Reaching out, further and further

This month marks the end of NTiYN as a research project, and the beginning of this work as a practice for life. Over on the Fuel website is a page of useful stuff that we’re hoping to share with as many people as possible: an evaluation booklet which discusses the ways in which the project was successful and not so much; the essay of historical precedences that I keep banging on about (sorry! It’s full of others’ good thinking and I’d love people to read it); and handbooks related to the two chief discoveries of the project, with suggestions for how to run theatre clubs and how to work with local engagement specialists.

The Theatre Club handbook I’m super proud of (and no, I didn’t write it!): ever since Lily Einhorn invited me to start hosting one as part of the participation project at the Young Vic in London, it’s been a mystery to me why every theatre in the country doesn’t offer one as part of its events programme. All it involves is opening up a space for audiences to talk about theatre shows without the people who made them present: it doesn’t have to replace the Q&A, in fact it’s best when the two are complementary. But it invites people to speak and be heard who often feel excluded from what looks like a theatre clique, through worry that they don’t have the right language or haven’t understood something. At Theatre Club, it’s brilliant when people don’t understand something, because often that’s when individual interpretations based on particular experiences begin to emerge. The best part of being involved in NTiYN for me has been watching people start up theatre clubs of their own, and through that forging social groups that get people going to the theatre more, in buildings they might not have visited before, and to see work they might not have taken a chance on, especially if they were likely to be attending alone. It’s through such groups that theatre can become less an occasional outing and more the fabric of life.

The people who have been instrumental in inspiring those groups to begin are the Local Engagement Specialists: people who live and work in the vicinity of the theatres to which Fuel tour, who form a point of connection between Fuel/the theatre-makers, the venue and the local communities. During the course of the research project those have been paid positions; Fuel have made the decision to use what they’ve learned to shape a volunteers network, but a necessary question was raised at the NTiYN closing event in Preston last month by Charlotte Bennett, producer with RashDash who runs a similar volunteer ambassador scheme, about the ethics of asking people to do that work for free. As an aside, that closing event was fascinating in the way that it brought people from all sections of the theatre industry – from the artistic director of the Royal Exchange, Manchester to independent producers, makers, actors, students, and the enthusiastic audience members who are Fuel’s new volunteers – into a room for a shared conversation in which a genuine attempt was made to scrub away hierarchies so that all opinions were equally valid. As mentioned on the home page, I came to NTiYN via Dialogue, an organisation (although that’s not quite the right word for it – it’s more a philosophy) that aims to inspire new relationships between people who make, watch and write about theatre. As you can tell from the name, dialogue is at the heart of what we do and think about, and this was a beautiful instance of how a theatre conference could be more egalitarian and creative in its structure. (And, yet another aside, there’s a lovely review of the event here by Olivia Corbin-Phillip, one of the new Colchester volunteers.)

I want to end by talking more about the Local Engagement Specialists, but rather than pull extracts from the handbook, I’d rather let them speak for themselves. Earlier this year I spoke to Jordana Golbourn (Colchester) about her experiences within NTiYN, how it had gone well and what might have been improved. As the only Local Engagement Specialist who stayed with NTiYN for the entire three years, she has a sense of overview that all the others lack. I’d argue that her staying power is in part down to the fact that outreach is the bedrock of everything she does: a freelance theatre-maker who runs projects at the Almeida and Make Believe Arts in London, among other venues, she works particularly with young people, using theatre as a tool to explore the issues relating to their lives. She’s also one of those people who talks so much sense and kindness that she ought to be in charge of everything.

Jordana already had a relationship with the Lakeside in Colchester when she became the Local Engagement Specialist there – and that proved as much a frustration as a benefit. “In the very initial stages of the project, I think they saw the relationship less as a collaborative thing, and more: ‘Jordana’s got this one.’ That was partly to do with how stretched they are as a venue – it’s just three people – so it was a relief to them to be able to have somebody who could work on some projects, and they trusted the model to make things happen.”

What that meant, however, was that: “I didn’t feel like I was doing anything in terms of outreach. I was just another marketing head for the show.” It felt like an opportunity was being squandered: “One of the biggest things [in theatre] is trying to get people out of the rut that they’re already working in. We’re really stretched, so to think of doing things in a different way is a job in itself.” In no way was this a problem unique to the Lakeside, and Jordana says: “It speaks volumes for where we are in theatre at the moment that people have not really grasped NTiYN as an opportunity to learn and reflect on their practice, and be part of something widely, across the country, but instead grasped at it as a bit more money for a bit of extra help.”

Her commitment to the project meant that she was able to trace the shift in approach at the Lakeside, the effect of the realisation that “actually collaborating with it works better”. Partly this happened because she became more assertive about the role she was willing to play: “I was really clear in the later stage that I’m not going to do marketing, I’m not going to take over your twitter handle: that’s your responsibility.” What she saw was that NTiYN “has made a real difference. When we first started, there was a lot of blanket marketing: everything went to everybody. They are now thinking show by show, and about who can we contact for each particular show.”

Communication problems with the venue were exacerbated by communication problems with Fuel. One of those was mechanical: email, it transpires, is a rubbish tool for planning outreach projects across multiple interested parties (to which we chant in chorus: WHO KNEW?). When Jordana says, “I’ve got a lot of love for google docs now,” she laughs at herself but is also sincere. “It lays out all the activity that we wanted to do and all the contacts and it’s really clear who’s doing what. Before using google docs, you’d have an initial meeting and everyone would go off and no one had a clear idea of what anyone was going to be doing.”

But the question of responsibility, and autonomy, isn’t just functional: it’s also emotional, and that proved harder to answer. Even in the final year of NTiYN, Jordana didn’t feel entirely clear what voice she was using as a Local Engagement Specialist. “Who are we speaking on behalf of, when we’re in that role? Am I supposed to be talking on behalf of the venue, or am I employed by Fuel? Do I feel like I have the same ownership over the work as the project managers at Fuel? Do I have enough weight to say: I’m Jordana, I’m a local theatre worker and enthusiast, and these are things I think are really brilliant and I think you should come? Is it OK to change depending on who you’re talking to? Because actually, different people might want different things: when contacting some of the schools I know really well, just being Jordana works, but for other schools that I don’t know so well, to be able to say, ‘I’m from this theatre company and this is what we do’ gives a weight that you need. I still haven’t worked out whether or not that flexibility is useful.”

These are perennial problems faced by freelancers: outsiders who are invited to behave like insiders, but without the privileges that might entail. And yet, in the context of NTiYN, it resulted in moments when barriers were put up between the Local Engagement Specialists and the touring theatre-makers that were not helpful for people attempting to do outreach work on those shows. Jordana recalls a research trip to a dress rehearsal in which the Local Engagement Specialists “didn’t get introduced to the artist or the production team”, creating a sense of distance between themselves and the makers. On another occasion, she didn’t find out that a performer in a show she had been working on grew up near Colchester until his parents came along to the theatre club: “That’s something we should have known and could have tapped into.” Earlier this year I spoke to Annabel Turpin, chief executive of the ARC in Stockton, and she discussed similar issues around communication, sharing of information and access to the artists. This has been one of the biggest learning points for Fuel: the realisation that sometimes they do form an unconscious barrier between artists, venues and communities.

The issue as Jordana sees it is in an industry-wide failure to really consider the question of responsibility when it comes to outreach and engagement. She remembers seeing a tweet by Alan Lane of Slung Low, distributing a photograph of one of the community actors in a show he was directing, Camelot, “going around the local community with posters, posing in the barbershop, having conversations. I thought: why is it only in community and amateur theatre where artists take this massive responsibility for promoting their work? Why is it only in those circumstances that people feel that it’s a proud thing to go out and tell people about it?” If she had her way, outreach wouldn’t be “someone else’s responsibility” but a collective endeavour – and the culture would be so much stronger for it.

Getting to know The Preston Bill

By Georgette Purdey

I have been working on Fuel’s New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood for 18 months and it feels to me like we have all been building towards The Preston Bill. It’s the moment the project has come together in a perfect storm: great show, great venue, great artist. It’s a marketing gal’s dream team!

Andy Smith has been planning this show for almost two years. A Lancashire lad, he was the perfect artist to write a piece in response to Preston. I had seen an open rehearsal of the show in Camden People’s Theatre in London a few months ago and really enjoyed it. Fast-forward to the final night in Preston and the show has come on leaps and bounds.

The New Continental is far from what you might think of a Prestonian boozer: it’ s swanky and welcoming, nestled on the corner of a beautiful park. It’s the perfect intimate venue for The Preston Bill and Fuel worked hard to make sure the audience had more than just a good night out.

