INSIDER MAGAZINE: The business of culture shifts with the times

It was a professional waymarker he could never have anticipated. Having chiselled a storied career in theatres across Australia and the United States, Nathan Bennett suddenly found himself on the side of a suburban highway in the summer heat paying homage to a rapscallion former felon who drank himself to a too-early grave. “Ambition has many manifestations,” Bennett laughs of the unlikely paean to the late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, known as Highway To Hell, that would see 150,000 West Australians line Canning Highway in 2020 in celebration of WA’s most fabled ratbag and rocker. The ambitious production would take out the Australian event award later that year. “It was a crazy idea and a huge risk, but one that paid off.” Calculated risk is Bennett’s daily diet as the Perth Festival’s executive director of almost seven years. Whilst most creatives are compelled towards the resplendence of stage light and applause, Bennett recognised early on he was destined to play what he designates somewhat facetiously as “the support act” — a dominion far beyond the curtain calls, where budgets command centre-stage alongside board reports, logistics, marketing and human resources. Debuting as a wide-eyed receptionist at the legendary Bell Shakespeare in Sydney in 2003, Bennett’s ambition was equalled by a precocious aptitude that would see him propelled to company manager, before being installed as general manager with leading cultural agitators Griffin Theatre Company while still in his 20s. “It’s certainly less sexy,” Bennett jests of a life beyond stage light. “But my philosophy of an artist-led organisation is that my role is to create the operating conditions from where these ambitions can be realised.” The Perth Festival is Australia’s longest running arts festival. Founded in 1953 out of the University of Western Australia, it has grown with, and often informed, the aspirations of the city. Once a wide-eyed and genteel mid-century lifeline back to the cultural ancestry of empire — a world of Shakespeare and Beethoven — the festival would become increasingly emboldened in the latter decades of the 20th century, daring to debut homegrown works such as Jimmy Chi’s enduring Bran Nue Dae (1990) and an acclaimed stage adaptation of Randolph Stow’s parabolic masterwork Tourmaline (1993) alongside the international canon. The narrative prescience of Tourmaline remains deeply symbolic for the festival: the existential fable of a water diviner who attempts to save a rapidly declining West Australian town wrecked by drought, only to, in his desperate search for water, find reefs of futile gold. This philosophical maxim — what is wealth without cultural succour to nourish the collective West Australian soul? — remains the Perth Festival’s very raison d’etre. Bennett would arrive at a critical juncture for the Perth Festival: beneath the long shadow of the rapturous acclaim of 2015’s The Giants, but with financial reserves depleted and a shifting cultural landscape that saw sponsors continuing to bleed across to Fringe World, with its irreverent charm and broad community appeal beyond the traditional cultural congregation. The arrival of homegrown artistic director Iain Grandage — who completes his tenure in 2024 — would galvanise the promise in turning the microscope inward and prioritising explorations of Aboriginal cultures and themes, predominantly Noongar. As though a cosmic reward for this proud celebration of home-spun narratives, Highway To Hell would surpass all expectations of audience reach. But that very day (March 1, 2020) would also mark another more ominous milestone: the first COVID-related death in WA. The State quickly shuttered and Bennett was left gazing deep into the financial abyss. The festival would survive this imposed period of introspection, but Bennett had long been prophesising of a reckoning of the traditional arts festival financial model in Australia: one that relied almost exclusively on government funding and top-end-of-town corporate sponsorship. Alarm bells were ringing long before Chevron terminated its 18-year relationship with the festival in 2022, a situation exacerbated by Australia-wide calls for art companies to take the moral high-wire and decouple from the resource sector. West Australian author and environmental campaigner Tim Winton would lob a further clarion cry into the fray with his Perth Festival keynote in 2022, citing the “smouldering dumpster fire of business as usual”. While Bennett applauds Winton’s conviction — “that’s what the festival is for, to raise awareness and sometimes bring discomfort” — he does not agree with the core tenant of divulging of resources-derived sponsorship. “It’s a really difficult question,” he ruminates on the so-called “green-washing” through culture in a State where resources underwrite the economy. “I think the cultural industries are the ones who tell the stories of the times, so there is naturally a heightened sense out of what is right and wrong. But the arts are also about scrutiny and visibility — you can’t just hide these things away and assume something has now changed. “And, of course, less investment ultimately means less work. Sponsorship is as much about making Perth a really vibrant place to want to come to, and live and work in, as it is supporting a festival: and we share that ambition.” The decision by the Fremantle Dockers in recent weeks to extend their own sponsorship deal with Woodside has further reignited debate about resource-derived sponsorship. Albeit the decision to extend this support for only two years following a 13-year partnership is potentially telling. “Corporate sponsorship globally, particularly in Australia, has decreased and that’s a trend we anticipated,” Bennett states matter-of-factly. “WA has been a little slower than other States to catch up, because we were so deeply supported by the resources sector, but we very much predicted corporate support was going to get harder and harder ... and it has.” The Perth Festival’s response has been to develop its philanthropic program, informed by Bennett’s tenure at Pig Iron Theatre Company in the United States in 2012-13: a country where private giving is deeply ingrained in the culture, a benevolence to the US culture industries valued at an estimated $37 billion in 2021 alone. While philanthropy remains in its nascence in Australia, the Perth Festival has witnessed its private giving ledgers swell from $280,000 to more than $2 million annually in recent years. Unlike sponsorship — which is innately transactional — philanthropy is more concerned with wedding donors to programs or causes to which they are personally or philosophically invested or aligned, including community engagement beyond the metropolitan purview and learning