Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion and the Arts

by Janet McDonald (Editor), Robert Mason (Editor)

Overview

This is the first major collection to reimagine and analyse the role of the creative arts in building resilient and inclusive regional communities. Bringing together Australia’s leading theorists in the creative industries, as well as case studies from practitioners working in the creative and performing arts and new material from targeted research projects, the book reconceptualizes the very meaning of regionalism and the position – and potential – of creative spaces in non-metropolitan centres.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783205141
Publisher:	Intellect Books
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Janet McDonald is Associate Professor (Theatre Studies), and is currently the School Coordinator of Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. Robert Mason is Lecturer (Migration and Security Studies) at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Janet McDonald is Associate Professor (Theatre Studies), and is currently the School Coordinator of Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. Robert Mason is Lecturer (Migration and Security Studies) at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Read an Excerpt

Creative Communities

Regional Inclusion & the Arts

---

By Janet McDonald, Robert Mason

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-514-1

---

CHAPTER 1

Common Patterns: Narratives of 'Mere Coincidence' and the Production of Regions

Paul Carter

RMIT University

In this account of place-making in Central Australia, a contrast is made between creative community and regulatory authority. A creative community resembles a revolutionary council of the kind influentially discussed by Hannah Arendt (2000); it is convened to manage change. In contrast, a regulatory authority (represented in Central Australia, and elsewhere, by local councils and regional governments) is constitutionally opposed to innovation. At issue are different models of democratic governance. Associated with these differing models are different conceptions of place and place stewardship. In Alice Springs, which furnishes the case study of this article, those actively engaged in nurturing a new space of sociability, or meeting place, understood place discursively (as a talking place). In contrast, the planning culture sought to eliminate storytelling mechanisms for social innovation, associating a plurality of voices and histories with the undermining of administrative authority and the ideological status quo. My argument is that the discourse of creative place-making is mythopoetic in its purpose: by way of identifying cross-cultural narratives of place-making that display analogies, it seeks common ground between different cultural patternings of place. Mythopoetic, story-based strategies of this kind can overthrow fixed and often divisionist myths of origin, replacing them with co-devised narratives. The chapter concludes with an acknowledgement that the creative place-making process outlined here redefines what is meant by place, which ceases to be an administrative convenience (static and void) and becomes an analogue of the performative techniques that conjure it into being. Place may be reconfigured as a network of passages or creative regions, comparable to a string figure or network, whose governance, it is suggested, is vested in the creative communities that bring it alive and maintain it.

Talking Place

The relationship between storytelling and place-making is a strained one. While plentiful evidence exists to demonstrate the role that foundational myths play in building local and regional identity, public planning understands procurement of the public good in terms of service provision and design functionality. A 'meeting place' initiative in Alice Springs, Central Australia, in which I was engaged between 2007 and 2011, illustrates these points. A bifurcation occurred early in the process between a community interested in discourse and a professionalized culture of planning interested in project management and delivery. Different community groups concerned to rebuild Alice Spring's social and environmental capital were engaged in plotting. Engineers and managers were signed up to a narrative. While the famous distinction that E.M. Forster made in Aspects of the Novel between story and plot may be simplistic in a literary context, in the context of developing regional literacy it is strictly accurate. To discuss sociability in terms of the protocols, location and content of meeting is to plot relationships. It involves holding together a region of reciprocities. In contrast, the story of a new public space, which originates in a planning brief and concludes in the delivery of a newly designed precinct, is purely linear. Instead of holding multiple senses of place, it eliminates these in the interests of progress. While stories relate, plans connect, and connectivity, as will emerge, is not necessarily an unqualified good.

