Behind the Scenes

Nithya Nagarajan

I kept a public diary on Instagram during my tenure as co-AD at Arts House, and I’ve carried that habit with me, like a small, stubborn lantern, ever since I left the building. In a sector that so often hides its workings, it felt like subtle defiance to peel back the curtain, to name both the sweetness but also the strain of arts work in real time. These entries are a snapshot from that period — a breadcrumb trail of resident ghosts, imaginative artistry, endless rehearsals, jet lag, joy, rage, invisible labour and shared meals — written in the steadfast belief that demystifying the “behind the scenes” and staying in ongoing, public dialogue are small but vital acts in building a more accountable, joyful cultural landscape.

July 20, 2022

For whatever this way of marking time is worth, I just completed 3 months at @artshouse. I think I’ve made friends with the resident ghosts 👻✨

August 3, 2022

Invite Asian artists to your venue, and the ingrained hospitality and generosity means they’ll feed you before they feed themselves 🙈

Jokes aside, here’s the BTS. The things you do not see as an audience. The sacred moments of intimacy and connection that reach far beyond a rehearsal room. Pictured here is a Selamatan where staff were invited to share delicious food with the performers w/ a moving gratitude to the Earth, to Indigenous soil, to the collaborators, to craft itself by @rianto_rds as a way to invoke a ritualistic gathering in communal feasting.

Collaborations are hard at the best of times, but they’re nigh impossible as a pandemic rips through. JAGAD is a rich collision, of appearances and disappearances, of the classical and the contemporary, of transcendence and interference. Even the clues to struggles of the collaboration in itself being made evident was mutually constitutive.

I do not particularly know where I’m going with this anecdotal offering but for a brief moment today I believed in the ability of an embodied process to wrestle with tensions that words simply cannot.

October 27, 2022

Long distance is nigh impossible, but you just got to be cute and keep trying 💌

December 21, 2022

Don’t @ us // we’re out of office 🧿

January 18, 2023

Morning musings

It’s been so heartbreaking to see our sector wield words like equity and justice with little consideration to the work. It’s hard not to feel disappointment when contemporary arts organisations re/appoint longstanding directors. When you witness the cultural amnesia from the last two years meaning CEO appointments by exec search firms without a sodding clue, or due diligence. When the pace of cis white able bodied men and women once again rising through the ranks in these roles is meteoric. I hung out with a dear friend and ex-colleague last night who has Korean heritage and he was saying how so many people in his new workplace look like him, and I can’t fathom how far we are from such a reality in our cultural institutions. All the while claiming to be a place of dreaming alternate futures. Who is allowed the rest to dream? When only white people dreamt, it manifested as colonisation. Every sector is possibly doing better than us in the demands for justice and that is allowed to perpetuate because of the elitism of the arts sector with its foyer wines and galas and private school-educated arts workers touting language clamored from radical Black traditions with zero accountability practices or systems change.

I’ve been researching strategic plans and structural pillars of almost every arts organisation on this continent reads First Nations First but what are we actually doing about it?

We talk about COMMUNITY but often think about audiences. Our governance structures are rotting at their roots with NFP Board models. Where we hire for diversity, we neither empower nor scaffold and almost always do so in junior positions. Forever capacity building building building building. In the articulation of solidarity building though, the arts scene is advancing ambition of an unchecked kind. Because the sector operates often from a place of white fragility, power structures are replicated when held by PoC. Those who knock loudest have doors opened for.

There are a plethora of problems: a complete lack of understanding of artistic and cultural forms of alterity; inability to engage with work critically; lack of resources and foresight for generational uplift of young people particularly from outer metro and regional areas (and if we only invest in young white people, we will only have another generation of white artists and curators and producers like duh?); a strongly fixated inward gaze; a strong old world cultural guard – so on and so forth.

When was the last time we took tools out on contracts? How are permanent ones for positions of arbitrary tastemakers and producers allowed to exist in perpetuity?

