How much?

The dizzy business of equating art with money.

In the 80s, I grew up in a mission brown weatherboard house, full of alfalfa and bulk honey and a deep freezer that had enough frozen bread to keep the six of us alive for 3 years.

It was the decade that began that belief that the neoliberal frame was right and good and inevitably. If you weren’t making money, it was a waste of time. There was that initial revolt when the teenagers burnt photos of Margaret thatcher. But it didn’t take much more than a decade to ensure that anyone who wasn’t singing from that ‘cash is king’ songbook, was considered a traitor to the success and survival of their nation.

I arrived on earth, just in time to have parents who hadn’t yet been conditioned by this capo manifesto, and believed that art and music were important. And while that deep freeze was a genuine safety net in case of low cash weeks, my parents found the money to pay for the four of us to learn an instrument. My brothers’ both were talented on the clarinet and trumpet and the eldest made a long career of it. My sister and I were less talented. Her dalliance with the trombone was ill conceived and my years playing violin only resulted in deep heartache because I could never make her sing the way I yearned to make her sing. I couldn’t work out how to transfer that feeling from inside me, through my fingers and onto my instrument.

We have abandoned the belief that witnessing and creating art is integral to a full life. But this is what happened and here we are. We’ve landed in this new millennium without much comeback to the assertion that art making is at best a hobby and at worst an indulgence that is anti-social.

So this week has been an essential reconnection with everything I know to be true. I co-chair Rollercoaster theatre company. A theatre company whose ensemble is neurodiverse and intellectually disabled. I joined the board 8 years ago, because I saw this photo by photographer and author Sarah Walker and I needed to know more.

There is something inescapably true about Erin looking into the middle distance, holding a fish in a yellow raincoat. It felt like it told me about those things I tried to get my violin to say, but had no skill.

This week, Rollercoaster celebrated 20 years of making theatre. It started in a cafe, after the parents of the ensemble realised their kids, who had all trained together as actors and were soon to graduate, would find no opportunities being actors with disability. None. So they taught themselves everything they could about running a theatre company, found themselves a director who would push and extend their artistry without asking them to dress up a cows or tress, and Rollercoaster was born.

20 years later, we gathered at Memo music hall in st kilda - invited supporters and set about to fundraise to yet again, keep the doors open for another year. We spend a lot of our time strategising as to how to find that compelling argument as to just why theatre matters. We build pitch decks to convince a society who has held their economics as a primary truth, that our theatre matters. Theatre that sits outside the mainstream, that tells of a different way to see and and feel the world and grows a deeper love for each other. Often, in social enterprise and charity, we try to talk in the language of these new people and find the economic reasoning for the work we do.

But Rollercoaster is theatre, and doesn’t generate enormous revenue. Its value is held somwhere else, hidden in that old world where worth wasn’t only understood through the revenue it generated. We understood then, what happened to us when we sat in the dark and gave ourselves over to our imaginations. Where we felt safe to ask challenging questions of ourselves - how are these stories mine? How are they unknown to me? What does it tell me about being human?

On thursday night, the ensemble performed works from over their twenty year catalogue. We witnessed a body of work that asked questions of inclusion, of desire, of loss, of joy… the questions we are all forever circling around.

I realised there was no economic reason that was effective enough to account for what was made in that room that night. No dollar value could be reasonably argued to equate, because really, there is not enough money in the world to match it. As we sat in the dark, the ensemble who had been making art together for two decades, danced and performed and bowed and costumed – and changed us. In the dark of that theatre we left the world of chaos and stocks and returned to that other place that we all belong – the place of great levelling, where no one can escape the truth of their humanity. We sit, looking up at these actors on stage, and see our own selves there. We are changed, we are returned, we are held in the arms of our imaginations and our empathy. We are taken somewhere new.

And to that question of how much? How many dollars can we match to tell us its worth? Keep walking. There’s not enough money in the world.

(also, your contribution to keep our doors open is actually deeply appreciated. If you feel like throwing some dollars our way… jump onto our website and hit the donate now button )

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