If I had a pound for every time someone has told me that touring is broken over the past 30 years, I would have enough money to ‘rescue’ the ENO with money left over to celebrate all the extraordinary work that happens up and down the country in theatres, arts centre and village halls every night of the week. Far from being broken touring is the solution to many of the challenges facing the sector not the problem. What better way to ensure more is made of the best work being created? I can think of no other sector that pays such little regard to what is, effectively, the research and development of creating new work. Can you imagine Apple investing huge sums in creatives to find new products and ways of growing their audience only to throw the results away once it has been tested. There is a disconnect between production and distribution which needs addressing. Companies speak of how hard it is to get tour dates whilst venue managers bemoan the lack of work, they can confidently book.
It used to be, loosely, that ACE would invest in the creation of work whilst Local Authorities provided the infrastructure for its presentation. And, I know, Local Authorities still play their part in supporting local venues across the country, but LAs are under huge pressure to justify their investment against other priorities and venue managers are encouraged to diversify their operating model. Often shorthand for ‘cost less money’. We are seeing the return of box office splits even for new work in a small regional venue and the return and expansion of riders which top slice box office returns before a fee is paid. This places too much responsibility on the company who often will not have a relationship with the local audience. But more than this, many small-scale venues are not measuring success by those of companies and vice versa. It is as if one is striving to be popular and the other to be of the highest quality. As if these were opposites when it is possible to be both. Indeed, I would go as far as to say, it is achieving both that makes the work exceptional.
We need to recognise that every time one partner seeks to mitigate their own risk they are almost always passing that risk on to the other partner – usually the artists. We need to find a place in which presenter and artists are working to the same goals, in which each rely on the other for an event to be successful, where the ambitions and circumstance of each are better understood. (another thing about risk. When an audience trusts the programmer for a venue they are much more likely to take a risk)
Here are a few thoughts on some of the ways we might work differently:
We have to abandon exclusion clauses. Not only are they not fit for the modern world – born from a belief that neighbouring venues are competitors rather than recognising there is an opportunity to cross promote, offer more choice for audiences, demonstrate confidence in the experience..
We need to reconsider the use of riders in a contract. I have heard of venues charging companies for Wifi – even though it was free to customers in the café, of ever growing ticket commission costs, of charging for heating dressing rooms, (‘if the show wasn’t happening we wouldn’t have to heat them’) of marketing contras with little evidence they are spent directly on the show. All of these have the impact of reducing the fee to the company. Either pay the artists a bigger fee or absorb the costs into core operations. It creates an adversarial relationship between companies and venues. At the very least venues should make clear from the offset all the costs they consider right to pass on.
During my time at Farnham Maltings, we established the house network. In very simple terms we secured investment from ACE to pay the fees of artists to tour the Southeast of England through a network of over 180 venues. Mostly arts centres in the 150 – 250 seat range and almost all not in receipt of regular funding from Arts Council. We would pay all the costs associated with touring a production directly to the company and then offer the work to the network on a model in which we would take 70 % of the box office. In this way the risk was taken away from the relationship and company and venue would focus on making the event successful. Of course, if a venue constantly was unable to build an audience, then we would discuss with said venue if they had the capacity to meet their ambitions. And that did mean on a small number of occasions not continuing to offer subsidised work into a venue. Non NPO’s sustaining and building their local audience and using their energy and skills to promote a successful event. The people of Reading would have no chance to access contemporary independent theatre without the energy and indefatigable commitment of South Street. Who sit far outside the NPO cohort. We need to make better use of our collective resources.
Once established the house network proved useful in other ways. In regional pitching events it was revelatory to ask venues to speak about their ambitions and resources alongside artists talking about future work. Indeed, more new work came from an artist hearing a venues ambition and responding to it than from trying to sell their latest idea.
I have spoken often about how much there is to learn from the touring that happens in rural communities. In this there is a three-way relationship between company, venue, and audience – usually brokered by a scheme. All are keenly aware of the need for each to play their part in making the event – often eating dinner together before a show, in which everyone comes through the same door and the local promoter will be in the local shop the next day facing their audience. Which, by the way, is not to say the work cannot be experimental, challenging, play with form and political. We just might not describe it as such to the audience. We will save that for the Arts Council.
