fashion nova mens
- hello, everybody, can you hear me, yes? - [audience in unison] yes. - good, okay, so this afternoon,what is the relationship between excellence of artand excellence of engagement? with me, i have all of you,and i have four people working on projects or withorganisations whose interests and practices intersect, or in somecases overlap with creative people and placesprojects, but are not part of that programme.
so, it may be that thisafternoon we get a slightly different and perhaps a wider perspective. they are, at the end, joverrent from unlimited, then we have jo hunter from 64 millionartists, matt fenton who is the artistic director of contacttheatre in manchester, and sylvan baker, who is associate artist with people's palace projects. they will tell us a bit aboutwhat they do, when they start to speak, and they're goingto speak for less than
10 minutes on the relationshipbetween excellence of art and excellence of engagement,and then i'm going to throw it open to everybody, to makecontributions, ask questions, shout "tosh", if that'swhat you want to do. (panelists laugh) in many ways i feel like areally sort of odd choice to be chairing this session, at theend for what me has been a really thought-provoking day. i really thought that thekeynote this morning was kind of
fascinating and completelyengaging, and then i popped into the session on what is quality,and how do we measure it, so i thought could pick up a few good points for this afternoon. although in my more pretentiousmoments, i sometimes describe myself as somebodywho is lucky enough to be paid to think about theatre,my real title is that of a theatre critic. critics review what they seein front of them, they're not
concerned with what the processwas, or the value of the project, beyond what itproduces in terms of art. and yet, it seems really clearto me that in a shifting and constantly-changing culturalcontext, that's a really narrow and inadequate way of evaluatingart, and its place and its role and function within society. is what a well-funded boutiquetheatre putting on its main stage of more importance thana community project in the medway towns, or somethinghappening in a library or a pub
in suffolk, something thatgoes often, unnoticed and unrecorded, at least inour broadsheet press? most ways of funding, talkingabout, and evaluating of the arts, of which i am part, asa broadsheet critic, would have you assume that that's the case. but might it be that we shouldthink about all arts projects in a different way, and talkabout the role and function of artists in a a different way too? perhaps much of the most importantand excellent work that's
being done is like aniceberg, below the surface of the water level. and it is that work, thatoften goes unseen, where organisations are workingwith audiences, encouraging participation, and givinglocal people agency is of more long-term importance thananother revival of private lives, or much ado about nothing ona main stage with a star name. these questions about whatgets seen, what gets written about, what gets applauded,feeds into wider questions
about what is valued, whatgets made, when, where, and ultimately, who is engaged,and who isn't, and where the money is spent. as jo hunter reminded meearlier, cpp has received 37 million pounds, the royalopera house gets 25 million pounds every single year. is it possible to produce greatart without a great process? and does it matter if agreat process and excellence of engagement doesn'talways produce great art?
what is great art anyway, maybe it's just an arts council construct. let's try and tease outsome of these questions this afternoon, and kicking offthe debate is jo hampton. - thanks very much, lyn. hi, i'm jo, i'm one of the directors of 64 million artists andwe're interested in unlocking human potential throughcreativity, and i guess we do that in sort of two ways,wherein we work in policy, so
we work with people like thethe arts council and voluntary arts, looking at kind of therole of everyday creativity, so self-led creativityin the arts ecology. and then we also do stuff in real life. so we work in workplacesquite a lot, we do work around mental health and well-being,and we're also starting to work across wholecities and looking at that sort of stuff, which is very exciting. i'm also 34, i've got twosisters, i really like singing
in the shower, i studiedtheatre, i'm quite scared of academics, and i sawsomething at the theatre two weeks ago that made me cryfor a whole hour afterwards, and all of those things havesort of affected the things that i have thought aboutsaying today, and all of the things that you've experiencedin the last last 48 hours and the last few years, andyour whole lives will also i guess affect how you hear it. and that got me thinking about three things.
who knows about what excellenceis, who cares, and how might we do things differentlyif we thought about it in another way? so who knows, then i'm notgoing to spend ages, i'm not going to spend hardly anytime talking about the quality metrics, but there wassomething that struck me in it when i saw it come out a couple weeks ago. in that there are 12 pointson the scale, nine of which are assessed by theorganisation themselves, their
professional peers, and theaudience, and then three, they are only assessed bythe organisation themself and their professional peers. and one of those is excellenceand it made me think is what we're saying that theaudience don't know what excellence is, 'cause idon't agree with that, it that's what we're saying,so not saying that's true. because i think we all know,we all know when we experience something excellent, we allknow what that is for us.
