Platform Papers > Issue 19: YOUR GENRE IS BACK

Your Genre is Black:
Indigenous Performing Arts and Policy

by Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson

Read the first three pages (PDF).

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In February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations on behalf of the Australian people. Now what?  In this Platform Paper, mid-career Indigenous performing artists think about their post-apology future.

Indigenous theatre blossomed in the 1990s when it was grasped as a means to expose social issues and advance the goals of Reconciliation. Now that generation of artists questions these motives. For some, history and community are central; others are impatient with ‘your genre is black’ and demand the professional respect they have earned. ‘Indigenous artists’, says director Wesley Enoch, ‘have been asked for decades to work at their slowest, to bring everyone along with them. It’s the equivalent of asking Cathy Freeman to run slowly, so that everyone can keep up with her.’

Glow and Johanson provide a forum for practitioners like Rachel Maza-Long, David Milroy, Stephen Page and Rhoda Roberts. Together they call for an end to second-best; and for measures that respond with post-apology confidence to the vision and inspiration that, in the opinion of the Australia Council, ‘remain at the heart of Australia’s culture’.

Dr Hilary Glow and Dr Katya Johanson are researchers and lecturers in arts, cultural policy, history and practice at Deakin University, Melbourne. Hilary Glow is the author of Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda (2007).

Platform Papers invites considered responses to Glow and Johanson’s argument for publication in the April edition – Beethoven or Britney? The Great Divide in Music Education.