There is something in Raymond Williams observation that “the common image of the country is an image of the past, with the common image of the city an image of the future”. Which leaves us, living in towns, inhabiting an undefined present.
These are a few reflections around the challenges, particularity and opportunities for cultural organisations working in towns. I am based in the southeast but hopefully there are some universal truths. I know that Banbury and Borden in the southeast are wildly different from the towns of Mansfield and Shirebrook. However, these thoughts are about communities of a certain scale, places with little cultural infrastructure where most people live. All are facing the same challenges: the decline in the high street; the scale and influence of local authorities; the gravitational pull of cities for young people; the pressures on other services, the prioritising of cities and areas of greatest need by funders. All my career I have heard half acknowledged truths that ‘towns are difficult’ and the most recent elections feel like they have demonstrated that.
According to the centre of towns the southeast has, by far, the largest number of towns of any region in the country. We don’t have a major regional city like Birmingham or Manchester championing its hinterland. London is the capital city and, whilst living in its shadow has a huge impact, it never feels like it has the southeast region in its stewardship. Which leaves us as a slightly ill-defined set of communities. ‘Near London’ describes us by where we are not. Towns are a key characteristic of our region and are something to be thought about, celebrated and cared for.
When it comes to arts development towns face a particular challenge. They lack the critical mass of a city which can deliver an ‘arts’ audience yet are often too large to have a coherent community that might turn out for an event in a village. Towns sit in that middle space and venues, where they exist, have to navigate how they build relationships with their community that are as much about place as they are about art.
One of the most useful things to come out of the pandemic for Farnham Maltings has been that, because we had to shut the buildings, we put our energy into responding to the immediate needs of our local community. We organised help lines, shopping, prescription pick-ups, share stores, buddying schemes and a hardship fund. We also used our convening skills to host a weekly meeting for every organisation involved in the response. From the Town Council to the Emergency Services, the Herald Newspaper, Churches and MPs office with over 40 organisations attending each week. What this did is throw us into a completely different set of relationship with our community based on identifying shared ambition. We agreed three principles. That activity should be delivered at the most local level, that we should only do the things no-one else was doing and that everything we did should be designed to outlive the pandemic. We also held true to the principle that everyone was welcome and we would not be a political, lobbying body. Our dearest hope is that we can sustain these relationships and the common purpose that has resulted.
We have learnt from those weekly meetings that there are lots of good and purposeful people trying to make things happen in our community. We knew that of course, but I don’t think we listened as hard. It also became clear we had a role to play in setting the culture of the discourse.
How do you ensure the leadership of these places aren’t isolated? Yes, they need to be deeply embedded within their communities, but they also need to be connected to and in conversation with others around the country – and world – who are working to solve the same problems. Almost all international exchange happens between our major capital cities, between Tokyo and London, Seoul and Copenhagen. How might we develop international dialogue between communities away from the centre? Is there a role for making better use of the digital? In writing these thoughts I randomly googled towns named Farnham, found one in Virginia, USA and have sent an email to the director of the local theatre. We will see what happens….
It would be good to have a conversation about towns within an international perspective. I have often thought that the people of, say, Petoskey in Michigan have more in common with the people of Midhurst than they do with Detroit. I am sure that the local newspaper will be telling similar stories and the amateur drama group in both communities will be working out how they sustain their audiences, or whatever. Through New Conversations – an exchange programme we run with BC and the Canada Council, the towns of Selby in North Yorkshire has begun to work with Selby, in Canada – born out of someone emailing the box office for one theatre thinking they were talking to the other. And it has led to a delightful series of exchanges between junior school classes, community arts groups, even stand-up comics. A kind of community up twinning. But how you make that happen at scale thus far avoids me.
Arts centres, where they exist, have a crucial role to play, particularly with so much of community services in but what happens when there isn’t one. This is a question that haunts me. Maybe because I once lived in a place that had no cultural offer and the community felt the poorer for it. Yes, to some extent, people make their own culture – I played in a local skittles team – and, maybe, some people travel the 20 miles to the nearest theatre but if we and ACE are arguing that access to culture is essential doesn’t something have to be available to everyone. By the way I am not arguing here for spreading resources thinly across the whole country – although they could be more evenly spread. I am acknowledging that lots of people don’t even get the chance to choose to engage.
