Sydney Festival has only itself to blame for this mess

The Sydney Dance Company performs Decadance at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: Daniel Boud

It’s not been a great new year for the beleaguered Sydney Festival. After accepting $20,000 from the Israeli embassy to stage Ohad Naharin’s production of Decadance, the premier cultural event has been embroiled in a bitter feud which, until recently, threatened to derail its entire program.

The campaign to boycott the festival, led by a coalition of pro-Palestinian organisations and backed by the aggressive Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, has demanded the organisers return the embassy money or face sustained disruption and calls for cancellation.

But the festival’s board has been caught on the back foot, fighting a rearguard action against a campaign that could’ve been confronted almost a month ago. And still, as the controversy rumbles into its third week, its position remains either confused or mendicant, or both.

It is clear, in the first instance, that the festival was more than happy to accept sponsorship from the embassy – remember, festival organisers approached the embassy, not the other way round – though not particularly keen as it happens on defending their decision to keep it, much less in advocating artistic freedom against calls for cancellation.

Sydney Festival chairman David Kirk. Picture: John Feder

In fact, quite the opposite seems to be the case. As dozens of performances fell to the demands of the boycott and the shrill demagoguery of the BDS movement, so, too, in its way did the board. In a series of lacklustre interviews last week, chairman David Kirk conceded there had been an error of judgment and then offered a conciliatory mea culpa, noting that he was not aware of the funding until he saw the logo of the embassy embossed on the festival programs late last year.

“In hindsight we have put artists in a very difficult position,” Kirk told ABC RN. “Many have been pressurised to withdraw and we’re very sorry about that … We never wanted to do that, and don’t want to do it again.”

Of course, the board will claim – not without merit – that the production of Decadance has gone ahead as planned, and calls for its cancellation have been ignored. But its response to the controversy has been characterised by a distinct lack of conviction at every turn. We have heard no strident defence of the festival’s long tradition of foreign sponsorship for special international performances. No defence of cultural exchange or the importance of artistic expression amid calls for censorship. Instead, only regrets, apologies and the inane injunction that there will be an independent review into the matter. Good luck.

Benjamin Law.

The feebleness of this position was perfectly illustrated by author Benjamin Law in a letter he wrote after resigning from the board. In a belated show of solidarity/virtue signalling, Law lamented the ­personal costs and sensitivities inherent in the debate, but somehow dodged the question of funding altogether.

“This funding, the boycott and the resulting conversation around it doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he wrote. “It has been a painful time, especially for the many Australians with deep connections to Israel and Palestine.”

In one sense it might even have been possible to accept Law’s resignation – as if anyone really cared – had he gone to the trouble of articulating his principles, rather than hiding behind the spew of vapid regrets that have so far typified the festival’s response to the boycott. Equally, if the board itself truly does regard the embassy’s sponsorship as an oversight – a mistake never to be repeated – then it ought to have the guts to come out and say so.

But here’s the rub. If the Sydney Festival had acted sooner and not made such a pageant of its progressive credentials and empty buzzwords, it’s likely the controversy would never have taken off in the first place.

Instead, everywhere is a safe space, everything is inclusive and diverse and everyone must partake in “respectful dialogues”. (Hardly an environment for the performance of bold and transgressive art, you would have thought.) And yet those words are rendered even more meaningless if its leaders cannot bring themselves to properly denounce the proponents of cancel culture, rather than pander to the demands of the boycotters and the censorious BDS movement.

It would be churlish to deny that art and politics are somehow separate entities in these matters. They never will be. But here was a golden opportunity for a major cultural institution to go on the offensive and declare its opposition to censorship in all its guises. Its silence has been deafening.

In the final analysis, it’s difficult to escape from the view that the Sydney Festival has found ­itself in a mess entirely of its own making.

Nicholas Jensen is a reporter with The Australian.