The novelty of our 'meeting place' project lay partly in the fact that it originated outside the planning departments. The Uniting Church's proposal to create a place of intercultural reconciliation adjacent to the John Flynn Church on Todd Mall had written into it certain assumptions about social planning; however, it was put forward circumspectly, as a catalyst of new dialogue rather than as a device to satisfy community consultation expectations ahead of building. For example, it was appreciated that the Indigenous landscape of Alice Springs did not resemble the centripetal construction of place characteristic of colonial planning. The physical expression of Indigenous song lines or dreaming tracks is enigmatic: while sacred sites and their connecting stories are marked in the Alice Springs landscape, the sense in which their linking tracks exist is unclear. Of these song lines, noted Alice Springs historian Dick Kimber writes irreverently, 'a plan of all of them would begin to look like a bowl of spaghetti!' (Kimber 2000). The labyrinth of interwoven passages and meanings conjured up here may not be susceptible to visualization in this way; however, the place sung, drawn and narrated into being is evidently centrifugal, radiant and active. In contrast with a centralized model of the meeting place, which has its origins in Europe, the Indigenous constitution of sociability focuses solely on relations at a distance. In this context, a new meeting place would not necessarily be an enclosure: it might be a place of disclosure.

Members of the Lhere Artepe Corporation alluded to this distinction when they suggested that what was needed was a 'talking place', not a 'meeting place'. The significance of this distinction is discussed in my book Meeting Place (2013). A meeting place cannot be assumed to exist apart from the discourse that produces it; therefore, ahead of meeting, an agreement to meet has to be negotiated. Prior to the institution of new social relations, an encounter occurs. The encounter involves the improvisation of communicational strategies that will form the basis of stable social relations in the future. The encounter is the creative matrix out of which the forms and conventions of a meeting place can emerge. If the agency that participants exercise in the encounter, and thus the meeting place established by planning fiat, is overruled, the result is a further deterioration of sociability – another non-meeting place. Additional intercultural issues arise when a meeting place is recast as a talking place. The most fundamental is the discovery that, after all, different communities may not want to meet, at least not in a whitefella way. In centralian Indigenous cultures, meetings between different communities are the exceptional, rather than normal, state of affairs. Such observations did not invalidate the Uniting Church initiative; however, they foregrounded the performative nature of what was being solicited. Common ground could not be assumed: it had to be discovered – or rediscovered.

To find common ground, community members had to be encouraged to meet in a way that relived the archetypal (but also everyday) experience of encounter. This is a complex and nuanced process. It is not sociologically essentialist: Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests in Alice Springs do not represent antithetical understandings of place and purpose. Obvious and profound historical, cultural and social experiences of difference exist; however, partly as a consequence of this, there is an equally strong desire for better communication. The Uniting Church initiative channelled this desire. As a result, my role was not to initiate dialogue where no call for it existed; it was to act in the role of dramaturg, listening to what the convening parties said and (I hope subtly) stirring into the discourse certain stories of my own, some locally sourced, some anecdotal, whose object was to thicken the talking, to open up the conversation to the social possibilities of metaphor and story in general. To encourage encounter was to use the poetic power of storytelling to elicit identifications (rather than entrench oppositional identities). Unlike the 'community consultation' process – associated in Alice Springs with 'consultation fatigue' – drawing out senses of place in story quickly builds group energy. Staging encounter is, in this regard, a form of psychic revitalization.

The community convened in this way is not the imagined community of national or regional myth: it is a concretely self-realizing creative community, united, in fact, by its capacity to imagine change as a negotiation between past, present and future. The talking that occurs in these forums is creative; that is, it evolves mimetically and responsively. As a result, the topic that emerges is not distinct from the dramaturgy of the discourse and the idea that emerges from the session is not separate from the fact of something having taken place. The value of this approach in reconciling differences soon emerged in Alice Springs. One discussion, I remember, quickly turned to the separation of the township from the river. A desire was expressed for better connectivity. In planning terms, this would mean reversing the mistakes of planning in the past; however, what was meant by connectivity here was emotional as well as physical. Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants remembered playing together as children in the Todd River bed; they remembered the individual trees and their names and associations; they remembered being related to each other before the 'prison house' of racialized prejudice and separatist acculturation closed down that common space of encounter. Connectivity here meant the act of relating. Relating (storytelling) was not only a form of recollection: it was building a new context for meeting. A new region of care was being discovered where (again) no one was outside it. The sense of collective empowerment recalled Jacques Rancière's (n.d.) description of the 'emancipated spectator': 'the theatrical privilege of living presence' was questioned and all were brought back 'to a level of equality with the telling of a story'. It promised 'the institution of a new stage of equality, where the different kinds of performances would be translated into one another'. In such performances, Rancière writes:

