News article on theaustralian.com.au

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/shared-response-to-our-humanity/story-e6frg8n6-1226158384159

The first paragraphs are offered below as a teaser;

IT is good, when we ask ourselves what we get from the performing arts - what they do for us, what they are worth - to recall what actually happens when we take ourselves off and become part of the audience at a play or a program of classical or contemporary or indigenous dance, or the opera, a musical, an orchestral or chamber concert, or the circus.

The first thing, of course, is that we are there; bodily present in the same space and the same moment as the performers. What happens then is uniquely for us.

The other is that we are there both as individuals, with all our quirks, our habits of attitude and response, our individual nervous systems and interests and prejudices and, at the same time, since we are by training as well as by nature social creatures, as part of a uniquely constituted group: strangers sitting beside and behind and in front of us whom we have for this occasion joined, and whose presence, and responses as we pick them up, will determine at least partly the way we see and hear what is about to happen and what we feel.

Click the link to read more.

David Malouf attended a recent meeting of major performing arts artistic directors to discuss the proposed national cultural policy. This essay is his response to that discussion.

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