Surely we have to make more of the things we have? I cannot imagine over the next few years the resources for lots of new infrastructure or initiatives. We will have to resist the instinct to compete and work collaboratively. By which I do not mean, ‘putting aside our differences to get the money’ or even worse, ‘getting someone else to pay for the things I want to do anyway’. I mean working with people whose ambition we care for. Where it matters that they succeed. In my own world the house network is one small example of this.
We are going to have to find shared ambitions, particularly with people unlike ourselves because it is these alliances that allow us to reach new and different people.
We are going to need to remain sharp, be ambitious, care and support each other, yet I retain an indefatigable belief in the value and ability our work has to make a difference to the quality of all the people of our communities lives.
Four weeks into the current lockdown and I am only now starting to recognise what might be possible in terms of repurposing the Maltings to support the town . We began a month ago by working with the town council and local paper to coordinate the emergency response for Farnham. Together we have set up a helpline, which now supports over 500 people with shopping, prescription pick-ups and social calls, we are providing marshals for the temporary treatment centre at the local hospital and drivers for meals on wheels.
For me, one of the most useful things has been hosting a weekly zoom meeting with 40 community organisations from across the town including resident associations, the MPs office, health authority, town and borough council, food bank, CAB, churches and many others. When setting these meetings up we borrowed much from the What Next model, both in shape and spirit. The meetings are open to all, start and end exactly on time, begin with everyone introducing themselves, invites guest experts and focuses on ‘what can we do’?
Having attended What Next in London pretty much from the start I have often thought we should start a local chapter in Farnham but dismissed the idea because, as a small town, we would struggle to attract sufficient people to make it viable. What I now recognise is that there are a host of people and organisations in every community concerned with ‘the quality of peoples lives’ – although they might not consider themselves as being involved in culture. One of the ‘themes’ of What Next is to forge unlikely alliances and, by chance, we have ended up with a group made up entirely of unlikely alliances.
From the start we agreed a number of principles:
That everything we do should have an ambition to outlive the current crisis.
That we are committed to ‘bottom-up’ development. If relationships are going to be sustained and communities strengthened then help and services need to be delivered at the most local level rather than trying to provide a town wide ‘service.’
That we will be action orientated with discussions ending with ‘what will we do to make this happen?’
Having established the processes to meet the immediate needs a raft of ideas and possibilities have started to surface – some long held ambitions which have found their time and are being realised at an astonishing pace
Library of things. This isn’t an original idea and it has been on my ‘to do’ list for years but somehow i have never found the moment. But in these times its possible to make things happen very quickly. we have found a shop, created a task team of volunteers and will be up and running later this week. It’s a simple idea. to create a community store of things – games, musical instruments, tools, etc that people can borrow – on trust. What i like about this idea is having a shop on the high street that encourages people to borrow rather than purchase feels timely.
Hardshipfund. in half a day we have managed to create a pot of around £20k from organisations like the Lions, Rotary clubs, town council, the parochial trust, a small family trust, etc. They have agreed to work together to instant cash awards to people in need based on referrals from Citizens Advice Bureau, social services, community organisations. We had the idea on last Thursday and hope to be making awards within a week.
Care Homes Each CCG has a Lead for Care Homes and ours was keen for us to develop activities for residents who aren’t receiving visits. There are lots of resources on line so we are pulling together the materials into activity boxes to make this simpler.
We are also now talking to the End of Care teams about what simple acts can be introduced – or reintroduced – to mark the moment of someone passing and aid the grieving process such as opening a window in that moment, which is something that used to regularly happen or placing a paper folded flower on the body (because real flowers are no longer allowed in hospitals)
Other more ambitious thoughts have started to be rehearsed. The most exciting of which is, ‘given there is less traffic about why don’t we trial pedestrianising the town’? i don’t know if we will pull it off but it’s something that has been talked about for 20 years. now might be the moment to describe what kind of community we want to become…..
