Even the resistance over the last half of the twentieth century of visual art to be confined to any particular style has been characterized by guerilla manouevres around style, and the rise of non-art. And if we add film into the mix of visual art (though I’d claim film is much more than just visual), we find a genre that has long taken on politics with both flair and vengeance.

Can we say the same about theatre or dance or music? Certainly contemporary dance in the hands of some individual choreographers has taken that route. I think of Anne Therese de Keersmaker’s I Said I or her solo work Once , Lloyd Newson’s successive works for DV8, and Alain Plaitel’s deeply moving treatises on the disenfranchised urbanites of a new Europe for Les Ballets de c de la B, but theatre? Music? How about John Adams and Peter Sellars? Or indeed Laurie Anderson’s beautiful Homeland and National Theatre of Scotland’s splendid Black Watch, both of which will be seen at Luminato this June. And if we care to scan cultures beyond the ‘western’ canon and times beyond our own, we will find a staggering weight of political art: Eastern European writers in the seventies, South African actors during apartheid, and indigenous peoples everywhere today.

These works, which engage socio-political issues, are certainly there and these are just the more obvious examples: there are a myriad of examples of smaller companies, more alternative music and festivals all over the world which attune themselves to issues of the day.

I suppose the question becomes ‘how effective is it’? How big is the gap between the audience member experiencing overt politically driven art and their going away to act on it. Sometimes I fear, in the same way as I fear our reaction to the barrage of ‘news’ stories in media of every kind, that knowing about it is deemed enough: yes I heard about it, and I can talk about it, but my responsibility ends there. Clearly those artists who are driven by thoughts about the big issues and the injustices of the world simply feel those things strongly enough to allow them to surface or drive their own work. In some cases it is enough for them that their position is understood - that they care enough about certain issues to make work about them. For others, expression alone will never be enough – the call to action requires that those who hear, see and listen also take up the cause.

I am currently writing a play about the first woman to study architecture in Vienna. She was a contemporary of Hanns Eisler, also Viennese, the composer who worked with Bertolt Brecht, especially when they were in exile in Hollywood and then, kicked out by McCarthy, returned to postwar Berlin and the Reconstruction. I regularly sing Brecht and Eisler’s songs today, pertinent as they are some fifty to seventy years after they were written, but working on the new the play has allowed me to look again at the young man himself. Studying under Schoenberg in Vienna he was absorbed by his music, but his writings (collected in the book Hanns Eisler, a rebel in music) show a composer whose art grew to be in service of the revolutionary cause. Unlike many a celebrity today willing to devote a portion of their time and financial gain to good works in the public interest, Eisler cared passionately about revolutionizing social conditions as well as musical style and he worked tirelessly in factories and sites of heavy industry making music with and for workers, often using their own skills (such as the brass traditions in certain towns) as his inspiration. The cause came first, the music in its service. His early career meant little to him outside the framework of loyalty to the rise of the working classes throughout the world. His and Brecht’s kampflied (translating as fighting song) The Solidarity Song couldn’t be more explicit and the same can be said for their Song of the Moldau which I paired with Dylan’s The Times They are a Changin’ in my 2005 concert iprotest!

Yet one of the most fascinating things about Bob Dylan’s Chronicles is his own revelation about how little he wanted to be anyone’s political hero, and to what extent he cared about pure music and performance every bit as much as ,if not more than, ‘the message’. So, you never can be sure, even with the most fighting lyrical stance; and if those songs inspired the fighters in the front line at the time, does it matter that the artist may have been less committed? We should acknowledge that very often just the courage to be an artist , especially in the context of certain repressive regimes, can be a political act in itself. One thing is for sure, that there is no such thing as an ‘apolitical’ artist, just as there is no such thing as an apolitical person. If you don’t comment on current issues, if you don’t take action against injustice in your own community, or your own nation, then by default you are happy with the status quo. So it always confounds me that only those who do take up those issues carry the ‘political’ label. On the other hand ‘to thine own self be true’ still holds for all of us, artists or not, and forcing fake concern, or taking up political themes just because they are fashionable would be as treacherous as not speaking or singing up when you do feel something passionately enough to work in your own way for change.

photo credits:
Emun Elliott in Blackwatch 2007 (Manuel Harlan)
Homeland (Laurie Anderson)

Robyn Archer is a singer, writer and director who has performed throughout Australia and the world. She has served as Artistic Director for the Adelaide and Melbourne International Arts Festivals, and the National Festival of Australian Theatre. In January 2006, she received the International Citation of Merit from the International Society of Performing Arts.

Find out more about Robyn Archer at the depArcher lounge www.robynarcher.com.au