it might be what makes us jumpout of our seat and clap our hands, it might make uscry, it might be we think something's excellent whenwe remember it in a couple of years, or when it reallyfeels like it's made a difference to our day. so to me, i'm much moreinterested not in excellence of engagement or excellence ofart necessarily, but excellence of experience, because ithink that if something was excellent for someone,then it was excellent.
because who am i or anyoneelse to invalidate that experience for them? and the thing i'm interestedin is that we did a study called everyday creativity,we went to talk to about 300 people across the countrywho are people who work in npos, people who runcommunity organisations, people who are everyday artists,people who work in all sorts of contexts, and we foundthat the top two things that people said were barriersfor people participating
in the arts and culture wereexcellence, the perceived notion of excellence, and language. so this perception that inthe arts, we're obsessed with having to be good, get better,make things top quality and actually maybe having ago or just getting started is not necessarily enough, wasputting people off, and also the way in which we talk about it. so, using language that we usewith each other, that doesn't necessarily read with otherpeople was also a massive
barrier for people. and so it started me asking thequestion, is us driving towards excellence actually drivingpeople away, driving us away from the process of engaging communities? so who cares about this,who cares about quality? in the commercial industries,whether you're making art, whether you're makinganything, people do a lot of listening to understand, theyreally want to understand their customer because they'reabsolutely trying to understand,
get ahead of the trends, toknow what they want, so they can charge them the mostmoney for it, so that they can beat their competitors,they're listening, listening, listening so that they can do that. and often in the arts we'lltalk about that and sort of see it like it's quite a dirtyword, commercial, or that it's sort of limiting or thatit's all about money. and we often say that we'rethe people helping people find what they don't know, we'rechallenging, and we're not
motivated by money. and i think there's truth inboth of those things but, i worry that actually we arevery motivated by money, but instead of having a directrelationship with our consumer, we're actually filtering theirmoney, and we're filtering all of that through thefunder, and that's where we're getting our money. so we're not having that directconversation, we're having, their money, their tax,their lottery, is coming
through a place and a set of people. and so when we talk about quality,when we talk about excellence, when we talk about reallyimportant questions like access and diversity, in aperceived hierarchy we tend to look up. and we forget to look aroundus, and i'm not saying that's necessarily the funders'fault, i think we're all complicit in that. but we seem to havecreated this structure that
we're operating in. i had a conversation with quitea senior person in the arts a couple of weeks ago, who saidto me, "using the word 'fun' to talk about your work isdangerous," i'm going to say that again, she said, "using theword 'fun' is dangerous." and i get where she was comingfrom, she was worried that in a climate where fundingseems to be decreasing, we have to take ourselves reallyseriously, and we have to make that case seriously.
but it worried me that weare so fragile and so fearful in the way that we aretalking about this stuff. and actually it seems tome that we're looking more and more inwards to each other, andupwards in this hierarchy, and not outwards. and just on that fun point, ihad an email this morning to say fun palaces have got 286fun palaces registered, 50 of which are in the last week. so i think fun is workingquite well, in that instance.
(audience laughs) so what might we do instead? i wonder what happens whenyou take that hierarchy which might have what people mightsee to have funders somewhere up here and buildings somewherehere and community art somewhere here and everydaycreativity somewhere here, and you flip it so that it's ona scale like this, so that me playing minecraft with my nieces,or me singing in the shower, or me seeing that show andcrying for an hour, all of those
things are completely importantin my cultural experience. all of those things arecompletely excellent to me, my singing is not excellent,but my experience of singing is really, really importantand excellent to me. and what if we saw everyoneas cultural producers in that way? 'cause when we see people asconsumers or as audiences, we limit them to being incrediblypassive, and we are starting to live in an age which isshaped by our predominant medium,
digital, and we havegenerations growing up who are expecting not just to makechoices, but to shape the choices that they have, to be absolutelyparticipative all the time, in lots and lots of aspects of their life. and we have to changewith the way that the world is changing. what if there wasn't anymoney, what would you do? what would be your purpose then? i'm not saying that we shouldn'thave public funding, 'cause
i definitely think that we should. but i think that we need toask ourselves really different, difficult questions, and weneed to be brave enough to question what we're doing, toquestion each other, and to stop acting from fragility,and from lack, and from having our hands out. because we're the arts, andwe can be bold and we can be imaginative, that's what we do. and i'm worried that by worryingabout excellence with each
other, by talking to eachother, we are ignoring everyone else, and they are themost important people. i'm just going to finish with aquote from a favorite everyday artist of mine, "the intuitivemind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. we have created a society thathonours the servant and has forgotten the gift." that's einstein, and he to meis one of the best everyday artists i know.
what if you trust yourself,what if you trust those around you, what would excellence be then? thank you. - thank you. (audience applause) jo, that was terrific andreally great to indeed, get a different perspective on anold problem, but i just want to ask what were you singingin the shower, and what was the show that made you cry for an hour?
