In her latest production, One The Bear, Candy Bowers strode on the Opera House stage, voice soaring.
Performing the hip hop musical at the Sydney Opera House last week, Bowers wanted to explore a theme close to her heart - how artists of colour navigate white spaces keen to profit from diverse work but unable to provide the artistic safety or reception to foster it.
“I’ve been the only black woman in very white artistic spaces my entire life,” says Bowers, a graduate of elite acting school NIDA.
“The only problem with the ‘it can only get better’ idea is that I did my first gig on the Opera House stage 10 years ago. I’m 40! I haven’t seen enough change during that time.”
The play is the latest in a string of offerings from showrunner Bowers who runs her own production house Black Honey. Bowers says she continues to be angered by the lack of progress in Australian arts behind the scenes where a damning survey found almost half of arts organisations in Australia still featured no people of diverse cultural or linguistic heritage among their leadership.
“(Change) is happening in sharp, explosive ways (on screen) but I don’t believe there is a sustainable succession plan with the boards, the chairs, the artistic directors.
“All our taxpayers dollars go into these buildings – it’s very egalitarian when it comes to who pays for sh**. But who gets to be in the building and what are their experience like in that building?”
Bowers critical eye does not spare the institution where her play was hosted. On the eve of the show Bowers wrote a viral Facebook post, criticising the Opera House team for disappointing sales as result of what she says was a lack of support.
“I have learned that there was no outreach for the show. There was almost zero press and very inconsistent internal support- our poster image wasn’t even displayed around the building until I brought it up,” she wrote in the post.
However, a spokesperson for the Sydney Opera House said, "Our work with Candy Bowers on her hip-hop fairy tale musical One the Bear, presented in the Studio as part of our Children, Families and Creative Learning program, encompassed traditional PR outreach, community engagement, a multi-channel marketing and social campaign and on-site presence, directly commensurate with all other shows of a similar scale.”
For Bowers, there needs to be further interrogation into how productions by diverse creators are received in traditionally white spaces. “What I’m really interested in is the narrative that black work doesn’t sell at the Opera House and if you have a person of the colour on the poster, subscribers are less likely to see the show. I say have people of colour on every poster – let’s not kowtow to bigotry,” she says.
“That’s what the show is about – I want to understand how hard it is for black artists not only to put on these shows but to be inside the walls of these building where you won’t see another black person in there unless they are serving you food.”
Bowers cites her work with schools, marginalised communities and Western Sydney’s Campbelltown Arts Centre, where she developed her work, as her natural comfort zones. But hosting diverse audiences who would never otherwise come to a Sydney Opera House performance was important.
“For me being at the Opera House – it’s about hijacking every stage.
“It’s saying you can be anywhere. You can do global, international level work in your backyard, on the basketball court, the Opera House, in the Northern Territory, in the middle of the desert – which is all the stuff I do,” she says.
“It’s about visibility and equality in every single space.”
Bowers says for now her sights are set for greener pastures overseas – as she gets ready to head to LA Talent Week to promote her show.
At the end of One The Bear, as her character wiggled her tail in goodbye on stage to the Jill Scott tune, 'You’re Golden', it’s clear Bowers is taking her own advice.
