It’s also a bit of an up yours from artists, and Avant Guards got into the swing of things with an irreverent swan song full of La Mama traditions. Proximity to Lygon St has always been a drawcard, and audiences could mill about the venue munching free pizza, or sampling a gelato stand from Brunetti.

We were also assailed by a flurry of raffle tickets, replacing the hundreds of La Mama raffles (there’s one drawn before every show) that won’t proceed while the venue is closed to the public. I won a pair of abandoned sunnies from lost property – and was glad of the cover on entering the stage for a fearsome durational performance.

For most of the day, the theatre was given over to the Kafkaesque spectacle of simulated La Mama board meetings. It was a farcical and depressing thing to witness artists squabbling over nepotism or excellence, or what programs should face funding cuts, and so on, and impromptu dancing didn’t up the fun factor much.

As protest theatre, it’s a fair cop though. Spirit-crushing bureaucracy and pleasing the bean-counters are not what artists do best, and why shouldn’t they excruciate audiences by boring us with the misery of it all? Artistic frustration needs an outlet, and the indie scene is so underfunded it’s a wonder that actors aren’t performing jargon-littered, pro-forma grant applications instead of plays these days.

The artists at Pony Cam are used to shaping such untamed energies into community theatre. They’re also not big complainers, and they’ll go the extra mile, as anyone who saw Burnout Paradise, their athletic ode to artistic burnout performed on treadmills, can attest.

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In fact, the Pony Cam ensemble literally ran on a treadmill the whole day of Avant Guards, the grind of putting one foot in front of another setting a steady beat for another performer, who compiled lists of various La Mama shows throughout the years, working to establish what it is the community is trying to save.

Provocations and festivities La Mama’s collaboration with Pony Cam marks the temporary closure of La Mama as a significant historical inflection point in Melbourne’s theatre scene. At present, La Mama will only be open to artistic residencies in 2025 and until that changes, the theatre’s status as a lynchpin connecting generations of Australian theatre artists, its essential function as an accessible incubator for new work, stands in the balance.

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