Gathered in the pub about half the audience arrived early for Garry Cooke’s work, a photographic journey of life through the past 80 years. As we sat with our pints we laughed at the juxtaposition of images from people’s own photo albums sandwiched next to world events. It’s important to remember that Uncle Ted washing his new car was just as mission critical in his life as NASA landing a man on the moon!

We then moved into the theatre space, which was bare apart from a chair and a ukulele. Andy held the audience spellbound with his beautifully lyric piece The Preston Bill. The embodiment of an ‘everyman’, the story of a life, an ordinary life. Sometimes that life seemed small and pedestrian but it illuminated much bigger debates and trends in society. I am not from Preston, but that didn’t matter, to me Bill was my Granddad born in South London, living through the Blitz, National Service, the Printers’ strike. His mother’s fond bedtime words were my Dad singing Que Sera to me every night as a child. He had captured the beauty and the pathos in everyday life.

As I looked around I had a bit of a ‘Henry Higgins’ moment – the denouement of the last two years of NTiYN. The audience were engaged, experiencing new writing, with a local artist in a versatile pub theatre. This was it – we had cracked it!

I couldn’t help but think about my childhood theatre experiences sat in church halls watching the work of companies like Eastern Angles – this was great storytelling stripped back to its bare bones.

In ‘the snug’ after, the Theatre Club was a lively debate fuelled by local pride and a sense of loss for the Preston of old. Understandably the dialogue moved to politics and although it’s easy to see The Preston Bill as partisan, I think that misses the point. The Preston Bill experiences life under Thatcher, Blair, Cameron – he is a prism through which we see the past 80 years played out. Things change, gay rights make advancements, some things don’t change so much. Throughout the play women remain benevolent characters but bit-parts, in a reflection on the ongoing fight for women’s rights.

The Preston Bill goes on tour in spring and I am confident that in theatres all around the country it will move audiences with its lyric narrative and leave them pondering on the legacy of their own lives.

Acts of giving

I’ve just done a bit of reorganising on this blog: not a redesign, because I’m technologically quite lazy and unexpectedly fond of its bubblegum pink; more a gentle rethink of how each post is categorised (goodbye argument, hello thinking – more friendly, no?). Apart from other usefulnesses, the exercise made me realise how little attention I’ve paid on here to a really important strand of New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood: the commissioning of new or adapted work specifically for one or more of NTiYN’s participating towns. It’s a story that has developed slowly and emerged piecemeal, through a series of really interesting and heartening events, each one demonstrating how vital this strand has been.

Some of those events have been responsive: Fuel encountered a work one place, and proposed producing it as part of NTiYN in another. Such was the case with Daniel Bye’s Story Hunt, which he made in association with ARC in Stockton-on-Tees: it begins with Dan spending a few days in a town, gathering stories of people’s lives and local events, and ends with a walking tour, in which Dan relates those stories back to the audience, weaving them with historical knowledge and an invigorating reminder that a town’s life and future depends on its people – and can be changed for the better by its people. Fuel loved the premise and programmed the work in Margate; I was at the Theatre Royal recently for a performance of a new show by Dan, Going Viral, and people in the audience afterwards said they had come because they had enjoyed Story Hunt and wanted to see more of him. Bingo!

Similarly, Fuel saw Tortoise in a Nutshell’s Feral – a live-animation puppet show set in a fading seaside town – in a concrete box at the Edinburgh festival, and instantly recognised that it would sit perfectly in two actual seaside towns, Margate and Poole. They invited the company to remake Feral specifically for those two places, giving them research and development time to redesign bits of the set and a few of the characters to reflect recognisable local landmarks and public individuals. In both instances, audience numbers far exceeded expectation – and, when I saw the show in Poole, it was gorgeously clear from instinctive vocal responses what a difference it made to everyone in the room that what they were seeing had been made with them in mind. In each place, locals were invited to make their own films to be screened before the performances, creating a lively conversation between different views of the areas, different art forms, different experiences.

It’s there in the title of The Preston Bill who that work was commissioned for. And the story of how it came to be made is itself emblematic. It began just over two years ago, with Andy Smith taking a tour of Preston as part of a series of Artists’ Missions – reconnaissance visits from a motley set of artists to the NTiYN towns, time spent getting a feel for the place, finding out about its identity, its people, its secret nooks and crannies, and thinking about a work that could be made in response.

Andy’s record of his day in Preston contains so many germs of The Preston Bill: the story of a man, in the industrial north, told with a left-leaning political slant; a man who has a very particular relationship to education and learning, who works for BAE – it’s fascinating to look back over the Mission text and images and, with hindsight, see in them clues to the contents of Andy’s play. I saw The Preston Bill in two places in the south while it was still in development: in Margate, where older men in the audience talked fascinatingly about the ways in which their lives did and didn’t intersect with Bill’s, and asked each other and Andy how they felt about the character, whether or not they sympathised with him; and in London, by which time Andy had introduced a big old “power in the unions” singalong that gave me goosebumps. Seeing it in Preston for the first time at the end of October, I was struck by the oddness of Andy’s opening lines: in this room, in this theatre, we can be both here and in the North, in a town called Preston. But we are in Preston!, the logical-realist bit of my brain cried. That statement felt so vibrant and magical in the south, simultaneously holding us in the room and transporting us elsewhere; in Preston, it felt obtrusive.

But that’s me quibbling. Other quibbles emerged in the post-show discussion: one man, for instance, took umbrage at Andy’s inauthentic pronunciation of Bracciano’s, name of a famous local cafe. But there was also pride: that this was a story of and from a town that should have stories told about it, that should be on the cultural map. And there was sadness: at the demise of industrial employment for working people in the area, the lack of apprenticeships, the diminishing of opportunity. I love that this single show was able to inspire such polarised discussion; that, in telling a seemingly simple story, it invites a complexity of response.

To accompany the Preston performances, Fuel also commissioned two local artists, Garry Cook and Toni-Dee Paul, to create their own short works. I caught Garry’s and it was a fascinating complement to Andy’s play: a series of photographs juxtaposing world events from the past 80 years with scenes of town/city and domestic life in Preston, slow-moving at first then erupting with rambunctious energy as Instagram took over. It made me think about how history is documented, represented and retold, what makes up a life, what impacts on a life – and how our lives today will be remembered 80 years from now.

The Preston Bill is the only finished work to have emerged from the Missions so far, but I don’t think that’s surprising: a one-man show which prides itself on having no set, no complicated lights, no touring requirements – literally, all Andy needs is his ukulele, and a chair which he finds in the venue – The Preston Bill is about as lo-fi as theatre gets, and even that took just over two years to be “finished”. Other works, by Sylvia Mercuriali (for Malvern) and Abigail Conway (for Poole) have, like so much in theatre, not come to fruition because of scheduling issues. I think more work will be born of NTiYN, and in the meantime, the Missions documents are entertaining, astute and often beautiful works of art in their own right. The artists – very few of whom already had a working relationship with Fuel – were invited to represent their visit on this blog as they chose, and they did so with text and images distinctive and characteristic in their focus and lens.

The one other work to emerge directly from the Missions wasn’t a commission: it was created by Slung Low five years ago and has been quietly popping up around the country ever since. The Knowledge Emporium is an alternative economy, a celebration of community, a sideshow and a compendium of stories in one. The premise is quite simple: Slung Low pitch up in a town in an air-stream caravan and spend a week inviting people to share their knowledge in exchange for sweets. At the end of the week, the performers read the knowledge back to the town in the time it takes to make a tortilla. Two years ago, Slung Low’s artistic director Alan Lane went on two Artists’ Missions: to bustling Colchester, which has four theatres of its own, and to nearby Jaywick, which is completely off the theatre touring radar. Fuel could have asked him to take the Emporium to Colchester: it certainly would have been easy; instead, they paved the way for a stint in Jaywick, which finally happened last month. Alan’s account of the week is one my favourite things I’ve ever published on this blog: it’s sad, and honest, and fierce, not least in its commitment to art that makes space for people’s voices to be heard. It’s one of the best things to come out of NTiYN, and it happened almost invisibly.

As part of the wrapping-up work on NTiYN, I’ve been interviewing other producers, theatre companies and artistic directors about their approaches to its questions around audience engagement; transcripts and a synthesising essay will be published here over the coming weeks. In one conversation, Vicky Featherstone talked about the vital role within the National Theatre of Scotland of community-specific programming, and how exciting she found the challenge of creating work that speaks directly to a social group or a building or a locale or an identity. And maybe it could be argued that all theatre aims to do this: but in that strand of NTS and this strand of NTiYN, that aim is foregrounded and explicit.