it is a matter of linking what one knows with what one does not know, of being at the same time performers who display their competences and visitors or spectators who are looking for what those competences may produce in a new context, among unknown people.

Taking Place

The emphasis that Rancière places on not knowing is important in developing a regional sense of place. As he implies, returning creative control of the encounter to the 'spectator' – now recast as self-actuating – makes room for the 'stranger' to appear. The efficacy of storytelling in the context of making place (as opposed to a generalized place-making) is measured by its success in revitalizing techniques of welcome, incorporation and care. Encouraging the creative retelling and evolution of place-making, stories draw the future into the present: the linear narrative of public planning, which prescribes sociability rather than ceding power over the script to the players themselves, is replaced by a discourse based on continuous translation and mutual adjustment. These effects are spatial as well as temporal. When common ground is opened up through the discovery of shared concerns – a process that the symbolic language of story mediates – the temporal present and the spatial present fuse in the idea of presence. According to Stanley Rosen (1999: 31), when we care, the 'present' is experienced as 'being by or next to': 'We produce the lived present, not as a synthesis of temporal points, but as the self-orientation of erotic striving'. The meeting place produced in this way is thus a disclosure (rather than an enclosure) – 'if the present is like a place, then it must be a place that we are always in' (Rosen 1999: 16). By the same token, it cannot be fully plotted: it is always immanent. As it depends on other presences, it is always a region of possible meetings; to be in it is to know that one cannot be everywhere. The idealized plans, elevations and perspectives of architectural and landscape design can give no idea of this experience.

This last point became important when our project was taken up by the Northern Territory Government and the Alice Springs Town Council and absorbed into the 'Moving Alice Ahead – Lifestyle, CBD Revitalization' initiative, announced by the Northern Territory Government in 2007. The meeting place project soon became identified with physical modifications to the spatial syntax of the centre of town. 'Revitalization' was, in the hands of the planners, engineers, councillors and media, construed purely in terms of improved 'connectivity', embodied in revised streetscapes and the provision of public art, offering a symbolic overlay or interpretation of the town's heritage. It should be stressed that there is no necessary rift between place-making and storytelling: we had shown this at Federation Square, where the public artwork 'Nearamnew' mediated successfully between these different modalities of time in space. Writing about that work, I referred to Jean-Luc Nancy's conception of community as 'not simply an empirical reality or presence, but rather an advent or a calling or something lying in wait' (Dallmayr 1997: 174–196, 179). This 'lying in wait' characterizes a social experience that is primarily rooted in a sense of relative placing and relative timing. Nancy speaks of a community of 'singular beings', whose finitude emerges relationally 'in a shared space or world'. 'What is involved in this originary sociality is not fusion or exclusion but a kind of "communication" that is vastly different from a mere exchange of information or messages' (Dallmayr 1997: 181). In a similar way, Rosen (1999: 32) characterizes architectural space as an opening towards the other. To put this in another way, the meeting place is not a destination – it is a passage.

When these thoughts are transposed from the somewhat abstract plane of social theory to the concrete situation of social fragmentation in Alice Springs, something else emerges. The new region of possible relations opened up through story is not a future meeting place in an earlier stage of development. If it is a network, its nodal points can never be synthesized to produce a territory. Further, against a background of violent colonization and its aftermath, the region will be composed of negative spaces as well as positive ones: there will be as many no-go zones as there are passages. A Gumatj elder from East Arnhem Land explains:

Some parts of this country are not to be lived on. In our culture we recognize that that there are places we can't go to because of a powerful event, places that are so powerful that you can become cursed by the land, you get sick from it. It is recognized as sickness country for all time [...] They have a mystical power and if you venture too close something will happen. That's why we don't go to these places. We always go around them, asking permission first from the people who know that country. Spirits talk to you. You can hear the land talk to you. People feel it.

