Some of them I haven't met in person. I hope to do so one day, though this in no way lessens the tremendous affection and regard I hold for them already; those days on which I find their emails in my inbox are a little brighter than all the rest. And I find as my conceptions and reconceptions of theatre and drama becoming more and more radical, these friends have become closer and closer (even if they agree or disagree with what I write here, find it more or less valid), rendering the dividing lines between the art of theatre, the fashioning of self and the conduct of life more and more invisible."
Moving away from all this anniversary-led nostalgia, Australian blogger Alison Croggon has written a very interesting piece about the need for good administrators in the arts. In a review of a recently published paper about arts advocacy she argues that the German novelist and intellectual Robert Musil "observed once that if there was to be real social change of any kind, what was required more than anything else was not idealists nor intellectuals, but managers: those who knew the nuts and bolts of creating and maintaining organisations, and understood how to change organisational structures".
Croggon acknowledges that this is often an unpopular view amongst artists – given how much money can be end up being spent on admin rather than actual art – but she goes on to say "One of the most useful weapons in an artist's survival arsenal is a practical understanding of how cultural policy and funding work, not from the narrow view of a practitioner applying cap-in-hand for the advantage of his or her project or organisation, but from the wider perspective of the place of culture in political and financial economies. This understanding is often rare among artists, not least because practitioners are too busy practising to have the time to read government reports."
While we're hanging out down under with Croggon, I wanted to take a few moments to look at some of the other blogs that reside in that part of the Southern hemisphere. Many of them are currently awash with talk of this year's Melbourne Fringe festival. Richard Watts is excited by this festival because "unlike other Fringe festivals around the planet, which predominantly feature interstate (hello Adelaide) or international guests (yes Edinburgh, I'm looking at you), the Melbourne Fringe consists almost entirely of shows and exhibitions and indefinable creative strangeness created by Melbourne artists."
To get a sense of the kind of work showcased there you could drop in at either the Born Dancin', On Stage and Walls, or Long Sentences No Suggestions blogs for reviews of the festivals latest offerings.
Of course, no festival would be complete without a good bit of controversy. As the Mono no Aware blog points out, this has come about as a result of David Tyndall, the artistic director of Dancehouse, laying into a review in The Age newspaper of one of his shows. His critique of the critique is sharp and well worth a look.
Finally, Dominic Cavendish on the Theatre Voice blog is asking why theatre is failing to tackle to the credit crunch: "Where are the plays confronting the massive global meltdown now haunting the waking hours, and nightmares, of millions of people? Where, more to the point, WERE the plays that scented something seriously awry in the financial markets?"
Cavendish is right that there has been little yet on our stages that tackles this issue head on. But perhaps the theatre works better as a critic of what is past than a prophet of what is to come. If so, then maybe next year will finally see the market taking centre stage - assuming, of course, that any theatres remain open.