I’ve struggled from the beginning with the ways in which NTiYN can be interpreted cynically as a hyper-inflated marketing exercise; but at its best heart, its gestures are more generous than that. What I love about all the works I’ve gathered here is how giving they are: the lengths they go to give people, communities, a chance to see and hear themselves; the different ground they tread to do so.

The currency of friendliness

Quick introduction by Maddy Costa: This post was written by Emma Geraghty, a writer and singer-songwriter, who attended the Derelict festival in Preston as part of a writing team I led there. It’s not specifically relevant to NTiYN, except that the Conti in Preston is one of the project’s six venues, but it’s such a lovely piece of writing – specifically, in its rejection of commercially-driven narratives that declare one city ‘successful’ and another ‘failed’ – that I wanted to include it here, too.

by Emma Geraghty

Sunshine and high winds. Wherever you are feels like a holiday, but it’s Preston in the early evening, and I have time to kill. So I walk. Down the high street. People are dressed for the summer, an inherently British thing in this weather, and I pass shops and cafes and roadworks. It reminds me of Bolton, of Salford, of every city town in the North, the ones people overlook as they look over the country. Because they’re not Manchester or Birmingham or Newcastle. They are Primark and betting shops and homelessness and dodgy pubs and council estates. All of the things that city-sized cities have, but get brushed under a carpet of commercialisation and extra-wide high streets.

A seagull cries overhead.
“Oh my god love you are BEAUTIFUL.”
“Spare any change, pet?”
“God bless.”

I sit on a bench on a square, I’m not sure which one, partially blinded by the sun, rolling a cigarette. There’s a courthouse, the Dean’s Court House, and a man shutting down some funfair rides. He pulls large waterproof covers over the seats, drags concrete blocks to surround them, leaves, returns with a metal fence, leaves, returns with a metal fence, leaves, returns, repeats, until the rides are surrounded. The muscles stand out on his arms. I think he sees me watching, so I smile, and he smiles.

“Here, sweetheart, got a light?”
“Cheers darlin’, have a good day now.”

The light on the buildings, on the pavement, is wonderful. Photography lighting. A man walks past, singing loudly to himself in a foreign tongue and pointing at something. He’s Asian or Muslim or Middle Eastern or… He’s smiling. The man on the next bench shouts “Allah Allah Allah” at the singing man. He is English or British or white or… The singing man doesn’t notice. The man on the bench lapses into silence.

I stub out my cigarette and walk. Shops are shutting. People are getting ready for their Saturday night. Equator. I buy a coffee and a fruit juice and sit. And write.

Preston was voted into the top ten unhealthiest high streets in Britain, according to a BBC survey. Qualifying features were betting shops, pawnbrokers, and takeaways, among others. It’s all rubbish. It’s a small working-class high street. That’s all. The healthiest high streets were mostly in southern areas of affluence, and there’s the difference. Money. It always is, in one way or another.

One of the things I pride myself on, being from the North, is that we are friendly. We have friendly accents. Even when we swear, it doesn’t sound as bad. We use terms of endearment constantly and naturally. Mate, love, pet, duck, darling, sweetheart. This place is a conversation piece. You can talk to anyone. Just passing the time of day is enough. Just lending a lighter is enough. Just sharing a smile is enough.

I will finish my juice and roll a cigarette and pack up my pen, purse, notebook, phone, and leave. I will turn left, cross the road, go over the carpark, turn right, go into the building, and see something. Derelict. This place is anything but derelict.

The what happens after

by Maddy Costa

This story begins in Newcastle, in the middle of March. As part of my ongoing quest to encourage more people not just to write about theatre but to do so in different and exciting ways, I was running a workshop with the Cuckoo Young Writers, and by chance met Ruth, newly commissioned by the Clod Ensemble to act as a local engagement specialist for their touring production The Red Chair. Ruth was feeling frustrated: she had come up with a fun social media campaign, and made contact with some interesting local groups, but so far it hadn’t translated into many conversations, let alone ticket sales. She felt she wasn’t getting anywhere.

I’m always open about the fact that I have no actual experience in outreach or engagement work, I’ve never worked in a theatre, and have no specific theatre training. However, instinctively I’m pretty certain that to think about outreach or engagement in terms of ticket sales is going about things the wrong way. This isn’t a criticism of Ruth, by the way: it’s a general observation. A fundamental belief that if you’re going to make the effort to talk to people, it’s got to be with a view to more than getting them to part with their cash.

Ruth told me about the groups she’d approached, particularly associations for blind and visually impaired people: The Red Chair, she felt, relies so much more on language, sound and hearing than on sight that she wanted to encourage these groups to come along, and use that as the beginning of a more general conversation about access to theatre. Which all sounded like the right kind of work, if only she could feel less disheartened. Four days later, she sent me an email, telling me about a conversation she’d had with the chair of the Newcastle Disability Forum: although no one was free to see The Red Chair, Ruth was organising an alternative theatre trip for them – and they had a long discussion about the good and bad of audio-description, which Ruth expected to continue. She concluded:

‘The longer-term outcomes seem to be where the heart of this is and I am starting to shift my head about that … I want to get as many people who may enjoy the show to see it … but actually what happens after that is key.’

The middle of this story takes place in Gloucester a few days later. I was there for the Strike a Light festival, which has grown up as part of the Collaborative Touring Network, a strategic touring project funded by Battersea Arts Centre. I hadn’t been to Strike a Light before, but it was instantly obvious how this spring festival was building on the previous autumn one (and on the two festivals before that). There was quantitative data for this – a clear increase in ticket sales – but what interested me were the ways I, as an outsider, noticed it in the atmosphere. In the way people stayed behind after a work-in-progress performance and talked about how it compared with another, earlier version of the same show. In the number of people who came out on a Sunday evening for another work-in-progress performance: students, theatre-makers, locals. Last year, there was an argument at the bar about making work as a person of colour in the region; this year there was a programmed discussion on the subject, more than 20 people debating passionately with each other – people who hadn’t met before, but could go on to work together. It was like seeing a community come into bud.

There are six CTN festivals, all of them in areas where there isn’t much theatre going on, all of them blossoming. Lyn Gardner wrote a Guardian blog about another one, run by Doorstep Arts in Torbay, which she described as: “a terrific celebration of the transformative power of arts engagement”, praising it for “growing a future model of arts engagement that could flourish all over the country”. That model is simple: galvanising and supporting communities to build the infrastructures they need to present touring work and inspire local makers.

This story now has a twist: on a Saturday in mid-April I went to Preston for the last weekend of the Derelict festival, a brilliant week-long programme of performances and fun. It ended with a discussion – my favourite kind of discussion, in which people of all different ages and backgrounds, from students to artistic directors and chief executives via producers, practising artists and academics, gather on equal terms. We began talking about the need for stronger infrastructure in Preston, to make it more possible to present and encourage people to attend theatre/performance/art, and one person suggested that it was important for the people of Preston to make this alone, and not allow others to build it for them. “Others” including Fuel – Preston’s Continental being one of the six NTiYN venues. I found this resistance really interesting: are organisations like Fuel and BAC riding roughshod over locals, who could quite happily build an arts community themselves? I don’t think so – but then, I’m always the Londoner in these situations, the outsider.

It was fascinating to encounter that oppositional perspective, and while not agreeing with it, I want to hold it in my thoughts. What makes me disagree is knowing how much autonomy people like Emma Jane in Gloucester and the Doorstep Arts team in Torbay have in shaping their festivals for their own communities. What begins as a potentially cynical opportunity for BAC to access new and hard-to-reach audiences is transformed by a genuine desire to support, on the one hand, local grassroots activity and, on the other, the entire theatre ecology. Similarly, when I see Fuel organise mentoring for a programmer in Preston (for instance), it’s not just to get more of their own work on: it’s so that programmer can learn new approaches to building a stronger, bolder venue, which could become a hub for locals and touring artists alike.

This story ends in Colchester on the last Friday in April, at an event curated by Jordana Golbourn, the local engagement specialist for the Lakeside. Since starting work with NTiYN a couple of years ago, Golbourn has sought to reach beyond the Lakeside’s campus community and forge links with people across Colchester and in nearby areas like Jaywick and Wyvenhoe. Inspired by Fuel’s Phenomenal People, she organised a social for local women, with me as host, to take place in the Lakeside’s cafe. It was another one of those perfect circles: the university’s head of Humanities and other top academics sitting at the same table with students, artists and theatre-makers, plus the mother and daughter who run an activist event called Colchester Soup. You could hear the electricity crackling across the table as women discovered like-minded souls, people with whom they might collaborate or from whom they could learn. In one short hour, the university feminist society had several new members; we learned about one woman’s art therapy practice, another’s work as a clown doctor and a third’s intention to build retreats for artists in Jaywick; pledged to support the university’s brilliant scheme for scholarships for young women and marvelled at how Colchester Soup directs funds to people with community-benefiting ideas. Somewhere in the mix we invited everyone present to come to the Phenomenal People show: I hope they come, but I hope much more that this was the first of many events, the beginning of a proper network, in which women can find mentors, share experience, build together.

