Flashing Twelve O’Clock talks to Artistic Director Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Head of Programming Glyn Roberts about their New Writing focused theatre, MKA.
Caveat: the text to speech generator couldn’t quite cope with Manderson-Galvin’s surname so it’ll sound a little odd.
Flashing Twelve O’clock talks to Nicola Gunn, performer and creator of such memorable works as Tyrannous Rex, An Unfortunate Woman and The Elephant Club about the new direction her work has taken with At the Sans Hotel and Hello My Name Is.
Part One
Part Two
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This month we found ourselves in the UK and took the opportunity to talk to expatriate Australian playwright and literary manager of the Finborough Theatre in London, Van Badham. Van is the author of plays including Poster Girl, Black Hands/Dead Section and Muff and also the novel Burnt Snow. She talks to us about the differences between the performing arts landscapes in the UK and Australia.
Part One
Part Two
Flashing 12 O’clock spoke to the newest Creative Producer of Melbourne Fringe, Neal Harvey. Neal has also been a Research Fellow at the AusStage project and producer for the independent theatre company Elbow Room. We caught up with him at the fringe offices in January.
Part One
Part Two
Though much of what I have to say in this introductory post may be better posted in the About section of this blog, I felt it was worth posting some initial remarks at the outset rather than heading straight to the business of podcasting and interviewing. Mainly, I felt it was important to cover some of the back ground to this project that wont go in the About section and to plant a flag, as it were, stating the intentions and the impetus for Flashing 12 O’clock, specifically, why contribute another blog to the overwhelming glut of diaristic opinion already choking the servers at technorati.
It’s approaching seven years now since Alison Croggon launched Theatre Notes and introduced the Australian performing arts community to emergent social media. Since then performers, playwrights, directors and critics have followed her lead creating a lively, though admittedly in some instances insular and reactive, community of discourse which has brought discussion of the performing arts out of the wine soaked shadows of theatre foyers and into a public arena. Voices have been contributed to the conversation about Australian performing arts that we may realistically never have heard from otherwise, and that can only be construed as a positive benefit to the community.
Among those early bloggers, I contributed in my own inimitably twenty-something fashion as the reviewer Danny Episode. Sporadic and bellicose, my former blog Television is Furniture is probably still out there somewhere, and the reviews published thereon stand as a marker of where I was at the time. The public longevity of past blogs, I think, is in many cases a testament to personal growth. There is sometimes a tendency in public discourse to hold a speaker to a position they espoused many years prior to the debate at hand, which seems to me to mark a fundamental atrophying of thought. Discourse, by it’s very nature, is fluid and the desire for definitive statements from which no deviation should be permitted suggests a profound insecurity regarding change – an insecurity that is difficult to comprehend when change, as Herodotus would have it, is the only constant. To deny change can lead only to stasis (note: stasis is not homeostasis) and demonstrates a baffling resistance to growth, progress and learning.
I have no real interest in returning to the world of the critic and Flashing 12 O’clock isn’t launched as another review blog – Alison, Chris Boyd, Richard Watts, John Bailey, Katherine Lyall Watson et al, have got that pretty much covered. Instead, I intend for Flashing 12 O’clock to serve two related purposes. The first is as a site for podcast and print interviews with the thinkers, makers and administrators of the Australian performing arts community. I’m hoping this will cover a wide range of people, (from directors to critics, from policy wonks to academic historians) all of whom will doubtless have something interesting to say about what’s going on in our community. Secondly I’m toying with the idea of putting up partial fragments of essays regarding the Australian performing arts, hoping for comment, feedback, correction where necessary, and debate in order to hone the arguments presented therein and draw on the collective intelligence of the performing arts community.
From time to time, as the mood takes me, I may also post reviews of works I’ve seen, but these will likely take a more retrospective stance, possibly considering several works in relation to each other. That said, this project is fairly fluid in it’s intent and so who knows where it may end up – my plan at this stage is to see how it runs for a year or so, aiming for at least one regular podcast per month, and then re-assess it at the start of 2012.
Our first interview (once I’ve figured out how to post a podcast) is with newly appointed Creative Producer for Melbourne Fringe, Dr Neal Harvey. Follow flashng12oclock on Twitter for updates.
I should also probably do a little self-publicity here, in the interests of full disclosure, and note that I have a Platform Paper being published by Currency in April titled Hello World! an investigation of social media and the possibilities they offer the performing arts in Australia. Feedback, on either this blog, the podcasts or the Platform Paper are welcome but be advised that abusive or emotive contributions will be treated as trolling and summarily deleted as per the comments policy.
So, lets see how it goes.
R.
