Peter Sellars, the perennial enfant terrible of operatic staging and
something of a left-wing arts evangelist, came to the Adelaide Festival more
than two years ago as artistic director, promising to start a new conversation
between Australia and the rest of the world. Work that was exciting, politically
challenging and socially relevant would be created for the March 2002 Festival
and the rest of the world would sit up and listen.
On the weekend of 10–11 November, the 43-year-old Sellars was forced to resign by a board who feared for the future of the biennial festival itself. With four months to go until opening night, the board believed his program was too thin, obscure and non-inclusive of the established arts community. This was Australia's most popular international arts festival and they were worried no one would turn up. Under pressure to change his program, and with no additional funding on offer, Sellars gave up.
"It appears that my presence is an impediment to the realization of the 2002 Adelaide Festival," Sellars said in a statement from Paris, where he has an opera in rehearsal. "I have made my share of mistakes since coming to Adelaide two and a half years ago, but I deeply believe in the principles for which this festival stands." Contacted since, Sellars sends his good wishes but says he will be making no further comment for some months. Adelaide Festival chief executive Sue Nattrass, a former artistic director of the Melbourne Festival (1998–99), stepped in from the wings to replace Sellars in a seamless transition. She is still an enthusiast for his socially radical vision but agrees his festival program was flawed. At least two significant international events had fallen from Sellars' wish list, she said, undermining the program's balance.
The crunch came at the end of October when Sellars released his program. Until then, his eccentric and contagious enthusiasm had elevated the Festival to a level that was dangerously over-hyped. Adelaide was having a love-fest, he said, it was going to be amazing, remarkable, extraordinary and life-changing. It was also low-risk, he said, because most of it was free — the box office was for this Festival irrelevant.
But money was not, and since the start of this year internal financial problems have dogged the Adelaide Festival. There was a ghastly accounting oversight that created an A$1 million hangover from the previous Festival in 2000, otherwise a great success. Sponsorship was problematic because Sellars demanded that companies enter into a social contract and withheld the usual commercial bartering tools like naming rights. The collapse of one of Australia's two national airlines, Ansett, cost the Festival about A$260,000 in flights and sponsorship; the 11 September disasters made the climate worse. Then the Festival almost lost A$600,000 in sponsorship from Australia's national telecommunications company, Telstra, after the board refused to heed its opposition to an unscreened festival television advertisement featuring images of Adolf Hitler. Telstra withdrew funding and the board backed down and cancelled the commercial before it was shown, but it took three more days for Telstra to come back. The South Australian state government, which treasures the Adelaide Festival, put in an additional A$2 million to cover the sponsorship crisis but it was not enough.
The biggest problem was that, in his desire to be democratic, Sellars spent so much money on community consultation and project development that there was not enough left for the events. Instead of pulling together the program himself, as others have done, he appointed a layer of nine salaried associate directors. Even after he sacrificed half his A$100,000 salary and shaved a week from the program — it runs for just over a week instead of two — too much had been spent. "That money was gone before the full funding picture was seen, that's part of the problem," says Nattrass. "Peter is the first one to say that the program is thin because it's not what he envisaged."
Sellars' fatal mistake may have been that when this disappointing program was announced, he was not there to explain and defend it. He left Adelaide in October for rehearsals at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris of Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin; although opening night in Paris was still a month away, he did not return for the 31 October Festival launch. Sellars did videotape a message to be shown at the launch, but it was delivered to the airport late, missed its flight and did not arrive in time.
As announced, the diversity of the 2000 Adelaide Festival (by Sellars' predecessor, Robyn Archer), which had about 90 events, was replaced with a program of just 18 items, including the regular Writer's Week and four films (one of which is listed as "Untitled" because it is controversial in the Aboriginal community). One of the attractions of the Festival plans announced last May, an appearance by renowned architect Frank Gehry, was nowhere to be seen. Gehry was dropped because there was no money to pay him.
Of what was left of the program, the best were the dance/theatre company MAU, whose performers are trained in the ancient dance and chants of the Pacific islands, in the Australian premiere of their work Bone Flute; members of a Cambodian orphanage run by an Australian woman, Geraldine Cox, performing music and dance at an arts complex in Adelaide's socially disadvantaged western suburbs; and six intimate nights of music, theatre, food and wine to be held in some of Adelaide's finest homes. In addition, the Aboriginal troupe Bangarra Dance Theatre will perform its work Skin, which premiered at Sydney's Olympic Arts Festival last year and has been seen in Melbourne and Brisbane as well.
In a supreme irony, the single most exciting event, Sellars' collaboration with John Adams in the contemporary multi-media opera El Niño, has almost certainly gone with him.
Sellars' ethos rejected "shopping-trolley" festivals in which events were bought and fed to overstuffed yuppies. Imported art was out, but he was persuaded to forgo his principles for the sake of El Niño, whose multicultural Nativity resonated with his themes of truth and racial reconciliation. Nattrass still wants to include it, but the awkwardness of having Sellars in town during a festival he was meant to direct makes this inconceivable. In a further irony, tickets for El Niño were already on sale and comprised 80 per cent of the box office revenues so far.
Nattrass will stay true to Sellars' themes of relevance and social justice but she is going shopping. If El Niño goes, its budget will be used to buy something else. The government's A$2 million has been allocated but not spent, and some works — including five international films which were to be chosen at the last minute so as to be utterly contemporary — will be recalled and the money used to build a more conventional program.
Sellars' absence from the launch of his own festival was unprecedented — and, rightly or wrongly, fostered the view that Sellars had lost faith in Adelaide and was choosing Paris. There are doubts now that he will ever return. "There was a realization, talking to him so far away, in Europe, that he is taking much more of a world view of this whole thing," the Adelaide Festival board's chairman, John Morphett, said this week.
Sellars is hurt, says Sue Nattrass — everybody is. A member of the Adelaide Festival board for five years and a former Festival artistic director, Jim Sharman (whose rock opera The Rocky Horror Show was became a huge cult success), resigned in protest over the board's desertion of Sellars. Sellars could be infuriating, he said, but he was also a great artist and the board should have backed him and his program. "I feel Peter Sellars was asking the right questions about the role of the arts in today's society," Sharman says. "These questions won't go away."
Comparisons are inevitable between Adelaide and Sellars' last festival, the Los Angeles Festival, which was built on the same messianic desire to enfranchise voices that are normally not heard. Begun in 1990, the Los Angeles Festival went into abeyance in 1993 and has not been held since.
The great difference between Sellars and predecessors such as Robyn Archer (1998 and 2000) and Barrie Kosky (1996) is the latter brought their own brilliance to programming but were broadly committed to serving a conventional arts audience. Sellars' festival model was not to broaden the audience but to change it completely — which left the arts community and arts audiences out in the cold. It may have been what he promised, but no one realized that the new audience was at the expense of the old. Ultimately, the existing festival won.
"Peter has been extraordinarily honorable in wanting to preserve the Adelaide
Festival, in not wanting to destroy the Adelaide Festival," Sue Nattrass says.
"He knows its importance and he doesn't want that to be
hurt."