What am I learning? Some things I have rediscovered, like the value of forging alliances with people not like myself and how this increases what is possible. I am reminded that people I might disagree with politically are sincerely committed to making things better and I should work with rather than against them. This is especially true on the local level. And I am reminded that I work in culture as much as in the arts. And that people express who they are and how they live in all sorts of ways. Through the stories we tell our children, in the songs we sing, in the food that we eat and in how we bury our dead. I have absolutely no doubt of our purpose although i wish it hadn’t been these circumstances that reminded me.
In an earlier post I wrote about the things we are doing in Farnham to respond to the coronavirus crisis. Here is an update one week on.
We are working closely with the Town Council, community groups, The Farnham Herald, residents associations, health authority, food bank, credit union and many more. What has very quickly become clear is that this isn’t going to be an emergency like a flood or fire. This is a slower, longer term set of challenges we face. At the moment, mostly, people are safe although anxiety levels are very, very high around what comes next. There have been some local issues, such as Meals on Wheels and all their drivers being over 70, and on-line shopping slots not being available for weeks but we are finding solutions as we go.
In one week we have managed to set up a helpline with three dedicated lines, a new CRM system that is GDPR compliant and auditable (thanks Keith, a man I didn’t know one week ago) with a script for operators to use (thanks Steph) a leaflet which is being delivered to 35,ooo people next week to every single ward across the town and surrounding villages and we have had over 50 people call for help in the first two days. Mostly they have needed food supplies or prescriptions picking up.
What I have quickly come to understand is that there is very real need and anxiety in every street in this town.
I thought I would share some of the challenges and solutions we have found so far. Very happy for people to respond, suggest solutions or add their own thoughts….
Over the last week during the setting up of the helpline service we convened a daily Zoom call with what quickly turned into 30 plus community organisations including the local paper, the Farnham Herald, churches, facebook groups, resident associations, Town Council, emergency response team, the local MPs office and others. This has proved really useful in ensuring everyone feels part of one solution and that we don’t duplicate provision. The guiding principal is that services should be delivered at the most local level – mindful that some requests need to be escalated quickly to the County or health service emergency number. To make sure this wrks well we are constantly speaking to Waverley Borough Council emergency response team who are in turn keeping us up to date with the national plan. We have remained resolute in wanting to provide a town wide service that coordinates the endeavours of others, by street or neighbourhood: firstly because people are more likely to trust someone very close by (and less likely to take advantage) and secondly because these relationships might outlive the current crisis.
One early question in the script is ‘do you have family near by or neighbours who already help you’ and about a third have said yes. In these cases we have encouraged the caller to continue to use their existing networks unless that becomes unavailable or a problem. It’s clear that some people thought they had to use this service because it was available….
We have, through the local authority, been checking against the electoral role each volunteer – although to date we have had sufficient DBS cleared volunteers – as one way of verifying that people are who they say they are. Given the general level of anxiety these steps have felt important to mitigate peoples concerns.
We have had challenges with how we pay for shopping securely. Supermarkets won’t let us let customers pay on the phone and, obviously, we don’t know what the cost of a particular list will be until we get to the checkout and we are reluctant to use cash. The best solution we have found so far is to work with a social care provider ‘Right at Home’ who already shop for their clients using a system of direct debits with an upfront deposit. They have volunteered their services and the town council has agreed to underwrite the deposit, any bad debts or non-payers if they arise. (none have)
Meals on Wheels have a bank of volunteer drivers who are DBS checked but they are all over 70. A local taxi firm has agreed to do the deliveries on a ‘per trip’ basis. (all the taxi drivers have up to date DBS certificates)
One group of callers have been people living in other parts of the country who have elderly parents living in Farnham for whom they have been doing on-line shopping – sometimes for years. We have had three today from Bournmouth, Salisbury and York. The challenge is that there are now no delivery slots and in all these cases the elders are very isolated and not well connected to their neighbours. In all three instances they have been couples rather than single people so perhaps relying on each other for their social contact. Here it feel like there are two challenges. Firstly sorting the shopping which we can do but secondly finding ways of better connecting to the local community which will take longer.
