Fearless Conversations: Major events back to fire up the city | SA film sector booming

The arts and major festivals will play a critical role in injecting life back into our city over the next six months, industry leaders say.

Theatre shows and festivals will play a major role in bringing life back to Adelaide’s city centre when pandemic restrictions are finally relaxed, according to arts industry leaders.

Festival Centre chief executive Douglas Gautier said that more than 180,000 attendances at this month’s OzAsia Festival, with its associated Moon Lantern Trail and Lucky Dumpling Market, showed the public was primed to embrace events again.

“I do think there is a real opportunity and responsibility on the arts sector to help with the Covid rebuild – particularly, for instance, with bringing people back into the city,” Mr Gautier said.

The Adelaide Fringe will be among the first major events to roll out once restrictions have eased next year.

Fringe director Heather Croall said that – as with this year’s event – it was committed to assist artists and venues withfunding to stage shows for its 2022 program in February-March.

Crowds enjoying last month’s OzAsia Festival. Photo Tyr Liang.

“The first year I arrived, we gave out $30,000. We now give out $600,000 to $700,000 of grants across the artist landscapein the Fringe every year,” said Ms Croall

“There’s a lot of small grants … what they will take with a $5000 or $10,000 intervention grant, and turn it into, is incredible.”

Ms Croall said the Fringe had again raised extra funding through the SA Government, Federal Government, donations and artsfoundations.

Adelaide Fringe Director and CEO Heather Croall with performers from Fringe show Disco Wonderland at this year’s Fringe. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

“That’s how Fringe operates … it’s an entrepreneurial platform,” she said.

“It’s a bit like thousands of small businesses.

“These people are getting small grants to get their show up … then we last year had a ticket box office of nearly $20m.

“That’s absolutely critical money, going into the pockets of artists and venues.”

Flinders University’s Assemblage centre director Garry Stewart said many SA performing arts companies – including Australian Dance Theatre, Windmill and State Theatre Company – had been quick to employ artists to produce streaming content when thepandemic began, but the novelty had worn off for audiences.

Flinders University’s Assemblage centre director Garry Stewart. Photo: Roy van der Vegt.

“Everyone got used to screens over the last couple of years, and I think most people are exhausted from that,” Mr Stewartsaid. “If we look at what’s happening in the (United) States and in Europe, people are rushing back to theatres and rushingback to cinemas as well.”

Blockbuster – Film sector booming as SAFC marks 50 years

On the eve of the South Australian Film Corporation’s 50th anniversary the state’s screen sector is not only booming but breaking records.

Speaking at the final Fearless Conversations forum held by the Sunday Mail, Advertiser and Flinders University, SAFC chiefexecutive Kate Croser said the industry was “busier than ever”.

“During the last few weeks there has been a record level of production activity with six simultaneous productions,” she said.

“Local producers are producing more content than ever and international and interstate productions are also looking to cometo South Australia.”

The six productions are vampire series Firebite, the Netflix-commissioned Gymnastics Academy: A Second Chance, Rolf De Heer film The Mountain, feature documentary Embrace Kids, ABC Kids series Beep and Mort and season two of Aussie Snake Wranglers.

“The screen sector bucked against the trend of the broader arts and entertainment sector when it came to the impact of Covid.” Ms Croser said.

19/8/2019 Kate Croser, new chief executive of South Australian Film Corporation pictured in Rymill Park. Picture MATT TURNER.

Local post-production companies such as visual-effects specialist Rising Sun Pictures - which is working on Thor: Love and Thunder and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic – were also in demand globally.

SA’s “Covid-safe advantage” was backed by its 50-year history of making world-class films.

The SAFC was founded in 1972, producing iconic films such as Storm Boy, Picnic At Hanging Rock and Sunday Too Far Away thatput the state on the map both nationally and internationally.

Ms Croser said the SAFC was “incredibly proud” of its achievements in the early days when it was a government-owned productioncompany, which she said had created an industry from “nowhere”. By the 1990s, SA’s screen sector was industry-led.

“What we have been able to do over the past 50 years, with the support of the SA Film Corporation but really through the entrepreneurialismof the sector, is grow from that very small start into a very sizeable and significant industry for SA,” Ms Croser said.

The number of storytellers and filmmakers now living in SA was “incomparable” to those in the 1970s, she said.

“In those early days it was people coming in from Sydney to make their films here, so what we’ve been able to do is turn thatright around. Now we have SA businesses, writers, directors, producers, crew and cast.”

Advancements in technology also meant it was far less challenging for SA film and television content to “cut through” andreach a global audience.

Rob Collins as Tyson in the new SA-shot vampire series Firebite. Image Ian Routledge/AMC+

“Back in the day you had to ship a physical film print around, so it’s a lot easier now,” Ms Croser said. “There is justso much more opportunity for storytellers and filmmakers to create content, to commercialise that content and to get it totheir audiences, whether its mainstream or really niche.”

Ms Croser said the SA screen sector was also receiving recognition at the highest critical levels.

SA-made ABC TV drama series First Day won the International Kids Emmy award and SA-produced and SAFC-supported When PomegranatesHowl has been put forward as Australia’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film at the 2022 Academy Awards.

“They are incredibly important cultural works - we’ve moved on in a positive direction from those early day, as importantas they were,” she said.

When creative arts meet science, economic success follows

Fusing the creative arts with sciences and other fields of academic and industrial research can lead to advancements which benefit the broader South Australian community and economy, says the head of Flinders University’s new Assemblage centre.

Professor Garry Stewart is now building connective tissue between the university’s many diverse schools of study, as he brings his 22 years as artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre to a close.

“The initial aim of Assemblage was to set up a centre within the university that brings together the already very sophisticated and formidable creative arts research that was happening,” he said.

“At Flinders there’s creative writing, there’s film, there’s a very long history in drama, indigenous studies, et cetera.”

Under Stewart’s guidance, Assemblage now aims to not only bring those together but also seek applications for, and input from, the university’s other diverse fields of research and associated industries.

“We live in a complex world with complex problems, and often those problems or issues can’t be looked at from (just) one discipline or one perspective. Interdisciplinarity permits this mindset, or thinking, in order to reach across from one art form to another, or across to sciences and engineering, or health sciences and medicine.

“It’s really shifting the practice of the creative arts academics.”

Assemblage has already established an arts and health alliance with the colleges of humanities, social sciences and nursing, among others.

“Out of that, we are spawning a lot of projects where arts is intervening in health in a variety of ways: Through community work, through stroke rehabilitation using virtual reality and augmented reality, (or) verbatim theatre and the processes of ageing.

“We have creative writers working with artificial intelligence over at engineering. I am starting a project using cobotics (collaborative robots) – that are used in manufacturing – and dance. It’s really incredibly broad-reaching.”

Stewart incorporated similar advancements in his work with ADT, but said it was never about the technology itself.

“It’s about: ‘What can it do for us?’ Technology is interesting because it provides a new canvas. At the very fundamental level of art-making practice, it’s about agency in the world and exploring the world and reframing the world in ways that we haven’t seen it before.”

By artists taking technology and using it for purposes other than it was originally intended for, further discoveries and applications can be made, which could have benefits for other industries and the wider public.

“Those kind of interventions into other fields has a disruptive nature. I don’t think, for example, the programmers at the engineering department ever thought they’d be working with dance.”

Artists can also make news, information, science and technology more relatable for a wider audience, Stewart said.

“We can hear data on what’s happening in the world, but artists take that data and those stories and those facts and turn them into these kind of emblems that have affect and emotion embedded in them, and are quite transformative.”