Welcome to the Australian Theatre Forum
Images of the 2011 Australian Theatre Forum courtesy of Sean Young. (See all of the 2011 Forum’s fabulous faces here.)
Postcards from the Future (recorded by australianplays.org):
Angharad Wynne-Jones' (Arts House/Tipping Point)
Wesley Enoch (Queensland Theatre Company)
Brenna Hobson (Belvoir St Theatre)
Joshua Lynzaat (St Martins/Catapult)
Australian Theatre Forum blogging
Cameron Woodhead | “Australian Theatre Forum 2011: Day One
Up bright and early (or early, anyway) on the first morning of the Australian Theatre Forum in Brisbane, where I’ll soon be joining hundreds of other theatre workers from across the country to discuss challenges facing the industry over the next decade”… Read more.
Jane Howard | “Australian Theatre Forum: Interdependence, or, what’s love got to do with it? In this afternoon’s panel, Interdependence: Love, Money & Artistic Exchange, we were asked to consider the fact that the ecology should be characterised as co-dependence”…Read more.
Augusta Supple | “New Strategies for Getting New Australian Writing on our Stages”
Let’s talk about production NOT Just development of New plays. We are living in an age of Australian playwriting where development is the major concern of playwrights"…
Read more.
Photo: Sean Young, and featuring members of Brisbane’s theatre community and Brisbane Powerhouse – ATF2011’s official home
The Australian Theatre Forum has submitted a formal response to the National Cultural Policy discussion paper, on behalf of the delegates, based on outcomes from the Forum.
CONVICTIONS & CONNECTIONS
Urgent conversations. Compelling ideas. Inspiring vision.
Professional theatre makers and artsworkers from around Australia—working as independents, in large and small companies, in festivals and venues—will congregate in Brisbane for the second Australian Theatre Forum.
Coinciding with Brisbane Festival 2011, this forum will see cultural leaders and contemporary thinkers teasing out some of the big issues around practice, infrastructure and sustainability. Over three packed days, delegates will exchange experiences and ideas and build a vision for a future.
The inaugural ATF was in Melbourne in May 2009 and was attended by 300 theatre workers from around Australia – providing the first meeting place to strategise collectively in 25 years. At ATF 2011 we invite the sector to review the changes since 2009 and set some new and dynamic directions for the next decade.
WHAT TO EXPECT
To participate… To make new connections… To identify priorities for the next decade of Australian theatre… To collaborate with peers after the ATF to implement those priorities.
To engage with ideas and with colleagues, through a range of exciting processes:
- Open Space forums – where participants take responsibility for driving the agenda and facilitating the conversations that matter;
- presentations from leaders in and outside of the theatre sector;
- salon scale discussions;
- continuing the conversation in social settings by night and enjoying performances around the city in the Brisbane Festival and Under the Radar.
WHY MEET
We all grapple with what it means to live with rapid change. A world where geopolitics, technology, economics, culture and ecology converge and connect in increasingly complex ways. A world with finite natural resources. Where technology connects us with what’s happening almost anywhere in the world in real time, and where social networking facilitates dialogue and has the potential to mobilise en masse.
We watch as the world grapples with disaster at what seems an unprecedented rate – floods, earthquakes, cyclones, bushfires, tsunamis, nuclear disaster and the slower but equally devastating decimation of island communities by rising sea levels.
We see world powers and established institutions being challenged – about greed, ethics, transparency, inclusion and access. New networks, leaders and powers are emerging – relationships are being reinvented, innovation remapped, governance reframed and business re-imagined.
As theatre workers, how do we engage – both on and offstage – with the urgent and the undeniable? Is our art speaking to contemporary communities? Is our infrastructure porous enough to welcome new generations of practitioners with different ways of seeing and doing? Are we thinking for change? Or are our practices further entrenching old habits – producing as if the world’s resources are limitless, making assumptions about who our audiences are and what they want, doing it because it’s ‘how we do it’?
The ATF is an opportunity to collectively recognise the innovations that are taking place in the sector and sketch out the changes yet to be made to negotiate our ever-evolving worlds. What needs to be held on to? What can be left behind? With vision and conviction, we can dream, assume responsibility and take action.
VENUE: Brisbane Powerhouse
CONTACT DETAILS:
Nicole Beyer, Director, Theatre Network Victoria; Chair, Australian Theatre Forum
T:(03) 8256 9685
E: nicole@tnv.net.au