The Colchester social might end this particular blog story, but it’s also a beginning and a continuation. Sometimes, like Ruth, I get disheartened on NTiYN trips, that it’s still so hard getting people to come and see shows. But time and again I remind myself: that’s not what it’s about. It’s about cultural shifts and making connections across communities; not individual shows but the way neighbourhoods function; not theatre as a product but theatre at the beating heart of society.

Facts and fictions

I’ve known my friend Andrew for 22 years, and for most of that time he’s lived in Ingol in Preston, which ought to mean it’s the place I know best of all the NTiYN towns. Sadly, I’m quite a rubbish friend, so have relied on him visiting me in London, and haven’t returned the favour since 1999. So we were both really excited when I started working on this project at the prospect of seeing more of each other – even though he quickly confessed an element of cynicism about the work I would be doing. The New Continental has good music gigs, he told me, but isn’t really a place that attracts a theatre-going audience. And, he argued, the best thing about going to theatre is that it finishes early – no frantic dash for the last bus home – so why would anyone want to stay for a post-show discussion?

It’s taken a surprisingly long time, but on Friday night I finally had my first visit to Preston, and the Conti, for Fiction. It was a chilly night of squally showers, and as we made the 15-minute walk through winding back streets from the bus stop to the venue, Andrew and I feared the worst. Our journey was well over half an hour: who else was going to do that if they didn’t have to? In the dark and rain? And the Conti isn’t on the same side of town as students, making it even less likely that people would come. Let alone stay for the Theatre Club.

Settled into the pub’s lovely snug – with roaring fire! – Andrew and I got our first gratifying surprise: we discovered that the show was sold out. The capacity was 60 people – even if only a tenth stayed, I argued, that would still be enough for an interesting discussion. But at the end, everyone poured out of the theatre – and it seemed Andrew’s dire predictions were coming true. Except they weren’t. Everyone had disappeared to take advantage of the offer of a free drink for the discussion, and within a few minutes, people started coming back in. First two people, then five, then a whole crowd: we’d arranged the chairs into a big circle, but it just wasn’t big enough, and people crowded at the back so they could join in, too. In the end we had about 30 people, half the audience – one of the biggest theatre clubs I’ve ever led.

And it was brilliant. Fiction takes place in an astonishingly complete darkness, and lots of people talked about the insecurity that made them feel; one woman confessed that it induced a state of such panic that she’d had to leave. We talked about whether the makers take enough care over communicating just how dark it’s going to get, and the games that can be played with the imagination because of that darkness. We shared our different experiences of visualising the things described in the show, and how that was affected by the different qualities of the recording. We compared the extent to which the many invitations to fall asleep in the text of the show had affected our alertness; one woman talked fascinatingly of her experience of hypnosis, and how similar this had felt. We asked who had “understood” the show, and whether not understanding was frustrating, and enjoyed the way that the movement and content of the text is as surreal as a dream. One man actually said this was the best instance of surrealism in theatre he’d ever encountered. Apart from a brief moment of splitting into small noisy conversations, for most of the hour we talked as a single, albeit huge, group, listening attentively to each other, enjoying everyone else’s individual perspective.

As we travelled home, Andrew confessed he was amazed – and that his cynicism had been overturned. He’d not only really enjoyed the conversation, but the event had proven him wrong: people in Preston WOULD come to this sort of thing, AND have a brilliant time. This shift in his perspective showed me again what’s properly great about the NTiYN project: it can make people who’ve lived in a town for decades reconsider their relationship with it, and discover that it’s not what they thought it was. And it does this patiently, one person at a time.

Artist Mission – Andy Smith in Preston: Man in Preston or North Western Story

As part of the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project Fuel have been inviting artists to undertake missions to each of the places that we are working in. As part of their mission they will be contributing to this blog. We are delighted to present this mission blog post from Andy Smith.  You can find out more about the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project at http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/new-theatre-in-your-neighbourhood

NOTES AND FRAGMENTS

WORKING TITLE

MAN IN PRESTON or NORTH WESTERN STORY

A PLAY IN FIVE ACTS

PROLOGUE:  IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD

The prologue should talk about the weeks leading up to his trip to Preston.  About how in this time he thinks a lot about what the word ‘neighbourhood’ might mean. He thinks about how it might present ideas of location, place and belonging.  He considers proximity and trust, friendliness and diversity.  He thinks about identity and community, about networks and support.  He thinks about if he lives in a neighbourhood, and about whether the word is in danger of being devalued in its use by politicians, the media, and maybe even initiatives with titles like ‘New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood’.

He also sings this a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5seuin47ayk

He thinks about what he is doing or going to do or think about in relation to this day in Preston that he has.  He thinks about how a day is not much.  He thinks about how he wants to spend time on his own getting a feel for the place as well as talking with others.

He also thinks about what ‘New Theatre’ means.  He thinks about what he might expect and what might be expected of him; a writer or theatre maker person who is categorically not from that neighbourhood but is going into that neighbourhood to think about it, (and talk to) the people that he meets that day.

 

ACT ONE:  APPROACHES

In the car on the way to Preston he thinks about how any document or piece of writing that begins with the sentence ‘In the car on the way to Preston’ will inevitably be a fiction in some sense.  This work will be a report of him in Preston, a re-presentation of him in Preston, an experience that he has attempted to be made comprehensible by turning it into words and pictures.  This is an intimation or imitation of Preston, of a man in Preston.  This is a story.

For some reason he can’t get the car radio to work, so as he drives down the road there is only fragments of music that drift in and out of his thoughts.  He looks through the windscreen and surveys the landscape as it plays.  The music might be from a playlist called ‘North by North West’.  It features desolate hillsides, overcast skies, street corners abandoned too soon, useless MP’s, shoeless children, grey fogs, and inevitably matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs.

He drives and he listens and his mind wanders.  And he thinks about flat caps and ukuleles, cotton mills and clocking off, the steam age and the railways. He imagines the industrial North, the Grim up North, the Northern Echo and the Northern Sky.  He parks the car at the legendary bus station, pays the parking and descends in the lift to the terminus.  The wind whips about.  The sky is overcast.  The plastic of the seats is garish and uninviting.  A sign hangs above pointing downward to the exit.  He enters the subway, where others advise him to keep left.

CONTEXT (PERSONAL)

I am from The North West, or rather The North of North West.  I come from the North of North West.  I was born in Carlisle.  Even further up the west coast mainline than Preston.  At the moment I live in Lancaster.  I think about how these are all different but all pretty small sizes of city.  Further North than what I think a more general perception of The North West is.  They aren’t Liverpool or Manchester, that’s for sure, their identity or importance more of a struggle.  All of this makes me wonder about what it means to be from here.  What the North West is now.  Whether there is a divide between it and The North East, or it and The South.  Age old questions.  How these landscapes define us.  Why?

ACT TWO:  CENTRES

At the start of act two he goes to the local library and museum.  The gold letters on the portico read “To Literature, Arts and Sciences. To them indeed, he thinks.

He seeks out and finds the local history section.  In it, there are biographies of Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff, lots of books on Railways, factories in Manchester, Liverpool and the slave trade and ‘murderous’ Bolton.

–       Excuse me… are these all of the local history books?

–       Yes they are.

–       It’s just that I can’t seem to find any about Preston.

–       No. Those are upstairs.

He looks at books and statues and crests.  He looks at a computer designed to impart local information.  He reads about ‘The Preston Guild’, the oldest festival in England.  It happens every 20 years.  He learns that things that happen rarely are sometimes described as happening “once every Preston Guild”.  He thinks that a guild is to do with a trade right or agreement that people joined, a collective of merchants and traders that worked in the city. Or something.  He’s not sure exactly.

He leaves the terminal and goes upstairs to another gallery and looks at famous faces from Preston.  He looks at old bones and skeletons. At carvings and statues and scrolls.  Conscious of time, he pauses for breath to try and make the artefacts connect, but struggles to do so.  Time for some life, he thinks.  So he leaves the building and heads for the town centre.

–       Excuse me… sorry to bother you… is this the way to the town centre?

