A Port in the Storm

Emily Sexton

My five years at Arts House included the pandemic. I arrived in late 2018 full of so many dreams and ideas and plans. I felt the programming was already amazing but there were two things I could do: expand the audience, and make structural change that matched the equity and diversity in programming. I was stepping into a place that had been central to my life for a long time. I’d danced, cried, slept, cuddled and landed in splits at Arts House long before I worked there.

I was utterly unprepared for a pandemic to wipe most of those dreams clean away. Except that I wasn’t, because the project I arrived to was Refuge, where we were working closely with emergency services, scientists and artists to prepare the community for a future pandemic.

We did a lot of good thinking in that project, but we didn’t understand how depressing it would become to get really, really good at cancelling shows.

We cancelled so many good shows.

The best show we cancelled was The Dispute. Directed by Jackson Castiglione, commissioned by Gideon Obarzanek for RISING in 2021 and written by Mohamed El Khatib, it was a fantastic and thoughtful process where children of separated parents shared their stories. The words “broken families” are still used and this show was the opportunity to hear the more nuanced version, and the ways the kids thought their parents’ separation had worked out for them. They did an excellent dress run for their families. We had post show drinks at Benchwarmer on Victoria St which my Mum wasn’t happy about. And then we all went into lockdown. That was it. None of you saw it.

There’s other things no one saw. The Arts House team did a lot of psychological first aid for people who had lost their identity, income and community.

What Arts House and its associated communities went through at that time wasn’t exceptional, but it certainly was a safe harbour for me.

And what is exceptional is that Arts House is always a safe harbour.

Many arts organisations will claim they are safe rooms in which one can push, experiment, fail. Begin things, complete them properly, execute ideas beautifully. Be soft, be ridiculously ambitious, be exceptional, be quiet.

But not one of them deliver that so consistently and generously as Arts House. It can do that through total catastrophe. It’s remarkable.

And isolated. Arts House used to exist within a national network of contemporary performances and arts programs who would develop, commission, present and tour new work. That network has been largely dismantled. This weakens Arts House too. Collectivity is strength.

We are so deeply fortunate to have Arts House as it is because of visionary, staunch arts bureaucrats like Jane Crawley. And committed councillors like Rohan Leppart and Cathy Oke. They knew and they know that a vibrant creative city isn’t measured by the height of its trees but the depth of its roots. By the new people it welcomes to its shores.

Support lots of small weird things. It’s what Melbourne does best. This enables scenius to emerge.

May there be 2020 more years of safe harbour provided by Arts House. And may we invest in 2020 other ports to support creatives and communities to weather the wetter and wilder storms ahead.

Image Credit: Bryony Jackson
Image Description: 6 children are on stage, standing on a structure that resembles lego pieces. In front of them are two people using computers as they watch the work.