David Finnigan is an award winning theatre maker, writer and games creator from Ngunnawal country, Australia. David produces performances and writing that explores concepts from Game Theory, Complex Systems science, Network Theory and Resilience. He has also had the dubious honour of performing on stage with me, in our performance lecture collaboration, Thinking Bigly. He has a show coming up at The Barbican, London, 27 September: You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History.
We discuss how all art might be considered climate art. Thus we should consider jobs as jobs, why put green there? or health is health. This can take some of the heat out of the language.
Even in the great depression, we sort of look back now. There's a tradition of screwball comedies in the great depression. Now, we look back at them and they had nothing to do with the kind of political issues and economic issues at the time. But we look back at them now and say, "Oh, they were deliberately escapist from those conditions of the time." So whatever you kind of create now it's very hard to not find a way to read it. That is a climate reading. And when something becomes all encompassing like that, it's almost such a broad term that it ceases to be useful to use it. I'm thinking now of your comment the other day where you said, "When we talk about climate health or we talk about climate justice, that's just health and that's just justice." At what point is it relevant to use the word climate and at what point is it unnecessary? Because climate's everything. Climate's everywhere. So it becomes a bit too vague.
We chat about the process of creativity in particular in performing arts. The importance of David finding a community in his home town and the constant making of work at the start of his artistic journey.
David discusses what he learned from scientists and his father. How this has integrated into his art.
We debate on what is most misunderstood about Australia and London.
I ask David what he learned from injured possums. David talks about London foxes and Underground mosquitoes.
How theatre is narrow but deep. How theatre is bad for being able to pay rent. What David learnt from theatre in the Philippines.
What we learn from failure. How we practice creativity and how we improve. David’s work in music and spoken word.
We end on David’s current projects including his one man climate show coming up at the Barbican.
David gives his advice to creatives.
“Don't ask for career advice, don't ask for professional advice. Ask people their story.”
Podcast available wherever you get podcasts, or below. Video with captions on YouTube, or above.
PODCAST INFO
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David Finnigan with Ben Yeoh (transcript, only lightly edited)
Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to David Finnigan. David is an award-wining theatre maker and games creator. He had the dubious honor of performing on stage with me in our performance lecture collaboration. He has a show coming up at the Barbican in London in September called "You’re Safe Til 2024." He's an all-around great person. Welcome.
David (00:56):
Hello, Ben. Thanks so much for having me.
Ben (00:58):
So you have written that all art is climate art. Is this an argument that all art simply reflects its times and we are obviously in climate times? Or do you want to unpack that thought for us a little bit more?
David (01:15):
I think you've actually just expressed it quite elegantly. I think for me, we've probably moved past the point sometime in the last 10, 20 years where climate could be described as an issue. It has just become too big to be an issue. It's too broad. It kind of touches everything. It has become the context or the background for every other issue. So in that sense, I think we could sort of say that we are now living in the climate era. I'm borrowing Alex Steffen's term there. We're in the early years now of the climate era and therefore whatever we make is going to be art of the climate era. People in 500 years I imagine will look back at us and say, "They were making work in the early years of the climate era." So whatever your work is about, it's going to be described as that. So I often say that trying to make work about the climate now is a bit like being a medieval artist trying to make work about medieval. We're trying to grasp something huge and complex and abstract while we're still in the middle of it. That's the kind of broad brushstrokes of that philosophy.
Ben (02:28):
I guess if you go back hundreds of years if you were in the middle of the plague your work would've been... Again, it's the same because the plague would've been all encompassing. You wouldn't say, "Oh, I'm making plague work" because you're just simply making work in the middle of that.
David (02:41):
Even in the great depression, we sort of look back now. There's a tradition of screwball comedies in the great depression. Now, we look back at them and they had nothing to do with the kind of political issues and economic issues at the time. But we look back at them now and say, "Oh, they were deliberately escapist from those conditions of the time." So whatever you kind of create now it's very hard to not find a way to read it. That is a climate reading. And when something becomes all encompassing like that, it's almost such a broad term that it ceases to be useful to use it. I'm thinking now of your comment the other day where you said, "When we talk about climate health or we talk about climate justice, that's just health and that's just justice." At what point is it relevant to use the word climate and at what point is it unnecessary? Because climate's everything. Climate's everywhere. So it becomes a bit too vague.
Ben (03:34):
Do you think there's something particular about its systemic nature or its wicked nature because there is...? Wicked in the sense of intractable problem as opposed to just evil, by the way. If you think about those things; health or justice, you could have made a call for that justice or health was a human ideal which could have been part of its times. But they've never really made it to the level that it is. But to your point, something like the great depression again, we now look back. I'm not sure at the time whether they would've thought of that. We see it back with that lens of history. Do you think there's something particular around about climate? Just kind of a reflection.
David (04:19):
I think the way we use the word climate kind of refers to this grab bag of transformation that the planet is undergoing. We use climate change kind of as the catchall term to refer to biodiversity loss, or land use change, or the transformations in the phosphorous nitrogen cycle, or colony collapse. Any number of these different sort of transitions that we're suddenly going through, climate change is kind of the catchall term for those even though climate change is probably only one small part. Certainly not the biggest part of these issues. Maybe not the part that's going to get us. So it's become a kind of a label that we stick on things. In that sense, I guess I know what it means loosely. I know what people mean when they say, "Oh, that works a piece of climate art."
I can guess some of the kind of genre beats that might exist within or some of the tropes that it might adopt. So it's useful perhaps in that sense, but also, it is kind of a vague label to slap on things. I'm not sure as an artist if you're making climate work-- Maybe you heard this too. But I do have every so often a young artist will come and say, "I want to make work about the climate. What should I do?" It's like, "What about the climate? It's too big. Keep zero in and keep narrowing down.”
So I make work about climate research. I work with climate scientists and I sometimes work with policy makers. I think you kind of exist at that intersection as well. But there are lots artists who make work that look at, for example, a specific community that might have been affected by dispossession or kind of indigenous conflicts. Like indigenous people being driven off land, migration, or gender issues which of course are exacerbated by climate and other planetary transformation issues. I think those are all legitimately equally climate work. .
Probably the work that you and I do is easier to label climate because it has the kind of... We use words like parts per million and greenhouse gases which kind of situated very much in what we understand climate change as being traditionally. Although I think in the last few years we have sort of stepped away from that a bit.
Ben (06:46):
Because it's possibly less useful. In fact, going to your point, the other way that actually is becoming a little bit of a hindrance having that label. I was thinking for instance when you were going through those things; plastic. With plastic you don't necessarily directly think of a climate thing. But obviously when you say climate and plastic it's like, "Yes that makes a lot of sense." But it's a different strand of that whole blob.
David (07:13):
I think like in a word cloud sort of mental association thing I think people do connect micro plastic pollution with climate change. Those two things sit next to each other. I think it's actually surprising for a lot of people to learn that plastic pollution doesn't really have much to do with climate change. They don't come from the same source. I mean, producing plastics, the plastics industry does have an emissions profile. But it's not on the scale of concrete or steel. The cycle of plastic is a kind of different issue. But I think for a lot of people-- well, for all of us, it sits in the same part of our brain.
