By Cameron Woodhead
Melbourne will lose a vital independent stage in 2025: La Mama is temporarily going dark and will cease public performance as it restructures its operations, before returning in 2026.
Its final show – Avant Guards – took place on Saturday and was a one-off durational performance and fundraising event, created with the rebellious collective, Pony Cam.
The Pony Cam ensemble literally ran on a treadmill the whole day of Avant Guards.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Fittingly, it offered the kind of communitarian, open-door celebration you’d expect from a La Mama last hurrah, with roving impromptu performance, and a mock-heroic re-enactment of a La Mama board meeting (I lasted 2½ hours of six) as a sobering final word on the state of independent theatre.
Closing its doors is not something La Mama would ever have done lightly, though there’s a defiance, almost a sense of brinkmanship, to the current state of play. Yes, the situation has ultimately been caused by a long legacy of inconsistent and inadequate support for the arts – La Mama was denied four-year organisational funding from the federal government in 2020 and again in 2024 – but the storied theatre has out-stared worse than neglect.
In 2007, La Mama had to buy the Carlton building they’d been making theatre in for four decades or be evicted; the community raised millions to purchase the venue. In 2018, fire ripped through La Mama HQ after an electrical fault, and it took three years to rebuild, just in time for COVID-19 lockdowns.
If La Mama can survive the prospect of eviction, fire, plague and pestilence, why is it closing in 2025? Arguments about taking that course seem to have been fierce behind closed doors, if Avant Guards is anything to go by – but it boils down to remaining true to the open-stage vision La Mama has had since it was founded by the formidable Betty Burstall in 1967.
Avant Guards offered the kind of communitarian, open-door celebration you’d expect from a La Mama last hurrah.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Last month, La Mama did receive belated operational funding in Creative Australia’s “pilot program” for the small and medium sector. For artistic director Caitlin Dullard, the ad hoc boost isn’t enough “to secure La Mama’s mission sustainably into the future”.
The 2025 hiatus is a chance to reassess and compel a reluctant reckoning with the failure of government arts policy to place a consistent value on an institution which has sustained, served and grown with Australian theatre over generations.
It’s also a bit of an up yours from artists, and Avant Guards got into the swing of things with an irreverent swansong full of La Mama traditions. Proximity to Lygon Street has always been a drawcard, and audiences could mill about the venue munching free pizza, or sampling a gelato stand from Brunetti.
We were also assailed by a flurry of raffle tickets, replacing the hundreds of La Mama raffles (there’s one drawn before every show) that won’t proceed while the venue is closed to the public. I won a pair of abandoned sunnies from lost property – and was glad of the cover on entering the stage for a fearsome durational performance.
Avant Guards at La Mama, December 14, 2024Credit: Darren Gill
For most of the day, the theatre was given over to the Kafkaesque spectacle of simulated La Mama board meetings. It was a farcical and depressing thing to witness artists squabbling over nepotism or excellence, or what programs should face funding cuts, and so on, and impromptu dancing didn’t up the fun factor much.
As protest theatre, it’s a fair cop, though. Spirit-crushing bureaucracy and pleasing the bean-counters are not what artists do best, and why shouldn’t they excruciate audiences by boring us with the misery of it all? Artistic frustration needs an outlet, and the indie scene is so underfunded, it’s a wonder that actors aren’t performing jargon-littered, pro-forma grant applications instead of plays these days.
The artists at Pony Cam are used to shaping such untamed energies into community theatre. They’re also not big complainers, and they’ll go the extra mile, as anyone who saw Burnout Paradise, their athletic ode to artistic burnout performed on treadmills, can attest.
In fact, the Pony Cam ensemble literally ran on a treadmill the whole day of Avant Guards, the grind of putting one foot in front of another setting a steady beat for another performer, who compiled lists of various La Mama shows throughout the years, working to establish what it is the community is trying to save.
La Mama’s collaboration with Pony Cam marks the temporary closure of La Mama as a significant historical inflection point in Melbourne’s theatre scene. At present, La Mama will only be open to artistic residencies in 2025 and until that changes, the theatre’s status as a lynchpin connecting generations of Australian theatre artists, its essential function as an accessible incubator for new work, stands in the balance.
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