–       Yes… but really it’s a city centre.

He walks through the town city centre.  The shops are as he might have expected, the signs and structures familiar.  He thinks about other ways to get information.  He goes into a newsagent.

–       Does Preston have a local paper?

–       Yes.  The Evening Post

–       When does it come out?

–       Every morning.

He has a coffee sitting below an escalator in the middle of a shopping centre.  Looks at the paper and opens his notebook. Looks at his surroundings.  Mostly he could be anywhere.  It’s hard to say what defines this place. Perhaps it is better, or easier, to think about what happened here rather than what is happening now.

 CONTEXT (HISTORICAL)

–       Visited by Charles Dickens, Franz Liszt and Karl Marx (who proclaimed it “the next St. Petersburg”).

–       First town (it was a town then) in the UK to get a KFC.

–       Made the UK’s 50^th city in the 50^th year of the present Queens reign.

ACT THREE: THE CONVERSATION

Where he arrives at his destination (a venue called The Continental) and where a long conversation takes place and takes in the following themes and subjects:

Communty and communities, arts practice, film making, theatre making, arts strategy, where we come from, how we make culture, public spaces, local and universal art, local politicians, children, the long term and the short term, what The Continental is and was, BAE systems, culture and cultures, railways and bus stations and connections and being connected, documentary film and theatre, reality and fiction, real people, parch peas, food and identity, living up to expectations, Preston being ‘third city’ (or always the bronze medal), coming back, getting out, the venue, the expectations of this project.

This is by no means a comprehensive list.

CONTEXT (LOCAL)

 

The fate of Preston’s iconic bus station remains in the balance after a Government minister delayed a decision on making it a listed building.  Culture minister Ed Vaizey had been expected to give his verdict last week after examining a submission from English Heritage.  But at the 11^th hour Mr Vaizey decided to call it back for another look and could now make a personal visit to view the giant terminus topped by a multi-storey car park.

ACT FOUR:  IN THE CITY

He walks around.

–       What do people do here?

–       Mostly, they leave.

He walks around some more.

CONTEXT (QUESTIONS)

Why might we make theatre in and from here?  Who might a piece of new theatre be for in this instance?  Where might it be for?  What might it be for?  Why?  What purpose would it seek to serve?  Why might it be important for this place?  Could it and should it be important for other places too?  Why?  Is it important that it should know these things before it is made?  How might it be made?  Who should it be made for and who should make it?  Why?

This is by no means a comprehensive list.

ACT FIVE:  THE JOURNEY HOME

In the car on the way home he sits in the traffic and recounts his day.  He thinks about the light and the sky and the smells and what Preston might be made of. He thinks a lot about cliché and archetype, and wonders if there was anything that he saw or heard or thought about that surprised him.  He wonders if he wanted to be surprised.  He thinks about things that might be good or bad about Preston.  About what the culture and ‘culture’ of Preston is or might be.

He thinks about what theatre might and can do about and in all of this.  About the many things that theatre can be. He thinks about responsibility, about story and experience, about being together.  About what we do and what we can do.  What might a work about or from this place say? Why?

EPILOGUE

That was a story about a man in Preston

Who wondered what it meant to be North Western

And that was what he had to say

About the thoughts he had in the course of his day

Artist mission – Ben Pacey in Preston

As part of the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project Fuel have been inviting artists to undertake missions to each of the places that we are working in. As part of their mission they will be contributing to this blog. We are delighted to present this mission blog post from Ben Pacey. You can find out more about the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project at http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/new-theatre-in-your-neighbourhood

Cycle into Birmingham, bump into friends as I lock my bike up. Run to the ticket machine. A quick ninety minutes –  and a coffee – on the train, and here I am.

Preston.

In the sunshine!

This is the city where I was born, and where I lived until I was eighteen. It wasn’t a city then, just a town¹. And it’s not like I haven’t been back. My parents still live here, but it’s a long time since I really engaged with the place itself.

My preconceptions of the place, although based on experience, are tangled up with all the rest of my childhood and adolescence. I don’t think that highly of the city, to be honest. But perhaps it’s just teenage angst from 1994?

Whatever. The sun’s shining as I arrive, and I’m looking forward to spending the day here. Let’s go.

Out of the station, and faced with the Fishergate Centre. Terrible graphic design. I skirt round, not through.

Past the army recruitment office on Fishergate. An IRA bomb was disabled in a controlled explosion here in ’91.

The Korova’s just around the corner. The shutters are down, but I see Sam through the door. An (almost brand new!) arts cafe in Preston. I can’t remember what this building used to be. It would probably have been damaged by the explosion, had the bomb gone off. Sam makes me another coffee.

It early days for The Korova, but it’s exciting that it’s here. It’s exciting that Sam, from Essex, has settled in Preston after studying at the University here. We talk about how you grown into a place at university. I think more fondly of Swansea than I do Preston, but they’re probably similar in many ways, although Swansea does have the sea. Sam’s tiny performance studio offers an accessible platform for local writers and performers. Audiences are small, but growing. It’s only been a couple of months.

Artists, perhaps writers in particular, are frustrated in the region, Sam says. They feel excluded from the established venues. It’s hard to engage with the Exchange or the Lowry in Manchester, for example, and the fringe scene there has a patchy reputation.

Sam reckons people in Preston are “laid back”.

It’s time to head to the New Continental.

The bacon sandwich shop on Corporation Street has gone. The guy with the silver beard and ponytail must have been frying pig in there for 30 years. No more. “Steve Tat-2” is still in business.

Five minutes later, West Cliff. Some lovely houses here, just below the railway station.

I wouldn’t have drunk in the Continental when I lived here, but since the refurb I’ve been in a few times, especially now that the Fox and Grapes, on Fox Street, has become a “beach bar”.

In the pub, Chantal. She’s upbeat and enthusiastic. We look at the performance space, which I haven’t seen before. It looks good, bigger than I expected. In a booth by the window, Ruth joins us, and we talk Preston. In a little while, we adjourn to a restaurant on Winckley Square² for lunch.

It turns out Ruth and I are about the same age, and both grew up in Preston. But we didn’t go to school together. I’m impressed by her choice to return, and by the energy she’s invested here since.

We talk about theatre audiences, or “Guardian-reading culture-seekers” as Ruth, probably accurately, identifies them. They’re not a demographic which Preston is overwhelmed by. Many employees of the university and the council live in Lancaster (quieter, “nicer,” nearer the Lake District) or Manchester, and seek their culture there, not here. With Manchester and Liverpool under an hour away, even those who do live here are probably in the habit of seeking culture (and employment, and shopping) elsewhere. Cursed with a good regional transport infrastructure, perhaps the city is doomed to decline into second-rate dormitory-city status?

I mention Preston Guild. I’d heard good things about last years iteration of this once-every-20-year civic celebration.  I’ve heard that it was a brilliant event, and really engendered a positive pride in the city. So I’m surprised by some negative feeling. Here, it seems there’s frustration that the organisers – particularly arts programmers – weren’t able to work with local artists as much as the local artists might have hoped.

But Ruth and Chantal are also frustrated by the local artists, who, I’m told, recently failed to attend Fuel-produced performances at the Continental, in part out of frustration that a platform was being given to artists from out-of-town, rather than themselves.

Lunch done, I suggest that there must be a massive pool of un-used (or under-used) manual skills in the city. I remember Strand Road in the ’80s, then a brick-build industrial gorge, the road cutting between two factories each half a kilometre long. General Electric’s heavy engineering on one side, British Aerospace (BAE Systems) on the other. Today, part of one factory, previously General Electric, is left, as Alstom. The Aerospace site is now all bland housing and a retail park. Ruth, some of whose family sill work for BAE³, reckons I’m a generation late. Those factories closed in the late ’80s, when there would have been a skills surplus⁴.

Ruth reckons Sam’s description of local people as “laid back” is optimistic.

“They’re apathetic”, she says.

Twenty years ago, it seems to me that people were either charmingly stoic and polite, apathetic verging on hopeless, or viciously frustrated.

Chantal and I head off to meet Sam and Nigel, who work for the council. On the way, we agree that seeing other peoples work is an artist’s responsibility.

We park in Sainsbury’s car park, by the bus station. This brown-brick-block hasn’t been a Sainsbury’s since the ’80s. On the left, the bus station. On the right, and over the footbridge, there’s still a local radio station broadcasting from a converted church.

The bus station!

