 to bring it out and start letting people in. Sure, you're a good one. Yeah, you're a good one. Wonderful. No, no, just welcome. Yes, my name is... I'll talk to you afterwards. Kaya, hello everyone. Welcome to Winter Nights 2019. It's the second iteration of a new festival, experimenting with new work in the process of creation and exploring the crafting culture of the art form that we all create and work with in study, teach, attend and care about, which is theatre. Just to clarify. And of course, welcome to tonight's opening event, a keynote lecture on theatre by Sheila Magadza, which will be a great way to get all of our neurons simultaneously buzzing and contemplative in that lovely paradoxical way that neurons do. I'd like to start by acknowledging that we're gathered for this event and the Blue Room Theatre stands on Wajak Noongar land and to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and to acknowledge the ongoing Noongar culture of this place. And at this point, before we get the program off and running for the next two weeks, I'd like to invite Aunty Roma Winmar to welcome us to country. Thanks, Aunty. Thank you very much, Aunty. Thank you very much, Aunty. This light's bright, you know, you fellas. Yes, on behalf of and with respect to Elders past and present, I'd like to welcome you here. As it was said, it's Wajak country. I'm a Noongar. I'm Minangorin. My Noongar name is Yibiang. And I like theatre too. And all the things that go with it. It's so good, you know, when everyone comes together and we're sharing and we have a special guest that's going to put us in the picture or everything else, of course. And the thing that we're sharing this moment, you know, right now and when we leave here, we'll be richer for it because of what's been passed on to us. And I like to sing you in, you know. But I must tell you, my brother and I were very close and we did a performance one day, this other girl and me, with the Elders and we took over some singing and then he was telling my daughter, he said, Oh, gosh. Your mother had a captive audience and she put them in excruciating pain. I'll try not to do that, all right? Oh, dear, sorry. I like Nietzsche, I like Kane. We come together as one now as we're going to have somebody enlighten us on other things. And I'd like to welcome you all here. And I'm proud to be here too, thank you. Thank you, Aunty. Now, a good thing to know about tonight is that if you love it so much that you need to get it again the lecture is both being live-streamed through a global theatre commons called HowlRound which is based in the US and hosts live broadcasts of events like this from around the world. There's lots up there from Argentina and Israel and various other places. And this lecture will, as well as being live-streamed at the moment, it's also available on their website to watch for months to come. Gather your family around the laptop. It's an initiative we're trialling in this second iteration of Winter Nights to see whether through this program we can connect the world to the prolific activity and creativity of the West Australian theatre sector without the travel budgets that we know are very often prohibitive in making those connections, especially in the independent sector which is where Western Australian theatre is actually uniquely strong. All of the program of Winter Nights over the next two weeks is made possible by the ongoing financial support we receive from our government partners, the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, the Australia Council and the City of Perth, also from our Winter Nights partners, the Minduru Foundation, the Alex Hotel and Whippa Snapper Distillery. It's a big collaborative affair that's allowing us to work with our dear friends from across the sector including the State Theatre Centre, Barking Gekko, Yuri Yarkin, Stutt Dance and the Centre for Stories. Thanks to all those organisations for the spirit of goodwill that goes into how we work together on these projects. I'd like to thank all of the participating artists and panellists as well. It takes a lot of bravery to share your ideas in public or to let other people into your creative process, which is what the next two weeks are all about. There are shows being trialled once, twice and three times on intermittent nights during the festival and the heart of the program is the recognition that theatre is an exchange, that as artists we need audience and that as audience we need artists and that we are all in this together. We want these experiments to grow from winter nights into something more because we have collectively nourished them with our eyeballs and our willingness. So the work is put forward in a spirit of openness that requires an openness from us all in kind as well. I was thinking about the comments that another former Perth Festival director Jonathan Holloway made in recently launching his current upcoming Melbourne Festival that he was compelled by the idea of reminding people through the program that truth is still truth. It does seem important that at this time and in this space we share a truth through and about what's put forward in front of us. But the other thing it seems to me is missing now is kindness and our challenge as members of a community is to balance and respect those two things and bring them into our conversations and there's a great opportunity here for us to do that. I expected that those thoughts may lead in some ways into the themes that Sheila will be exploring in her lecture for us now. But before I get right into the introduction of Sheila one thing that we have done for this winter night is to give all of the participating artists a disposable camera to create the images that we'll use to publish those next years and so I'm going to take a photo of the audience now before we go down. And Ryan insists I need