Dear Artist, Love Audience: A provocation by Helen Cole

Since hearing Helen Cole present her provocation setting out a utopian partnership between artists and audiences at the British Council showcase in Edinburgh this summer, I have been searching for a freely available transcript of the text of this brilliant bit of thinking to no avail. (It is published in full in the Live Art Almanac).
So I’ve done the job myself, transcribing from the video record of Helen’s contribution to the British Council’s panel discussion on The Art of Programming here (Helen’s provocation for those who’d like to hear her deliver it in person is on the second speaker video and begins at 10’20″ approx).

Here is the text in full:

Dear Artist,

When I come to see a show by you, I want to be shown things I would not have the opportunity to see anywhere else. I want to discover new possibilities that I could not find without you. I want you to be a seer and a doer, a magician, an explorer. I want you to effect change, be that large or small. I want you to understand why you have invited me here: to be aware of my presence and what I’m offering in return. I want you to be curious and fearless, humble and questioning. I want you to be a bit impressive, strange and special, clever and full of charm. I want your imagination to work all the time, overtime even in your sleep. I want you to create beauty, disorientation, newness and dreams. I want you to play and think and make a difference whilst you touch and shock and amuse. I want you to be alive to risk and difficulty, incongruity, intrigue and doubt. I want you to hold a magnifying glass to uncertainty, contradiction, ambiguity; to be mobile, nomadic, dynamic. To disrupt and unshape.  I want you to possess good timing, humour, skill and humility. I want you to be ordinary, real and unreal, familiar and wild. I want you to open up the doors between worlds and navigate the gaps in between. I know this is impossible but I want you to be all of this.

In return, I will be attentive in the dark and make you aware I’m here. I will react to anything you throw at me with interest, compassion and belief. I will be awake to possibility, especially the untested and untried. I will not always seek beauty but will look for the restless and the truth. I will allow my subconscious to be free and my senses to be alive. I will be active, open-minded, questioning and fierce. I will be brave and loyal, challenging and intrigued. I will consider your suggestions and meet your curiosity with interest and understanding. I will question you but my mind can always change. I will bring knowledge and experience, excitement and hope. I will be appreciative, supportive, critical, honest and clear. I will put my bum on the seat and if there’s no seat I will not complain. I will follow you and match the risks you take with risks of my own. I will be generous, intelligent, responsive and pleased. I will give a standing ovation, come back again and bring others too. If you meet your part of the bargain, I promise to fulfil mine.

Love, Audience.

This should be how it should be.

The Love of the New

This weekend I found myself surveying the Belgian battlefields at Waterloo and soaking up the atmosphere of the annual Brussels Jazz Marathon. The continental mini-break wasn’t just any old weekend abroad, however: it was this week’s contribution to my New Year’s Resolution of 2011, given to me – as is becoming traditional – by my best friend. Knowing that I was facing a tough year ahead in my personal life she determined that I was to ensure that positivity and vibrancy featured in the coming year by commanding me to experience something new each and every week. Rules were established via an inevitable haggling process over what was allowable but variety was key: experiences might be grand or humble, planned or spontaneous, solitary or communal, significant or frivolous. Documentary evidence must be kept by way of witness to (and souvenir of) the tale of my year of All Things New.

   

The resolution is now nearly half-way through and I am beginning to see what this year of new experiences is teaching me, what it’s giving me, how it’s bringing me back to life and getting me through almost without me noticing.

All of which has got me thinking about the possibility of translating this healing and invigorating approach to my professional life. Having found myself in the position of needing to help steer a theatre company through its own ‘annus horribilis’, I wonder whether a similar approach could be adopted by a cultural organisation staring into the abyss, and, if so, whether it might yield similarly encouraging refreshment. It would of course be a brave company to embrace the experiment – as I’m myself finding, the levels of organisation, creativity and upfront expense required can be daunting and time-consuming, but if my own experience is anything to go by I can’t help but think that there’d be benefits to reap. When change is forced upon you, to dare to go one step further and invite yet more newness into life is an empowering move.