There are huge issues that stare us in the face rn: financial, cultural and material safety for artists, burnout, ableism, nationalism, racism, casteism, Islamophobia (I hate this word but I use it to make a point. You can’t scientifically be scared of Muslims. It’s not a health condition. Rather, you are conditioned to do so), anti-trans sentiment, climate change, mass exodus from our sector. WHY are we in the work of culture if we cannot do the work of change?

Being agents of storytelling and abstraction is a strong place to advocate and dissent from. However, socially-engaged practices have no ethical framework or code and extraction of knowledges moonlights as consultation and engagement. Demand better from your museums and galleries, your SME organisations and majors, your council arts orgs and commercial spaces, your festivals and your fringes.

Hope is a doing word, not a being word. I try very hard to remain in the action of hope. I have felt the possibility of hope in waves but this morning I find that ray hiding behind the clouds. We’re on the brink of a national cultural policy, but what are we reflecting in practice? From a micro-personal politic, I see for myself arts work as uninvited settler work. How do you see it?

Not out here arguing against fallibility but out here asking us all to take collective responsibility, accountability, ACTION. REFLECTION. We’re allowed mistakes but we’re not allowed inertia. Phew. Good morning 👋🏾

January 21, 2023

✅ 2023 is year of good hoomans as collaborators ONLY

⛔ no villains bullies tyrants racists meanies brutes nasties doozies (no matter the power)
🌬️

April 2, 2023

Some mems 🫴🏾

1. Sharing a meal with Germaine Acogny and Helmut Vogt here from Senegal. She taught us about her Acogny technique. The 62 movement phrases within it in conversation with the earth, the sky and the water and her body as interface between Africa and Europe. She asked me about my grandmother, who passed last year, and said she feels so much of her strength and vitality in me 😭
2. Closing night performance of Somewhere at the Beginning – her solo which she created 8 years ago: layered with ancestral memory, imagery, voice, video and movement in radical and rigorous ways. The audience were stunned in their seats in silence and the Bessie and Golden Lion award winner received 4 rounds of thundering applause and whoops for this magnificent work. @artshouse is the smallest hall she has performed this show in but said it was one of her most memorable experiences 🤲🏾
3. Germaine speaking to a room of young Black and PoC folks courtesy of @signalarts and @footscrayarts. Special thanks to @aisha__3000 @theashabee @ruthruach @miigaaynaath for the many ways you enriched her visit. Germaine said this is the largest number of Black folks she has had in an audience outside of Senegal and regarded how meaningful this was to her. She discussed the themes of the performance: how she was sent to a Catholic orphanage at 7 years old and the trauma she faced; how the symbolism of the bird represents a shedding of the weight to give flight to the present; how her dad and her brothers eventually let her have her grandmere Aloopho’s knives; what it meant for her to go to her village for the first time 👁️
4. They gifted me this traditional wooden sculpture of Oshun, the goddess of love and liberation, and wished that anything I birth into this world whether it be children, artistry or a dream is blessed by her fiercely protective spirit. Wrapped in a Melahfa from Mauritania that reminded them of a Batik saree from India. I’m not crying, you’re crying 🥻
5. ‘We need to refuse the demand to become a master, to mastery. Instead we should wish for a mistress of voice, that is the illicit voice, the becoming voice, the other voice (Smith L)’ 💗

I’m forever changed xoxo

April 20, 2023

1 year at @artshouse ✨ gratitude & all that jazz ✌🏾

I attempted to keep a daily journal for my first year as AD, in a non-designated role, but I didn’t get very far. Here are 12 reflections, notes to self and hot tips I’ve garnered along the way tho – one for every month it took the earth to orbit the ☀