to use the flash. I don't think so. Thank you for that. When we approached Sheila a while ago we were hoping to establish a format where a prominent person with an interest in theatre could provide insight, reflection and provocation on the place of theatre socially, culturally or personally and that it would be delivered independent of any professional position the lecturer holds. It was wonderful for Sheila after a little rumination to say yes and to indicate she would like to speak on the subject of theatre as a ritual essential to our humanity. Sheila is currently Executive Director of the Chamber of Arts and Culture, WA. She has extensive experience as an artistic director and producer of major events and festivals. For the last decade she has held leadership positions as Artistic Director of Perth International Arts Festival and the New Zealand Festival. She has commissioned and produced new work with renowned artists and companies from across Australia, New Zealand and internationally. These have included concert performances, outdoor spectacle events, dance, theatre and site-specific installations. Please welcome Sheila. I'm incredibly nervous as I stand here tonight but to acknowledge the people of the Wajahaknunga Nation as well and to remember all the people who've stood probably in many places feeling nervous is a good thing to remember the stories that have gone before and the elders past and present who steered us to this point. So thank you for that. I am not a writer, I'm not a theatre maker, I'm not a critic, I'm not an academic I'm the subject of theatre and I have a huge respect for those of you who are hence my great nervousness as I stand in front of you offering really only my own observations based on my years of programming and commissioning theatre and as a theatre goer and through the conversations that I've had with artists and audiences and really just an attempt to see this in a broader, bigger cultural matrix of those conversations and what it all means for where we are at the present. Because theatre itself by definition spans such a huge range of cultural origin of form of national identity all the subject matter that's tied up within it and there's really no proper way I think to try and interrogate the whole so I've had to kind of draw this into quite a personal set of ruminations to use your word, Julian and thank you for forcing me to succumb to your charms and being here you owe me a drink but this is really just a reflection on things that have become important to me as I think about theatre which have probably changed over time as well anyway I'll ignore it someone's trying to get out there's a little person trapped under here alright I'll just ignore it the ghost of the blue room so the other qualifier that I wanted to put on here is when I started to go through this exercise I sat down and I wrote all the names of artists and Australian works that have really impacted me over the last 30 years and it was a huge list and it was quite an emotional one when I thought through it and all the circumstances in which I saw it and I realised that I feel I cannot do justice to the huge conversation that is there about Australian theatre and Australian practice so I've decided that I'm not going to go into specifics about Australian theatre works and I'm going to leave that to those of you who are much better qualified through your experiences or from being practitioners within the field but I just don't want you to think that I'm being dismissive or in the very few examples that I am using from being abroad that there's any kind of implication that things are better elsewhere I looked at it all and I was quite overwhelmed by really a great weight of consequence and history there that I think deserves a really good head but it's also in thinking about doing this knowing that I was going to be preaching to the choir and what could I add to what you already know because we're all here today because we believe in the power of storytelling and how central it is to being human and we'll just take that as a given that stories could reconcile our experiences with our imagination they allow us to travel into the past and into the future they allow us to explain what we know and also to try and define the unknown the power and primacy of language in the arts has been argued by many and continues to be held by those people who hold literature up as the ultimate art form not to be outdone by anybody else not even opera the other arguers of the ultimate art form and storytellers have always been really powerful members of society whether they were reciting from memory and oral history stories passed down through the generations or whether they were the storytellers who started to record in written form the stories that they wanted to tell language was power and we all know that more and more these days as you see the consequence of language and words and as they say the word was God so all was well and within this we grew our idea of theatre and many cultures have theatrical traditions well documented across the world but I guess I'm focusing on the Anglo playwriting tradition that has long dominated our understanding of theatre as I start this off because when I started programming many years ago there was a formula that existed in multi arts festivals that relied heavily on what I used to say was straight white theatre we'd always be going okay we need straight white theatre and all these gaps because we knew we would get a great large portion of box office of that and whether they were the kind of intimate little pieces that we did in the Octagon or here kind of solo shows or whether they were the bigger proscenium shows we knew that we would have a pretty guaranteed audience but over the years that started to erode and it became harder and harder and I had to question myself