I love the idea that for a theatre company, say, this might mean changing the way you recruit your creative practitioners one week or trialling the use of Open Space technology for your staff meetings the next. For me, it’s the little things as much as the big things which are important in encouraging new habits of openness, positivity and forward momentum: sharing lunch together on a Friday, for instance, or changing to a supplier of Fair Trade paper. They’re helpful because they re-set patterns and re-calibrate norms without presenting too much of a painful challenge; they’re easy wins which give courage for embracing bigger changes.

That said, there’s no doubt a fine line between encouraging radical levels of openness to organisational change and welcoming in a damaging level of instability. And it probably takes a braver producer than I, or one in a better position to command buy-in from an entire organisation, to achieve this weekly schedule of new experiences. But what’s important is that experiments aren’t as scary as people think: their not working means nothing more than that they didn’t work. Trial of something new doesn’t have to equate to immediate wholesale change in the long-term, but I do think the process of habituating an organisation to change and newness can usefully reveal, and perhaps helpfully re-shape, its values.

The Challenge of Touring

It seems abundantly clear to me that small arts organisations are facing a real battle at the moment, by which I mean organisations small in terms of infrastructure, not in terms of ambition, profile or achievement. Organisations which aren’t building-based risk being less visible in the public consciousness, and we only need to look at the rationale of how local authorities are implementing their budget reductions to realise that it’s the organisations with smaller infrastructures which will suffer the greatest impact over the next few years. Having spent most of my career working in touring theatre on the small and middle scale, I’ve been turning my attention recently to the challenges touring is going to face over the coming year or so, and wondering if it might be time to think of some new ideas and experiment with some new models.

As far as the obvious challenge of finance and fundraising goes, suffice to say that of course there are vitally important conversations for every touring company to be having around the topical pressures which the UK’s mixed economy funding model is going to come under in our more straitened times. I think these conversations need to include the level of reliance on public subsidy; the concept and realities of philanthropy; and possibilities for diversifying income or embracing a spirit of entrepreneurialism that don’t threaten the primacy of the company’s artistic purpose. I’m sure each and every company worth their salt will be using the next year to interrogate these conversations thoroughly and honestly and to design a long-term strategy for securing their financial future beyond 2012 in the context of whatever Arts Council decisions are handed down at the end of March.

Easier said than done, no doubt, but while impossible to ignore, the challenge of money isn’t the only one touring companies are facing.

For me, the most important challenge for a touring company right now is simply: how do we remain brave and artistically adventurous?

Of course a large part of this will be down to the artistic choices the company makes, but I think there is scope for an organisation’s whole culture playing a part in rising to this challenge. As I see it, every decision a small arts organisation makes is made within a context of risk and in support of the artistic programme, and for me the real challenge for producers, general managers and executive directors is to cultivate a positive culture of ambitious risk-taking which doesn’t jeopardise the things rightly regarded as too precious to risk losing. Being able to decipher and articulate what those all-too-precious non-negotiables are feels like a crucial process for touring companies, whether it be the ability to have an artist-led infrastructure, for example, or the scope to commission work on an international platform. I certainly think that knowing what you’re not prepared to give up liberates you when it comes to reconsidering everything else. I know that I want to work in organisations which manage to achieve a congruence between the sense of bravery and spirit of adventure of the work on stage and the way they work as a team off-stage, and I think this is easier to achieve when there’s a collective understanding of what you’re protecting at all costs, and what you’re bold enough to re-examine.

The second challenge for me is about partnerships: how do we find the best partners and how do we best nurture our relationships with them?

I don’t think it’s at all contentious to suggest that one of the keys to success for arts organisations now and in the future will be the strength and authenticity of their partnerships. I think the conundrum about collaboration is how you reconcile inevitable challenges of ownership, voice and compromise as you go about the often tricky process of translating hopeful theory about partnership working into the reality of practice. The danger as I see it is that, as collaboration becomes as much a necessity as a choice, incipient relationships can be hurried along too enthusiastically for the sake of short term benefit, before a genuine symbiosis has established itself organically between the artists or organisations in question. That for me is both the risk and the challenge: of being open to new partnership opportunities but always allowing the demands of the work to remain the primary stimulus of those relationships, rather than the sheer convenience of what each partner can bring to the table.

The final challenge I’ve been thinking about is the challenge at the heart of touring: how do touring companies connect meaningfully with audiences?

