What will we do now?

On May 14-16 2009 in Melbourne's Arts House Meat Market a unique gathering of Australia's theatre practitioners, producers, presenters and commentators came together to explore the urgent issues of our time and imagine possible futures for the Australian theatre sector. This Forum is the first time the theatre sector has got together in this way for over 20 years and it is hoped that this will be the first of a regular biennial forum hosted by different cities and towns across Australia.

While the Australian Theatre Forum 2009 has come to an end, it feels as though many conversations have only just begun. The full reports from the Open Space and Action Planning days are available in the online forum now online.

These reports were typed up or hand written by delegates following each discussion and have been published as they are. It's an unwieldy 249 pages worth, however the discussion and action plan headings are summarised at the top of the document to assist you in navigating the multitude of ideas.

We look forward to hearing about the progress of ideas, projects and strategies articulated at the Forum in due course!

With the intention of making sure that what needed to get talked about did, we radically departed from the traditional conference model and used instead Open Space, a self organising conferencing method for a full day of the conference, facilitated by Improbable Theatre, London, forerunners in using Open Space with the theatre sector, public funders and private corporations in the UK and Europe.

Over the 3 days 5 outstanding international and Australian speakers gave keynotes that struck a chord on future thinking on the big issues at the marathon opening night dinner, with speed dating opportunities for people and their work, confessionals on the failures, facilitated action planning and of course parties in the fabulous Melbourne bars.

Australia's cultural luminaries - presenters, commentators, academics, producers and artists actively engaged as respondents before, during and after the conference, including Robyn Archer, Stephen Armstrong, Alison Croggon, Matt Lutton, Julian Meyrick, Chris Mead, Sarah Miller and Fiona Winning.