Ben (07:56):
Sure. Definitely adjacent. So you're talking about your work with policy makers sometimes steeped in climate scientists or speaking to scientists and that in games. How would you view your own origin story starting work in Australia? Starting work with a kind of interactive games or performance. Also, spoken word, poetry. We might come up to your music making and sound creation as well. How do you view how your own creative journeys come about?
David (08:29):
I'll give you the kind of origin story as I think of it now. I'm from Ngunnawal country in Australia which is a region in the Southeast in between Lake George and the Murrumbidgee River. So I'm from the city of Canberra which is the capital but it's also a city of around 350,000 people. So it's not a huge population. There wasn't a huge theatre scene. I came up in my late teens and early twenties making theatre in this independent arts community in Canberra particularly with a collective called Bohemian. We later changed our name to Boho. I and my collaborators set out to make work that was interactive and looked at science. I think my friend Jack Lloyd who's a very close collaborator really was interested in gaming and how that could translate to theatre.
I was very interested in doing something around science. Just been reading some books, some pop science books on the shelves and thought that would be a kind of interesting thread to fold into our work. So our very first show as Boho was called a “Prisoner's Dilemma.” It looked at game theory; the classic prisoners dilemma game theory concept. Game theory for anyone who doesn't know is a branch of science that tries to analyze real world decision making using math. So it tries to break down real world conflicts or complex decisions into a sort of mathematical structure where you can actually calculate. It's essentially any situation where what the best thing to do depends on what other people do.
One classic example is the game of chicken. You can imagine you have two cars driving towards each other. The first one to swerve is the loser. But of course, if neither car swerves, then you both hit each other and both drivers are dead. So chicken, it's also quite similar in a lot of ways to nuclear escalation and the mutually assured destruction. So you can kind of analyze this game and the scientists who developed game theory in the forties and fifties used it to try and think about how they might fight a nuclear war which they kind of expected to be doing. It's also just a great way to think about choices and decisions. We kind of built this show around a lot of these decisions that the audience might make and scenarios where we put them where they would have to cooperate or compete with each other and hacked gaming devices. So gave Wiimotes and joysticks to the audience and they could use them to kind of pilot the performers around on stage. That was where we began.
From there, we went from looking at game theory to looking at complex systems science and network theory. All of these I guess that you could broadly put under the heading of earth sciences or earth system sciences. They're all sciences that are interested in the kind of complex connections of how things work in the world. Probably it wasn't until 2010 that we really explicitly said out loud we were making a show about climate because wanted to avoid exactly what we were talking about earlier. We were really interested in the other things around climate that weren't being talked about. So biodiversity loss, land use transformation. These are the kind of global change phenomena that weren't being discussed. We kind of deliberately stepped around the topic. Then finally in 2010 we made a show called “True Logic of the Future” that looked right into climate shocks and the intersection between climate and politics and so on. So that work kind of took us into working with scientists. From then on, much of my theatre has been done in collaboration with researchers or in research institutions, in universities, in laboratories making work with scientists about science.
Ben (12:52):
Were you influenced by your family as well? Because your father was a scientist. I'm not sure how much professional science work he's still doing. Was it the kind of cultural looking and reading you were doing at the time or I'm imagining it was a bit of both, or did that come later?
David (13:14):
My dad was a big part of it. None of his children followed him into the sciences and he never really nudged us or pushed us one way or another. Certainly, when I began exploring theatre both my parents were very supportive. But I think it was really exciting for him when I began to sort of look around and be like, "Dad, can you point us in the direction of a resource? We want to talk with a scientist who knows about this issue or this topic." So he was like, "Well, yeah. I have a friend here who can chat with you and have a coffee with you about how complex systems intersect with Australian history or how network theory meets the Murray Darling basin; the kind of river system in Australia. So that was really great. That was really helpful. My dad was originally British. He moved to Australia in the 1970s and began working in what was then called environmental mechanics. So his area of expertise is wind flow over waving plant canopies. That's a thing that he has literally written the book on. A wind flow over low lying plant canopies. For the 10 people in the world who kind of study that, he's written a textbook that they often use.
Ben (14:40):
That has a special name?
David (14:42):
It's micro meteorology. f you see wind through a kind of grass field, the Japanese word for that is honami which means rice heart wave which is quite lovely. So obviously, that micro meteorology in the 1980s began to be folded into these bigger conversations about what was then called the greenhouse effect; what was starting to be called global warming. So my dad and a lot of his colleagues were sort of brought into these bigger discussions about can the climate change? What would it look like if the climate change? How would we know if the climate was changing? How could we model that? When people started making bold assertions saying, "Yeah, we could be facing five degrees of warming in the next century," people like my dad were kind of brought in to sort of go, "Is this realistic or is this not?"
Then in the 2000s, he became really interested in complexity theory. I think after chaos theory in the 1980s complexity was the next hot topic emerging out of places like the Santa Fe Institute. So my dad was kind of really interested in bringing complex system science to Australia and helped built up one of the first labs that looked at complexity theory in Australia. Built a kind of unit and hosted a whole series of conversations with scientists that tried to look at what complex systems could tell us about different sorts of issues that we were facing; climate being one of them. So all of that effectively meant that he was always there with some really interesting conversations around the dinner table and there were always books on the shelf. If we needed some inspiration I could go poking around and be like, "Well, I don't even understand the title of this one but I can skim it through and find some interesting anecdotes within these books."
Ben (16:46):
So we have science if you're interested in game theory. Was there any cultural icon or play movie TV element for teenager David which was really influential, or did you just sift through into that via performing and making?
David (17:07):
This is kind of a funny thing. I feel like the world I come from is very DIY. I actually suspect this is a real difference between you and me because you began making theater in London. So in Canberra in Australia particularly in the early 2000s, one of the things that I think was actually great was there was no weight of influence because there wasn't a kind of scene of theatre makers above us. I wasn't going to see the theatre. When I was in year 12, my friends and I found out that you could hire a theatre. You could pay $400 a week and you could rent this little tiny black box space the size of this room. They would just give you the keys and you could put on a show.
So we just did and it was awful. No one came, but it was the most fun that I had ever had and the most meaningful, fulfilling thing that I could possibly imagine. So I just did that and that was all I did. I spent the next 10 years really just making theatre nonstop with my friends. That's how we hung out. That's how we basically lived. Every cent that we earned went on theatre art and every minute that we weren't working or if we were studying at school, we were in the theatre making these shows that no one saw except each other. I didn't have the money to drive to Sydney to go and see a proper theatre show and when those occasional touring shows came to Canberra I couldn't afford to see them either.
So the only theatre I was seeing was the theatre of my friends and collaborators. Maybe there were 250 people in the scene making music, art, and dance and I would see everything that they did. So for me, the kind of big influences that I had were playwrights like Adam Hadley, Jack Lloyd, Nick McHariston, or Chris Lloyd. People who were my friends, also rivals, also inspirations which meant weirdly-- I think this is probably something I'm really both proud of but also I recognize as a big failing. By the time I came to take a workout out of Canberra and see the bigger world and come to places like London to put things on, I really didn't have a sense of what was going on in the bigger theatre conversation. A lot of the basic skills or basic discussions that had been going on here I had no clue about.