All touring companies face the inevitable challenge of, by definition, being absent from most of their audience for most of the year. Unlike building-based organisations the focus of their attention is forever split: they both need to connect with their neighbouring communities in their year-round base, and also with their audiences distributed further afield. The challenge for a company with touring at its core is to be as open to engaging with those geographically distant audiences as it is with those in its immediate locality.

I think that the time is ripe to re-examine the status quo of the touring model, to look at different patterns of working both with artists and with theatres, and there’s a great opportunity for a bold company to lead the thinking in this area. Just as venues are teaming up with resident companies and sharing certain costs or functions, might there, for example, be scope for a squad of touring companies to team up and provide a selection of shows in repertoire, sharing subsistence and travel costs as they travel the country alongside each other…?

Touring will always be the best platform for sharing artists’ work and I believe it is crucial for the health of the sector as a whole, but I think it’s going to have to work harder and become more flexible and imaginative in its structures in order to continue to serve as the backbone of a healthy business model for small organisations.

User-led innovation: A NESTA provocation

Sir John Tusa, Sarah Weir & John Holden

Yesterday I and 6 other Clore fellows took part in a symposium hosted by Nesta on the theme of leadership in times of uncertainy. Nesta and the Clore Leadership programme had commissioned each of us to write a provocation on an aspect of contemporary cultural leadership. My paper investigates the sector’s resistance to user-led innovation and attempts to offer some suggestions as to how the sector’s leaders might better embrace or apply some of the fundamental principles underlying this evolving form of activity.

I was particularly interested in how the practical application of values of openness, freedom and co-creation might question or challenge the concept of the role of the professional artist and the received notion of the safe space for creative risk and experientation, where ‘safe’ can often mean ‘closed’.

My article looks at three aspects of resistance:

- responsivity: how can our arts organisations be truly responsive without their artistic autonomy feeling under threat?;

- permission and permissive leadership: how do we create a culture within which we give permission to our users to transgress, to do what we don’t want them to do as much as what we do want them to do?;

- and messiness: innovation by definition is not the hand-maiden of best practice, and if most innovation stems from radicalism, how do we allow for that radicalism without sterilising it in the very process of permitting or legitimising  it?.

I end by looking at the role of institutions and producers in all of this – something I think will become ever more critical in offering a pivotal context for this kind of activity, which can on the one hand protect safe spaces for artistic experiment and on the other make work and creative processes porous for users to access and contribute to.

I gather that all the articles are due to be published on the Clore and Nesta websites, but having received a couple of requests, have decided to publish mine in full here also:

Final EDITED Nesta article M KNIGHT

Harare International Festival of the Arts 2010

A short video of some of the musical highlights of the 2010 HIFA festival in Zimbabwe which I was lucky enough to attend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15F3SQ_fMR4

IberoAmericano Festival de Teatro de Bogota

Something of a dream came true for me last week when I was able to attend the bi-ennial theatre festival in Bogota, Columbia. I had heard excited rumours about this festival for a while: South America’s Edinburgh, host to theatre companies from all over the Latin continent, started somewhat improbably in 1998 by the aging but much beloved Columbian soap star Fanny Mikey. This was the place I needed to be to continue pursuing the marriage of my personal passion for South America with my professional interest in theatre producing.

The 2010 festival was the first since the sad passing of its charismatic founder Fanny Mikey, and tributes to her larger-than-life presence were everywhere: theatres were named in her honour, her orange curls and wicked grin were plastered across billboards, and ebullient quotes from her life adorned theatre foyers, the most bullish of which read: “Everything in life is possible; the only thing impossible is war.”

