The ‘real' alternative: Multiculturalism and community arts in Sydney

Two artistic productions - the photographic exhibition ’52 Suburbs’, and British dance company DV8’s physical theatre production, ‘Can we talk about this?’ -  premiered in Sydney in 2011, offering contrasting explorations of issues arising from contemporary policies and social imaginaries of multiculturalism. Both ‘mainstream’ productions interpellated a liberal, middle-class audience, and were received with considerable public and critical acclaim – the former for ostensibly celebrating Sydney’s multicultural fabric by depicting locally rooted manifestations of cultural expression, identity, and community, the latter for exploring issues of human rights, equality, and freedom of speech in relation to multiculturalism. The counterpoints between these two productions and the ways in which they attempt to narrate and interrogate multiculturalism reflect the contemporary tensions, limitations and paradoxes inherent in ‘managing diversity’ in Australia through the model of liberal multiculturalism. This paper argues that, as an alternative to popular ‘mainstream’ narratives of multiculturalism, there exist emergent possibilities in localised, vernacular artistic productions, which represent the multiplicity of migrant voices and the ‘multicultural real’ in Australian society. In Sydney, Australia’s largest and most culturally diverse city, the multiple identities of the city are given voice through the work of community arts organisations such as Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) and Curiousworks. The forms of representation in the artistic works of such community organisations, while highly political in their own right, can serve to make the socio-political and historical realities of ‘managing’ and negotiating socio-cultural diversity in Australia more visible. In doing so, they create spaces for the telling of alternative tales that are central to enabling more radically democratic representations of Australian society, and to reinvigorating a cacophonous multicultural discourse in Australia.