So in a way I'm really pleased about that kind of upbringing because it meant I got to make a lot of stuff. I got to get all this bad stuff out of the way. I was never intimidated by being like, "Well, I can't put something on because I've seen all this amazing work by all these top end professionals I could never compete with." On the flip side, my standards were really all over the place. I feel like this would be very different for you coming up in London. My impression is as a young artist in London you're bombarded by seeing this work that you're told, "This is the best work in the world." How can you compare yourself to that?
Ben (20:35):
I'm interested in your comment that you could probably tell when your work was good or not good even without a reference to outside theatre. I do think you are definitely in a conversation in London or New York. I remember in my twenties there was an ongoing discussion between the kind of playwriting or theatre making where the playwright was very center and it was their vision and the director and actors would fill out that vision. But it was still a writer centric vision versus the form of theatre influenced by other things where it was much more collaborative; whether that was devised, or a vision or an idea of theatre making that way. Obviously, actually the splintering of all of those and being part of that live debate where actually for someone who has always been a little bit of outside even to theatre, I could see that they probably had more in common than they had apart. But it was very interesting. I've always been an outsider for that, because as most people listening to this will know I have a very different day job in sustainable investing. I'm interested in all of these other things.
But I think there is an element of being an outsider which can be really useful for creating more unique art or perhaps just art which wouldn't happen otherwise, either because you have a commercial imperative and the commercial market tends to be influenced by a certain amount of things. I was listening to MrBeast who's one of the largest YouTubers ever. He started this way but within YouTube. Obviously, he had a lot of feedback and was very obsessed by that and has gone on to have a multimillion franchise which hasn't happened and I don't think would happen in theatre. So there was something about its medium and its time.
David (22:29):
Yeah. The low ceiling is an interesting thing. I was talking about this the other day. The fact that to get into theatre is quite a high floor. You can't just sit down at the desk and write. You need a group of other people, you need a space, and you probably need an audience. Depending on what you're making you might need lights and sound and a set. So it's quite a high floor to kind of get started in. Then there's quite a low ceiling in that unless you're a smash hit first play west end, you are probably only performing to tens or hundreds of people on a good night. You're not on YouTube where it takes absolutely no challenge to make your first video and there's really no limit to how many people you could reach.
Ben (23:13):
I think about that because this series of podcasts has now reached more people than my in person plays probably ever will or ever will have. Maybe my radio play one which went on World Service potentially stole more.
David (23:30):
There's something in this though that I feel like one thing that is nice about theatre. Maybe I tell myself this because I'm a theatre maker. I'm too deep into theatre to shift art forms. So whenever I can think of something that I like about theatre I have to clutch to it. But I do feel like theatre is a very narrow but deep form. You have a very narrow group of people that you can reach. It's as many people that fit in the room really. Those are probably a very specific type of person. But when you have them, you can take them deep. You turn off the lights and they're with you for an hour and they're completely there.
I can't think of many other mediums where you can actually take someone's full attention for 60 minutes of their life. That's quite a generous thing that people give you. Whereas with the podcast or with the YouTube, I think you are getting a huge number. It's a shallow but broad medium. You're hitting a huge number of people but probably you're getting their distracted attention while they're doing something else, or they're watching you but they have five other tabs that they could flip to at any moment.
Ben (24:37):
I think there's a lot of truth to that. There's something to do with the liveness of it as well where a brilliant piece of art or even art that other people don't think is brilliant but transforms you, you can leave that room different than how you entered. Most other art forms do not do that to the same extent. I think all art has that capability but theatre has a higher percentage conversion. Maybe not that high even, but for a narrower number. I was also going back to your Canberra observation. What do you think is most misunderstood then, or perhaps that people would be surprised to know about Canberra or Australia having grown up there and now seen so much of the outside world? Do people really misunderstand Australia or don't get something about it, or even in particular Canberra? Is there something you would give back or forth or the observations? Maybe you could do the same like London. This is as an outside of what London doesn't understand about itself. I'm interested in Canberra or Australia.
David (25:45):
Canberra's a great choice because people within Australia hate Canberra. Canberra is broadly despised because Canberra is the seat of parliament and it's a sort of purpose built capital city. The origin of Canberra is that both Melbourne and Sydney were debating over which would be the capital, and to compromise they built this new city in between the two. So it's this sort of deliberately built town that has a big public service space and all of the politicians in the country come there to be there for six months a year perhaps to work and to be in session.
So whenever you watch a news broadcast in Australia it'll say, "Canberra has decided" some awful thing or "Canberra says," and it'll be some grim thing. If you come to Canberra as an outsider, you'll go to maybe a few kind of Washington DC esque landmarks. There are some museums, there are some nice architecture in the city center part but it's deliberately quite low. There's not much there for outsiders to get into. The perception of Canberra is that it's boring, it's evil because of the politicians that live and work there. Because it's a public service town it's also quite progressive. For years it has had more progressive policies around pornography and marijuana. So you'll often hear people be like, "Oh, Canberra. It's porn, pot, and polys" which is what we're known for.
The truth is it's actually an extraordinary city. It’s an extraordinary community. There's the kind of parliamentary triangle which is where all the politicians are, it's where all the museums are, and it's where you get these ambitious young staffers who come from Melbourne and Sydney when they're very young and they work in the triangle for two, three years and move back to the big city. Outside of that you have this weird little community that exists off the outside of any light. Because it's completely hated on, essentially you never get jerks come. You never get anyone come there who wants to be seen because they'll never be seen. So you have this very self-contained, very self-supporting community. It's the community I grew up in and the community that made me as an artist. The kind of art scene there is flourishing and weird and deeply off the radar. But all that said, I actually have no particular. Because of all that I have no real interest in trying to counter that myth. So when people are like, "I hate Canberra" I'm like, "Yeah. Good. Continue to hate it." I don't particularly want to change anyone's mind because it's also my secret.
Ben (28:45):
So if you are a weirdo in Canberra you can find your tribe quite easily as it were. I mean, sort of semi hidden, but you probably don't have to sniff around very much to find it and then probably find quite a happy home.
David (29:00):
I would say yeah. But for London, what do you think is most misunderstood about London? Because you're a proper born and bred London native. You're one of the rare breed.
Ben (29:09):
You've thrown the question straight back at me. I think some people when they first come to London find it somewhat unfriendly because unlike where you go to maybe even Australia or America there's a kind of surfaced, "Hi, how are you?" And you kind of get that surface feel that you're part of their community, which I don't think is the case for a lot of Americans. Although again, that generalization has a lot of exceptions. Whereas I think in London you don't get that surface feel very often. In fact, not at all. But if you scratch below the surface, I still think it's one of the most multicultural deep places because it's still a pivot point for many things. It has a very long, deep culture itself. It's taking a melting pot still despite everything of all of these other cultures and perhaps a little bit like what you were reflecting on Canberra that you can find your weirdness. You can find something in London as well.
Actually, you find a lot of people whether from UK or even elsewhere that are drawn to London to find that. So I think that's true. Our food is pretty good as well. So people think that London food isn't that great. But actually from the low end to high end and probably even better at the so-called low and mid-end, it's extremely varied. Partly maybe if you go back you had the spice trade or whatever through that but because of all of those cultures and things coming through. What's your reflection on London?