(McMillan 2007: 19)

These 'powerful events' may be ancient or modern. They include murders, massacres and other forms of violence. Not all prohibited places are sick: they may be extremely powerful and under exclusive guardianship (Strehlow 1971: 585–586). The point, though, is that this understanding of country fuses social existence and regional literacy.

In exploring senses of place through story with a view to establishing grounds for meeting, plotting elided with passage: it was as if we were making a labyrinth composed entirely of threads – not so different, after all, from Kimber's bowl of spaghetti. We had to see that every passage had its shadow path. Alice Springs is a profoundly traumatized community; it is also comprehensively globalized. It concentrates a history of social and environmental exploitation and adaptation; it communicates to the world the concentrated essence of 'Australia', a dehistoricized compound of ochre landscapes, outback hospitality and Aboriginal art. It has a remarkable nucleus of creative artists, entrepreneurs and activists; it also experiences extremes of social alienation and fragmentation. In a symbolic way, our 'meeting place' represented a process for bringing distant things near. In connecting, it also gave expression to radiating areas of concern that were both psychological and geographical. This centripetal/centrifugal character is found in two of Alice Springs' iconic and defining historical agencies: the Overland Telegraph Line and the John Flynn Flying Doctor Service. The architect of the Telegraph Line, Charles Todd (whose daughter's name is commemorated in the name Alice Springs), oversaw the construction of a system of communication that brought distant communities close. For his part, Flynn developed the twin technologies of flying and radio transmission to service isolated communities, in this way building a networked region of care. However, we had to remember that this drive to connect, while it mediated between near and far, largely treated Indigenous people, their laws, society and culture as a no-go zone; not from respect, but from indifference (Trudinger 2010).

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Creative Communities by Janet McDonald, Robert Mason. Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

 

Introduction - Janet McDonald and Robert Mason

Rethinking Regionalism 

Chapter 1: Common Patterns: Narratives of ‘Mere Coincidence’ and the Production of Regions - Paul Carter

Chapter 2: Creative and Destructive Communities of Lake Condah/Tae Rak, Western Victoria - Louise Johnson

Chapter 3: Creativity and Attenuated Sociality: Creative Communities in Suburban and Peri-Urban Australia - Mark Gibson

Chapter 4: Learning from Inland: Redefining Regional Creativity - Margaret Woodward and Craig Bremner

Returning Creativity 

Chapter 5: Getting to Know the Story of the Boathouse Dances: Football, Freedom and Rock ‘n’ Roll - Tamara Whyte, Chris Matthews, Michael Balfour, Lyndon Murphy and Linda Hassall

Chapter 6: ‘The Artists Are Taking Over This Town’: Lifestyle Migration and Regional Creative Capital - Susan Luckman

Chapter 7: Art in Response to Crisis: Drought, Flood and the Regional Community - Andrew Mason

Chapter 8: ‘Now We Will Live Forever’: Creative Practice and Refugee Settlement in Regional Australia - Wendy Richards

Restoring Community 

Chapter 9: Making Stories Matter: Using Participatory New Media Storytelling and Evaluation to Serve Marginalized and Regional Communities - Ariella Van Luyn and Helen Klaebe

Chapter 10: Vicarious Heritage: Performing Multicultural Heritage in Regional Australia - Robert Mason

Chapter 11: Practising for Life: Amateur Theatre, Regionalism and the Gold Coast - Patrick Mitchell

Chapter 12: Artist-Run Initiatives as Liminal Incubatory Arts Practice - Janet McDonald

Chapter 13: Same but Different: Growing New Audiences for the Performing Arts in Regional Australia - Rebecca Scollen