1. If you want artists to freefall into their process, land in their decisions and sink into their craft – you must catalyse the conditions for this to happen, safely. This is your core responsibility
2. In shared leadership, trust implicitly and explicitly in your co-pilot
3. Listen with curiosity and intent, but always reserve the right to keep your own counsel
4. Pay close attention to the person with the least power in any room. Pay closer attention to who isn’t even in the room
5. You’ll be disappointed along the way – sometimes in the system, sometimes in your colleagues, sometimes in your artists, and most often in yourself and that’s completely okay and valid. Notice it, learn from it, and move through it
6. There will be unglamorous parts to the job that nobody gets to see: outbreaks, medical emergencies, staffing shortages and sometimes the trifecta before 9 am. Trust that tomorrow is another day and triage today
7. You don’t have to conflate leadership with ego – you can synonymise leadership with service
8. Representation means nothing without integrity
9. The resistance you feel when you talk about race at work is real, but it is a muscle that grows and flexes with practice, for you and for everyone in your orbit
10. Surrender to the suspension of belief in the theatre
11. A collective vision 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 > singular vision
12. ‘we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities. The door is opened only so far. If some of us can squeeze through the crack of that door, then we owe it to those who have made those demands that the door be opened to use the knowledge or the skills that we acquire not only for ourselves but in the service of the community’, Angela Davis

Channeling my paati, Nagammal, Queen of the 🐍 in my first rodeo. May she always Rest. In. Power 🥺

May 13, 2023

It has categorically been a very rough week. I’m resting with sleep ins, reading in bed, savouring art with friends and having yumcha with my pregnant bffl @divyaaalopez on mother’s day to recover 💓

Institutional work can be so brutal, and it’s important to de-glamour what it means to be in arts work, in public service, in voluntary boards. I’m thinking of that overshared graphic of WoC leaving organisations in 18 months. I’m thinking of Black and Brown friends in service roles in our sector and the things we endure in an average week. With @yirramboi this week, I’m especially thinking of what First Nations leadership costs in bureaucratic systems but also how it cannot be contained. Looking at you @sherenesr
@mainey_88 🔥 so deadly 🖤

When you are a WoC, you are salaried for an institutional responsibility but you are held to a community responsibility, often by multiple communities (as you should be). But sometimes you are tired in your bones, and navigating and combatting structural racism at the same time, producing and presenting a year round program as the pandemic lives on, holding your breath with shifted audience behaviours with late ticket purchase, having people management responsibilities when the world is falling apart for most of them too and (occasionally) appeasing demands from artists you simply cannot rise to meet.

Institutional leadership is slippery, you become entangled in the very power structures you critiqued from outside as an artist and as someone in kin with community and non-human life, and you have to keep coming back to why you do this work. At any cost, you cannot lie to yourself. You are privy to rooms and conversations that should be imagining better futures, but are actively causing harm, or silencing others, or looking away, often a combination of the above. You have to be responsible without self-censure in these rooms but speaking truth to power when you have power in the public eye but are still the least powerful person in these rooms is very hard. Whiteness operates in such insidious ways and I honestly miss the first two decades of my life when I was not witness to it daily.

How do YOU keep on, keepin’ on?

