By Nick Miller
Circus Oz, the Melbourne-based contemporary circus company founded in 1977, is to be stripped of $2.6 million in national funding and the company wound up – but the Australia Council has pledged to reinvest the money in Victorian performing arts with a focus on circus and physical theatre.
This week company members voted against a proposal to change how the company is run by reconstituting its board and membership to reduce the influence of artists and former employees.
Mitch Jones – Circus Oz artist.Credit: Jacinta Oaten / Circus Oz
Executive director Penny Miles said the Council, the federal government’s arts funding agency, had insisted on the changes and made it clear their continued funding was contingent on them.
But members voted, with a majority of 62 out of 81 votes in an anonymous online poll on Wednesday, to reject the ultimatum and therefore close the company, which was not viable without national funding.
Unidentified members told industry website ArtsHub they were shocked by Friday’s announcement, and accused the company of moving too fast to wind up after the vote, instead of consulting further about a way forward.
A former employee, speaking to The Age on background because they did not want to be identified, said members had already discussed closing the company down because they were disillusioned with the direction it had taken in recent years, and were angry about abrupt changes and redundancies.
But Miles said the decision of the members “defies logic”, and reflected an unrealistic view of how a major company should be run.
“[The management team] inherited a mess and they not only cleaned it up they were excelling,” she said. “We’d completely flipped the table around for this company, resuscitated it to the point where it wasn’t just going to survive, it was going to thrive.
“That makes it even harder... It’s a very sad day for the circus family everywhere.”
The news was also met with dismay by circus artists. Mitch Jones, who has been involved with the company for two decades since he was a teenager, and is now an artistic fellow at Circus Oz, said the relationship between company members and its daily business “was becoming dysfunctional”.
Circus Oz Incubator fellowship artists: Jess Love and Captain Ruin.Credit: Joe Armao
The decision to close the company instead of agree to the Australia Council’s terms “represents the selfishness of an older generation taking their bat and ball home with them when they were told they needed to change their relationship with the company,” he said.
The members are around 100 people who have worked for the company for more than three years full-time over its lifespan.
Jones said he has some sympathy for the point of view that artists should have control of an arts organisation, but a lot of the members were not performers and never had been.
“While I absolutely agree that the government has been quite heavy-handed by giving them this black and white option, to change the company structure or lose the funding with no middle ground, what is missing from the conversation is the effect on younger artists,” he said.
“I don’t want to be on a board, I want to make art. The idea of the company as a social experiment is a lovely bit of nostalgia, but is also from a different political era. There’s this sense amongst my generation of artists that once again it’s Boomers, Baby Boomers, who are trying to define the narrative around the terms that are familiar to them... they’re not willing to see it from a fresh new perspective.”
The news comes barely a fortnight after the company announced its first post-pandemic show, which was to have put performers in the alleys and secret spaces of inner-city Melbourne. The company is now unsure if that show can be put on while the organisation is being wound up.
The announcement came the same day the federal government announced another $6 million from a $50 million fund would be used to prop up companies, including $500,000 for Brisbane-based circus company Circa.
However, the issues at Circus Oz, which received $420,000 from the same fund in August, are not directly related to the pandemic. It has been under a warning from its main funding body, the Australia Council, since 2018 that it needed to reform or lose its funding status.
The Council had concerns about the company’s artistic vibrancy and its financial business model, Miles said – it had posted big losses over the previous decade.
In January, the Australia Council suspended Circus Oz’s application for funding in 2022-24, subject to an independent “review of the company’s strategic vision and business model”. The review, which is confidential, was given to the company last month.
The company has undergone a radical restructure in anticipation of the review’s findings, cutting half its administrative jobs, making more diverse hires, and shifting to a program of smaller productions and a big artist development program – all done in the hope of retaining federal support.
However, the Australia Council made it clear to the company that the recommendations around governance, reform and membership, where the board would be “skills-based” rather than artist-led, and membership would be open to the wider circus community, were “non-negotiable and funding was contingent on our ability to deliver,” Miles said.
Company treasurer Mike McCreadie said with 70 per cent of their funding coming from government, “take that out of the equation and we’re just not a viable business going forward”.
“It’s really disappointing, I feel for our staff, I feel for the performers,” McCreadie said. “And I feel for Victoria not having Circus Oz in the future. It’s a terrible shame and a pity.”
Federal arts minister Paul Fletcher said funding for the major arts organisations was “done on an arm’s length basis” by the Australia Council, but funding “can’t be a club where once you’re in it you can just sit back and know that the funding will keep rolling on forever”.
He wanted to “acknowledge and celebrate” the track record of Circus Oz, he said, but it was up to the Australia Council to work through its funding processes.
In a statement, the Australia Council accepted the decision to wind up the company and said the independent review had “highlighted a number of the challenges facing the company which have led to this difficult decision”.
“Funding from the Australia Council and Creative Victoria previously provided to Circus Oz will be reinvested in the performing arts in Victoria for the years ahead, with a focus on circus and physical theatre.”
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