- so i tend to sing show tunesin the shower, i love it. get a big belt out, andthe show was yerma, which it was so funny 'cause i usedto work in the theatre, and i got completely disillusionedwith it, and now a week, the other week where i went tosee groundhog day the musical, yerma, and this brilliantshow by little bulb at battersea arts centre. and i was like, "oh my god,it's brilliant, again!" but that strength of feelingto be remembered, that
i felt like i was a participantin that show, i didn't feel like i was just a passive receiver. - yeah, fantastic. okay, jo verrent. - okay, what's the relationshipbetween the excellence of art and the excellence of engagement? i'm not one of you, i'm not acpp-er, but i'm really pleased to be here because changingand challenging the status quo is something i thinkwe all have in common.
i'm the senior producer fora programme called unlimited, which is a commissions programmethat is focused on excellent art across all art forms, andit's art that's creatively lead by disabled artists. and that varies, it can besomething like bekki perriman's the doorways project, which isa sound installation with the voices of homeless people. it can be liz carr's assistedsuicide: the musical, don't need to give a - prettymuch what it says on the tin.
it can be cameron morgan'stv classics, he's a learning-disabled artist,who's taken through visual arts decades of television, anddistilled them into a particular journey, or noã«mi lakmaier'scherophobia, which was i suppose, you might refer toit as "high art", in that it was a piece where her boundbody was lifted by twenty thousand helium balloons. all excellent art, and allled by disabled artists. but i can't talk aboutexcellence until i've spoken a
little about equality and access. there used to be a slogan forthe direct action network, a political campaigning body,which said, "to boldly go where everybody else has been before." and whatever the culturalsector looks like, whatever the situation is, yes we wantto challenge it and make it more equitable, but first,we've got to get access to it in the first place. so, we're a programme, we'renot an organisation, we're led
by shape arts, which is adisability led arts organisation, and arts admin, which isan artist-focused arts organisation, we're a strategicprogramme from arts council england, but with otherfunders involved too, and we're time-limited. but we shouldn't have tobe here in the first place. we're here due to the systemicoppression of disabled people, this is the bit wherei get my soapbox out and stand on it.
we're here because thearts sector ignores or fails to recognise, on the whole,disabled people as artists, as audience members, and as participants. it fails to meet our ambitions,it fails to meet our needs. and we're here because theconditions to create excellence in all ways for disabledpeople, just don't exist. i'm just going to read a piecethat liz carr, one of the artists i mentioned earlier,she spoke at the labour party conference earlier this week.
and she wanted to describe topeople what it meant what it felt like to be a disabledperson in the uk at the moment. "for many people, being disabledin austerity britain means being hated, stigmatised,demonised as burdens, drains on the state. it means being labelled asfraudsters and work-shy. it's about being segregated andexcluded, and oppressed, and discriminated against. it's about being forgottenand derided and abused, and
sanctioned, and attacked, andkilled, and cut, and rationed and reduced and starved, and homeless,and hungry, and fearful, and terrified, and alone, andisolated, and abandoned, and denied resources, and silenced,and rendered invisible, and made to jump throughhoops to prove your worth. devalued, punished, subjectof vicious attacks, both by individuals, and by the state. it's about being inhuman,being seen as useless. and being seen as the undeserving poor.
that's the reality for disabledpeople in today's society." disability is linked to poverty,it's not linked to class, in that that, disabilitydoesn't discriminate. we have a term for disabledpeople, often non-disabled people, which is tabs, whichis the temporarily-able bodied. in that nobody quite knowswhen they might join us. but it is the culturalsector is a jigsaw, we can't encourage disabled artists tomake excellent art if other places within the culturalsector aren't also providing
access for disabled people toengage in every single arts opportunity, every singlearts programme that there is. there's a saying also withinthe disability movements, "nowt about us without us". and i've heard that theme alot within cpp, in that you can't engage with the communitywithout genuinely involving them within all aspectsof that decision-making. and i would say you can't engagewith the community, without engaging with the disabledpeople within that community too.
so once access is in place,and that's not always the easiest thing, how can thatengagement lead to excellence? i love what watershed do inbristol, it actually says on the door, if you sign up, if you go to work there, you have to be professionally interrupt-able. you have to share yourresources, you have to share your knowledge and expertise. so introductions,networking, introductions to opportunities are crucial.
belief is crucial too, manydisabled people don't have a sense of self-belief in whatthey can achieve, simply because the years of systemicoppression have actually squashed that out of them. and we need time and space,and often our notions of time and space may be different to your notions of time and space. excellence of engagement fordisabled people needs your openness, your effort,and your accessibility.