Having the ex-head of the ambulance service as part of the initial shaping group has been useful in developing safe guarding protocols and a set of questions to protect volunteers when interacting with others. We can share these
Having the local MP office in the Zoom meeting has been useful – they were very keen to join – to offer them a bottom up view on how people are responding, what local solutions are emerging and feeding back to government where they think they can influence. For example encouraging the post office to speed up the delivery of leaflets.
One thing we have become increasingly clear about is that we should run this as a free service – even though people are offering donations. Because charity shops are mostly shut and fund raising activates have ground to a halt, we want to leave space for them to raise the funds they need so, when offered, are suggesting they make a donation to the local food bank because….
….food banks are struggling for three reasons. Food donations are down, many essential items are out of stock and lots of collection points – like the ones in churches – are now closed. We are exploring with catering suppliers if there is a deal to be done with them as they aren’t supplying restaurants and we are looking for new drop off points.
The group that originally shaped this initiative is now starting to talk about the longer term, how we ensure people don’t feel socially isolated, how churches are adapting to run their services, having dealt with each callers initial need we are currently writing some guidelines for volunteers to follow up with a social call – especially to those who are on their own. we will also share other peoples solutions like organising quiz nights via Zoom, etc. It’s early days but I have no doubt the ingenuity of people will triumph.
Like every other cultural organisation in the country we are trying to make sense of ‘what next’? Because we are companies full of creative, motivated individuals the urge to find solutions, try and predict and respond is overwhelming. Farnham Maltings has a mission expressed as ‘contributing to the quality of life of all the people of Farnham’. Given this mission, an animated staff team and a set of positive relationships with our local authorities, it has, dare i say it, almost been fun to identify problems and find solutions. I am sure there are others doing brilliant things with the resources they have. Here are some of the things we are doing, which I am describing here as ideas, possibilities, alliances, that might serve others. In all of this there is an opportunity to make things forever better than they were.
We are working with the town council and have established a weekly meeting at the Maltings of organisations involved in responding including facebook groups, the Farnham Herald, Care Farnham, the emergency planning team from the Borough Council, Nextdoor and Whatsapp groups, residents associations, food bank and most of the churches to coordinate actions across the town. The meetings are designed to do three things. Coordinate actions, identify need and share resources.
One thing that has surprised me is the huge, latent generosity within the community. One facebook group has had 2,500 people sign up as volunteers within its first week offering all sorts of skills and resources, from lifts to hospital, help with shopping, IT, even a local trades people offering services to the vulnerable for free. The thing that has become quickly apparent it the challange is to match this energy with need and we are not yet sure even now how we best use this. But we are in it for the long game and I am sure ideas will emerge.
Having the local newspaper, the Farnham Herald, on board is really useful. they are giving over the front page and have committed to run a campaign with a column every week to support our efforts
Problems and solutions we have already begun to work on:
Information and connecting people. We are giving over our box office team to be the first point of contact for anyone who has particular needs. They will direct people to the most local provider. We believe we are best to encourage people to work through neighbourhoods rather than a town wide service on the basis that these relationships might outlive the current crisis. Already we have heard of two people who have lived opposite each other for 20 years and had never had the excuse to speak until now.
Coordinating leaflet drops for ‘acts of kindness’. There are two or three versions of the neighbourhood card being circulated however they are not reaching every part of the community so we are working through the volunteer workforce to ensure every house receives them. One person has developed an app this week to track where the leaflets have been dropped off.
Meals on Wheels is run using volunteers most of whom are over 40 so can’t continue as they are required to self isolate. The volunteers also need to be DBS checked. Speaking to the local taxi firms, who suddenly have no business, we discovered that they all have to be DBS checked and are more than willing to come to an arrangement where they are being paid a flat fee for each delivery. The town council has brokered this and is talking to local small trusts to cover these costs sustaining a service for many of our most vulnerable people and keeping local taxi companies in business.
The local library has closed which was the one free publicly accessible point in the town for many socially disadvantaged and vulnerable people to the internet. We have put a call out for ‘spare’ ipads and laptops which we will lend to people with a dongle allowing broadband access. We are asking all the phone companies if they will sponsor this – we shall see. But if not a couple of local community organisations have offered to underwrite the cost.