June 18, 2023

Mini manifesto on international engagement and the arts

1. Internationalism is the antidote to nationalism. There is a danger of the inward gaze and because of the tyranny of distance in Australia – we suffer acutely from this
2. We are geospatially in the Asia Pacific – re-orienting Australia’s gaze from the global north to our periphery, our neighbourhood and our horizon is not just imminent, it is well overdue
3. People from the Asia Pacific region form our largest diasporas with that only set to grow in Australia – and how we relate to each other through land and water holds deep cultural, spiritual and political significance for First Nations peoples, for peoples from the ‘East’, for peoples from the ‘global South’ and investing in these strategies for relation must underpin our collective imagination. In the West, we’ve been conditioned to believe in a perceptual shrinking of reality and we want to look beyond that gazing ball
4. I want to address the elephant in the room. There’s always a tension in the conversation at the intersection of racial justice and climate change:But to limit one’s understanding of the climate conversion to the frame that all artists, particularly artists from marginalised backgrounds, do not get on planes ever again is not just lazy but forfeits the opportunity to understand a condition of planetary entanglement in all its complexity.So it’s not just why international, but it’s more importantly who and how we prioritise in that work, and the ways that it connects to our hyperlocal context
5. At Arts House, we unapologetically prioritise Indigenous led, Black led and diaspora driven engagement and work built around reciprocity, solidarity, gathering and ideasbecome entangled in the very power structures you critiqued from outside as an artist and as someone in kin with community and non-human life, and you have to keep coming back to why you do this work. At any cost, you cannot lie to yourself. You are privy to rooms and conversations that should be imagining better futures, but are actively causing harm, or silencing others, or looking away, often a combination of the above. You have to be responsible without self-censure in these rooms but speaking truth to power when you have power in the public eye but are still the least powerful person in these rooms is very hard. Whiteness operates in such insidious ways and I honestly miss the first two decades of my life when I was not witness to it daily.
6. So what are these ideas? Ideas of cultural maintenance, alternate temporarily, language renewal, critical fabulation, kin making, mobility-labour relations, new economies and speculative, liberated futures
7. Cultural exchange as a way to counter neo-colonial models of import/export. There are many ways of liveness and living that happens within the complexity of place – we must not reduce place to its economic exchanges
8. Artists need to better grapple with fertile crossings of difference and we need to allow space for collective discovery so something we’ve been asking ourselves this year is how does one build breath for international engagement that is deliberate, purposeful and inclusive?
9. As Fredrick Douglass said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will’. Our community carries a demand for cultural empowerment
10. How do we as institutions then, as salaried personnel to respond, meet this demand? What is our coordinated approach? What is our impact investment? What conditions do we create for gathering when they are possible? How do we have nuance in thinking about the carbon-human cost?

Borders were a colonial invention and tool for segregation and control. How can we catalyse porosity to co-evolve our humanity, heal our lands and shift the material conditions of our lives? How do we engage in exchange of people, concepts, ideas not swiftly, but deeply? What are the expansive possibilities of being, listening, witnessing, gathering?

Here for these messy convos ❤️ hmu 👋🏽

October 4, 2023

On shared leadership

I will at some point write more formal reflections on shared leadership. But as I come to my final weeks at @artshouse and throughout my tenure, I’ve had a LOT of closed door questions on what collaboration or co-Artistic Directorship has been like. Sometimes they are loaded questions, ‘so how’s it 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 going!?’ (and sometimes by senior leaders in the industry, which is frankly, embarrassing for them I hope).

Is there a power dynamic when you enter a collaboration that was set up for a single person initially and you are racially marginalised? Absolutely. But to reduce a collaborative praxis to these most superficial of essences is lazy, unkind and doesn’t account for the generative space that being in relational ways of working can engender.

The best way I can describe it is I can read and write Arabic script because I grew up in Kuwait but I cannot speak Arabic. I can understand and to some extent speak Hindi from learning it in school and from the influence of Bollywood. This collision of languages makes me accidentally decent at a third thing, Urdu (which uses the Arabic alphabet but is close to Hindi in speech). This deep and profound love for Urdu makes me immerse myself in its poetry and truth-telling. Sometimes I linger on a word, sometimes it rolls off my tongue lusciously, sometimes I stutter and sometimes I interpret it differently to the author’s intent. This is the closest somatic semblance I have of being in close collaboration with @emsexton

In the last year, I’ve spent more time with her on a day to day basis, probably more than my family, partner, friends. This gives you the appreciation for someone else’s worldview in a haunting way. It is a daily practice of empathy, of embodied hope, of the work of change. The relationship takes as much work to set up and tend to, as the work itself, but nourishing this soft space is so important. These are lessons we learn in the rehearsal room all the time, and the artists we get to work with like @myglip and @yuimasukawa pictured here remind us everyday in a building where art is being made year in, year out.

