One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney. I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.
I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever. It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools. My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang. She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking. I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.
I’d resisted seeing the show for months. Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel. They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before
The Commitments repopularised that style of music. When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer. Monday morning consequences be damned.
One Sunday she prevailed. She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition. Her friend
Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with
Daniel Cordeaux. Also on stage that night were
Marko Mustac,
Ewan Campbell and
Andrew Denton. It was intoxicating. The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as
Keith Johnston intended. It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous. It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music. By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high. We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -
These people are my age. If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?
I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated consumer of cultural production. Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February. In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today. I left full-time employment in June 1991. In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world. I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows. I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own. After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus. By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.
Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow. I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.
A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote a
piece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -
I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.
The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated. As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities. One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course. Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog). The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London. But it is unlikely it will be Art. At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations. The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.
Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test. Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable. With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent. For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion. How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already. As Keith says: -
Don’t be original be obvious.
Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art? It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life. The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still. I've hated the last few improv shows I've done. It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale. If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?
I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say. The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.