Shopping and prescriptions for vulnerable people. This is taking a little time to work through as we figure out how to organise payments securely. But we are talking to the supermarket managers and hope to have a way, perhaps through our box office, of paying a supermarket bill and then the customer reimbursing us on the telephone.
NHS has asked to use these buildings to collect more blood donations and to potentially use parts of the building in case they are needed for triage.
Volunteer coordinator. We are asking the person who coordinates volunteers for the Maltings to identify a common, robust system of good practice across the various groups and identify particular sub groups – IE people who have been DBS checked.
Remaining socially connected. We are encouraging doorstep conversations – at a distance – whilst trying to work out how to safeguard people. The major challenge is how we encourage people to remain socially connected whilst physically apart. It is obvious that anxiety and peoples’ mental health is as big a challenge as their physical health. Maybe that is where creativity and imagination will play its part. One thought is to put our workshop programme on line as a set of tutorials. we are also commissioning artists to make work for these times and developing collaborative craft projects from home.
Most of this came out of two one hour meetings. People can be extraordinary when offered the chance and I remain convinced that things will be better after this storm.
I have tried to enter the ‘conversation’ online about the next ten year stratergy but, to date, it feels like shouting in the dark. maybe themes and debate will come later. So for now – and not for the first time – i’m going to write this to find out what i think about what ACE might do over the next ten years.
First. change the name – from Arts Council to Culture Council. not only does this better express what ACE actually does it is a much more democratic term. People often use the term ‘arty’ pejoratively to dismiss the arts as ‘not for me’. No-one does that around the term culture. Everybody recognises that culture is part of all of us, even if its a word not regularly used. Its also worth remembering that it is the Department of Culture, Media and Sport not Department of Arts, Media and Sport. there is an opportunity to reframe the work we do around shaping and contributing to what makes us us. I think if we were to collectively frame what we do around a concern for the with quality of peoples lives rather than one around the creative industries, we would go a long way to increasing our relevance and usefulness.
Secondly, the current mission is ‘Great Art for Everyone.’ there are a number of problems with this. firstly who are the arbiters of ‘Great’. It feels like the judgement is based on an outmoded view of high and low art, one couched in judgement and excellence. why can’t we just say Art and and not put a value judgement there from the start? the sports council doesn’t say good sport for all’.
But the word that is least useful is ‘for’. ‘Great art for everyone’ articulates a missionary model in which the art goes to people. Much better would be ‘from’ or ‘by’….
Next, get rid of art form departments. Of course employ specialists that bring particular expertise but have them working more collegiately. (this is happening more and more but we are still too preoccupied with ‘the dance sector, or the visual arts sector). most art is combined art anyway. people express who they are in all sorts of ways. through the songs we sing at football matches to stories we tell our children to the poems we say to at our funerals, to the way we shape our gardens and the food we cook for others. we might not always invest in these moments but we should accept that they spring from the same place.
how about making it an option on every single project grant for a additional % – say 10% – can be exclusively used to improve access to the work so that this becomes a natural and realisable element of every piece of new art.
thats it for now. i bet now i have got these things out of my head i will think of other things …
If we are to believe the front page of the Sunday Times this week we are about to see another assault on our values as a country in which a government hell bent on promoting a narrow curriculum demonstrates, once again, that it has a willful disregard for the people who nurture and care for the quality of life of the country and for our long term economic future. A government that seems incapable of making judgements based on anything other than vote capture and simplistic notions of value for money.
In summary the article suggests a reduction in University fees to £7,500 from £9,250, cutting the 6.1% interest rate on student loans and raising the threshold at which repayment start to £25000. Which all sounds very good. (One can only guess at the spur for this change of heart – could it be a response to Labours proposals in the last election?)
However there is a catch.
The government is only proposing to protect the funding of science and technology degree courses – on the spurious grounds that they cost more money to deliver and provide higher graduate pay. But there is no such protection for arts subjects – which can be equally expensive to deliver – because they don’t represent ‘value for money’.
This is pernicious, fiscally irresponsible and downright daft policy from a government incapable of differentiating between value and money.
