I spoke with émigré Australian author, poet, dramaturge and actor, Christopher Barnett who is the subject of a new Australian-French documentary in production, These Heathen Dreams.
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| Christopher Barnett and Thomas Harlan |
Christopher Barnett, dramaturge and poet, is acclaimed as one of Australia’s most prominent artists to have emerged from the culturally significant though so far little written about underground art scene of the late 1970s and 80s in Australia. This was a time of cultural turbulence and in Adelaide where Barnett grew up there was a strong intellectual activist influence of Marxism and Maoism which he became part of as a child, through the anti Vietnam War movement. Later, and as co-founder of the experimental theatre group All Out Ensemble, he was known for socially engaged works that pushed boundaries of conventional understandings of theatre such that he was described at the time by the Australian newspaper as “Australia’s most controversial artist”. In the late 80s, he was invited to work in theatre in France. Finding the climate oppressive he left Australia to live and work in France where he has since then played a socially important and respected role as founding director of Le Dernier Spectateur, an experimental arts laboratory and theatre company in Nantes, France, that works with people who are marginalized and disregarded, and people who are incarcerated in prisons and asylums. Jean Marc Ayrault, premier ministre and mayor of Nantes, has for the past two decades commended his work and is one of the people interviewed in the film by Australian film maker Anne Tsoulis. Friends with Christopher Barnett in their student days in Adelaide, three years ago she was reunited with her friend through a chance social media connection, and is so inspired by his work that she is now making a documentary, These Heathen Dreams, based on Barnett’s life and work; with Sydney based producer Georgia Wallace-Crabbe, and in collaboration with French production company and co-producer, Nantes-based Les Films Du Balibari. I met Christopher a couple of years ago on Facebook, and was intrigued by his poetry and the work he is known for now with the marginalized and dispossessed, restoring dignity. The documentary makers are currently raising money for the Australian side of production (it already has been funded in France) through ‘Pozible’ the social media crowdfunding website. I spoke with Christopher Barnett, via email, on his life and achievement as a poet, dramaturge and experimental artist in Australia in the 1980s, and since the 1990s, in France.
Ruth Skilbeck: I am particularly interested in your work with marginalised and disregarded groups of people and in how your own life experiences and background have shaped your vision and choice to work as artist in these ways that you have achieved so much by. You were born and brought up in Adelaide, of émigré parents. How did that experience affect you, and shape your perspective as an artist, how did you feel as a child of émigré parents growing up in Adelaide, did you feel as if you fitted in to the local life and can you say how did this shape you as a young poet and artist as you grew up?
Christopher Barnett: The primary impact of my childhood and adolescence was poverty. Profound poverty. I witnessed in a rich country the vast inequalities of opportunity in housing health and education – these affected me quite literally. The patrimoine of my parents less so. My father was in a tuberculosis sanatorium except for the last nine months of his 44 years. The youngest boys were placed in a orphanage for a short time because my mother could not sustain our care for a moment. This abandonment, even short was enough to seek another family. That family was the Worker-Student Alliance – W.S.A and then to the communist party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) a clandestine organization which involved both clandestine activity and voyages in the seven years I was in it. I saw myself as Vietnamese and did all in my power to aid the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in their struggle. That was the formative moment in the making of me as a writer. I wrote early, 8 years old, under my father’s instruction, it was an organic and natural voice that then articulated itself in the struggle against war and imperialism. It also supplied me with frameworks and models that are still resonant in my practice today.
Skilbeck: You began writing poetry at an early age and also, I believe, and publishing and performing your poetry. What inspired you to begin writing poetry?
Who were you influences? How and where did you first encounter poetry? Can you remember the first poem you wrote? What was your first published poem?
What are your influences and inspirations now as a poet?
Barnett: I began writing with my father who though exceptionally ill was an accomplished writer, the first real poem at 8, the first published poem at 14 in a school magazine and in pamphlets. I also wrote street theatre and polemic during this same moment. I understood I was gifted because the reaction by the public was instantaneous and I felt a real humility in front of the complexity of my work even at this young age. I surrender to it if you like and I always listened and listened and listen. Writing is about listening at a very deep level, because it is polyphony, a multiplicity of voices. The influences were Michael Dransfield and Charles Buckmaster but really the major influence was and remain Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nazim Hikmet . I read poetry today in three languages and though that circle of influence now includes other people like Pasolini and especially the Greek poets of that time especially Elytis and Ritsos but the central influences remain the same.