David (30:56):
I think you're right. Those are all my favorite things about it. A friend observed before I came here. They were like, "The thing you'll notice about London if you spend some time there is that whatever weird thing you're into you'll find a community.” But you can keep digging. In Melbourne, if you're into historical reenactment maybe there'll be a group that meets that does historical reenactment. But in London you'll be like, "There's a group that does historical reenactment for the Victorian era." When you get there they'll be like, "Do you want the one that does 1890, 1895, or 95 to 1900?" So it's like you can just keep digging and you'll keep finding the weirdness goes deeper.
Ben (31:35):
Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth there. Like you say, I've lived here for over 40 years. I just did the calculation. I have lived and worked-- apart from my time at university, within about a 12 to 14 mile radius of where I was born. Pretty much every week, definitely every month, I'm still learning things about the city which astounds me.
David (32:00):
There's one thing I do find very strange here. I'm speaking as an Australian white settler. My parents are British and they moved out to Australia in the 1970, I think. They're what's called 10 pound palms because you could get a boat ticket for 10 pounds at the time. So growing up in Australia you always have this sense, and it's very hard to put into words but you're very aware of it from quite a young age that you are not on your own land; the land you live on is not yours. At a point, you learn that the land you're on was stolen. Gradually bit by bit you kind of learn the depths of what that entailed.
Some people never really engage with that and some people really do. But I think no matter who you are, if you spend any time in Australia as a settler you are aware that there is this legacy, there's this guilt, and you're responsible for something that you personally didn't do. By the time you're aware of it, you're already culpable. That's a strange thing and people metabolize that in different ways. Some people metabolize it by trying to address it and some people metabolize it by very actively ignoring it. It's a very kind of sore and contentious thing in the country. Not even speaking about the indigenous people who have born the worst of it in every sort of angle. So it was really weird getting to London and getting to the UK and meeting white people, British people who felt like the land that they were on belonged to them. I realized I'd never felt that. It's a strange sort of sensation. I don't know what your experience has been.
Ben (33:48):
So there is increasing awareness of that. Obviously, you feel it more in Australia. I think it's interesting comparing it to other lands which were colonized in that way; America and Canada. So they feel it less in America, but growing probably more in Canada. I put Canada between Australia and America but with similar reactions into it or sort of against it because of where it's come from. Here in the UK or in England, there is something where you go back to this land owner mentality or not. So when you dig down there is something around-- You have this in these great landed estates. Particularly in London, Marylebone is owned by certain estate around Sloan Square. It's the Catagens around Westminster. It's the Grosvenor or the Duke of Westminster. Going back probably to around the 1066 mark and then onwards, there is a sense that they own it. But actually it's a sense of owned still amongst the kind of landed elite.
Perhaps this is getting a little political, but they probably have gone a little bit into the shadows because they don't want to raise the fact that actually a lot of that wealth-- You see it probably mostly with the queen and things like that. They still own a lot of it. I think the vast majority of UK’s capital wealth is still tied up in the land. That generational wealth has really held for hundreds and hundreds of years. I think there's a kind of myth that we tell ourselves here about how it is, and therefore this quest particularly in the UK about owning your property and your land and things come from that. I think then the offshoots about how when the UK was colonizing everything, there was an offshoot of that mentality. It’s actually if you didn't have the land then-- and most people didn't, they wanted to own pieces of other land because of that. So I do think there is that, but it expresses itself in a slightly quaint way to put it.
Thinking back on the journey as an artist that you have, I'm really intrigued that a lot of your recent work has been in the style of theatre where you are essentially a playwright and a writer. So your voice as a player has come out and other people have put it on and it has been more collaborative from that. Whereas for instance your roots as you were saying were in the kind of collaborative art form. You've kind of gone that way in your journey whereas a lot of other people kind of go maybe the other way. I don't whether they go the other way but it's a mix. You still do both sets of work and I was intrigued. Is this a kind of form versus function, voice aspect, or is it just you've ended up doing more of that because you had done less of it before and you're more interested in it? Is there any kind of purpose to it or is it one of those just falling into it via luck and what opens out to you?
David (36:59):
It's a great question. Maybe now on a good year I'm able to kind of pick and choose a little bit what I'll work on, if I'm lucky. I still struggle to pay rent much of the time. I'm not by any means at the point where I can sit back and say, "I'm just going to do this for the next six months." But the work that I do that earns me money tends to be games. It tends to be interactive scenarios that I develop for research institutions or for organizations that want to communicate an idea. I'll get commissioned to make a game or an interactive activity that illustrates that idea.
That does have the field much more of those collective cooperative works devised theatre. My practicing game making comes from my work in devised theatre and that skillset that I've built up through working with Boho and with Coney and those other organizations over the years. The other stuff that I do that's more sort of playwright centric comes from this playwriting practice which just I don't think will ever earn me as much money. I don't think it'll ever kind of pay a living wage. It's great now that I no longer have to try and pay my bills through that sort of traditional theatre because I think for most people that's not viable, and certainly it's not viable for me.
If I get a show up, that's a miracle and I'm very grateful for it. But it's not going to pay my bills. It does really scratch a deep, important itch in me. I probably am drawn more towards the playwriting end of the spectrum where I get to write a script and other people perform it or I'll perform it. I'm drawn more towards that. But I think that might be, as you say, because I was doing more of the other stuff for so long and it's still so rare that I get a theatre company say, "Yeah, we want to produce one of your works.” I don't get enough of that. But if someone said, "You'd have to give up the game making," I wouldn't want to do that. So I'm grateful for having both, but the ratio is never quite what you'd like.
Ben (39:15):
Yeah. You always go for the rarity or the thing that you can't have. Do you have a view on how digital or hybrid will work out? There's a phrase within theatre particularly here in the UK with building back better, building back different. Actually, to be absolutely honest I see very limited things about building back any differently than it really was pre pandemic. Really just small things around the edges is my kind of outside of you. But digital and perhaps hybrid which has been talked about for a long time, you might have thought that the pandemic might have finally been a catalyst and trigger for doing more work like that. And actually, I think you have done some successful work on this sort of line but it's been its own thing. What do you think of the future? Does hybrid digital, performing arts have a space? How's it going to go?
David (40:08):
I certainly don't think that what we were doing in the pandemic either has a real organic audience hungry for it or even a huge cohort of artists that are excited about it. I think there's a small group of artists who are really nudging at what that form could be. And there's a small group of audience who are really interested in that sort of experimental work. But I think a lot of it was just theatre artists being forced online. Certainly, that's where I sort of landed. I think you're right completely about the question of building back better. That intention hasn't really carried through. I think it's worse than actually reading your latest newsletter. Was it yesterday, it came out? Was this your prediction or was this a stat? That in fact, a lot of the artists that kind of held on for dear life through the pandemic to the art form might now be knocked out by the oncoming economic downturn. Was that a stat or was that a prediction?
Ben (41:16):
Some of it is stat and some of it is prediction. Some of the stat is if you look at for instance the proportion of people who are in the lowest fifth, and for instance if you're not really making rent you're definitely in the lowest two quartiles. I don't know exactly where you go. But if you look at the lowest fifth, they spend about 10 to 20% of their budget on food. Food is up 10% plus and actually lower cost food is up more. So all of that is now absorbed. And to your point, there are moderate to heavy headwinds still. So COVID is still a cost and it's going to be an ongoing cost essentially forever. This disease is with us forever and it's going to cost us more in everything: in health, in money, how we cope with it. Some of that cost is definitely going to be for some time in live event cost. The cost of managing it, the cost of cancellations; all of this. That hasn't been put in any calculations. So you've had this bounce back because people had no choice of a pandemic. The kind of new normal of what it is certainly for the next year or two is not looking great now.