the kind of automatic go-to place which was oh we'll put on a great big piece of check off everyone will come and they didn't and more and more people kept you know sighing as they read three hours of text based theatre in the program and that really led me to start thinking about where theatre was going because since their 60s as we know we've been accelerating really accelerating towards a culture that's dominated now by the visual whether it's television screen digital graphic design whatever it is John Burge's book told us that we was processing this huge number of images per day and I just looked on Google the other day and it's like 4,000 or 5,000 images we see every day and I couldn't quite figure that and in many areas of our culture this is set up a tension between those who uphold the language language and literacy and those who've migrated onto the visual codes and who see those as the primary communication for what they're doing and they function very different neurologically which I only just discovered because with literacy we've got two millennia or more of development of criteria for relevance for criticism for logic, adequacy and judgement they're all functions that sit in our left brain but a visual culture bypasses that it's based on more holistic, uncritical, intuitive faculties and processing mechanisms that are dominant in our right brain and so there is an inevitable conflict between literary and visual cultures sometimes of course they go beautifully hand in hand but there is this underlying tension and so those who think that word based literary culture should be seen as the norm intellectually, morally, educationally politically tend to see visual culture and especially it's rise to dominance as a real threat to what we perceive as the truth and goodness and I probably was in that camp myself whereas those who are immersed in visual culture as more and more are now they don't have words and concepts that criticise the other side they don't even bother going there because words and concepts and criticism are more or less foreign to a right brain way of thinking they just get on they ignore the linguistic based colleagues and they just become creators and receptors of visual culture and so we see them possibly or those who criticise them in all kind of modes of communication as being not so bright they're actually living in a whole different world of intelligence that we are struggling to understand and that's really helped me to understand the shift that I've been observing in our theatre culture because of the huge growth in the appetite for physical theatre, for design driven spectacle, for devised and immersive experiences and of course our fumbling relationship with technology as we start to move on to other platforms and it's not necessarily a bad thing but I guess it's helpful to understand the context in which this is all happening and it's certainly been helpful for me and I had this image that I wanted to put up which is not a theatre image but it's just recently been in all the media this is the raptors who just won the basketball first Canadian team but the power of image that is an opera just sitting there by itself and you can look at that and the drama, the tension everything that is there and it's just really a reminder about how powerful we have become with our visual imagery and how quickly it's being transmitted so in 2013 Julian Merrick argued he set up this whole thesis of an intergenerational conflict in theatre between those who were the World War II generation of theatre makers and then the new wave that came along in the 60s, 70s, 80s and challenged that and really asserted an Australian identity which he describes as a rejection of the old formalities of technicality and structure and moving on into a much freer kind of open discourse but in the same paper he measures a subsequent decline in Australian theatre and he measures it by a decreasing number of theatre companies a decreasing number of Australian plays staged each year and decreasing audiences for those plays now I haven't had the chance to do as extensive research of my own but my sense that he is rightly or wrongly focused on only one aspect of our theatre tradition and that the larger picture is not as gloomy as he paints because people are consuming stories in many many many more ways now and whether it's through other kinds of theatre or other art forms or on screen or on stage or even through our media which has now become storytelling as well there's a much greater range of stories being told in different ways and reaching different audiences across social division in Australia and that's not necessarily a bad thing it's also a way that we've been taking a lot of our work abroad and I think that that's something that is a positive and it's also impossible to ignore the colonial history that sought to eradicate indigenous language and has never valued the world views that are embedded in that language so if we're going to have a truly truly meaningful conversation an exploration of what theatre might be and its relevance we really need to look at every cultural tool at our disposal and not just focus I think on that one aspect and this includes other languages other forms of storytelling and that may allow for untold stories to emerge that have previously been really suppressed and it challenges all of us both the artists and audiences to develop our literacy in a much greater range than we have been up till now because the issue isn't that people are turning away from storytelling it's just where those stories are being told now and by whom and the authority of an old system has been subverted and the story has kind of burst out of its confines and formalities including languages sometimes mostly I think for the better although I have wanted to strangle someone who stood across