What the Performing Arts in Scotland Can Be Doing Right Now Even Though They Can't Perform

 

While there are and have been various initiatives by individual producers, as a freelancer, I feel very strongly that to effect a better future, or anything resembling one, we need to make a continuous and collective public and political case for the performing arts as a public good.  I do not believe we can do that unless we think, talk and act collectively as soon as is humanly possible.

My immediate recommendation then, is for a future focussed "commission" to be created and supported by the Scottish Government, in cooperation with the Federation of Scottish Theatre as our currently best placed industry wide organisation and with Creative Scotland as well as representation from the “national” performing companies.

This commission must start, I think, with an honest confession that the system was already broken.  The model of the old Scottish Arts Council has been eroding in esteem and actuality for fifteen years or more. Lottery funding has more or less entirely taken over as a financial resource from direct taxation, and theatres (for example) make a lot bigger proportion of their income at the box office than they used to. (This being why it is the most successful theatres in box office terms that have been hardest hit by closure and are most challenged by the demands of social distancing). A managerial structure for the theatre, at least, that was already more or less moribund has been delivered a coup de grace. It seems to me to be an exercise in futility to attempt to breathe life into a corpse.

Much I believe, better to consider the needs of the population as a whole for a dynamic and participatory model of the arts at EVERY stage of recovery that can challenge the world as well as ourselves, and to consider those needs from the ground up. A grown up and expert commission can be entrusted with both the immediate stasks of sector wide survival and a future facing remit to inform the immediate decisions we need to make right now with that future as the organizing strategic principle.

A flourishing of the performing arts in Scotland from stand up comedy and poetry slams to opera for schools in the future needs to start right now with help to create the conditions for employing artists to MAKE ART in the short and medium term while simultaneously making hard choices, art form by art form, on the basis of a debated and agreed set of values.  I do not believe that we can act simply as individual and competing producers for the audience's money and attention.  I think we need to think and act in what are undoubtedly our shared interests as producers and freelancers, and that OUR interests are best served by servicing our shared audiences. We need to think and act together now and for the sake of our cultural future.

First, we need to collate all the initiatives being taken by all the oproducers. We need a survey to tell us, as a community of makers, what is being made, what is proposed to be made. I think we need to do this publicly, perhaps in a series of podcast interviews which can promote as well as help to coordinate our efforts.

Second, I believe that in three to five years we must look to have a New Deal for the arts in Scotland that is actively supported by the taxpayers and lottery players as well as the artists and audiences of Scotland not as an adjunct to the good life of the few, but of the richer, better life of the nation as a whole.

I summarise here what I think are the stages of our recovery.

Critical  

Right now. The planning stage.  Forming new collective bodies with a specific public remit for planning and regulating the recovery. Involving managements, unions and freelancers, venues and producers in a single conversation.  We are WAY behind on this.

Convalescence   (Autumn 2020)

Practise of performing arts without a live audience. Keeping the muscles toned for writers, performers, designers, director, builders, marketing AND audiences…BY creation of online content and activity to the HIGHEST possible, commercially viable production standards. Outreach to other public bodies and institutions for specialist services in care and custodial settings (for example)/..and community involvement as practised by Eden Court and Opitlochry, for example, in order to build lasting goodwill.  Despite good examples, this is now being done in a piece meal and disorganised way. A collective approach would make better art and better marketing. The international reach of the internet should be used to show the world our best stuff…in archive, but in NEW production under new conditions too. Monologues, two and three handers…adapted and commissioned and p[roduced to high standards. We can do MUCH better than actors in their houses on mobile phones. We have seen this in the best practice of some producers. But coordination is again KEY for cost effectiveness and for coordinated and effective marketing and fundraising. (Sept 2020 -Feb 2021?)

Recovery  (Sept 2020 - Summer 2021)

Experimental practice of performing arts WITH a live audience. Creating live events outdoors and under controlled Covid copmpliant circumstances. This should be seen as an effort of the whole sector rather than a competition within the sector for a limited audience and limited resources. There should be touring standards for small scakle work in snmlal venues, perhaps tied to online prod Thaose resources should be focused on securing the widest possible audience as a collective goal. Monologues, two and three handers?

Commissions for longer term developments should go to playwrights and creative teams to coalesce around specific future productions under whatever circumstances that prevail in that future. We cannot have a staggered standing start to the creative process…a certain degree of chaos is to be expected. But it should be managed and not left to those with the sharpest elbows. (Spring 2021?)

Relaunch  

An event/festival with full audiences to be advertised nationally and internationally.  A collective effort of a community under leadership. Edinburgh Festival Summer 2021? Christmas 2021? This is more in the hands of people developing vaccines than those developiong plays.  We should also prepare ourselves for the thought that it might never happen. We could be living the way we're going to live for the next ten years already.

Normality.  

The normal, in short, is dead, long live the normal. 

In order to make any recovery plan work, we need to make a commitment right now to a complete structural over haul based on support for individual creators and their audiences and communities through local creative hubs. Ensembles, funding bodies, touring networks and festivals…all interconnected nationally, swapping product and practice, but all locally based, tied in with local government, education, penal and health care.  All this should be in place by the time of next elections to the Scottish parliament, whatever its consstitutional status turns out to be, in 2025.

This ambitious destination should guide all our steps in the interim, through what is going to be “normal” for some time. The conditions of lockdown may truncate our practice, but they can also re-focus us on creating a better, deeper, wider Scottish theatre in a good, long term creative relationship with its audiences from workshops in church halls to local and high profile international festivals reasponsive to what an audience needs.  

All of this should also exist in video form at for broadcasting, promotion and pay-for-view audiences It is not just theatre makers who are under-employed and itching to work. Film makers are too. As an aside, I have rarely known a time in thirty five years of doing this, when I am hearing so many good ideas buzzing around in the air.

We can start doing any and all of this right now, and by these means we can also employ the freelancers, or at least some of them, who have been most severely affected. We can sustain and keep their skills and thus safeguard the immediate as well as longer term health of our sector. By showing artists that we treasure them, by employing their skills to entertain and educate us, we will make everything about living here better. We should make no mistake. If we don’t do it, then the bad guys will end up controlling even more of whatever is left than they do now...and paying the kind of wages they feel like paying. To unwrap the metaphor, they will pay peanuts...and the audience will get monkey shit.

The New Scottish Theatre ought to be our destination not just in some unspecified future, but in the here and now. There is no such place as normnal, and there is no getting “Back” to it.  The future is in our hands right now but the future, as we used to say, is unwritten.

If we decide to get there, we can respond best to the pandemic, the economic crisis that follows it…and eventual recover a stronger version of that future by taking deliberate and collective steps towards it right here and right now.