it needs your vision and ethosand commitment to be shown in real practical, tangibleand demonstrable action, it's not about words, it is about what you do. you are the ones who need to shift, not disabled people themselves. at the moment, disabled peoplemake up somewhere between 14 to 22% of the population,and that's on the increase as the population ages. you want us to engage withyou, we tick your boxes, but
unless you do that whole-heartedlyand with access at the heart of what you do, that isn't going to happen. and some disabled people, infact many disabled people, often thought to be as manyas 60% don't wear the term disabled, like i do on my vest. my mother often wishes i wouldshut up about it, and she says, "why do you keepbanging on about it, you've got a job!" and the labels thing isn'ta really big issue for a lot
of people, some people don'twant to be labeled 'disabled artist', 'disabled person',they just want access to those opportunities, whichbrings me to my cushion. i'm collecting impairments,i think it's a bit like pokemon go, i want to collect them all. and i now have chronic painand fatigue amongst my many lists of things that i deal with,hence i wasn't partying til 3am, i hope thosepeople are still in the room. some of us went to bed afterholby city and a chinese meal
in our beds. but my cushion, which i broughtwith me, we've sent disabled artists at melanie hallidayto work with an integrated youth theatre, and we wantedcushions of the oppressed. soft furnishings of the revolution. what was really interestingis that not a single cushion they made was about disability. actually, the things that theywere interested in, actually slightly, frida kahlo, hero,great, but the things that they
really wanted to get overwere the bigger issues that everybody is concerned about. and i just think that that'sa really important step forward, that we mustprovide access, but we must avoid labels, thank you. - jo, thank you very much indeed. i'd just like to ask you aquestion, do you think that disabled arts constantly hasto justify its excellence more than other areas of the arts?
- absolutely, the lens thatpeople bring to it is, it's going to be a bit crap then. because the expectationsof disability are that. were we the pirates, thebaddies, there isn't many james bond villains whodon't have a disability. we are used to that beingthe kind of trope that is churned out within things. so we have to exceed abovethat, and then, with pretty much the exception of you, we arethen written about within the
media as our impairmentsas opposed to our art. so not only does the work haveto better, but then we have to work that much harder toget it out within the public domain and to actuallyget the work talked about. - thank you very much. matt, over to you. - thank you, hi, afternoon everyone. my name's matt fenton,i'm director at contact in manchester, in fact wedropped the word "theatre" a
number of years ago, actually,for some specific reasons because at that time we thoughteven the word theatre was a huge barrier to engagingwith the young people that we wanted to work with, andthat was 20 years ago. the other thing contact did20 years ago was a really interesting experiment in governance. and i'm going to talk about power,or i'm going to try and talk about the power inpeople, place, and power. so contact and the staff andboard at that time made a
decision to reach youngpeople, to engage with that difficult teenage audience,they would bring those young people into governance-leveldecisions within the organisation, that would includeyoung board members, which is not not unique. young panels would alsomake all staff appointments, including mine, and i remembervery well the question asked by a young woman called ifrinaislam, who is now on our board, but at that timeshe was part of the young staff
appointment panel, she askedme in my interview at contact, "what's the most interestingthing that's ever happened to you?" which completely floored me,and then i told her a bit about how i met my wife, andjust told her some true stuff. and i didn't talk about thesorts of things i would normally talk about in an interview. young people have equalchoice and voting right in our programme, so four youngpeople joined four staff, and
together those eight people,of which i am one 1/8th member, even as artisticdirector, 1/8th member of that conversation thatdecides the programme. they decide who our auditorsare, they get involved in marketing, communications, everything. what comes out the other endof that, is a programme that in many instances i have notchosen or commissioned, as artistic director, that ihope, i think, authentically engages with young peoplewho look and sound a lot
like those young people whohave made those decisions. so contact, i think, is aninteresting case study in how we might authentically engagewith those we're struggling to reach, not by trying to sellthem something, not through education, or outreach in atraditional sense, where we go, "we've got this great thing,we've decided what it is, you'll love it if only youknew about it, and here's some programmes to make you kind ofengage with the ideas and then maybe eventually you'll pass them to kids."
you know, it's not based on that model of engagement is theother way around. the people you want to talk to at the core,and there's tensions within that, i get paid, the youngpeople don't, you can unpick that model and critiqueit, but nonetheless, that leap of faith delivers for us. so a third of ouraudience are black, asian, or multi-ethnic, as are a third of the decision-makers roughly.