from me giving me marketing advice once and she told me it's all about the story now Sheila you know we're just going to create a story that chair is a story and your journey here was a story and I was just like you wanted to go no that's not that's not what story is supposed to be mad men taught us all of that didn't it so for some people this transition is painful and there's a current review of playwriting Australia whose business model is failing which highlights this and Robert Reed has written about the decline in publishing scripts and how many are being lost even the published ones are not being archived and looked after as well as they should be or accessed and what he describes as an ongoing erasure of our local history our local literature and performance that allows for the ignorance of our past to fester and gradually become thoughtless jingoism and white nationalism we're also losing criticism and discussion about the arts within our media which we've talked about a lot just recently with the advent of seesaw and Alison Croggan argues that there are reluctance to engage with any deep conversation about our culture is proudly being badged as anti-elitism when in fact it's just anti-intellectualism and a refusal or an inability to promote an informed literate discourse about our culture so moving on to the topic of ritual we know there's been much discussion of the relationship between theatre and ritual over the last 150 years drawing on roots in psychology or anthropology or religion or primitive rights whatever it is that or absurdism in some case but really it's about finding the transformative potential of theatre beyond simple entertainment although I should say I'm quite a big fan of simple entertainment and I don't think that everything needs to be laden with meaning I'm quite happy to live in a moment and laugh and cry and go home and just be transported from reality for a moment so I don't think we all need to exist in one particular spectrum but this question of purposeful theatre and the meaning that we are ascribing to it is really important particularly when it's either a collective endeavor or a public endeavor then it does need to have something of a little bit more of a purposeful intent about it and I was going to put up this picture the next picture Roger Without a D just to illustrate the power of this this is Robert Wilson's Ila Gallego which I saw at the Melbourne Festival many many years ago and it was about three hours with no break so no one was there in this huge great theatre and it was a transformative moment you know Robert Wilson is sometimes hard going but he was working with an ensemble from South Sulawesi and they were telling a creation myth which went on for hours of this beautiful ritualized performance about the creation myth and the battles between the gods and long long long epic story and it was beautiful most the language that I didn't understand and was never translated but you were just in this almost trance like state through the whole thing and there was a bit there was a the final ending was when like in many mythologies the common thing is that the gods retreat to the world of the gods and we humans are left behind the mortals without them when we used to cohabit and he left a very bright white dark space on the stage and modern man and modern woman came on in their kind of plain suits and I burst into tears because we just lost that whole world of magic and speaking monkeys and all sorts of crazy things the mythology of it but it was all just done through this kind of very long ritualized performance that somehow opened a door into the big intent of that story and that piece and the search for efficacy or impact and meaning and purpose really comes into sharp focus as the world is flooded by creative content ranging from documentary to fantasy and everything that you want in between and the question of what will compel people towards theatre as opposed to something else and what will make it meaningful for them and the question there I'm struggling to even as I'm reading this I realize I'm struggling to articulate what it is that I wanted to say because there are two aspects for this one is that are we aware of the broader rituals that surround how we create theatre and how we ask audiences to engage with it rituals that have been perhaps hidden but in fact have been detrimental to female practitioners for many years who have excluded other cultures who may have exerted class privilege or demanded unwavering belief in a fixed position that ritualized sense of our whole industry that we've kind of just let sit there and are we really able to unpick that and move towards a different set of practices and intentions with our even our starting point of making theatre Alison Croggan also says she needs us to convent our brutal ignorance of Indigenous culture a refusal in which itself emerges from an anxiety about our occupation of this country that we are unable as a nation to acknowledge it's as if we've cauterized ourselves in order to enable our comfortable cruelties. Art is after all a scalpel that removes scar tissue inflaming feeling excavating thought a whisper of freedom that may threaten to unravel the catastrophic lies by which we live that's another, I guess really big challenge about the rituals that we've used to make ourselves comfortable in these spaces and to not question things that really need to be interrogated and in an increasingly lonely society we also need rituals to address that challenge of loneliness and to bring us back together it's well documented now how bad this is for everybody and the beauty of this opportunity is that they allow us to put aside our egotistical selves and to be guided in some form by theatre practitioners for example through a shared example they could have the potential to give us a means of