They claim it’s based, in part, on the dubious argument that some universities have large surpluses. You can be sure that this isn’t the case of all universities and particularly specialist arts schools and drama colleges where most of the high quality creative arts education is taught. Where is the evidence that arts courses are cheap to run? Take a look at the cost of the craft disciplines, or rehearsal and production costs for dance and drama students or the technology to support film and animation courses. I dont buy it.
Based on this approach, what reaction might this have in the range of disciplines that Universities teach in the future. Will the creative arts be valued as equal and essential partners of science and technology, supporting the nation’s industrial strategy? Not very probable. Vice-Chancellors are unlikely to seek to retain the relatively high cost base and lower fee levels of creative arts courses if this policy goes through. Nevermind one in ten new jobs are in the Creative Industries or that the sector is outperforming every other in terms of growth.
More baffling is the argument that tuition fees ought to be equated to graduate earnings. There are many professions that are highly valued but that may not attract high earnings. The creative industries stimulate the economy in extraordinary ways, support the creation and regeneration of places and enrich and improve the quality of lives. They are generative and produce employment (currently 1.8 million people work in the creative industries). Why are graduate earnings the tool of policy makers? Surely there is a wider and more important context? Surely we should value what the creative arts bring to UK economy, society and culture and recognise what it takes to educate and support the emerging artist, designer, maker (the majority of which are degree educated). It is a nonsense to equate fees to graduates earnings.
I worry that scant regard is being given to the teaching of a set of disciplines that encourage questioning, independent thinking, vision and imagining how the world might better.
I have been talking to Surrey County Council for ten years now about working together. there have been lots of days when i – and i am sure they – have scratched our heads as to why or what we were trying to make happen. i have, on occasions cursed them – usually i admit because they are different from me and work differently. But, but, but something has finally flourished.
For the past couple of years Surrey County Council has had a freeze on appointments across the authority, which has meant they haven’t had someone in a part time role within the Arts Team. When the opportunity came for them to reappoint to that post the head of the arts team came and asked if we would be interested in a conversation about turning the part time role into a full time post that might accommodate a shared ambitions. It became a conversation not about money but about purpose. About what the two organisations are trying to achieve. Which has resulted in us creating a Surrey Performing Arts Officer post, based with us, working across the County. This role will look to support the County’s independent theatre makers, strengthening a venue network and identifying opportunities for people to participate in making their own performance. If we succeed then we both feel we will have made a real contribution to our own ambitions and to the place we work. Sharing a post means we have expanded our sphere of influence, grown our networks and will have more resources to call upon. More than this, the process of developing the partnership has helped us both to reaffirm our own purpose. Which surprised me.
As i say we have been talking regularly over a few years about how we might work more collaboratively. Which is the first lesson I guess. It takes time and there will be occasions when you will think nothing is ever going to happen. But the world changes around us and, eventually, the moment will occur when something becomes possible because agendas have aligned. So we should keep the conversation going way past when you might stop at a party.
When it came to it, we realised that both of us were going to have to give power away in order to get to somewhere new. I think this is particularly hard for Local Authorities who are used to setting agendas and contracting services. And we know the partnerships based on putting aside differences to get to the money never last past the money. What this became has been a case of finding the things we share that we could both invest in. What we ended up with something different from what both of us started with. it required us not to have an obvious solution.
As always it has taken trust and care to get to a point when we were both prepared to take a risk on each other. And there is still a hint of taking a risk. but its worth it.
We will be advertising the new role in arts jobs and on our website from 18th September.
Last week we ran an event called ‘I liked it but I couldn’t book it’ as part of the Guardian and BACs series of conversations called A Nations Theatre led by Lyn Gardner – who has written a blog about the event here. The focus of that particular conversation was how we might ensure contemporary theatre thrives in our rural communities. In thinking what I might say before the event I decided that the one notion I wanted to challenge was that of ‘taking the audience on a journey’. Not that I am anti journey. Every piece of work I make has some element of journey in it. The journeys I wanted to challenge are the drug dealer kind. The ‘get them in on the soft drugs and then we can get them onto the hard stuff’ There is so much wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to start.
