From WAAPA to Art Gallery of WA, new challenges to redraw the cultural landscape of the west

There’s plenty new in store for WA in 2020 but surprisingly for some it must come at budget prices.

WAAPA Dance students perform in Verge, part of the 2019 season. Picture: Stephen Heath

Western Australia’s cultural scene looks set for big changes next year, with some of its major arts institutions facing upbeat new leadership, new venues and persistent challenges.

The biggest physical change to the landscape is the Western Australian Museum, the $396m building that Premier Mark McGowan last week declared complete ahead of an extensive internal fit-out during the next few months. Since West Australians have waited more than two decades for a purpose-built museum, it will be a momentous event when it opens its doors later next year.

There are also changes due at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which is conducting interviews for a new gallery director after the departure of Stefano Carboni in June. The chosen applicant is due to be selected in February.

Since Carboni’s exit, AGWA has been run by arts bureaucrat Colin Walker, who was seconded from the state’s Department of Culture and Arts. A part-time ­curator, Ric Spencer, has filled the lead curatorial role while the gallery continues with a severely ­depleted curatorial team — halved from eight staff when Carboni arrived and including an international art curator position left vacant for nearly two years.

Stefano Carboni, former AGNSW director.

There are 35 applicants for the director’s job but the field of the best national and international candidates may have been narrowed dramatically by the fact — until now undisclosed — that the job’s salary range has been cut by nearly 30 per cent. It relegates the role of a state gallery director to the equivalent status and pay of a regional art gallery director.

The cut has been confirmed by the state’s Public Sector Commission, which told The Australian: “The previous occupant’s salary was ­negotiated based on experience, and factored in their relocation. While the salary range on offer ($202,631 to $235,539 per annum) is between 15 per cent and 27 per cent less than that provided to the previous occupant, it is consistent with comparable roles,” the statement reads. Those roles include the directors of the WA Museum, state library and zoo.

Insiders say the McGowan government has relegated AGWA, the state’s pre-eminent public gallery, to a salary range on a par with ­regional galleries such as Bendigo, Newcastle, Armidale, Mornington and Launceston.

The new AGWA salary range is in fact lower than the one offered more than a decade ago, the last time the role was formally advertised. In 2008 the successful applicant was ­offered a starting salary of about $260,000.

Several candidates approached directly by the job search firm are believed to have responded politely ­that they could not consider applying for a job interstate and moving their family for that salary.

The PSC says the final salary for the successful AGWA candidate is “yet to be determined”.

Another likely turn-off for any interested applicant may have been the WA government’s stated aim to merge AGWA, the state museum and state library under one administrative and board entity. Critics of the amalgamation — a move that has since been abandoned in the face of protests ­reported by The Australian — said it would deter any ambitious gallery director from applying for the job while that threat hung over AGWA.

Whoever chooses to accept the AGWA job, they will confront the challenge of a new crowd-pulling museum on its doorstep. They also will have to deal with a cultural precinct taskforce, just announced, that will be overseeing a tourism-focused “transforma­tion” of the Perth Cultural Centre, the city precinct bounded by the art gallery, state museum, public library and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Culture and the Arts Minister David Templeman says: “It’s ­important there is a unified vision for the space. The state government is working to create a space that welcomes tourists and brings together the local community.”

On the brighter side, Perth’s “arts offer” is likely to be enriched by the state’s talented actors, singers, dancers and theatre practitioners studying at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. WAAPA has ambitious plans to move its performances into the city, and — in time — to shift part of its inner-suburban campus at Mount Lawley into an as yet undisclosed location in the CBD.

WAAPA has been energised by the arrival in April of David Shirley, a British-trained actor, ­director, writer and research academic who will head up WAAPA as executive dean for the next five years. Previously he was director of the school of theatre within Manchester Metropolitan University.

WAAPA boss David Shirley

In launching WAAPA’s program for 2020, its 40th anniver­sary year, Shirley announced a new three-year partnership with the Perth Theatre Trust that will give WAAPA access to the state’s major performing spaces — His Majesty’s Theatre, State Theatre Centre of WA, Subiaco Arts ­Centre and Albany Entertainment Centre.

The new arrangement means that, for the first time, WAAPA’s mid-year musical will be staged at His Majesty’s Theatre, providing commercial opportunities to the college and professional experience to undergraduate performers. Apart from this year’s musical Mamma Mia!, a contemporary dance season and graduate year student productions also will be staged in the PTT venues.

Shirley tells The Australian that WAAPA previously has used off-campus venues such as the Regal Theatre and the experimental Blue Room. “But this will be in a more planned and coherent way, not so random,” he says. “It’s the state’s principal arts venues coming together with the premier arts training institution.

“One of our aims at WAAPA is to ensure that our students are well equipped and ready for the next stage in their careers, and this agreement ensures that this can happen. It is a remarkable ­opportunity.” He says the move is also a concerted bid to elevate WAAPA’s profile at state, national and international levels.

Discussions are under way to form partnerships and exchange students with ­Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, the music faculties of Beijing Normal University and Nanjing University of the Arts, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Britain’s Royal Northern College of Music, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, East Caro­lina University in North Carolina, and Indonesia’s Surabaya College of the Arts.

“We hope to attract students from colleges all over the world to all our courses, many of which can be singled out as the best examples of training in the world — our bachelor of music theatre, for instance, or our dance training,” Shirley says.

WAAPA also has secured exclusive rights to stage in 2020 the first performance of a Pina Bausch work in Perth. ­Titled Tannhauser Bacchanal, the work will be performed for the first time outside Germany and will be directed and staged by members of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, Barbara Kaufmann and Marigia Magipinto, with WAAPA dance students.