communicating across difference and also a way of responding to our physical environment which we have pretty well remained immune to for a long time in our practice theatre can provide this and I do believe it will do this in time but something in our current model does need to change to allow it because the more we move into digital also the more we crave a live experience as well but the nature of what we're seeking seems to be changing because at one end there's this really great enjoyment of mass spectacle and those huge touring shows that come through and you could fill a stadia and Lion King goes on forever and it's great you're part of this really visceral social movement and I love it too when I attend those things the sense that this year you've all been captured by this great big thing but at the other end there's this real need for intimacy and I think a move towards smaller scale highly personal immersive interactive and more experimental experiences which is also gorgeous and really fulfilling and allows I guess a greater level of participation by the audiences but there's the middle ground which is where we've situated quite a lot of our traditional theatre where I think there is a bit of a problem it's become quite difficult to reign and something that I sometimes feel struggles to make an audience feel connected and involved and I can't quite understand why that's become a more sterile experience in that middle ground I think maybe some of it is about maybe the nature of the form of the work and how that is evolving, some of it maybe is about the social world that sits around the work but some of it is also probably about the way we've configured our spaces and where we situate the work so some years ago I discovered the German term for the fear of forcing a threshold and by extension they have good words in German by extension the fear of trying something new and I'm going to pronounce it badly but it's and apparently arts administrators have been using those terms since the 1970s I'm just new to it which to describe the difficulty of getting people through the doors of art centres and exhibition spaces spaces that have been designed previously and expensively subsidised for their great delight in recreation but which many still regard as off-limits and I don't think much has changed since the 1970s in this problem about how we make our spaces more permeable to a wider group of people because even I I have decades of going to theatres and exhibitions often on my own and often in cities where I'm travelling so I don't know people when I get there I often have that kind of moment of insecurity as I arrive at the door of whatever it is, social or intellectual inadequacy, can I do this and you put on your pretend face and you go on in but you know that crossing, that big expanse of a foyer is a big thing for a lot of people and you know all the conventions go to the stalls, go to a box office it's not selling boxes but it's still you know that's where you go I think we forget that that's not easy for people to just naturally adopt. One of my big favourite social commentator he's a cultural commentator he's basically a renter called Trevor McDonald who has a blog called Marketing the Arts to Death and he's based in America and he's largely working with large cultural institutions orchestras etc who are having huge problems across America and he's very anti institutional and kind of feels that he has the answer that everyone's ignored about how we need to get audiences into events and he writes this lovely description of I used to do marketing for a large performing arts centre where the management priorities often had little to do with contemporary reality and where board level decision making made it incredibly hard to sell tickets I was complaining about this to a friend there for decades and he launched into a little tirade that went something like this your problem Trevor is that you actually believe the mission statement which has nothing to do with why we're here this place was created by powerful cultural elites to be a playground for cultural elites that's its primary objective the most important thing here that happens is the annual gala everything else the art, the education, the audience is here to make sure that annual gala happens every year once an arts centre Trevor it's a fricking round Olympus and you're just a nobody mortal who's here to keep things running so that gods have a place to play so stop trying to sell tickets that's not your job you do marketing marketing's all about making pretty brochures that we can all hold up and say my look how attractive we all are and that's all anybody wants from you nobody cares how many tickets you sell it's a bit grim a bit harsh but it made me laugh and he goes on to say but what if we end up going out of business well going out of business of course we're going out of business this place is a dinosaur but you're not going to be able to do anything about that my friend Mount Olympus itself went out of business thousands of years ago and everyone else just got along fine um Trevor always has a kind of strong view on things and of course he's writing in a system that relies heavily on private patronage which we don't to the same extent but it's an extreme illustration of the question of who controls our cultural spaces and why and how that's all managed and how it translates into something that actually is accessible to a number of people I think it also illustrates this particular thing the problem of scale and once you scale up to a certain level the mechanisms that have to come into play whether it's government or private in terms of funding and sustaining these institutions is pretty complicated and it's very easy I think to kind of become quite constricted in our thinking our picture is definitely not as dire as Trevor paints