70% are under 30, we don'tdefine as a young peoples' theatre in public, nothing inour marketing says "this is for the kids", it just somehow,the programme those young people put togetherattracts other young people. that's all i'll say about content. so i haven't really written aformal speech or presentation, and in many ways what i'mgoing to say now, i think is not for this room, it's reallyjust the notes that i've made and the things you've made me think about
over the last two days. and if you get a bit upsetabout it, i hope you don't, i'm sure you won't, butactually, i'm thinking not about you, i'm thinking theprovocation of the way that you're working and engagingcommunities, how that might provoke and challenge my peers,who are for the most part, building-based, very well-fundedcity centre-based cultural organisations, who collectivelytake up an awful lot of the coverage, the funding, theprofile, and maybe the kudos
in the arts. so one thing i did actuallyyesterday, i was trying to kind of write down what wouldit sound like to hear the messages that art organisationsoften send to communities? and it might sound somethinga bit like, "we've got this brilliant thing, it's excellent,you don't know about it, but here's a little taste. we will change your life, wewill improve your health and your well-being, we willimprove your community, we will
empower your youth, andre-engage your elderly. we will re-animate the shit bits of your post-industrial town. and we know that we'll dothis, because it is written in our funding application,(audience laughs) and, and this was inspired by youlot, we have independent evaluators, criticalfriends, and academics - academics! - to tell us that it is true.
we are with you and for you,even though you may not see anyone who looks or sounds ordresses or eats much like you in our organisation. come on in, the water's lovely." so, in other words, thedistrust, or the cognitive dissonance with those messagesand many peoples' lived experience of austerity,breeds a kind of disengagement. and my sense is that thatdisengagement is not unlike a disengagement we feel in the arts, is not unlike the
disengagement we see withpolitics, with the kinds of messages that come out ofwestminster, and that sort of disengagement withpolitics that we know can have surprising and even veryalarming consequences. so i'm interested then inhow through a slow sustained engagement like many of youare doing all the time, the brilliant kinds of practices,tactics, and approaches that you're engaged in, howthat might challenge larger building-based cultural organisations to
ask different questions. so how might engaging authentically with communities change us? how might our institutions bebetter, how might we animate these buildings we're operatingwithin, what might the arts and creativity, your creativity,do with some brilliant artists, to help youachieve what you want to do, on your terms? so a different set of questions,how might participatory
decision-making change thestructures, the governance, the board make-up, the models ofleadership and appointment, the commissioning processes,and thereby our core programmes, and the kinds of uses we mightget from the arts, and the buildings that house them, andthe kind of people that may or may not feel welcome orrepresented in those buildings or by that art? so i genuinely believe inthe kinds of practices you're engaged in, and thatthey produce excellence.
the one-on-one cup of tea, ora community centre visit that becomes a conversationthat becomes the project, that becomes the festival,that commissions the show, that inspires a kid to see theirworld completely differently, that chain of events is thekind of everyday magic that we're searching for, andmany of us were that kid. so that brings me i guess, totoday and now, and what might we do as we go out andleave this building. what might these last twodays change for us and how we
engage authentically withthose we seek to enter into conversation with, so thankyou, thank you for making me do this. - matt, i would be reallyinterested to know whether the way that you work at contactin that particular instance with young people, do youthink that's transferable to almost any cultural organisation,working in that way, but maybe not with youngpeople, with old people, or maybe, yeah?
- the short answer is yes,(laughs) yes, and of course contact is only one example. - okay, so what stops it? - power, money, vested interest,the relationships we're in with our funders, which are sometimes dysfunctional relationships. the pressures we put on ourselvesas arts leaders to deliver the numbers, to engage withthe largest number of people, to make the best case for ourfunding, and it pushes us into
awkward shapes as institutions. and some of that isinauthentic, and i think that in-authenticity comes across,and people go, "nah mate, that's not for me." - okay, let's move on,sylvan, i've got my eye on your biscuits, here. are you going to reward yourselfwith them when you finish? - engagement is simple, it's all about the correct motivation.
so firstly, i'd like to startwith an apology, and the apology is about mynon-attendance for the majority of this conference, i onlyarrived about, an hour ago. so, as a health warning, ifwhat i'm about to say or begin to think about has alreadybeen said, and most likely been said better by some of you, i'm sorry. so i am a associate artistat an organisation called people's palace projects. it's an arts and socialjustice research centre based
at queen mary university in east london. and it takes its name from amuch older notion where people would endow great works forthe poor, and they were called people's palaces, andthere's a number of them around the country. and it took its name from that,to try and rejuvenate it in a more positive and useful way. and the arts and social justicepart is probably one of the things that i will throw outinto the air, as something that
will operate around whati'm going to speak about. i'm also slightly frightenedbecause i'm now an academic, so i hope you don't hold it against me. but wearing sort of my artist'sshoes, everyone always talks about hats, sometimes it's shoes. wearing my artist's shoe ithink i'm not going to talk about excellence, i'm going to bodyswerve it, i'm going to talk about quality and thinking about whathappens and how it happens, and whether we aestheticallyenjoy it, is quality.