Fanny Mikey, founder of the Bogota Theatre Festival

Clearly the international theatre world is beginning to take notice of this festival: about 50 international delegates from the professional theatre world attended the 2008 edition of the festival; this year, there were 100 of us, including 6 Brits – myself and 5 representatives of the newly established International Theatre Consortium. Bogota is an extraordinary and challenging place for a festival of this scale: at 2,640 metres above sea level, the city’s air is thinner than usual, and heavily polluted by the smog of traffic fumes that permanently clog the highways, enforcing strenuous aerobic exercise on us in our dashing from venue to venue. The city is immense, and the geographical layout of the grid system is frustratingly deceptive: streets called ‘carreras’ run in one direction and cross streets called ‘calles’ run at right angles. All are supposedly numbered, but given that absolutely no roadsigns exist, very few people, including taxi drivers, seem to know which street is which, with odd diagonal streets and occasional avenues adding to the confusion. Maps seemed to vary wildly in their accuracy, and taxis are almost always 40 minutes late, their passage constantly blocked by bumper-to-bumper traffic. Given that the festival included plenty of events at obscure venues – residential apartments, old crumbling theatres tucked away in courtyards up pedestrian sidestreets, school halls, parks, etc. – most delegates missed at least one show per day from their intended agenda, despite Columbian timekeeping meaning that most shows went up 30 minutes late, and waiting on the busy pavements of Bogota soon became a significant part of the experience.

Despite having to do battle with the city each day, it was an inspiring adventure, and on the occasions when we weren’t in a rush, a wander through the back streets offered up all sorts of surreal delights, from brightly coloured murals, to mountains of fresh strawberries sold by the scoop from a barrow, to dozens of tiny theatres hidden away between shops and houses.

I was of course delighted and secretly rather proud that Teatro de Los Andes’ new show – a South American version of The Odyssey – went down so well (rousing standing ovation from an almost full house) and am hoping that its warm reception might add momentum to my campaign to get this fabulous Bolivian company’s work to the UK (see my first ever blog post on the subject). Other highlights for me included work by Chilean company Teatro En El Blanco: they presented two shows in Bogota – Diciembre, which I didn’t manage to get to see but which is coming our way in the summer care of the Edinburgh International Festival, and Neva, a weirdly comic piece about the death of Anton Chekov. Los Santos Innocentes by Mapa Teatro was a powerful piece of work (using fantastic documentary film footage, two venerable marimba players and a team of actors) about the surreal annual festival in an isolated Columbian town in which King Herod’s slaughter of innocent children is commemorated by drag queens running through the streets whipping passing victims. The site-specific piece El Autor Intelectual from Colombian company La Maldita Vanidad was also worth a watch: we peered voyeuristically from an external courtyard through a living room window into an apartment where three siblings argued over whose turn it was to look after their ailing mother, with tragicomedy inevitably turning to tragedy as the stakes got higher and higher. And an honourable mention must be made of the enjoyably bonkers show A Dentro La Casa A Fuera from Colectivo Inedita: no one seemed to have much of an idea of what was going on in this piece but it certainly ticked the ‘memorable and delightfully bizarre’ box, and what attendance at a Latin American arts festival would be complete without just that?

I could have stayed twice as long and was sad to miss the Cien Dias trilogy in particular, in which three separate directors tackle the dystopian subject matter of a world in which no murders take place, except for the one assassination prescribed each 100 day period by the state, with the murderer and victim selected by public ballot. I have heard good things about part one of the trilogy from those lucky enough to have stayed a day or so longer than my schedule allowed.

As ever, I had to sit through my fair share of the bad during the week in return for the reward of the good – only a few theatrical frogs ever turn obligingly into princes upon kissing, I find – but I quite enjoy the gamble in pursuit of discovering something new and wonderful. I do admit, however, to being grateful for the occasional interval at which I could slip out discreetly in pursuit of a glass of Malbec when it all got too taxing.

So all in all, a stimulating, invigorating, delightful week; put it in your 2012 diaries now.

Leadership: Continuous Personal Development

One of the things I’ve been increasingly thinking about recently, in part as a specific focus of some of my Clore Fellowship training, is the personal nature of leadership. When I was asked to talk about my leadership perspective for a presentation a little while back, my first instinct was to look for examples or instances from my professional life which had influenced my understanding of leadership. But I quickly realised that it was much more personal than that – my perspective on leadership had begun to be formed much earlier on in my life through more personal encounters. So I felt a consideration of this topic would be dishonest of me if I didn’t direct my reflections to much more personal influences, foremost of which had to be my Mum.

My Mum and Dad - taken about 5 years ago

Mum has worked for about 30 years for an officially sexually discriminative organisation, an organisation whose male leaders have always forbidden female employees from rising to leadership roles. Even today, this discrimination is still enforced at the highest levels of the organisation.