When you go out five or seven years hopefully as we have done before, humans do quite well in the face of adversity and the coming up of new things. But I think we forget that it's very painful for the people who are inventing this type of stuff. So I think it's completely true. Actually, you see this with artists. The sort of poor artists in adversity kind of trope. There is some truth to it and they do create more and there is really interesting stuff which comes out. But if you also look at it, it's at a huge personal and other cost. Sometimes I speak to some of them and they're not exactly sure whether it was worth it, or at least worth it for them. It's probably worth it for the value they bring to society. So I think that there is some of that.
David (43:24):
I think that's absolutely right. It reminds me of that other Alex Steffen line where he says, “We're not heading towards an apocalypse, like society wide apocalypse. But we are heading towards a situation where there are many more personal apocalypses while society trudges on.” I think what you described is exactly that. People are kind of suddenly seeing years of their life go up in smoke and all of their money has to go towards just survival costs. Within that, how can you make work? How can you innovate or celebrate the work that you're making or the community around you?
Ben (44:00):
Exactly. And if the end part of thinking of human progress is that sense of, "We are wealthy so we can spend our time doing the things which make us human; call that art, or reading, or chatting with friends, or dancing, or music making and all of that," well, that whole blob is squeezed by all of this coming; whether it is climate related, or pandemic related, or inflation related. That blob of humanity seems to me to be squeezed. That's not doom in the sense that we are still about, but we are lesser for it and that does worry me certainly over the next two or three years because the catalyst, particularly in performing arts of pandemic hasn't really changed that trajectory it seems to me
David (44:53):
I think that's right. The personal experience I have of this is not my experience but it's something I've seen. I work a lot in the Philippines and have been doing for about 15 years. Being there since 2006, one thing that's been really extraordinary to see is this surge of-- Philippines is a country of 98 million people. It's the 12th most populous country in the world. In recent decades it has this sort of burgeoning middle class. There are these huge numbers of people who their parents lived in quite severe poverty. They have come to a better standard of living where they can start to experience a better life and as part of that consume art. What they are hungry for is art by Filipinos about Filipino experiences made for them by their peers.
So being around Filipino theatre makers was like nothing I've ever seen here or in New York or Australia. When work was made it was seized on, debated, discussed, engaged with, and grappled with. The audience is growing every year. Now, you can really imagine that trajectory in the coming decades as we hit these various crunches and shocks that growth might just stall. There's going to be millions and maybe billions of people who, as well as all the other sort of suffering and deprivation that they'll have to go through, won't get to see their worlds represented back to them the way they could have done. I don't know where that ranks on the scale of sadness but that does make me sad.
Ben (46:39):
I really would love to hear more about your work in the Philippines. Maybe the other reflection I have is the way you came into creative arts was a lot of doing and arguably a lot of 'failure' or a lot of stuff which wasn't that great and iterating. In some ways I think we talk about this in creative arts. That stays with us whether we had admitted or not that this is an act of failing, and rehearsals are one way. I was thinking about that. Science presents these conclusions to the Anza showings. That's one output.
But actually, a lot of our interesting other output is the rehearsals. The creative is the messy failure process. Sometimes even the output of that is also a failure. I think a lot of science is actually the messy input before that and they have the hard equation at the end but there's a lot you don't see beforehand. So I was interested in your reflection on that process and what you learnt from failure or not. I think there's a kind of collective failure maybe in and around pandemic. I'm not exactly sure. It's interesting to see how Philippines respond or your own personal practice. So you can go with that wherever you like.
David (47:57):
Sure. The thing that immediately jumps to mind is this idea which I was writing about a little while ago. The pandemic as a kind of rehearsal. This metaphor came up a lot I think in the early days of the pandemic. That dealing with COVID would be a rehearsal for the bigger shocks that would've come. I loved Adam Tooze's kind of in media res history, “Shutdown” which is a book that came out last year that looked at the first 14 months of the pandemic. He kind of grabbed on two examples of where the response went right. The first one being China's initial massive scale lockdown of Wuhan in those first 70 days that managed to at extreme cost get the virus under control and limit the outbreak. Sure enough, people in Wuhan were out in nightclubs while you and I spent most of 2020 in lockdown. Where they're at now is a very different story, obviously.
For two, he sort of points out that came from the fact that a lot of the leading Chinese government officials now came of age in the SARS crisis in 2003. There was this big reckoning post SARS where a lot of officials were kicked out and this whole new generation took over. That was the generation that's now in charge and kind of running the show. The other one he talks about was the sort of financial response, and this is getting very much out of my wheelhouse. But he sort of says, "We came perilously close to some serious collapse in those days of February, March, 2020. That we didn't was because of some lessons learned by financial regulators during the GFC.”
So if those two analogies hold-- and I like to think they do, then that suggest there's a sort of room where we can kind of rehearse a little bit our way through crises. One way or another we have learned from COVID. The next shock is going to be different and it's probably going to hit us very badly as well. But hopefully, we would have taken some kind of tips and tricks from this experience. In the absence of a sort of global overarching green new deal or kind of Paris agreement that we work to collectively as an international body, I think stumbling from crisis to crisis and picking up some tricks along the way is probably the best we can hope for, for the rest of our lives.
Ben (50:40):
So usually I'm the optimistic one and I think long term optimism is actually both correct and the correct strategy. But I have to say the pandemic or where we are now has tilted me slightly the other way because I don't think we are learning the obvious lessons. For instance, it seems fairly clear that give it a 30 or 50 year view, we are very likely to have another sort of viral pandemic. But we seem to put nothing in place from what we've learned this time around for the kind of things that you would need in order to make that pandemic manageable. So if that is a foreshadowing for some of the things around; either another pandemic or other joint coordination problems, or the first one we talked about right at the beginning which is obviously a major one that also makes me feel less hopeful because essentially the special interests or the interest groups for the smaller bodies-- I say small, whether that's nation state or however, just conflict in a way that we don't seem to be able to coordinate. But to your point, we do seem to learn a little bit every time. I just thought we'd learn maybe a little bit more but that's out of my sayings.
David (51:56):
It's true. I feel like even during the black plague governments didn't think that you could just announce that the virus was over. The fact that there is this sort of willingness from the top down to sort of say, "We are done now. Covid's not a problem anymore." It doesn't bode well for other kinds of shocks and crises that are coming down the pipeline very fast towards us.
Ben (52:21):
Maybe it's to do with the time scale though now because there is something which seems to be compressed. I think humans over history have tended to work more in generations. Actually, maybe in a generational aspect we're still okay. Like every 30 or 40 years we are trundling through. But just because of humans, some of these timelines have really moved up and that has caused perhaps a crunch that we have not kept up with the timelines that we have put on physical world; maybe even also in technological world with what we're doing with AI or nuclear technology and all of these advanced really quickly. Like suddenly, "Well, we're very good at usually killing one another. Now we have capabilities which could wipe out pretty much a lot of life on the planet." That's a kind of really big jump in where you would think in a kind of technological progress.
