The mainstreaming of Carnivale
[This is an abridgement of an address read by Rosarela Meza on behalf of the management committee at the launch of the First Multicultural Theatre Festival in Sydney on October 5.]
The festival is the first activity of the Multicultural Theatre Alliance, an organisation of over 20 theatre companies from more than 10 different cultural backgrounds and even more languages.
The companies involved are performing for free because there were no funds available for that part of the festival.
The NSW government, through Carnivale, gave $5000 towards this festival. It also gave us billing in small print in the back pages of the Carnivale program, while the imports and the mainstream activities fill the glossy front pages.
The media covering Carnivale aren't interested. "What's the angle?", they ask, as they try to decide whether to cover the event or not. And all the time you know that they're thinking: folklore, boring, traditional.
We are talking Carnivale here — Carnivale, which was supposed to showcase art from communities of non-English speaking background. God help us when Carnivale is mainstreamed into the Sydney Festival in 1993!
Our artists, like many other professional migrants, have difficulty getting their qualifications recognised. They are denied the possibilities to create utilising the resources and professional tools available in Australia only to mainstream artists or highly commercialised companies.
Others, who aren't trained in theatre but want to gain the necessary experience and skills, are denied the possibility to gain this experience in the context of our own cultures.
Our work receives very little support from the arts funding authorities. Our communities aren't receiving any benefit from tax money spent on cultural activity.
Flipping through annual reports gives you some idea of where the money goes. For example, last year the NSW Ministry for the Arts spent $445,000 on Carnivale. Of that, the official opening cost $94,795 for a full four-course dinner — and we, the ethnic communities, weren't invited. $94,176 went on publicity and promotions; again, migrant communities just made it to the fine print in the back pages. Exhibitions, theatres and concerts got $103,221, which leaves assistance to local groups at $73,683.
The Australia Council has a better record and is always developing strategies to ensure that the activities it supports reflect the multicultural nature of Australian society. Despite this, only 6.6% of its total budget went on activities that could be labelled multicultural.
First they try to make you assimilate and then they try to then, when they realise that you won't go away but are here to stay, they try to make a buck out of you. So you get all these projects which anthropologise our cultures and communities while they build the careers of the anthropologists. Peter Brooks' Mahabarata gets the kid glove treatment, but a local production of the same play by an Indian-Australian company most certainly wouldn't.
Government policies and our so-called mainstream cultural activities do not yet reflect our reality: that people of non-English speaking backgrounds form almost 40% of Australia's population.
Through the festival we will show the rich cultural life which the rest of the nation could be privy to if the cultural barons didn't always have it their way.