This place is brilliant. Famously the largest bus station in Europe⁵. A classic example of brutalist architecture. To me, it’s a dilapidated location for a sci-fi film set in a world where society really values (and funds!) public transport. It’s an epic space. There’s glass, concrete, beautiful timber beams to lean on, and that weird rubbery black flooring which is always slightly sticky. There’s 80 separate bus stands. Stand 33 for bus 33. Stand 35 for bus 35. Both will take you back to my childhood, or at least my parents house. Somehow I can forgive this place for the uncountable hours I must have spend waiting here.

If it were a film set, the orange plastic bucket seats in the cafe would be filled with tourists, thirsty for greasy 50p tea and an authentic taste of their beloved film. Perhaps it’s an atmospheric spy thriller, or a tale of repressed lust exploding into a brutalist brief encounter, or just a quietly moving portrait of everyday northern dignity and stoicism?

In reality, after decades of under-funding, the bus station is on its last legs, and the council is doing its best to be rid of it, despite vocal opposition. Ruth’s been working with architects and artists to develop ideas for restoring and repurposing the structure. Nigel, who’s part of the planning team, doesn’t really want to talk about it. He admits the council wasn’t prepared for furore caused by the announcement of demolition plans.

I chat to Sam and Nigel in the Harris Museum. Just across the foyer, the pendulum⁶, swinging, has always been there. This is an odd conversation. I can’t quite tell if their language is council bureau-speak, or if they’re being actively evasive. Everything we speak of seems somehow far away. Maybe I’m just in a post-lunch slump?

Briefly boosted for the Guild in 2012, the arts budget, predictably, now leaves everyone under-resourced. But I can’t tell if the arts team are interested in engaging with artists, or not. During the Guild, it seems, someone was employed to communicate with unsolicited contact from artists, who were attempting to engage so vigorously that – at least during 2012 – “we couldn’t just send them all holding emails”. Budgets cut, so presumably the auto-responder is back on.

I’ve just missed the deadline for a project called “Forgotten Spaces”. RIBA, in collaboration with Preston Council, invited proposals for imaginatively re-purposing underused or forgotten urban spaces in the city. There are lots of those, here. The public could apply, but the focus was on professional – or student – architects. It sounds really exciting, but disappointingly, there’s no money to realise any of the competition entries. It’s focus is on raising the city’s profile and attracting development investment. Incidentally, entrants were not permitted to make proposals to reinvent the bus station: “The building remains in use and is therefore ineligible under the competition rules”.

We talk about audiences, and whether Preston has any. The Guild was massively popular, but then it’s only once every 20 years. I’m interested to hear about the Preston Passion⁷, and Preston Remembers (a heritage event which ran in parallel to the restoration of Preston’s cenotaph) – both of which attracted large audiences and popular engagement. Sam and Nigel identify Preston as being a religious and military city. Anything with a connection to either, they reckon, will be popular here. The “religious” tag I get – this is Priest-town, after all – but I’m surprised by “military”. There’s a small barracks in Fulwood, there’s the aerospace connection, and the un-exploded army recruitment centre. I’m told about archives rich in film footage of soldiers departing by train in 1914.

Conversation over, and I’m free-range.

A quick look around the Harris Museum. The “Discover Preston” exhibition looks contemporary and shiny. Refurbished in time for the Guild, I guess. A handful of kids are hanging out here. They avoid me. Upstairs, I’m impressed by a temporary exhibition of video art called “Workplace”. It doesn’t feature any local artists, so far as I can tell.

Back out in the sunshine.

The town centre’s struggling. An influx of charity shops.

The (beautiful) outdoor covered market is hanging on. On days when there’s no market, or car-boot, it’s a brilliant covered space for “outdoor” events and spectacle. It recently sheltered Preston Mela – usually held in one of the parks – from the rain. The larger of the two spaces reminds me of the warehouses in Nantes where Les Machines De L’Ile are based. I hear a rumour that the council want to sell these spaces for redevelopment.

I’m told  that the indoor market is thriving, but I don’t visit. Incongruously, in a run-down arcade, piped radio reports that J-Lo has caused international controversy by performing in Turkmenistan.

I pass back through the bus station to take some photos. The pedestrian underpasses are empty. I remember them bustling, and choked with cigarette smoke.

It’s now 5pm on a Monday, and the Guild Hall is also deserted. And stuck in the 1970s. Not just the building, even the programming. It doesn’t look like anyone thought to spruce this place up for the 2012 Guild.

I spotted Theatre Street earlier, and want to check it out. The highlight is the derelict orphanage, one of the “Forgotten Spaces” from the RIBA project. I’ve never noticed this massive building before. It’s hard to imagine it revitalised as an arts or workspace complex. So much money! Perhaps the university could do something with it? More likely apartments, if it’s still here when the economy picks up.

I head to Avenham Park. Ten minutes from the city centre, it’s green and amazing, especially in the sunshine. The grass slope rolls down into a massive amphitheatre, with a tree-lined avenue and the river as a backdrop. The damp hulking concrete “bandstand” which I remember has gone, replaced by a new cafe. It’s all sleek timber and exposed architecture. But disappointing as a cafe, I hear.

The adjoining Miller Park looks amazing. Another Guild year transformation, perhaps? Hope there’s budget left for upkeep, but both parks look brilliant today.

As I re-approach the New Continental, I’m intrigued by a strange space beneath the railway arches.

Pass the pub this time. Following the river, I soon diverge to walk down Strand Road.

I could visit the docks, now surrounded by apartments, retail and offices. I don’t.

Under the railway again, swallows swoop low over the canal, catching flies. Tea time. I head home.

Notes

1. City status was awarded in 2002 as part of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

2. A gorgeous rolling tree-lined square, just back from the high street (Fishergate), and enclosed by mostly original Georgian town-houses (now offices). Unfortunately, there’s no view out from the basement restaurant(!).

3. One of my family’s next-door neighbours, a skilled carpenter, would have been part of this generation. A skilled carpenter, he was mostly unemployed through the ’90s, which would have been the final decade of his career. His son runs a small one-man-band furniture and upholstery business, rather than making timber formers for aircraft wings.

4. BAE Systems is still a significant employer in Preston, manufacturing military aircraft at two out-of-town sites at Samlesbury and Warton.

5. Although, according to Wikipedia, “some claim that it is the second largest bus station in Western Europe”. So maybe I was duped.

6. Wikipedia tells me it’s a Foucault Pendulum, which acts as a “reasonably-accurate” clock, thanks to the rotation of the earth.

7. According to the BBC, the Preston Passion was “a ground-breaking live event marking Good Friday with a contemporary and ambitious exploration of the Passion story. A unique combination of spectacular mass participation performance and three original recorded dramas based in Preston past and present, drawing on the enduring universal themes of the story of Christ’s condemnation and crucifixion.”

Artist mission – Javier Marzan in Preston

As part of the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project Fuel have been inviting artists to undertake missions to each of the places that we are working in. As part of their mission they will be contributing to the blog. We are delighted to present this mission blog post from Javier Marzan. You can find out more about the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project a thttp://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/new-theatre-in-your-neighbourhood

I am on Piccadilly station waiting for the eight thirteen train that will take me to Preston.  Many times I passed through this city on my way to somewhere else, all I know  of Preston is platform number three, they are many  platforms on this huge red brick station, and many people that, just like me, seem to be passing through on their way to Manchester, London or  Edinburgh.  Today I will get off at Preston and step beyond the station, I am a man with a mission. The train is here.  I am sitting next to some students hard at work on their papers and a gentle old couple reading the news, the rain taping on the glass faster and harder as we speed along. Bolton, Chorley and here we are, Preston.

It is a rainy day, one of many I am sure, and the town seems to be illuminated by a huge fluorescent batten. My first meeting on this day curated for me by Chantal Oakes is at the Korova arts café just of the high street, five minutes walk  from the station.  Although I get a bit lost and have to ask for directions, everybody I ask knows where the church that gives the name of the street I am looking for is, but nobody knows where the street is or heard of café Korova . I walk up and down a bit and on this short stretch I pass by three churches, this is indeed a priest town. I also walk by Theatre street where there is not a single theatre or cinema any more, the name is just an echo of the past. At last following my nose and retracing my steps  I find the meeting point.

-Good morning, Chantal?

-Javier?

-Nice to meet you

– This is Sam Buist, have a coffee and a chat and I will see you later

Sam is the man who runs this arts café. Some tables and chairs and small bar area at the front, a chill out area behind  with sofa, coffee table and carpet; upstairs a tiny black box room is the venue.

