Pivoting ‘Resilience’: Australian Women Playwrights, Community and the COVID-19 Crisis

In this essay we report the results of interviews undertaken with 10 playwrights in Australia from March to September, 2021, as a means of examining the gendered impacts of the pandemic itself and the calls for resilience that it prompted. It has been widely acknowledged that women were disproportionately disadvantaged by COVID-19: in these interviews, we set out to understand the lived experience of this impact for Australian women playwrights. Among those interviewed were Sydney-based Alana Valentine and Noëlle Janaczewska, Newcastle-based Vanessa Bates, Melbourne-based Michele Lee and Emilie Collyer, regional Victorian playwright Janet Brown, South Australian Verity Laughton and, from Darwin, Mary Anne Butler. Also interviewed were anonymous playwrights from Western and South Australia. A recurrent theme in these conversations was the challenge of navigating isolation according to geography and gender. We find that this challenge was not mitigated but rather compounded by calls for resilience in various guises, most notably in appeals for people to ‘pivot’ their work and creative practices, and to compete with colleagues for funding. We consider these calls in light of the ways in which Ames and Greer problematise the concepts of resilience and resourcefulness, examining how the emphasis on resilience - especially by funding bodies - registered for artists who entered the pandemic in the context of an already depleted and under-resourced industry. We also use interviews to highlight how artists found community and productive connection during the pandemic, despite organisational structures that promoted competition and division rather than communal relationships. This supports arguments made by Ames and Greer and their contributors, for a re-imaging of 'resilience' from a fraught neoliberal concept to a more productive communal strategy for navigating challenging times.