The third thing you bring into being, even fleetingly, can be the seeds from which new branches emerge. I’ve learnt so much from being in this equation with @emsexton : how to invest early and meaningfully to support new works of scale in artist led formats, how to speak to media in different registers about the work we do, about the importance of this place’s artistry, about the stories our artists sing and how to extrapolate its key themes, how to open up emergent ideas early in the piece to think in a collaborative container etc etc. I believe this space of co-learning is ever evolving.

Has it always been easy? Of course not, but you learn to trust from your core, to look toward a shared horizon, to advocate for artists, for staff, for yourself but also and always for each other. You also learn to listen with intent, to communicate more clearly, to argue better and sometimes to let things go. These are not just sector skills – these are life skills.

One piece of advice we got from another duo in shared leadership when we started was, ‘if one of us says no, it doesn’t happen’. At the time, I thought it made perfect sense but in hindsight I respectfully disagree. The in-betweenness that you have to negotiate daily is where you get to practice the ‘not yet’.

I’m in extremely white leadership and board rooms often, nationally, and there is all talk talk talk about shift in leadership, structural change, alternate ways of working, diversity inclusion equity blah blah blah but typically there is little to no action. And this is because it costs something to cede space, to cede power, to cede material, financial and social benefit you get access to. Em did this for belief in blunting the edges of the institution and in step with me. Course it was imperfect, and when you road test things early, they can be rocky. But IF you’re willing to take risk together, there’s reward of the richest kind. To not cite the openness, labour and active allyship this has taken on her part would be a disservice.

We follow in the footsteps of great female leaders at AH and hopefully a future that is far more intersectional with community at its ♥

October 27, 2023

Today I wrapped up as co-AD at @artshouse. It’s been the highest honour of my working life to helm my absolute favourite arts organisation on this continent and serve the @cityofmelbourne succeeding a long line of immense feminist leadership both at Arts House and in the histories of North Melbourne Town Hall. There is simply no other like it.

I’ve written long reflections in my previous posts to share thoughts + demystify arts work but today I’m at a loss for words so here’s 10 things I’ve learnt from our Elders, artists, collaborators, colleagues and creative forces of nature

1. When you don’t know where to go, always go home ~ Germaine Acogny @ecoledessables
2. Every organisation in the West expects me to make work about Korea because I’m Korean. But what they don’t understand is all my work is already Korean because of my sensibility. How can it not be? This nuance is lost on the West ~ @geumhyung_jeong
3. Joy is resistance ~ @dandawcreative
4. When I get any opportunity, I think about the maximum possible way to decentralize resources and empower my (Dalit) community ~ @vishalkswamy
5. How do we restore cultural practices? That’s the real work ~ @jacobboehme
6. Sustainability is about slowing the fuck down ~ @emsexton
7. Those who chant do not die ~ @basel.abb @ruanne.ar
8. I thought I was making a work about revenge, but it was always about release ~ @bettygrumble
9. It’s okay to feel sad, it’s okay to be vulnerable ~ @priyanamana
10. How do we build collective euphoria? ~ @marzigold

Signing off with my favourite farewell message from a dear colleague @sayrahmay ‘Breaking the rules is your legacy Nith’ 💖

I’ll be back for a blip on Dec 5 to launch next year’s program, our second DIAP and our first Equity—Builder, Arts House’s living anti-racism plan. You can only hope to leave a place better than you found it, and I gave it my all with brilliant hoomans on my team and the very best of artists. The future of Arts House burns brightly ✨

As for me, I’m gonna sleep for days, travel overseas solo and with old friends, make an original new work with @ojsatchell at @belvoirst and marry my best friend. Sydney, she’s coming, it’s been a minute 👋🏽

These are just a few fragments from that chapter; I’m still working out what a life in service of culture really means. But like all good experimental art: interpret at will.

Image credit: Jacinta Keefe
Image description: People are sitting around a long table, in-conversation with those around them. The table is covered with trays of foods, plates, glasses and cutlery.