programs. And while box office takings remain paramount, festival impact reports today are more a glitzy PR manifesto on impact over income. Acknowledging the increasingly challenging economic conditions, however, Bennett has concurrently endeavoured a wholesale rewiring of the traditional festival model: moving away from the annual spectacular to a year-long program of events, resulting in 2023’s reboot of Highway To Hell (rebadged as High Voltage and personally championed by former premier Mark McGowan, albeit to muted reception). Ever Now followed in October: a well-received celebration of Noongar culture in collaboration with Tourism Western Australia, offering a purview into how future collaborations may manifest. While allowing the Perth Festival to tap into alternative funding, the year-round model also enables for greater community engagement, economic efficiencies of scale and more secure employment for the organisation’s staff and contractors. The Fremantle Biennale, too, has propelled this confluence of art, business and community into bold new terrain. Established by artist Tom Muller in 2017 as an avant-garde outlier, today the festival’s cultural reach is omnipotent: largely through its drone light show, First Lights, that has enchanted audiences Australia-wide since its inception as Moombaki in 2021. First Lights returns for the biennale’s fourth instalment in November, with a finale to take place on Rottnest Island on November 17 and 18. But while the cultural medium is now well-established, in 2020 the exclusive technology, flight systems and regulatory parameters did not even exist, let alone be in operation. Muller would partner with Robert Lednor of Stellar Lights, whose drone technology was previously tailored to geological applications. Together they developed an innovative program that joined forces with SPH Engineering in Lithuania to customise drone swarm software and technology, purpose-built GPS for tightly-packed “dances” and satellite tracking to accommodate for incongruous terrain. Domestically, legal partners Clifford Chance secured Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protection relating to the First Nations’ stories that informed the narrative and choreography and Lednor was quite literally charged with writing the rulebook on drone swarm (or “dance”) protocol for the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia. But the pair’s recent application for approval to launch fireworks from airborne drones for the recent America’s Cup commemorations would prove a little beyond the frontiers of the imagination for CASA. Innovation has ever been at the very kernel of the Fremantle Biennale, both creatively and in relation to its public and commercial partnerships. The convergence of the disciplines of conceptual art, industrial design, architecture and sustainability have enabled a cultural conversation that nudges well beyond the paradigmatic confines of theatres and concert halls, and into the liminal spheres of place and perception. Married with First Nations lore and language, it is a truly compelling mix. “There are great strengths in bringing people from different disciplines together,” Muller offers, citing David Tacey’s Re-enchantment — a treatise on the Australian metaphysical realm — as a seminal influence. “To be part of the biennale is not a static experience: we are participants, not mere observers or commentators.” The Swiss-born Muller would begin his creative life in the graffiti and skateboarding subculture, before going onto become an acclaimed conceptual artist in his adopted homeland of Australia and founding the Fremantle Biennale in 2016. Muller draws a direct axis between his subversive graffiti provenance and the biennale, namely the unforgiving impulse to take genuine risks and operate well beyond traditional paradigms and mediums. Indeed, the biennale’s daring debut would wholly embody this subversive essence in commissioning Swiss artist Felice Varini to create a one kilometre long temporal artwork upon the carapace of Fremantle’s historic West End buildings, equally enchanting as scandalising locals. Despite the controversy, Arcs d’Ellipses is now widely considered an epochal juncture in the conception and application of public art in WA. This intrepid doctrine has attracted some of the State’s most high-profile philanthropic supporters, including Mindaroo and Hesperia, plus significant public funding from Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council) and the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, and innovative partnerships with the likes of Fremantle Ports and Water Corporation. But it is the Biennale’s research and innovation that truly sets it apart from the pack, including the creation of pioneering new technologies, concepts and materials that can have potential application far beyond the artistic medium. For the upcoming instalment — entitled Signals 23 — the Biennale has partnered with Metrix Group to engineer and debut a new form of lenticular screen, patented as MotionPerf, that will run 60m along Fremantle’s landmark Elders Woolstores building, featuring poetic works from Sam Bloor. Sitting vacant for decades — and a favourite template for graffiti artists — Hesperia will begin developing the century-old Woolstores for residential and commercial use in 2024. Similarly, sustainable design firm Syrinx has been charged with imagining this year’s festival pavilion at Fremantle’s J Shed at Bathers Beach in collaboration with progressive architectural studio vittinoAshe, traditional owner Brendan Moore and jeweller Melissa Cameron — constructed from salvaged timber and featuring its own desalination system. “It is when an architect or designer is challenged to do something outside their usual remit that interesting questions are raised and innovative solutions created,” Muller offers of the Biennale’s multi-discipline approach, adding that it is only through a forensic understanding of place that we can create art that truthfully responds to both a corporeal and conceptual reality. “Once we start colliding disciplines you are now having conversations that open up to new ways of thinking. A hybridised approach, where nothing is finite. This really allows for multi-sensorial experiences for audiences in newly imagined spaces with an entirely new ecology of ideas. “The Biennale is about being nimble and responsive, and constantly pioneering how people work together,” Muller concludes, exploring the cavernous womb of the Woolstores, augmented by geometric columns of light beaming down from the roof like apparitions. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The art is in taking the risk and surrendering to the process.” Fremantle Biennale (fremantlebiennale. com.au) runs November 3-19. Perth Festival (perthfestival.com.au) takes place throughout February.