but I think what we're saying is we need to be mindful that we're building and we're managing spaces that people actually want to inhabit people not just us and that we find ways for people to overcome their feeling angst and be more permeable as institutions to thinking and people that are not here at the moment and I quote the veritable Julian Hobber who recently wrote in an article the essential element to great theatre is a public space that has a sense of occasion and atmosphere that adds to your feeling of being engaged in a ritual bigger than yourself but that doesn't have to be elitist and of course the alternative is to make theatre in new spaces to step over our own thresholds and go out into the outside world with our practice and that leads me to the last part of my talk which is about how we're evolving our way of making theatre and I'm going to just talk about two pieces that have I guess made me think very hard about what is possible in how we evolve our form still retaining the power of a live performance but thinking really outside of what we've done because one of my favourite quotes from many many years now is what Becket said about his work which is to find the form that accommodates the mess that is the task of the artist now and we certainly have more mess so we have to think about how we respond to it so this first piece this is all I can show you about it it's a highly secretive installation immersive theatre piece in London in 2012 in an empty office block in east London and you walked in that door and went through the most mind-blowing 45 minutes experience that you could ever have it was an Alice in Wonderland experience that started with kind of this dingy reception room and then they open a door and send you your first scene which is a bunch of kids playing video games and generally ignoring you so you stand there and it's all quite small wondering what it is and then the kid says you know why are you hanging around here go in there and he points to a cupboard on the ground and you like what and he said yeah go in the cupboard and you get on your hands and knees and you crawl through the cupboard and emerge into something completely different and that happens over and over again but what was amazing about this piece is that you were an audience of one the whole way through the journey and each night there was a performance the number of performance it took to carry the whole thing off was about 200 controversially volunteers so it completely inverted the relationship and each time you landed in a scene the kind of unfolding series of scenes you you had to determine what you were going to do you were participatory so in one scene you literally end up on a podium and have to conduct a live orchestra and then you get shunted out into the back and you have to operate a digger digging out the back garden and all sorts of other but you also have to you end up in an art gallery where you're giving the floor talk for the art on the walls and you've got an expectant so it's if you want the minute you grasp what you had to do and you kind of just you become the performer and those 20 volunteers actually become the audience because they're watching idiot after idiot come through and respond to the provocation that they've set up and of course what they did in order to reward the audience the volunteers who were the performers come audience it was all beautifully was every now and then they put a famous person through so they'd be sitting there replaying their scene over over again but in would walk Stephen Fry in a moment or something like that and then they would all go home going oh my god so it was it was really a compelling journey through theatrical illusion really unimaginable indescribable and I love the way it completely just turned everything on its head and it really in kind of requiring you to improvise your own theatrical experiment you were in a 3D film performance art theme parks you were referencing gaming and it was an incredibly euphoric experience and the warmth in every room of the people who greeted you the other performers who kind of were always having a joke on you was just beautiful it was a very very special experience it's been repeated a few times but in the end the controversial nature of the volunteers meant that it got shut down because because the question really was should they continue running a theatre company based entirely on volunteer participation so that was it's an interesting question because I think there's a very fine line there between who was the audience and who wasn't and it kind of just blew up the whole thing but nobody knew how to deal with it so the second piece is one that I've been involved with more recently which I wanted to talk about because it was an epic epic reconstruction culturally of how we might make a theatre piece for a big kind of spectacle occasion and it was called a Waka Odyssey and Roger will go to the next one which I hope is the website yeah so if you just scroll down you'll see the extent of this but this was a work that took us probably two years to make the starting point for it was the desire to make a big spectacle piece of theatre based on a Maori cultural base and it had a creative team of three people and myself and we basically came up with the idea the purpose of the work was to highlight the lost knowledge of the navigation of the Pacific the traditional navigation of the Pacific by traditional voyages and navigators and it was an incredibly complex thing to construct because we started off with really that things had to be done from a Maori cultural base built on Maori cultural values which meant Maori process the importance of doing the right things in the right order and nothing happening until those right steps have been taken. Maori reciprocity how we do for others and not because we expect