As a child, I saw Mum challenge that situation every day through her work, and watched her play a very active part in the long fight against this discrimination. Eventually this culminated in a landmark court case in 1994 that, despite vociferous resistance from many colleagues, enabled her and other women finally to assume positions of leadership in the middle ranks of her organisation.

So I suppose I have to admit that something of the feminist was awoken in me from an early age, having become accustomed to seeing women struggle to assert their suitability for roles of leadership against the dominant male powers that be.

[I also now have a rather complicated and dysfunctional relationship with the church as a result, but that’s neither here nor there...]

Observing Mum’s working life at close quarters gave me a bird’s eye view on a very particular, unusual kind of leadership, and that is the leadership of voluntary communities. The kind of leadership role I saw her adopt was, I imagine, a very different one to had she been the boss of a profit-making corporation. There was nothing powerful or overtly impressive about it. In fact, as a slightly stroppy teenager it seemed to me that leadership was basically a total hassle: it seemed to involve dealing with eccentric, egomaniac nutters on a daily basis, being stuck at social gatherings for hours on end because everyone wanted to witter on at you about something or other, and you always always ended up really upsetting someone.

Leadership as I saw it through Mum’s experiences was tricky – it was something that had to be constantly negotiated with the community you were leading. There was something very politically complicated I learned from her about how to assert leadership from a position of being the only professional amongst a community of willing – sometimes overly willing – volunteers. It was, in effect, an example of what Julia Middleton has famously called ‘leadership beyond authority’ – leading from a position that doesn’t comprise hiring and firing authority over those persuaded to follow you.

Violin masterclass with Hugh Bean

As a child, the most important element of my education came in the form of one-on-one instrumental tuition: I played the violin a lot growing up and so my violin teachers were pretty significant people in my life. In a way, they were my leaders.

But, because of the nature of that sort of tuition, because of the intimacy and more familial relationship you develop with a teacher of that sort, their leadership was primarily facilitative. Of course I had my fair share of those who were dogmatic and dictatorial and frankly pretty terrifying about scale practice (or the lack of it), but in the main, my experience of their role was as leaders whose job it was to bring out the best in their pupils, so it was first and foremost a role of encouragement and support.

Incidentally, the wisest thing one of them ever said to me, and which I’ve never forgotten, was: “Don’t be afraid to get worse in order to get better.”

So if the point I’m making is that leadership is personal, that, although clear boundaries between the personal and the professional are useful, the two spheres are inextricably linked, then why have I allowed my thoughts to turn to a very public figure with whom I have no personal connection who holds the most conventionally powerful leadership role in the Western world? This man I think represents so many astonishing things about contemporary leadership because he manages to conflate the personal and the professional so apparently effortlessly.  Until he came along, I didn’t think it was possible in this day and age to revere political leaders. There’s too much spin, and therefore too much cynicism. There’s too much media exposure and interrogation, revealing all the disappointing flaws and human hypocrisies that in a former age might have remained hidden. I’ve always thought of my elders who idolised President Kennedy or Winston Churchill as somewhat naive – I thought that sort of reverence and respect for political leaders was a thing of the less sophisticated past, before citizens considered themselves journalists, publishers and opinion formers. I have become accustomed, ironically, never to finding admirable leadership qualities in those who occupy the most stereotypical positions of leadership.

And so, given the aggressive, non-stop media exposure of our current era, it is astonishing to me that this man has succeeded in making so many people fall in love with him, like teenage fans smitten with a rock star.

So how does that feed into my perspective on leadership in general? I think it has taught me that leadership can be different to what you have become accustomed to expect.

And that the most important thing about it is that it is utterly devoid of pretence. Or at least that it comes across as being so.

Leadership is as much about the person as the job title, meaning that professional development is impossible without personal development.

West Midlands theatrical goings on in 2010

I can’t claim credit for this brilliant picture – it was taken by a friend of mine on New Year’s Eve.