and the nicest definition ofquality for me, comes from zen and the art of motorcyclemaintenance, we define quality by it's absence,so we'll leave that there. i think one of the challengesis that there are sometimes truisms, said about our field. and for me a truism issomething that you hear often enough, that you beginto believe it as a fact. and one of those truisms isthat socially-engaged practice is more about the process andnot about the product, as if
there is this simple binaryprocess, process, process, (gasps) and there's the product. and i want to consider thatwithin the work that i'm aware of and the partnership workthat people's palace projects does because it's a partnershiporganisation, there are a microcosm of processes and products. i was in a presentation earlier,and i saw a little bit of film where a young woman spokeabout singing with a live band in front of anaudience for the first time.
lots of process going onthere, and then she got off the stage, and walked back toher family and her mum tapped her, and that tap said, "you'reamazing, love," in that tap. and for me, there was a profound process and product colliding. i think that the engagementthat we aspire to is very relational, both in the realworld, and the digital world. one of my favorite cohorts towork with are children under five, 'cause if you're pants,they're gone, they don't mess
around, they leave, orthey walk up to you and go, "this is boring." so i think the engagement we'retalking about is completely relational, it's about being alongside. it's about space, andit's about finding ways to be subversive around some of those bigger structures like power. there was a time when alot of the articulation, the discourse about communityarts and arts, was always
collated together with sport. and actually, there are someparallels, but not that many. and one of the ones that iwas thinking about on the train up here, was grassroots-ness. there's a thing in football, iam going to talk about football. grassroots football, you canturn out and play for the dog & gun sunday team, and thatmight not be by the metrics that we talk about art, excellentfootball, it might be, but it might not.
but you may know in yourself,and sorry if this means that i'm going to start losing people,that you'll never turn out for the real madrid first team. however, in your grassrootsparticipation, your reading of the game is consideredalong with the pundits that you see on a saturday evening, in parity. now one of the challengesfor arts is, when it is being participated in at a grassrootslevel, one of those other truisms is that your readingof arts is somehow deficient
to everybody else's reading of arts, it's that high art-ness, andi think that's a problem. i think it's one of thebarriers to allowing people to be part of that dialogicconversation that i want for genuine engagement. it's one of those reasons thatthe quality and the decision about quality isn't made bythose people, because there can be an inference, a stenchabout, well actually, the reason why you might say it'snot good isn't 'cause it's
not good, it's becauseyou don't understand it. and we need to look at that. but to riff off in acompletely different direction, there's a theorist calledjill dolan who talks about the utopian feeling of the arts. artists want to change theworld, want to stop hunger, want to make equalities an everyday thing. when it starts to get reallychallenging and difficult, is when the other--
theatre's my practice, the othersocial actors, the funders, the policy-makers, those peoplewho tend to actually pat the butter into the shape thatit is when it becomes the project, when they-- see, i've made a metaphorand completely lost my train of thought. when they are deciding the terms. so when commissioning becomesabout all of those utopian outcomes that are in theart, if i'm commissioned to
make art that just makespeople better, i start to get worried, because it can dothat, but when it's predicated around that, it becomes problematic. if you've ever heard me speakbefore, sorry, and one of the things that we need to dois to find ways to speak authoritatively about theother ways of knowing that are present within our work, andwe need to do it bullishly, so that academics don'tcome and evaluate it for us. though, you are putting me out of work.
ironically, one of the greatestpieces of quality engagement i saw wasn't a community project, it was the sultan's elephant, thefrench company royal de lux brought a huge 30-metrearticulated elephant to london, and it walked though the streets. and those of you not familiarwith london, it has that reputation of being reallyisolating, and people are unfriendly and don't speak. and on the second day ofits sojourn around the city,
it lay, the elephant,outside the national gallery. and i remember being in a pret amanger which was beside the national gallery and this guyran in and went, "you don't know me, but just in case youhaven't noticed, there's a 30-metre elephant and it'soutside, and i don't know how long it's going to be there, it'snot moving, don't know how long it's going to be there, soyou should go and see it." and i thought, there is oneof the strongest examples of relationality i've ever seen.
and the other one, again,comes from the elephant. at the end, long story short,a girl gets into a rocket and flies away, and what iremember, is one of the producers talking about that moment. and saying that she was inthe crowd, and there was a man standing there, tears in hiseyes, and as the rocket, it was lifted by a crane butwe'll move on, as the rocket took off and jets came outthe bottom, the man picked up his dog, and held itup so his dog could see.