David (53:19):
I think you're absolutely right. The shocks that we're being hit with there's this pace at which they come. I think COVID probably ranks as a pretty good example of a mid-sized shock for the 21st century. The shocks are going to keep getting bigger on average and the gaps between them are going to get smaller and smaller. I was just sort of doing a kind of back of the envelope calculation for myself the other day and it struck me. I feel like I lost probably two years of my life to COVID. That being a theatre maker particularly, I lost two years where I couldn't practice my art, I couldn't practice my kind of profession. I also went from lockdowns in the UK to lockdowns in Australia.
So I spent probably a long time unable to connect with my community and be around the people that really matter to me. Financially, there was a big impact as well. So I'd say I lost two years and that's out of this decade. Assuming nothing else goes wrong in the 2020s which is a big thing to assume, but I could imagine… Losing two years out of this decade I was like, "Does that mean I could expect to lose four years out of the 2030s, six years out of the 2040s, and eight years out of the 2050s?" What do you think?
Ben (54:40):
I don't think it's linear. I think it's possible but you'd be unlucky. That would be my thought. I think there is a reasonable thesis which suggests is this the whole-- This is like an environmental curve. Things get worse before they get better. So you kind of have a cross between a techno optimist and a techno realist as in the technology will save us, but there will be a period where it could destroy you before it could save you. What you need to do through that period is progress humanity in all of its aspects which I think is both social, moral and everything in order to use the technology well and the technology. So you hit through the other side. But as you're doing that and you have not yet progressed enough and your technology has got more, you could well wipe out everything. So the risk becomes higher.
But you need to go through that because we're now at a point in time that if we don't go through the technology we end up there anyway. So you have to take that risk and hope you get through. You could see a landscape where if we have got through and maybe we'll come onto this… So for instance, I am worried-- I think one of my moral failings is that I eat animals and I can kind of reach a point through a sort of techno optimism or something where you go through that and you have the equivalent and you're not causing any harm to non-human sentient beings. But you probably get through there through technology rather than cultural change. You might get there through a bit of both. You could see this through everything. How we treat the seas, how we treat the land and all of that. But you definitely go through a period where that becomes a lot worse; potentially much worse before you get through to that other side. I don't know what to do with that except that it seems to be that's probably where we're heading.
David (56:37):
It has to be where we're heading. It's that thing where if we had gotten onto this 30 years ago, the transition would've been quite gentle. We wouldn't have had to disrupt our lives and our society very much at all to make the transition. But where we are now after 30, 40 years of inaction, the talk that's built up the energy by not making this move is like we've kind of press this spring down year after year. When it finally unleashes as it's beginning to do, there's no way through that doesn't cause huge damage. I think we are past the point for example, where without the kind of global agreements or something like the green new deal there will be a huge cost to transitioning from fossil fuels and cost in jobs for countless people who are going to lose their jobs, and a cost in energy security for a lot of the people who struggle the most because we haven't put in place the structures that would support those people during a transition. We're not going to at this rate. So I think you're right. We need to make that transition because we all... We will make that transition. But the cost is going to be-- We go through a dark place before we get to that other side.
Ben (58:02):
Perhaps bringing it back to something a little bit smaller and optimistic. I was very intrigued reading about your work with possums and injured possums. Maybe tell us what you've learnt helping injured possums and why this might give us hope.
David (58:21):
Okay. So during lockdown in Melbourne last year, my partner Rebecca Gigs and I were... Rebecca had this notion that we should volunteer. I think she'd been reading about a hedgehog hospital here in the UK. She was very excited and wanted us to go to see the hedgehogs here. We weren't able to because of lockdown. So when we got back to Australia she was like, "I really want to volunteer to do wildlife rescue." So we signed up to Wildlife Victoria and we got our animal rescue licenses. We did our training to rescue injured marsupials. The first thing they get you to do is to become a kind of animal transporter. This is before you feel ready to do proper rescuing of a snake that has run across the road and been hit, or pulling a bird that has run into power lines.
They get you to take an injured animal from the vet to where it's going to be fostered and looked after. We essentially signed onto this service where you get these texts saying, "There's a possum with three children. They're 31 grams, 35, and 37 grams. They're in a vet in Mona Vale and we need you to take them down to Richmond.” So we would drive to these vets and we'd take these animals. But because it was during lockdown we couldn't actually go into the vets. So we'd literally be pulling up to these vets and then a vet nurse would come out into the car park with just a sack that was wriggling and hand it to us at nine o'clock at night. Meanwhile, there'd be teenagers on the other side of the car park actually buying drugs like normal people.
We were trading weird animals. Then you'd have to drive with these possums. Essentially, because they're marsupials they need to be kept very warm. So they're in these sort of bundled up socks and blankets and wrapped around in these baskets. We take them to where they were being fostered and looked after. I think what was extraordinary was realizing that there is this whole network of people who rescue animals and foster animals in the city. Actually, the amount of wildlife going on in the city was extraordinary. We had no idea that there was this much native wildlife moving through these very dense urban areas. Unfortunately, you find out about it when they get injured, but it was still a really lovely thing to see that our own city was threaded through or is threaded through with wild animals.
Ben (01:01:00):
Cities and wildlife. There is a harmony and balance that we can get to.
David (01:01:09):
This is where I want to talk about the London underground mosquito.
Ben (01:01:11):
Go for it.
David (01:01:14):
London obviously has its extraordinary fox population. The quintessential London experience in my mind is coming out of a nightclub at three in the morning and there's a fox just roaming up and down the road with someone's kebab that they've stolen. But there's also this incredible ecology of mosquitoes in the underground. London mosquitoes are a very particular breed of mosquitoes. They drink bird blood. They don't drink human blood. They don't swarm and I think they are only active in summertime. So they're a very particular kind of mosquito. When they built the underground in the 1890s, 1880s, there were no mosquitoes down there. There were no insects down there.
The very first time that people reported encountering mosquitoes was actually during the blitz when people were sheltering down in the tunnels. That was the first time. So it took them 50, 60 years to get there. The mosquitoes that have moved to the London underground are not the same mosquitoes as the ones above. Somehow, they are a different species that's made its way here somehow hitching a ride on something. They drink human blood. They're active year round and they mate in big swarms. So they are their own species and they become over time their own sort of distinct species. But even better, they actually have evolved into distinct subspecies. So there is a Central line mosquito, there is a Bakerloo line mosquito, and there is a Victoria line mosquito. They are genetically distinct and they never interbreed. They are evolving into their own actual separate species. As this researcher said, the only way they would actually get to interbreed is if they all got out and changed trains at Oxford circus. That's the London equivalent. Australian wildlife story.
Ben (01:03:14):
That is incredible that nature will find a way. In fact, someone was commentating that if humanity wiped itself out, probably there will be a lot of other living stuff which will come and take its place. So it's a human problem. Some of these things is not necessarily an earth problem.