Skilbeck: At the age of 20, you had your first media write-up when you started up a poetry reading venue, because you considered the that there weren’t enough opportunities to encounter poetry in Adelaide, as reported in the article in the You were with a group that included writers who went on to become well-known Australian authors including Larry Buttrose. What gave you the idea to do this, to bring performance to poetry and make it performative; and could you talk a little about that experience. What was important to you about the physical performance of poetry?
Barnett: I was covered by the media much earlier than that as much for my politics as my poetry, I identified with very few contemporaries but I had people who were talented as musician for example and that created an organic need to create venues which I did and I created a group– action for people’s art – to perform in parks. I have never ever considered myself a ‘performance poet’ but saw that I was continuing a tradition of Mayakovsky and Hikmet to read to people publicly – to confront people more than to console them. I think I was the first person to do readings at a systematic level in high schools & do what were writing workshops, with very very tough schools of which I have good memories.
Skilbeck: Earlier than this, at age 13, you were “recruited to a Maoist division of the Communist Party” according to the information on These Heathen Dreams’ Facebook page. Could you say something about this, how this happened and what it involved, and the effects on your later beliefs and work as an artist?
Barnett: It was and remains important for me even if that organization was flawed. Deeply flawed. Many of the comrades I began with especially the women were very influential & only consolidated the thoughts that were already nascent within me. It provided analysis with which I largely agreed, – dissent came much later & that was essentially because I have a deep relationship with Latin Americans – and the Chines reaction to Chile 1973 made me want to leave, there were necessary lies within the part but for me it was a lie too far & too obscene to be complicit with. At the same moment I was supporting Chilean exiles in public concerts. Other than this, you must understand that as I was doing my schooling I was participating fully in political work, while other teenagers were doing ‘ normal’ things, sport, chasing girls etc. I was involved in both legal & illegal actions on a fairly vast level and for a long time.
The women in the party were extraordinary – they were so strong yet very human, they contextualized the struggle for me in the most human terms and this was to have a long-term affect in both my cultural work/political practice.
Study applied study, what would be now called close reading was trained into me and I still use these tools today. I read 12 books a week in 3 languages and my ability to do so was borne in that moment in the party.
I still regard myself as a communist and am regarded, I do not regret that appellation and hope I will be remembered that on that political level I have never ever compromised, on the contrary I have fought when it was a very lonely act.
Given the conditions of capital, of late capitalism, of its complete collapse essentially – I find myself very close to that 14-year-old boy, with the same engagement and same will to wonder.
Skilbeck: As documented in the media reviews from the time, when you were working in Adelaide in theatre you gave performances in car parks – could you say something about that, what did you perform and who were your audience what kinds of reaction did you get?
Barnett: I performed everywhere under different condition. I performed work and had a close relationship with the Experimental Art Foundation. I founded the All Out Ensemble with Nicholas Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach and I think we were know as much for our excellence as for our violence. Contrary to myth I am not a violent man but the work certainly is, it is something I live with and am proud of its passion and energy.
The audience reaction was always in extremes and we worked with those extremes - successfully I think. We worked towards transmutations, rapid volatile but considered.
Skilbeck: Did you go to university or art school, and if so where?
Barnett: No, I went to a teacher college and participated in the lectures and tutorials of Dr Neale Hunter’s honors class on China at Adelaide University and the lectures of Brian Medlin, Ian Hunt and Greg O’Hair at Flinders University. Like many of us though the real schooling was in the streets and formed also in the Party.
Skilbeck: When did you first become involved in theatre?
Barnett: 1980 with Nick Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach.
Skilbeck: Who were your main influences?
Barnett: Meyerhold and Piscator, Brecht, Artaud.
Skilbeck: Experimental Arts. In the 1980s you were a driving force in the underground art scene in Australia. In Adelaide, you founded All Out Ensemble in collaboration with Director Nicolas Tsoutas and Peggy Wallach, and other artists. Could you say something about this experience?
Barnett: The All Out Ensemble included many people, mostly painters, sculptors but included musicians and actors. It was a very dynamic and politicized group. And I think we were all concerned by excellence within the experimental. It was brutal in its deconstruction but it was also familial, Nick and Peggy helped to make that so – and we worked densely and dynamically, and we worked across forms all the time. Mayakovsky was close to all of us so it is no accident that my Selling Ourselves for Dinner should become a central work.