his connection to his animal,his dog, he wanted that to see the denouement, the beautiful thing. i don't think there's anythingwrong with that at all. i think the way to, and ialways have, and there are other organisations that come tomind that do things in the way that contact do. the citizen's theatre inglasgow has been doing it for years, has been makingits role as a theatre in a community different.
i always think that theconnection of arts to communities and its quality, its excellence,is about those first three steps in this six or sevendegrees of separation. and it's why art is that thing,when somebody else hasn't seen it, but when somebody elsegoes to see yerma, can they explain to you why it made them feel that? that's one of the intrinsicdraws of art but, if we aren't finding ways in which tonot make it sound like that horrible listing that mattjust articulated, then we don't
allow anyone to have a scopeto get that utopian dream. so, excellent, i don't oftenthink about it, i can see it as an artist or an academic, by its absence. 'cause it normally means there'san absence of participants. so, that's my piece. - i think the sultan'selephant example is a really fascinating one because often,and very much today, with the word 'place' that we'reoften talking about local and of course it's quite hardsometimes, to think of london and
the streets of londonin perhaps in that way. and yet, during those threedays in may, it absolutely felt as though the people oflondon owned the streets, and particularly some of those quiteposh streets, like the mall, that they normally hadno opportunity to do so. and that kind of feeds intoideas that were talking about earlier, you mentioned beingsubversive, sylvan, and earlier in a session there was a talkabout disobedience, and i think that very muchkind of feeds into that.
we've got 15 minutes i'mafraid, so i think let's open it straight out to you, to have some, ah there you are, deferred gratification. - malted milk, mmhm. - do we have questions, observations? - i don't think it's justfunders, i think there are others social actors as an academiccalls them, who are in play. some of them funders, but someof them are opinion-formers, policy-makers, and those whoare trying to tap the zeitgeist
of what's going on. so in my experience, the artisticleadership has been there, is there, and has beenthere for a long time. it is potentially diffusingsome of its creativity to find ways to reinvent itselfso that it can get funded. so the crime justice projects,and you know you want to make art, you have to talk aboutcrime diversion or minimising recidivism, and that kindof rhetoric, but there is also that controversial questionabout how that zeal of how
wonderful and empowering artcan be, is articulated to those people who aren't feeling the zeal. - yeah and i think i wasprobably trying to roll together too many thoughts into onestatement, i'm not trying to make an anti-funder case, i'm justsaying that that relationship and that dialogue cause yousometimes to kind of talk yourself in knots, really. 'cause you're trying to talkabout so many different things, and some of it is justkind of a data-reporting
relationship, but othertimes it's actually trying to explain the intrinsic andsocial value of what you're doing, for quite a small number of people. and just that relationship isalso one of power, as well, 'cause there's money involved. that can affect one's kind ofengagement with communities around us, so it's kind ofgrows from the point that jo was making really, about that looking up kind of relationship.
and i don't think the fundersimpose that, i think that's partly self-imposed as well. the other point that i wasreally trying to talk about is how we might get differentkinds of people thinking that the arts, and workingin the arts is for them, and by doing that, whetherthat's being on boards or that's having jobslike mine, that that might produce different kindsof narratives, different canons because i thinkwhether we like it or not,
it is a fairly culturally-similar,fairly monocultural group of leaders we haverunning the majority of our institutions, and they getmore similar, i think, the bigger and more powerfulthose institutions. so i was trying to make that point at the same time (laughs). - oh, go on jo.- is something-- is something about silos that occurs. so we're the bit that doesthe disability bit, and cpps
the bit that does the bitwith the disengaged and it's kind of like,well actually, all the arts organisations, all the culturalinfrastructure all those players should actually becreating something that has far more synergy than keeping us in our boxes. - i mean, i think that's verytrue, and i think that one of the things that actuallyis reflected in that is that when we talk about thekind of cultural shifts that are taking place and the sort ofthings that you talked about,
jo, whereby actually peoplegrow up expecting that they are going to participate, thatthey're not just going to consume, is about the factthat the arts in many ways, are still often top-downorganisations, that they're not very good at operating asplatforms, and in fact that there is a very strongpaternalistic relationship between funding and artists - think sometimes it's quitein that funding, that sort of hierarchical structure, i thinkwe're all complicit and all
responsible for the hierarchy,wherever we sit in it. i think too often we'll say,"oh, the funders are doing this, or oh, the npos, theydo all of that and oh, the opera house gets themoney," i do that sometimes, i'm not saying-- but actually, what can we alldo, like what can we all be doing to keep challenging andhow can we actually - this has been a really good two days, i've heard somegreat stuff, how are we really taking that to the doors ofnpos and challenging, like
what can we actually do? i'm interested to hearthat from the room as well as the panel. - talking about the elephantagain, i think the most creative thing that the producersof the sultan's elephant did, is that they got thepeople, the dominant social actors of london, the peoplefrom tfl, transport for london, and others, and they showedthem how royal de luxe worked. they took them to nantes ona wet day, and showed them
the elephant walking around. and i'll always remember this'cause it was the guy who's very senior in tfl, transportfor london, and he said, "it was wet, it was cold, ididn't know why the hell i was there, and then i saw the elephant." because they had to movetraffic lights, and post boxes, and everything to get thiscreature down the street. and he said he saw it innantes and he saw what it did, and he was the guy, if youwere there, who was driving
the manipulateurs around inthe bus, 'cause that's how much he got it. there's lots of solutions,but one is, to not talk about what we do in the abstract,because one of the reasons why it works is because it'sso difficult to articulate it. but to get some embodied,experiential stuff going on, 'cause if we get that byin, we've got them forever. - and that turns nos into yeses. - it's at the centre of it, i think.