Firstly all of the work that I, and many of my contemporaries, make has carefully considered the audience from the start. But I never think ‘is it simple?’, ‘is it easy to understand?’ or ‘is it early-audience work?’ I make the best work that I possibly can. Every time. And as part of that process I ask myself who is this art for. By and large I would never include swearing in a show – on the basis that years ago I directed a production I was really proud of and when I asked my gran what she thought of it all she said was that she didn’t like the swearing. I don’t want that to be the conversation at the end of a show. I would also never describe my work as ‘cutting edge’ or ‘experimental’ or ‘challenging’ – all words that might appeal to an urban arts going audience – but they might not appeal to a community audience in rural Lincolnshire. I would, however, hope to make work that has all of those qualities. Work in which the lead character is a fish, work about the current migrant crisis, work that deals with a young boys realization that they are born in the wrong body, and more.
I wonder if this is a conversation that other art forms have? Does the curator of the Tate think that they need to show new visitors simple line drawings – or better still, cartoons, before showing them Picasso’s Guernica or the work of Paul Klee?
In my earlier days I worked in Theatre in Education and we would often talk about the contract with the audience. In this instance often with young people who had no theatre vocabulary. In these works there would always be an establishing of the relationship between the actors and audience early on in the piece. And many of these works experimented with form, played with time, asked the audience to shift from viewer to participant, asked complex questions about how we live our lives. 6 year olds in Watford had no difficulty in navigating this territory. We are in danger of missing the opportunities to play, to make use of the unique strengths of community touring – that we are presenting work in spaces that are familiar to the audience, that we enter and leave through the same door, that there is no architecture to separate players from audience, that the audience often knows each other – if we ape a cabaret circuit touring model.
I also worry that the custodians who want to start with ‘easy work’ risk underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Theatre, if anything, has to be driven by a passion. There has to be a reason to tell the story to this audience, at this time in this place. If we start with versions of Jane Eyre or plays about how good it was before the tractor was invented we risk creating in the minds of our audience that community touring has nothing to say. A mistake that many repertory companies made in the 80s and 90s.
I do know that there is a lot of work being made that hasn’t considered its audience and work that underestimates them. Work that is designed to ‘give them what we think they want’. And mostly they are a disappointment. Yes, people may initially feel sated, that they have had their dose of culture. But, rather like poor Chinese food, they will feel hungry in half an hour. Theatre, at its best, needs to live in the mind and hearts of the audience long after the company has gone. We need to be more ambitious for the work if theatre is going to retain its place alongside programmer’s choices of music, comedy and film. Theatre, of course, has the potential to be a good night out but it can, uniquely, be so much more than that. Theatre can be vital and relevant and heart stopping.
we have been asked to organise a series of events that explore what the arts might do to shift some uncomfortable truths around the narrowness of the audience and the workforce of the arts – particularly across the south east of England. I don’t entirely know why we have been asked but there you have it. Having been asked we are determined to run the best events that we can.
in planning the first event i stumbled upon this uncomfortable observation about most events organised around diversity. ‘that entail grabbing every piece of diversity you can find, throwing it at a white wall and seeing what sticks’. God knows, i have been to a few of those events myself. We accept the problem is all of ours and that we need to diversify or die. It would be foolhardy to base a business model on sustaining the arts by focusing on just retaining an ageing, cautious audience. And we completely accept the truth that nothing changes unless those in power give away some of it. What we constantly struggle with is the few practical steps that can be done to make that change happen.
The other dimension to this discussion is class – or socio economics – of the communities we work with. Yes, the South East has a few particularly diverse communities – Slough and Luton for example. But with a very small group of exceptions the BME artists and audiences we are working with don’t come from these places. And there are great swathes of the region like Bognor Regis and Brightlingsea for whom the arts are a foreign country. As my friend Joe says ‘you think i am hard to reach, from where i am sitting you’re hard to reach’.
So here is the ask. If we can do one thing, or three, things to make a difference what should they be. Are there examples of people taking actions that have made a difference – either here or around the world, what pledges can we ask people to consider? Not just in inner cities but in provincial communities in, say, Borden, Bicester and Banbury. Communities that are predominately white, conservative and that we care about.