It was not without problems but how could it be otherwise with so many people at such a dynamic level and in great intensity. We also engaged many other people who were not ‘in’ the ensemble but saw what we were doing. As a formation we received considerable support. Theatre was dead in Australia even if Melbourne had tried to fight the good fight against imperial culture, and in Sydney The Performance Syndicate under Rex Cramphorn was doing important work – but we were all connected in one way or another and in fact I would go on to work with the central members of The Performance Syndicate, Nicholas Lathouris & Margaret Cameron whom I consider and still consider amongst the most impressive theatre workers Australia has ever produced.
I am very very proud of the people who I have had as collaborators. I have been honored by their work with my texts and with me as a human being.
Skilbeck: Collaboration. Working in the mode of collaboration, I believe you worked in Melbourne with artists Nicolas Lathouris, Margaret Cameron and Alison Davey and also with many other collaborators and collaborators in Sydney, specifically with a number of people including the Central, Art Unit, founded by former Adelaide artists Juilee Pryor and Robert McDonald, and Performance Space. Could you talk a little about these performances and works? And the importance of collaboration to your mode of working?
Barnett: When I moved to Melbourne began a collaboration with Nicolas Lathouris and Margaret Cameron, which in a spiritual sense, still exists today, these two were the most gifted practitioners in Australia, as actors, as thinkers, as collaborators, as initiators. It is a special relationship, for each page of text I wrote, Nicholas wrote four meditating on the questions. It was a very very close collaboration which also included many people, actors like Ramesh Ayyar, John F Howard and many others. Again it included artist across all forms – musician and painters. I also wrote on these painters, or text for the musicians. I did radio work texts for radio and I also wrote text for film with such people as John Hughes & Darryl Dellora. Melbourne was a very rich time in the sense of the depth of collaboration and the prolific nature of our work, many many performances in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.
Collaboration has remained central to my work. When I came to France I worked with people from MC93 the most prestigious company in France at the time where Heinner Muller or Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars introduced their work. Evlyn Didi the great actress (also seen in much of the work of the Finnish film maker Aki Kaurismaki) was important here but in many ways Evlyn and her group were French versions of Nicholas & Marg, exactly the same background. Great classical actors who primarily worked experimentally.
I have collaborated with many people in France, when I first came a colloquium on the centenaire of Vladimir Mayakovsky held at the Pompidou Centre & universities in Paris chose me – as the contemporary version of Mayakovsky. I performed a text for theatre for them, it was a great honour to be recognized by the experts in Mayakovsky from around the world including Russia who thought I represented what Mayakovsky would be today. It was one of the most important moments in an already rich history that has maintained its resonances today.
Skilbeck: According to your biography note on These Heathen Dreams’ Facebook page, when you left Australia you were battling a drug or alcohol addiction. Could you talk a little about this? How did you overcome this? Is part of your work in theatre to help others also to overcome addictions?
Barnett: This is a myth really. I was never an addict of any kind. I was just messy. It didn’t take a great deal to derange me, so I never had to use what other might have been obliged to – what was dangerous, in a life with many calculated risks, I took risks that were close to suicidal, there was also a great risk of an unhappy accident.
I stopped all that in the mid eighties and never returned to it, never wanted to. It was not an important aspect of what I was, what I was doing, in fact it risked that work.
I drank and took drugs because I could not bear the Australian reality, it was a barbarism coated in culture. It was and remains a culture that is complicit in the crimes of its political classes.
I was born in a very dark place, I have worked within a very dark place, I have searched within such darkness I thought there would never be light – so intoxication had as much to do with the pain of that.
Or the boredom of living in a dying culture.
Skilbeck: Many artists of course have taken drugs or drank and there is a discourse that sees a connection between intoxications and artistic creativity, as there also is with madness and artistic genius. What do you think of these ideas? Is there a symbiotic relation between intoxication and poetry that it may inspire greater visionary works and or flight of creative insights? Or would these be delusions? Or does this go beyond either/or binaries?
Barnett: As I said that aspect was not important to me. At all. I drank to stop the hurting and ennui that a culture like Australia reproduces.
However, I worked as a writer in the community from very young and I worked in many psychiatric hospitals and foundations. The question of madness, of barbarity was important to me then, it remains important now.
Skilbeck: When and why did you decide to leave Australia? Could you say something about that decision to go into self-exile?
Barnett: I started leaving in 1987 – to work in France, Italy, Holland Sweden and Montreal but I would come back but not for very long. I consider I left finally in 1990 – I had had enough.
There was nothing within Australia culture that I recognized, it was foreign to me at almost every level. There was no risk.
My work has always embraced risk.