Sam is an enterprising man who opened this venue a month ago and already has managed to bring an audience in, he also organizes the Tringe festival which is the Preston fringe. He is passionate and a bit of a fighter. We talk about the city and and it’s cultural offers. We talk about, how things seem to happen in pockets, the lack of interaction between the people in the arts, the lack of sharing between the amateur groups, the university and the independent writers and actors. There is a fear of dialogue, an overprotection of ideas that prevents growth.  We talk about the Preston Guild, a celebration that happens once every twenty years,  where all the trades parade through the city and hand their tools to the next generation. It is still going on even if the trades are not there any more but it is a direct link to the past. I am fascinated by this, and the fact that still is an event that happens only every twenty years says a lot about the people of Preston, they’re quiet unassuming and patient.  Sam agrees and says it is the people he would miss most if he was to leave this city, he says they are very  welcoming of strangers, perhaps becaus  of the docks and the arrival of people from all over in its history  prestonians are very accepting. And it is true, there are prestonian, Caribbean, Indian Chinese communities and very little tension amongst them. Maybe this is why, Sam thinks,  you don’t hear much of Preston on national news. People of Preston don’t like to brag or shout.

We have been chatting a while and now another Sam joins us,  Samantha Blackburn who works as a cultural developer for the city council.  Samantha lived in Canada for many years and now she is back here where she was born, she still has that American twang on her speech.  Sam and Sam agree on many points.  One of them is how people in the arts administrations are somehow afraid of the new, they are conservative with small c, not politically, as the polls show here people vote labour.  They agree in that there is a lack of spaces where to present work, there is not an arts centre as such, plenty of empty buildings but not the will to open their doors to an arts enterprise.  And if there is one thing Preston needs it is an arts centre ,where the theatre, the visual arts and etc.. can share, for is in a physical space where a dialogue amongst all this pocketed groups can flourish.  It is very telling when Samantha takes us to the museum that the only place available for local artist to show their work is on the walls by the stairs.  There are simply no outlets for the creative industry.

Samantha is keen to change attitudes from the inside but even within the council there is a lack of dialogue and the little money available for the arts is controlled by a financial department that decide what artistic project to fund  and, much to her frustration, without listening what the cultural developers have to say.

⁃  He is an accountant. He plays golf! Doesn’t even ask what we think! He wanted to spend £33,000  exhibiting a mock up of the terracotta army when we could do so much more!

There is the Preston guild, and the rolling the egg down the hill and the Mela and the Caribbean carnival and the Chinese new year which people love and get involved in.   And there is the Guild theatre, a shopping arcade entrance guides you to it, a theatre encased in seventies purpose build architecture where they program shows with acts that used to be on telly or had a success years ago in the commercial circuit which is run by the council and bleeds money, but they won’t program anything else.  I am sure that with a bit of imagination it could develop and educate an audience but it is a not very inviting space, it is a space that says: come watch the show and go!  If you want to talk about what you’ve seen do it somewhere else, and don’t hang around before the show either for I have not room for you and I am not going to offer you a coffee or a tea either. Purpose built, like much of Preston, like the wonderful brutal bus station that divides opinion.  The problem is that this places are not open to change, they  where built for a purpose and now that things have change and their use is not the same they stand there big and proud but not knowing what to do, like the strong  hands developed by many people here  who worked manufacturing cars or textiles or in the docks and are now folded  inside a pocket now the work is gone.

Sam and Sam, Chantal and me walk around the town, Millers arcade and its empty shops, the museum by the square, where we see what huge mills the town housed withtheir tall chimneys and today flat as a pancake, a ceremonial barrow and spade used to inaugurate the buildings now the only thing remaining of it.  It came and it went in no more than two generations, or four Preston guilds, as they say.

We make our way through from the guild theatre and, through a series of  doors and  a crossing tunnel bridge, into a  car park on top of the bus station and we have not been outside.

– Purpose build architecture. Chantal says .I don’t find it intimidating,this is the type of surrounding where I grew up.

I do find it a bit intimidating.

-woahh! This car park is huge! I say

-Yes there is talk of grounding the station but this car park is just too useful.  Chantal says.

We are off to “The Continental”, which is like the grown up well to do relative of Korova café.  This is the place where Fuel will present their work.  After a nice lunch we nose around the venue and have a good chat with Robin Talbot who runs and programs it.  It is a very flexible and roomy place well kit out for music.  As Robin says is in music where he can make a bigger return.  It is simpler than theatre to prepare the gig and can fit twice as many people as the sitting is not required.  Still this is the sort of space that is ideal for this city.  It feels a bit out of the way although is just a fifteen minute walk from the high street, and is the kind of place you will like to hang around. But again, it is a private enterprise with the need of making money; even so it runs an imaginative and novel program.   And the council still looses money on the Guild theatre.  Preston needs an arts centre, and people like Robin that help to run it .

Our plans to walk back through the park, Preston unlike the workers of the mills has good lungs, are negated by the rain . We will meet to see the show at the Korova.

For a couple of hours I walk around Town continuously slapped on the face by the rain. They are folding the stalls at the market. A great  Victorian covered space, no walls, ornate iron columns sporting a high roof.  It has been used as a makeshift cinema, and I think it is an ideal place to use as a venue for many types of work .

I see the permafrost of corporate outlets, betting shops, chain restaurants and pubs.

It is in the pubs and clubs where you can find a crossover audience, young and old drinking and having fun in the same venue. Like football brings generations together, so does beer. The arts has catching up to do .

Preston is a depressed town, or pressed more like it, pressed by the lack of money and lack of work, like many industrial places where the industry has gone there is a hole difficult to fill.

After changing my very wet socks I make my way to  Sam’s  tiny theatre to watch “In a land much like ours” by breathe out theatre.  It feels as I am part of the action sitting so near the actors ,who do a great job by the way. It is a drama ,a very linear narrative of a couple whose daughter is killed (it is Grimm up north).  Running alongside there is a parallel story, the fable of David and Goliath narrated by one of the three actors using a lego world in which after killing the giant David becomes one himself clumsily destroying the town he wanted to save ( it is Grimm up north)

The audience really liked it.  Having the fable of David cutting trough the main narrative gave the somehow pedestrian story another flavour.  Chatting to a couple of audience members afterwards, both in amateur dramatics, I find out that  it is precisely this David fable that had them both really confused and did not know what the meaning was. They quite frustrated about this .

The theatre offers in Preston are minimal and very mainstream giving very little space for the imagination of an audience to grow.

If was to make a piece of work in Preston I would try to make something that encouraged  the artists of the city to collaborate and share, and like in a night club will bring generations together.

What can we do about touring?

by Catherine Love

At the latest annual session of Devoted and Disgruntled, a forum for those working in theatre to air both passion and frustration, it was telling that one of the busiest groups was gathered around the question “what can we do about touring?” For those in attendance, the question was a familiar one, but the answers were not forthcoming.

As this example suggests, there is evidence of a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction – if not outright disillusionment – with the current model of touring theatre in the UK. The financial strain of taking a show on tour seems to be increasing, with companies shouldering more of the burden from venues, while relationships with the areas and audiences that the work visits are often shallow and fleeting. Something is not working.

This frustration provides the backdrop for Fuel’s New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood (NTiYN) project, an initiative that aims to begin answering just that question: what can we do about touring? The ambition behind the project is to forge better links between Fuel, the work it tours and the areas and communities it tours to. It is about a dialogue with venues and audiences, both new and existing.

“Traditional touring models have been about people dropping into each place, performing and then moving on to the next place. What we’re trying to do is build a relationship with audiences and communities.”

Kate McGrath, co-director of Fuel

While the visiting artists might vary from year to year, the aim is to create Fuel as the link, building a relationship that establishes trust on the part of audiences and encourages them to experience new work. The project also involves work eventually being commissioned specifically for particular localities, cementing the link between the cultural event and the area in which it is taking place, with Fuel sitting at the nexus of these relationships. In the company’s own words: “we want to create a following for our work: one that is sustainable, growing and ever-changing”.

This report looks back at the initial six-month research phase of NTiYN, placing the initiative within the context of the current touring landscape in the UK and sharing its key findings. The hope is that through a combination of research, reflection and shared lessons, it might be possible to move closer towards answering that opening question.

Touring Theatre in the UK

During the discussion at Devoted and Disgruntled, a number of concerns and frustrations were expressed about the ways in which touring theatre in the UK currently works. Companies and artists are perceived to be taking a greater share of the risk than regional venues; fewer resources are available, meaning that the marketing of a show and its engagement with local audiences is limited; theatregoers are booking later, contributing towards a general aversion to risk; touring theatre companies are often denied access to audience data at each of the venues they visit. The challenges are manifold.