and i think again, it goes atall levels, i think we work a lot with kind of play in ourwork, with lots of different people and often when we workin the real world we don't talk about art really, at all. but also i think the senseof play in places like this, and the way in which we talkto each other, and being able to be playful aroundconcepts and have difficult conversations in a playfulway, i think is also really important, so i thinkat both of those levels.
- is there time for a response? - yeah, yeah. - yeah, i think playfulprocesses can also have amazing outcomes that are reallyinteresting and unpredictable, with our partnership withpeople's palace projects and bac, on a methodology frombrazil, it's a project called agencia, the agency, that usesclowning and devised theatre to create social enterprises. so young people go through avery playful iterative devising
and improvising process, butwhat they're improvising is actually little start-up businesses. and has produced a bakingproject for families that access food banks, a project thatuses football to help build language skills, teach englishas a foreign language through football, a book-sharing projectin children's homes, kind of really interesting,unexpected outcomes that an arts organisation would never come up with. yeah, and also to worry lessabout the outcome, and to
worry less about whether it's art or not. - yeah, i think that'ssomething we should be promoting in society in general, andthat's why i think creativity is at the heart of that, andwe should be talking about that stuff more because it'sreally important that we create a society in whichpeople are willing to just try stuff out, and take morerisks, and have a go, and not worry because that's how we up-endhierarchies in general, and make things more playful.
- we have to remember thatterms like creativity are being hijacked, if i have50p for everytime i went to a conference where theywent, "there are creatives here, so there's no powerpoint." you know, i think it'sincredibly creative to make eight pounds last a week, andto work out what you're going to prioritise. and that creativity doesn'tjust sit in the arts. physics is extremelycreative, so it's changing the
dialogue, and being playful with it. - we have an interestingissue within disability sector around pay, in thatsome people if they take money, lose benefits. and some people live on akind of precarious knife edge around that, so there'ssome really interesting conversations that arehad, not in public, around routes around that. but we have at unlimited,we have a thing that if
anybody is asked to doanything, in terms of workshops or that kind of thing,they are paid to do it. we pay freelancers ifthey're on selection panels, we pay them. not massive sums, but ithink that if you start to enter an economy where youtreat people differently, then you're setting upquite negative hierarchies. - i guess it also goes downto how people want to engage. so for some people, theydon't want to be paid, like
something that they do isfor fun, is with their mates is whatever, and pay doesn'tcome into it and as soon as it gets into a hierarchywhen people are working together and that's when it's complicated. if someone wants to bepaid and they're not being paid, now that is reallycomplicated and i think for us it's really difficult, 64 million artists is a controversial name withlots of people and obviously i completely value theworth of professional artists,
i think they should be paid properly. i think they are talented,they have skills, they are putting their life intomaking money from that. and so i think we just needto keep talking about it all the time, and asking questionsand listening to what people want, and to allowvoluntary arts and amateur arts to thrive in the way that they are. and if that's what they wantand to value professionals as well and to keep askingdifficult questions about
where those lines blur. - [lyn] anyone else wantto comment on it, you don't have to. - i just think it's amulti-factor relationship, if you are going into theparticipation because there is a transaction, a payment,around it, it changes its orientation completely. that's not to say thereshouldn't be some monetising of the process, but idon't know whether that's
the deciding factor orthe be-all and end-all, all the time. - aren't academics usually paid the most? - most academics pay to goto conferences, and that's all i know. (panel and audience laughs) - okay, i'm afraid we haveto leave it there, thank you very much to the panel,and to all of you for what i think was a really interesting session.
0 komentar :
Posting Komentar