Skilbeck: Would you return to live in Australia and what are your thoughts on this? Have your returned to visit and/or work?
Barnett: Only twice, very early, in 92 and 93 to work on a French filmBrûlures which John Cumming filmed for & I wrote a text for the Splinter Theatre Group in Canberra under the direction of Nicholas Lathouris.
Skilbeck: Can you talk a little on your views on the Australian political scene and arts and cultural scenes now?
Barnett: In real terms I have not ‘lived’ in Australia for 25 years so I can say little but from what I read & in communications with colleagues – it appears, very very ugly. Certainly I do not recognize myself in that culture.
Since 1975 the political class & the public had accepted a servitude to u s imperialism and a complicity in the crimes of that empire. It disgusted me.
That disgust turned to fury with what Howard transformed that country back into the one I was born in – the Menzies meanness towards others, towards the ‘other’ – in this moment I spoke out against Australia long & often in Europe, I spoke of it as a filtered apartheid South Africa. That situation has worsened but given that I gave medical aid to the Viet Cong directly when they were fighting Australian soldiers, my critique of that culture has been there since I was very very young. And I regret nothing about that critique.
Skilbeck: You moved to France, to the western Brittany city of Nantes on the river Loire, which is widely regarded as the Breton cultural capital. What made you choose Nantes?
Barnett: Alchemy. The town willingness to support what was a very risky proposition, great collaborators. I knew the city from 1977/8 – I fell in love with the city and the people.
Skilbeck: How did you come to start up the experimental arts laboratory and theatre company? What was the purpose and mission of Le Dernier Spectateur Theatre?
Barnett: I was invited to but I was going to work with actors, which I did. In 1997 I worked with the greatest Cuban actors of this era on a version of Macbeth – El Macbeth, they taught me so much & I hope I taught them but from this moment I decided I wanted to pursue my work with the dispossessed, which I was already doing in Nantes in parallel.
LDS [Le Dernier Spectateur] was about the transformative nature of creation, about the richness of interiority that only the poor possess, it was about polyphonies and multitudes, it was not accidentally a search for excellence in the very people dominant culture ignored.
LDS has done writing and theatre workshops every week, ten séances a week for over 20 years now, we have made a singular contribution to French culture. Our thirty books prove without exception that this population is capable of the most profound gifts and articulation of those gifts.
All the political apparatus here accept that & certainly all the scholars, hospitals doctors, institutions are aware of our work.
Skilbeck: Looking back, what have been the most significant achievements in your work at Le Dernier Spectateur?
Barnett: To survive. To create. To prove my proposition. To see people who have been ignored, create extraordinary things, for them to continue their education.
Skilbeck: I am particularly interested in your work with people who are marginalized and incarcerated- in prisons and in asylums and hospitals. Could you talk about this work? How and when did you start to work with these groups, what inspired you to do so? What have been the greatest challenges and most rewarding parts of this work?
Barnett: I have already described this above. I have been doing workshops like this since I was 13.
Skilbeck: One of your poems that I know through following its developments and reiterations on Facebook, is Furkan, and I’ve seen you perform the poem to the accompaniment of a saxophonist to a group of peoples in Nantes, in a video by Georgia Wallace-Crabbe. It’s a very moving poem. Could you say something about how you came to write it and what it is about? And the particular significance of this subject to you?
Barnett: It is a poem that pays homage to the young Turkish medical student Furkan Dogan who was murdered by Israeli commandos. It is a requiem for all those who struggle. It is a magnificent poem that has benefited directly from my service to the community.
The poem and the workshops are one.
It continues with the improvisations pour le memorial.
Skilbeck: Looking back on your life’s work so far, what have been the most rewarding and memorable achievements? What are you most proud of?
Barnett: All. I regret not one moment. But for the world’s experts, people whom I respect to denote me as this epoch’s Mayakovsky touched me deeply, very deeply, because that connection remains. I write almost impossibly epic poems, I work amongst the people at a level which does not reduce them but demands that they explore their interiority with the precision of scholars.
And I have succeeded.
Skilbeck: What has been the biggest influence on you in your life and work as a socially engaged artist?
What drives you to make art in all the ways that you do and to work with others?
What have been your greatest joys and happiness’s? Do you have any regrets?
Barnett: Tran Duc Thao & Louis Althusser. And my late collaborator film maker & novelist Thomas Harlan which requires a book
I believe in serving the people.
To be alive in dangerous times.
No regrets, none at all.
Ruth Skilbeck
First published in Arts Features International, Feb 1, 2013
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