Following on from signing up to the West Midlands Theatre Pledge initiated by James Yarker from Stan’s Cafe (see earlier blog post), I have been thinking about what shows I’ll be attending in 2010 to fulfill this commitment. Turns out, it’s nothing like as hard as you’d think to find 12 regional shows that sound intriguing and exciting and I’ve been booking tickets like there’s no tomorrow. So, here’s what I’ll be showing up at over the coming months in the West Midlands area:

I kick off next week with the wacky sounding Ringside at Birmingham’s Town Hall, performed by Mem Morrison and presented by the brilliant triumverate of Fierce, Arts Admin and Birmingham Rep.

Following hard on its heels are two slightly alternative events: Foursight Theatre’s Education & Outreach department’s The Corner Shop Schools Project – a site-specific piece devised by Wolverhampton pupils and performed in their school; and a screening of You, The Living by a new arthouse and world cinema club in my home town of Worcester (not theatre, I know, but a cultural initiative I’m keen to support) at the city’s small subterranean Arts Workshop.

In late January I’ll be heading to Birmingham’s Custard Factory for a promenade performance of Measure for Measure by Rogue Play Theatre, a company I’ve been introduced to via the Stan’s Cafe’s blog. Never seen their work before so this one will be a first for me.

I then embark on a series of outings to Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre where I’m currently shadowing the Executive Director as part of my Clore fellowship. Their new season includes some promising shows, and on my hitlist is the trilogy of Neil LaBute plays in the studio, plus Medea (a Northern Broadsides production) and Behud on the main stage.

Also in Coventry, I’ll be heading down the road to the City Arcade shopping centre where Theatre Absolute are leaseholders of a streetside unit for the next year or so, in which they’ll be performing their new show Breathe in the spring.

My former colleagues at Foursight Theatre will be touring their co-production with the ever inventive and charismatic Talking Birds in the spring – a full tour list isn’t yet posted online anywhere that I can see, but I happen to know that West Midlands performances of the cabaret-style show, Forever In Your Debt, include outings at the Arena Theatre Wolverhampton, The Courtyard Hereford and Warwick Arts Centre, so I’ll definitely make it along to one of those.

Talking Birds have got a couple of other projects in the pipeline for 2010 which I’ve also made a note in my diary about: Project 42 at the soon-to-be-reopened mac looks great, as does We Love You City, their autumn show at the Belgrade Theatre about Coventry City Football Club’s winning of the FA Cup way back when.

At Warwick Arts Centre I’ll be taking in Filter’s production of The Three Sisters and attending the Bite Size Festival in March, at which I’m especially looking forward to the premiere of Untied Artists‘ show Al Bowlly’s Croon Manifesto.

Not strictly relevant to the pledge – as it’s taking place at London’s Hampstead Theatre – but care of the creative team at Stratford’s RSC, is the premiere of Dunsinane. Directed by another Clore fellow Roxana Silbert and written by David Greig, I’ll be going along to support.

Other highlights on my radar but slightly off-message as far as West Midlands’ work goes include Bristol Old Vic’s production Juliet and her Romeo, ENO’s production of Satyagraha, a brave and unusual collaboration with Improbable, and Trilogy at BAC, one of the hits of 2009′s Edinburgh Festival I didn’t manage to see.

So, that should keep me busy for a few months and get me started on fulfilling my pledge. Any other suggestions most welcome of course.

Taking the Pledge

Last week, at the invitation of the Arts Council West Midlands’ Theatre Officer, I attended an Open Space discussion entitled The Challenge of Change – How can we create a better future for theatre in the West Midlands? It was something of a call to arms for the sector in the region and demonstrated a very positive collective will from the 80 or so theatre makers who attended to address the challenges we all identified through a series of conversations over the two day event.

This morning I was visiting the Stan’s Cafe website to book my tickets for their latest show (The Just Price of Flowers – on until Saturday at their A.E.Harris factory site in Birmingham; well worth a look!) and I came across a blog post from their director James Yarker on his thoughts following the event. He has come up with a series of pledges that he’s encouraging all of us to take to ensure the conversation results in us all ‘doing’ as well as ‘talking’. I think he’s on to something so I’ve decided to join him and take up the pledge too. Do spread the word and, just maybe, this will begin to make a difference.

The West Midlands Theatre Pledge

1: Attend 12 theatre shows in the next 12 months, 4 by West Midlands writers/artists/companies you haven’t seen before, 1 in a West Midlands Venue you’ve never been to before.

