Candy Bowers as One and Nancy Denis as Ursula in One the Bear. In the current season at Arts Centre Melbourne, Ursula is played by Ashleyrose Gilham. Photo: Hana Schlesinger.
‘When was the last time you saw two black women as best friends in a play?’ asks actor and activist Candy Bowers.
‘It seems like a fucking simple concept, right, but that does not happen on our stages, and certainly not written and directed and created by black women, right?’
Her play, One the Bear, accomplishes all of the above. It’s a hip-hop musical exploring body image and colonialism, using the allegory of bears to expose how black women’s bodies have been objectified throughout history. ‘It’s an ancient conversation and a current conversation,’ said Bowers, a NIDA graduate.
The production is showing in August as part of Arts Centre Melbourne’s Big World, Up Close program which also includes a dance theatre piece on blood, ancestry and being Blak and HIV-positive (Blood on the Dance Floor), and a Blackfoot warrior woman’s revenge story (Deer Woman).
Now in its third year, Big World, Up Close aims to redress the balance of what is represented on Australian stages. This year’s program presents six works from around the world that speak across ‘the fault lines between ancestry and contemporary existence’.
‘There’s a real sense of a conversation,’ said Bowers, who is also a cultural ambassador for the series. ‘Jacob [Boehme]’s work and mine and Deer Woman interact through dealing with colonisation and oppression, while Between Tiny Cities and Since Ali Died both speak to manhood and specifically Cambodian and Malaysian manhood. That’s stuff you don’t usually get to see… There’s something beautiful about handpicking a series of works that have this connection.’
Director of programming Edwina Lunn said of her programming ethos: ‘We are keen on perspectives from around the world, but we look for relevance to our Australian context – themes of activism, defiance, decolonisation, personal journeys, reclaiming histories and searches for ancestors; revenge, power, truth.’
Arts Centre Melbourne’s program is just one example of how fresh approaches to cosmopolitanism and collaboration are reorienting Australia’s international arts programming. This month, Blak Dot Gallery and Channels Festival’s Digital Nations exhibition presents new and experimental works from Australian and international First Nations artists, while the Cosmopolitan exhibition program at Sydney’s Critical Path invites artists, writers and collectives from Australia, Aotearoa, China, the USA and France to address ‘world-making, centres and peripheries’.
Cross-border programs are increasingly focusing on diasporic and decolonial dialogues or person-to-person connections, rather than state-based showcases or exchanges.
Dancers Erak Mith (Phnom Penh) and Aaron Lim (Darwin) in Between Tiny Cities. Photo: Prudence Upton.
Return Flight, an international project from literary journal Going Down Swinging, is also in its third year. The current edition and exhibition, Return Flight MEL>HKG, pairs artists and writers from Melbourne and Hong Kong, while earlier iterations connected Melbourne to Christchurch and Edinburgh.
Project manager and curator Elizaveta Maltseva told ArtsHub that the project came about when she was living in Edinburgh and noted similarities between art worlds of both cities.
‘I think the reason why I intentionally tried to steer the exchange to take place between cities rather than countries is because countries are just so vast. I sometimes fear that people from one side of Melbourne don’t understand those from the other side,’ she said.
Zooming in on the hyperlocal – on the intimate and unapologetically idiosyncratic – offers something special in the age of connectivity and content saturation.
‘It’s that thing about our (online) lives these days – we appear to be more connected and isolated at the same time,’ Maltseva said.
There’s also a growing disillusionment with the state as a site of connection, especially in a settler colonial country like Australia. ‘My heritage is Russian as my family migrated to Australia when I was a child. Growing up very othered in both countries, I think I taught myself quite early on to rely on the individual connection rather than the national,’ Maltseva said.
The Big World, Up Close program notes various cultural affiliations and identities for each of the presenting artists rather than just the nationalities on their passports, drawing from how the artists themselves position their work. That also enables the program to explicitly reach across shared experiences of colonisation, migration, and diaspora.
None that fits neatly and simply just with nationality.
‘I think that craving of person to person connections is inherently about representation,’ said Lunn. ‘We all want to see versions of ourselves on stages, on the telly, in politics, being creative and connecting with us. A truth to our population and the need for genuine and meaningful connections means visibility across gender, ability and culture. None that fits neatly and simply just with nationality.’
The truth is that many of us are neither simply nor straightforwardly Australian. But the movement towards an arts sector that’s representative of this reality has been slow, incremental and erratic.
For Bowers, it’s not enough just to be on the stage.
‘I don’t want to be the only black woman in a play or in the room or in the building. I feel much more lonely inside the building than at the margins, because at least in the margins, I’m there with all my mates,’ she said.
Her experiences in the UK and US, where she saw ‘a lot more people of colour running shit’, showed her that entering the system can call up a mixed bag of emotions. ‘We can be dissatisfied and fucking joyous, and disruptive, and angry that we’re the only ones, and we can do all of that at once.’
She said that artists need to use every opportunity to change the game.
‘When I was at Edinburgh [in 2017], it was almost an all-black female award ceremony,’ she said. ‘Show after show by black women won out the awards. And I’m like, this is us seeing each other. This is us doing the work for us, and putting our elbows out and throwing each other through the crack in the wall.’
Related: From Taiwan to Melbourne: First Nations exchanges that decentre the West