David (01:03:33):
It is definitely a problem. Kim Stanley Robinson makes this point. “The biodiversity loss and species extinction is the most final thing that we are responsible for.” What we lose will never come back. This has been on my mind today. I need you to fact check this for me. But tell me, the opera as an art form in my mind is a bit of a dwindling kind of heritage art form. It has been around for a long time but the audience base is sort of old and getting older and they are dwindling and there isn't a new audience for it. So I think it is sort of gradually on the way out. But I still feel like there will be opera performed after you and I are dead.
Ben (01:04:22):
I think that's true. I think that will be true.
David (01:04:25):
But rhinos-- The population is crashing and I think it's very likely that rhinos will be gone before you and I die. So what I've been chewing on. I woke up the other night and was like, "Oh my God. Is opera going to outlive us but rhinos won't?"
Ben (01:04:44):
I think that might be true. Although we can then talk about the woolly mammoth and whether it comes back or not. I actually particularly think of noh plays which are even more niche because I think noh plays will continue to survive in that niche.
David (01:05:06):
Are you going to have a world practitioner on the podcast at some point? I would love to hear that.
Ben (01:05:14):
I've been following a few people in Japan so hopefully we'll get them on. Yeah, I think that might be true.
David (01:05:23):
I think not even opera singers would want their art form to outlive rhinos.
Ben (01:05:27):
I did want to ask before we finish about your music making and actually maybe a little bit your spoken word. But your music and music collaboration, do you find that's in the same kind of blob as your performative work or even your playwright work, or does that exist in an adjacent world for you? It's interesting you're talking about Boho and your time there. You kind of put in a string of performance making, music making, and dancing all in one blob. It seems to me perhaps now that I listen to you, it is more connected than it seems when I've been looking at the outside saying actually it is maybe not a separate work as it seems. Do you find it all as kind of it's all the work of David Finnigan or in your mind is it a little bit more separate as well?
David (01:06:13):
No. I do put things in buckets but I think it's also very much all me. The work I do-- So I perform music with my brothers as Finnigan and brother. My brother Chris is a guitarist and makes music as fossil rabbit. He makes this beautiful kind of guitar and digital soundscapes and songs. He's an extraordinary musician. I'm not, I don't play anything. But I would do spoken word over the top of his beautiful compositions. One thing that I actually really love and appreciate about Chris and about that project is that many years ago when we started performing together I was like, "We are really enjoying this. We should actually kind of take it more seriously. We should try and get some funding to record an album. We should try and actually go and do proper tours." Chris was always like, "No, I don't want to professionalize it like that. I want to keep it as this thing that we do purely for fun and purely for our own satisfaction." Because of that, that collaboration with Chris and the kind of music making has become the loveliest and no strings attached to arts practice I have. I find it very restorative because it's not tied to-- It's not going to pay my rent. It's not going to be part of my professional practice in a big way.
Ben (01:07:40):
No public or commercial imperative with that. I guess riffing back on that failure question earlier then as well, what's been the most disastrous creative things that you've done and what have you learned from them?
David (01:07:57):
That's such a good question. My biggest failure is I think actually-- Perhaps it relates a little bit to what I said earlier about growing up in Canberra and coming up in this DIY community driven scene where it had a kind of punk ethos where we're like you want to make it fast, you want to make it dirty, you want to make it honest, and then you want to get onto the next thing. You set the fuck up, you rock the fuck out, and you get the fuck off stage. You don't kind of overthink and you don't try and make something too pretty. So my work is definitely not too pretty. My work always still now has these jagged edges and broken bits. It's me sort of fumbling around on stage and that's an aesthetic.
The problem with that aesthetic is that it can also just be the same as being sloppy and lazy. It's very hard to know when you're starting out which is which. So I got to a point in my practice probably about in my late twenties, early thirties where I had built up this practice. I was making lots of work and I was touring it and I was getting into venues, but I couldn't get a show of mine produced by a serious theatre company. I couldn't get a script of mine to be taken and picked up and produced. I had enough runs on the board that I could get to meet with literary managers and artistic directors. I could get into those rooms and have those conversations, but I just couldn't get them to actually pick up and take a work of mine.
In my head, it was because they just weren't connecting with this sort of voice that I had or this sort of style that I had which is very distinctive and it's still not for everyone. My stuff is not for everyone by any means. But it actually wasn't the style that was getting in the way. It was that I just wasn't good enough as a writer. I actually wasn't writing scripts that were really world class; had to be produced. I think what had happened is that I'd been so committed to this idea of just churning stuff out and whatever I churned out was honest, authentic, and true that I had stopped getting better. You get better when you start out at age 17 and you make six shows a year for five years. You get better and you do get better quite quickly. You get to a standard.
But I hit that plateau and I hadn't moved for years. I won an award for Kill Climate Deniers which is a script of mine, which is very kind of scatter shot collage, Tumblr blog aesthetic. It's a really kind of all over the piece work. I'd won an award for it and I was very excited. I thought, "Great. Now it's really going to start happening. My work is going to be picked up. I'm going to have a future." What happened instead was I won the award and nothing happened. I went to meet with these theatres and I was like, "Hey, I just won this script award for this play." They were like, "Good on you." I would show them my other work and they were like, "No."
I had this real slump after the play award where I thought that things would get easier and I could kind of relax a bit and stop working so hard and take my foot off the accelerator a bit. Instead, I was in this sort of weird blank space. It took me-- I reckoned six months before it finally dawned on me very slowly that actually the problem was me and the problem was that I wasn't actually working on improving; whatever that means. That doesn't mean being dishonest or untrue to your voice, but it definitely means not just spitting out first drafts and trusting that that'll be enough which was my kind of classic era. I don't regret much in my career. Your journey is your journey. But I feel like I've lost probably at least six to eight years of my practice because I just didn't know that I had to be working all the time. Perhaps I would've known if I'd been in a city like London earlier and had a clear ladder to climb.
Ben (01:12:29):
Yeah. I reflect on that is maybe that might have helped. But partly, I think our art form or that performing art form is perhaps a little bit harder to know. That's why my earlier question is like, "How do you know your stuff is good?" And actually like you say, your first six years you are always just going to get better and then maybe you'll plateau. I think of it like a musician. If you're a piano player this is a little bit like well, you got to a certain level and you stopped practicing for three or four years. It's kind of really obvious for musicians and they need to practice and it's sort of honed into them that actually there is no other way around it. So it's a very obvious form.
But you are right. In all of the creative arts I think if you are improving you're essentially practicing at something. Like you say, it is individual, it's your journey. It might be whatever it is. If you stop that practice journey or whatever it is that you do to make yourself get better, that actually slowly decays or it doesn't improve and you lose ground away. Actually in performing arts it is perhaps less obvious because it's sometimes only obvious when it's in front of an audience. Or in this case, you're not getting in front of an audience so you're not getting that. You're just getting a kind of producer script writer who for whatever reason; either they can see it a little bit in the work or maybe they have an intuition, it's not all adding out. Some of that can be just bad luck as well. So that makes it even harder. But as you say, some of it is at the core because actually you've not taken it up to that other level of where that practice would be.