stuff back but because it's what we do for each other and that reciprocity brought out a whole aspect of that project that we hadn't anticipated when we started when we put our whole expectation out there what we got back was far bigger than what we'd imagined and manaaki which is a central principle that you act in ways that enhance the mana of others which is you act in ways that enhance the dignity of another person always so we set about making this project which basically involved the voyaging of six wakaura which are these twin-hold canoes which are modelled on the traditional voyaging canoes around New Zealand and from Samoa and the Cook Islands into New Zealand on this kind of epic ritualised journey down into Wellington where we staged this huge welcome based on the mythology of a Maori story called Kupe was the first voyager who came to New Zealand he effectively he and his wife Kura Maratini discovered Aotearoa New Zealand and she named it and in Wellington Wellington is the site of an epic battle that he had with an octopus that had drawn him all the way down the island to find the harbour of Whanganui Otara which is the Wellington Harbour so this piece ended up being a piece of performance art there was so many there were so many questioning faces when I proposed this at the festival because we're not a sports organisation we're an arts organisation etc etc and are they going to kill themselves on the way because when I said no these are people who've sailed off to Hawaiian home again they can make it down the North Island but it was really in the end what pushed it over the line was that sitting underneath us was this really really important purpose about revealing this lost knowledge this lost cultural knowledge and celebrating the people who were bringing it back into practice this was an environmental piece that was about our relationship to the ocean particularly out into the Pacific in times of environmental challenge to highlight the fact that the culture of ocean is bigger than we see ourselves sometimes as land people in New Zealand but in fact all cultures derived from the ocean and if the ocean is not well the consequences are huge and it was also with the local iwi the local tribe who gave us half of the story and the permission to go ahead and then put in place all the protocols around it so the result was a week long event starting with the arrival of the canoes into the harbour which was what we called our theatrical that was the theatrical piece and following that there were smaller commissioned theatre pieces and educational programs and community events that last for a week and were a huge extension of that project and the night that the walker came in which was just by the skin of their teeth because they had they had weather down on the way was amazing there were tens of thousands of people gathered on the waterfront the story had been told so well digitally if you scroll down here there would have been this whole big digital project that happened behind it there had been schools training there were a thousand people training in the Haka that had been specially commissioned which signified the welcome of the canoes there was a 200 strong choir a mixed ability choir community choir that also was involved in singing back out and then we had these performers placed around the harbour and presented the stories of Kupi Kura Maratini and then the hope for the future in the form of a young girl and it was an incredible moment it wasn't the best piece of theatre possibly that's ever been produced but in terms of a community ritual a very very powerful piece of theatre and something so grounded in both the environment and the indigenous culture what was amazing to me was how many people turned out and understood how important that was there is a little video that will play just to show you a clip of how it looked it was very very hard to capture because it was on such scale I think where my hope comes from for the future because I would love to do that again and get some of it right some of the bits that we didn't get right but it just demonstrates that the power is there if you can collect the right elements and do it in the right way and do it in places and spaces and with people whose stories are very very important and that there is not necessarily a cultural barrier to everyone participating in that and it's a really I think important thing for me where I've come to now from my journey through theatre for all this time and my heart really goes to things like that now where I feel yeah something important can happen so writing this lecture as I've said has been a very challenging process and I've swung between pessimism and optimism between clarity and confusion on a daily basis but it's made me realise why I am quite challenged by the contextual changes in our cultural landscape and how also challenged by how that is affecting our artists and our art forms and whether we are being able to pick up and move as fast as we need to around those challenges because things aren't going to stay the same sadly and I guess clinging to the symbols and life rafts of the forms that we know is not they may give us certainty for now but they're not going to help us into the future but we have to be optimistic about the power of creativity to insert itself into the journey of humanity and the capacity of the coming generations to tell these powerful stories in the way that they choose to and to support them to find those ways thank you thank you Sheila it's such a privilege and an honour to learn from your experience and your wisdom so thank you very very much I was especially drawn to your observation about the ongoing appeal of small scale intimate theatre I must say that's all please join us in the bar and have a drink and talk about what we've learned tonight thank you very much