Comments on: 10 questions: Alison Croggon

By: MK

MK — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:39:00 +0000

Just want to say how happy I am to see a “10 Questions” with someone from Australia. I truly believe that Australian, New Zealand and Canadian theatre artists can learn a great deal from each other. And I love how national and international this blog is.

Alison, I’m coming down for APAM and will spend a few days in Melbourne. I hope we can meet up.

By: Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:21:00 +0000

Theatre’s ephemerality is utterly seductive, as far as I’m concerned, a huge part of its potency. But it’s made me realise all art, no matter how solid looking, is actually an ephemeral experience. You can’t read the same book twice. :)

The question of chronicling theatre is a bit of a personal obsession, perhaps because of the particular culture here, which means that many important events have been lost to anything except personal memory. We suffer from a particularly amnesiac culture. Maybe the Oz bloggers can help to change that!

By: Ian Mackenzie

Ian Mackenzie — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:40:00 +0000

I agree Mike. And I’m glad Alison makes the point here. I’ve never heard a critic speak that way about their work. I guess it’s unique to theatre criticism in that there is no direct record of the event.

Simon Ogden just penned a nice post on the topic of process-oriented artists versus outcome-oriented artists. Check it out here. I suspect your friend the novelist may be among the latter. Which is cool, too.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:00:00 +0000

I like the notion of a critic as someone who “provide(s) a record of an ephemeral event”. I just had lunch with a friend who used to do theatre, but has settled on being a novelist. She cites the ephemeral nature of theater as a major reason why she changed careers, the satisfaction of actually having something concrete to show for your work being much more poignant in her case.

I’m of the opposite mind. I like the whole 1 shot nature, here for 1 moment and gone forever that is intrinsic to the theatre. But it’s important that there are some writers who preserve it for posterity in some way. Which is also why a bad review is so harsh, no matter how many times you check it, it hasn’t changed. The show changes every night. The review lasts forever. (Except for 1 friend’s fringe show which changed from a 3 to 4 star review over night this summer, but that’s just the exception that proves the rule really.)