David (01:13:59):
It's not like there's an obvious way to improve as a writer. Sure you have your own experience on this. I'd be curious to know what improving as a writer looks like for you. But you can't just sort of sit and write. If you just sit at the computer and write every day and churn out a thousand words a day, you will get better to begin with and then you'll plateau. To improve you need to focus on your weakest points as a writer, target them, and actually build up craft and muscles in specific parts of their practice that are not strong. They might not even be the parts that you are writing. You might not even care about that. For me, my issue is I've never been a strong writer of characters. I can write dialogue, I can write plot, I can write science ideas but I can't write a believable, realistic character. And that's fine. In my plays, the characters tend not to be fully 3D dimensional rounded characters.
But trying to learn to write a character I think is fed back into my actual... Even if I write something where the characters aren't important, you still need to be building up skills and muscles. I didn't realize that. I thought you could just keep writing and if you did a bunch of writing every day you'd kind of just keep improving. What's it for you? How do you improve as a writer?
Ben (01:15:24):
So there's an economist polymath, Tyler Cowan, who has articulated this question as, "What do you do every day that is like a musician practicing scales?" Particularly in what he would call the knowledge economy of which creative arts is definitely one. I think actually it's a key question when you reach our age or our practice where you've done a lot where you can kind of follow this groove and you'll get to a certain level. What do you do arguably for the next 40 years for where you could take it to this further level? So I don't think there's necessarily an easy question or answer there. I think it also depends on what it is. So within creative arts it is different to what you might do for investing or for other parts. But it does have some elements.
David (01:16:15):
You have brilliantly reframed the question while avoiding answering it.
Ben (01:16:21):
So it has certain parts. One element is the nuts and bolts of the core practice of what you're doing. So if it is writing, there is a certain amount which still has to be writing. That's for instance why I've increased the level of blogging a newsletter and less writing that I've done because there is a certain amount of that core bit of what you're doing. It might not be exactly like in a playwriting or dialogue or a character, but it is the foundational wordsmithing part of what you want to do.
The second element I think, is around reading or absorbing the type of work which you are interested in, in your domain. So novelists or memoirist or whatever should be reading around that. They're probably reading fiction and poetry and things, but around that. I think that performance makers need to be watching a certain amount of performance. I probably don't watch enough. If you can't get to that you can actually still read it in the written form; not as good, but there are certain elements of that. So particularly if you're saying you're very interested in character, then you can read very interesting writers around character.
I think I would go further to say if you've identified somewhere where you think you are weak or you just like to know more about-- so say this element of character, you don't just need to go to the ones who you think are really brilliant around character. You need to go to the ones who did something or are doing something interesting but may not be working out. And then you need to work out what it is you think may be interesting or not interesting. And then why do you think it failed or not failed? Maybe it's not failed. Maybe it's only half there and they haven't finished it and you will pick up that journey. Because I think at this level of where you're trying to take it into sort of an Olympic level sport as opposed to just a county player, you are dealing with all of the embodied knowledge of where the world has got to now, which is actually the same in science. You get all the way to where you are now. So you need to have an understanding of where all of that is. But then when you are there, we know that you can't just repeat what has just gone before because then that is no longer where the edge of the frontier is.
So you need to make these leaps and bounds. In order to do that you have to see where other people make leaps and either be like, "Oh yeah. Sorry, that was dead end. I can see that." Or you needed to stretch one further and you didn't realize there was an invisible stepping stone there had you dared to reach that further point. So at the level I think you are at where you're creating new work with potentially new form, new ways of thinking and seeing, you are combining the best of what you are seeing in the world with some of these leaps of faith as to what it is. Some of it is a recombination of ideas which are already on the edge. Maybe they're not even on the edge because they’re combination of things which have gone before but combined into something new or there's something on the edge. So they're mostly either a combination or something you can see, or I also think that you borrow-- Maybe this is why I was asking about some of your other art forms like music, spoken word, or your work with scientists, or even your work with possums and animals.
I have this thread through your work and Rebecca. The snail, the whale, the koala; all of this. You borrow from another domain. Fairly deeply into that domain as well. Maybe not all the way at the cutting edge of that domain, but quite deeply into that domain and you transfer or you transform the knowledge or skill in that domain into your own domain and you combine it into something new. If you're quite close to the edge of that domain, or even if you're not necessarily at the edge but you see some insight which isn't widely understood except within that domain, and you bring out of that domain and by bringing it out you transform it into something other, and you're transforming it through your voice, then I think you get creative arts innovation. That practicing of that which is that core and going in I think is what you do in creative arts knowledge to create frontier work once you pass the foundation.
David (01:21:09):
Yeah. I think that's right. One of the best things perhaps about working in the space we're working where we create theatre about planetary transformation and global change is that those two domains really don't connect. They don't interface easily. There's no comfortable overlap on the Venn diagram between the huge global abstract slow moving transformation of our planet and our society. On the other hand, the very kind of intimate, personal relationship. Two people having a conversation on stage that theatre’s very good at. The form does not meet the content. Trying to reach to connect things from one domain to the other and trying to find ways to map one in the form of the other is a continual struggle and mostly it's failure. But every so often when you get it right, you are previously on uncharted territory which is exciting. The great thing about this work is that it kind of calls on-- Because it's doomed to failure in a way, it can't really be a rethread of things that have gone before.
Ben (01:22:19):
Exactly. So we've given ourselves a part answer. Great. So maybe coming to the last couple of questions, what projects or work are you doing at the moment?
David (01:22:35):
My next sort of public outing is I'm performing a show called "You're Safe Til 2024." Deep history. I'm performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in August and I'm performing it at the Barbican in London at the end of September. That's a solo show that talks about the deep arc of human history over the last 75,000 years. But really it's a story about the last three days of 2019 when the bushfires were impacting Australia and at that time hit Canberra. My best friend Jack who I mentioned who I made theatre with and my dad who I mentioned as a big influence were both caught on the front line of these fires in different ways. So it's a show about that three days and how that three days has become-- It is kind of an encapsulation of the climate shocks that are yet to come in the future. That's the next big piece.
But beyond that, the thing that I've been writing that I'm very excited about is a piece called “Dance Dance Insurrection” which is a high school dance competition play. It's about a group of teens of misfits and losers who set out to form a team and compete in a big dance competition in order to save their parents from online radicalization by destroying the internet altogether. So they set out to win this dance competition that happens at a big internet infrastructure hub and destroyed that hub and get rid of the internet for good. So it's kind of a joyful trash dance piece that also unfolds a lot of stuff about the shape of the internet and how that kind of structure has affected our brains in the last 30 years.
Ben (01:24:25):
Wow. Amazing. I look forward to watching or reading that. Last question would be, do you have any advice to people; maybe advice for people who want to be creatives or any kind of life advice that you've thought about in your career or time?
David (01:24:48):
I’ll borrow Scott Young's advice because I thought it was lovely. His advice went for people who were... Basically, if you are seeking to kind of get advice from older artists, professionals, or mentors he suggested that you don't ask for advice. Don't ask for career advice, don't ask for professional advice. Ask people their story. Ask people how they did it and then you can tease out the relevant bits from that. But if you ask people advice they tend to give you these vague platitudes like, "Just keep trying. Don't give up."
Ben (01:25:24):
"Learn from failure."
David (01:25:26):
Exactly. Don't ask for advice, ask for people's stories. That's my advice.
Ben (01:25:31):
Great. Well that seems like excellent advice. David, thank you very much.
David (01:25:36):
Thank you so much, Ben.
Ben (01:25:37):
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