2: Take 12 people who have never been, rarely go, or don’t ‘do’ Independent Theatre to a show. Share transport.

3: Host a meal/party for 8 people 4 of which you barely know.

4: Write 12 comments/reviews/blog entries about theatre on other people’s sites.

5: Attend 1 mid*point or return to the next Open Space event.

Risky Business

My thinking about my Clore research paper has been developing over the last few weeks and I’m delighted that the wonderfully imaginative and clear-thinking John Holden has agreed to supervise my research.

Having settled on a draft wording for a stimulus question, I thought I would share my somewhat chaotic thoughts on the topic so far.

What is the leadership role in optimising risk taking in the UK’s subsidised performing arts sector?

I would like to investigate some of the complexities bubbling beneath the received narrative surrounding risk taking in the UK’s subsidised performing arts sector, as I’m not convinced we often talk about them entirely honestly. I’m interested in the complexity of the relationship between artistic risk taking and financial obligation. I’m interested in how the many areas of the sector that have an impact on this issue are intricately interconnected, how practice and process at an individual, organisational and strategic level influence our approach to risk. I’m interested in what scope there is in the sector for failure: it strikes me that if we’re really taking risks, some of the time they’ll fail, they won’t come off, and I’m interested in how much scope there really is for that failure to be seen as fuel to the creative process at large. I think we need failure, I think it feeds us artistically, so I think our attitude to risk taking is wrapped up in our attitude to failure too. I’m interested in the role of leadership in all of this – in where we need the leadership and what the role of the sector at large can or should be in enabling, encouraging and optimising risk taking.

My own experience of the touring theatre sector would suggest that it is becoming increasingly risk-averse as opposed to risk-taking and my interest in exploring the complexities at the heart of this topic stem from a concern that the iteration of a risk-averse approach may lead to a more stagnant sector in the future.

Some of the questions I am keen to explore include:

What potential is there for risk and failure within cultural leadership in the current climate? What is the leadership role in this? At what level? How can leadership allow for, encourage, and embrace failure brought about by risk? How much is leadership actually about being the one who takes the risk, who decides which risks to take and which ones not to take, about being the one who leads the failure? Can failing be leading? In fact, if an arts scene without failure is a stultified and stagnant one that only replicates former ‘success’, does the true and vitalising success of our arts sector depend upon its failures? Failure breeds success; it defines excellence through being a foil, through being a motivation to do better, to tell the truth more truthfully, to speak more powerfully, more honestly. Failure is our drinking water – what if there weren’t any?

How does the subsidised sector negotiate the dichotomous relationship of artistic risk and financial responsibility? How does it remain accountable to its taxpayer-provided income whilst continuing to push the boundaries, to play and experiment freely and with most potential for creativity? Does its sense of public accountability overwhelm its greater responsibility to take risks because of – not in spite of – its receipt of subsidy? Does it self-censor under the perceived weight of financial obligation?

What is the role of development in stimulating and encouraging artistic risk? What do we mean by artistic risk? Can we define it at all adequately? Is risk taking about the heart and risk management about the head? Can any risk assessment process be more than a procedural formality? Is risk taking about individuals, not about organisations or sector-wide approaches? Is it about brave and passionate champions of art, not about sector-wide facilitation? Is it easier or more difficult for long established, well regarded organisations?

How does the approach typical of, necessitated by or aspired to within the subsidised arts sector compare with the approach of the commercial arts sector? And, by extension, how does the approach of the arts sector at large compare to the approach of other sectors, for example the commercial and corporate sectors? Is there anything to learn from the financial sector’s attitude to risk? To its empire-building based upon risk? To successful companies built out of the ashes of failed companies? To insolvency practices and investment strategies based on concepts of varying and assessed risk?

I should add that for me there is also an individual interest at the heart of this research: as someone who has found themselves cast more often than they would wish in the risk averse role as the ‘nay-sayer’ who reigns in, controls, anticipates and problem solves, I want to take a sideways look through the process of this research at my own attitude to risk.

So, having arrived at this punishing and somewhat daunting series of questions, I am beginning at this point by simply reading, thinking, talking, and interviewing, so all contributions and thoughts are most welcome.