This paints a picture that is corroborated by the experiences of a number of touring companies, producers and venue managers. A major difficulty surrounds the simple imperative to attract audiences, which for many companies is absolutely vital to the ongoing viability of their work. As Jo Crowley, producer for theatre company 1927, observes, “there’s a constant frustration about lack of audiences here”. She compares the situation in the UK with the experience of touring internationally, where the company have been met with considerably larger audiences.

It is suggested that the root of the problem lies in successfully connecting work with the right audiences. Gavin Stride, director of Farnham Maltings and one of the key forces behind South East touring consortium House, emphasises the need to “better connect the ambitions of artists with the ambitions of audiences”. This is echoed by producer Ed Collier of China Plate, who states that “touring and making for us are always completely intertwined”, going on to describe how the organisation thinks carefully about audiences right from the start of the making process.

Connected to this question of audiences is the relationship with venues, who should be much better placed to provide local audience insight for touring companies and artists. While in some cases this collaborative exchange does take place, frustration with the overall lack of cooperation from venues is a recurring sentiment. Crowley argues that “there needs to be a better conversation […] about how we work better to collect the information we need and to nurture our audience collectively”, while an Independent Theatre Council (ITC) conference in February 2013 highlighted how difficult it is for touring companies to collect data and information on their audiences from different venues.

Another concern that keeps emerging is to do with the depth of engagement that visiting artists and companies are able to achieve. A phrase that is repeated with startling regularity is “parachuting in and out”, capturing the fleeting quality of many artists’ visits to different venues. Battersea Arts Centre’s (BAC) artistic director David Jubb claims that “there’s no real level of depth of engagement”, while Crowley suggests that the length of time a production is able to spend in an area makes a huge difference. “You can see a distinct difference when you’re in a town or city for a week,” she says.

For Fuel, a further area that they feel needs addressing is the experience of touring for the artists involved. The fleeting nature of visits to venues all around the country can be both frustrating and exhausting, while the financial strain means that many artists have to hold down additional jobs, restricting the time that they can spend making their work and meeting audiences. As well as developing audiences, Fuel feel that touring needs to be made more sustainable and artistically fulfilling for the artists they work with.

The final major area of concern is, unsurprisingly, financial. As both venues and companies face cuts in their public funding, touring artists are being confronted with challenges on all sides. Venues are now less able to take risks, increasingly opting for box office splits rather than paying guarantees, while the pot of funding available for individual touring projects is shrinking. The shared impression of those at Devoted and Disgruntled was that touring is simply more expensive than it used to be.

There is also the knock-on impact of financial difficulties faced by theatregoers, who as a result are booking tickets later and displaying a decreased appetite for risk. As Caroline Dyott of English Touring Theatre (ETT) notes, “there’s certainly an awareness that audiences are being pickier about what they book and booking later so that they can take less of a risk on something”. This all creates an environment in which touring work that is perceived to be experimental or risky presents an ever growing challenge.

ACE Strategic Touring Fund

One attempt to address the current shortcomings of touring, of which there are more than can be fully addressed within the constraints of this report, is Arts Council England’s (ACE) Strategic Touring Fund. This initiative, launched in 2011, is awarding funding of £45 million between 2012 and 2015 to arts organisations offering innovative touring and audience development solutions.

The programme’s stated aims include “people across England having improved access to great art visiting their local area”, “stronger relationships forged between those involved in artistic, audience and programme development” and “a wide range of high quality work on tour”. There is also a particular emphasis on work for young people and on areas, communities or demographic groups classed as having low cultural engagement.

To date, the Strategic Touring Fund has awarded a total of £16,463,673 across seven rounds of funding, with projects spanning a wide range of art forms, target audiences and regions of the country. Alongside NTiYN, the below projects offer a snapshot of how some of the other successful applicants are using this funding to address the difficulties involved in touring.

BAC’s Collaborative Touring Consortium is transporting the theatre’s Cook Up model of new work, food, conversation and debate to six areas of low cultural engagement. This touring programme is designed to work collaboratively with the six partner venues and to generate a genuine artistic exchange, engaging with local artists as well as bringing in work developed by BAC.

 ETT’s National Touring Group is linking together a consortium of major regional receiving theatres to offer those venues more agency over the work they present and to create a network for touring high quality, large scale drama, with the aim of developing audiences’ appetite for this work.

 China Plate’s Macbeth: Blood Will Have Blood has now completed the initial phase of touring an immersive schools version of Macbeth in partnership with educational organisation Contender Charlie. This project worked with a number of hub venues around the country and brought in students from the surrounding schools, thereby establishing long-term links between education and the arts in those areas. A second phase is currently being planned.

 Paines Plough’s Small-Scale Touring Network is working to establish a connected and collaborative network of around 25 venues across England, to which the company will take regular small-scale productions alongside undertaking audience development work. The hope is that more meaningful relationships will be formed between venues, touring companies and audiences.

 New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood

 “New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood is a pilot research project run by Fuel in order to find new ways of engaging with more and more diverse audiences through touring really exciting and innovative new work.”

Louise Blackwell, co-director of Fuel

The initial six-month phase of NTiYN, funded through ACE’s Strategic Touring Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, has focused on establishing links with partner venues and developing audiences in these areas. The emphasis at this stage has been on research and exploration, with the aim of taking these findings forward into the project’s future life.

The five venues in question are The Lighthouse in Poole, The Continental in Preston, ARC in Stockton, the Lakeside Theatre in Colchester and the Malvern Theatres. Each of these venues received one or more of the five Fuel shows included in the initiative: Uninvited Guests’ Love Letters Straight From Your Heart and Make Better Please, Inua Ellams’ The 14th Tale, Will Adamsdale’s The Victorian in the Wall and Clod Ensemble’s Zero.

Alongside presenting these shows, each venue was also involved in research and audience development work carried out in partnership with a Local Engagement Specialist (LES) hired by Fuel for their knowledge of the local community. This model was designed to provide Fuel with additional networks and contacts in each of the different geographical locations, as well as supporting their desire to establish a deeper connection with the areas that they visit.

The audience development work undertaken at each of the venues by the LES spanned a wide range of activities, including workshops held by the visiting artists, engagement with local schools and universities, communication with existing arts and community networks, ticket offers and discounts, and the promotion of Fuel’s work at other arts events. Fuel has also been working with Maddy Costa of Dialogue, who ran Theatre Club events at a number of the venues. These informal post-show discussions are modelled on the format of the book club and offer an open space for anyone who has attended to share their thoughts with others.

While the key findings will draw in outcomes from all five venues, for the purposes of this report the focus has been narrowed down to two case studies: the Lighthouse in Poole and the Continental in Preston.

Case Study 1: Poole

The Lighthouse in Poole is a large arts centre, catering for a wide variety of audiences in the surrounding area. Its programme covers live music, comedy, dance, film and visual arts alongside theatre, with the building incorporating a cinema, a gallery, a large concert hall, a 669-seat theatre and a smaller studio space. It is a venue with a wide remit and competing demands on its resources, offering a necessarily diverse programme.

Fuel brought two NTiYN shows to The Lighthouse’s studio space: The 14th Tale and The Victorian in the Wall. Fuel supported these visiting productions through the work of LES Lorna Rees, who undertook a range of audience research and development activities. These included running workshops with the artists, targeting audiences at Bournemouth University with the help of newly recruited student ambassadors, forging connections with existing networks of local artists, and working closely with box office staff. While much of the work done by Fuel at The Lighthouse was successful, there were some programming challenges; the scheduling of the shows, for instance, coincided with a major outdoor arts event in the town and with the university holidays.

Fuel’s most notable successes, meanwhile, were achieved through a personal approach. Eschewing the tactic of offering free tickets in favour of adding value, Lorna explored ways of deepening audience engagement through her “Theatre Salon” model. This was successfully used for the first performance of The Victorian in the Wall, after which audience members were invited to stay behind for free drinks and nibbles and an informal Q&A with the show’s cast. This event was well attended and encouraged lively conversation with the cast, creating a much more relaxed environment than the usual rigid structure of the post-show talk. One couple said that they usually never stay for these talks as they worry it will go over their heads, but they enjoyed the Theatre Salon and displayed an interest in attending similar events in future.

Another small but particularly heartening triumph was persuading two teenage boys to attend The 14th Tale. Lorna approached the pair outside The Lighthouse just before the show, offering them free tickets and signing them up to the theatre’s student membership scheme. After seeing and enjoying the show, the two boys stayed behind to speak to Inua and to thank Lorna for the tickets. As Lorna commented in her feedback, “this is what this project does – it gives us permission, with our depth of knowledge, to make decisions and take risks and to maybe, just maybe, with two judiciously applied comps, convert two teenage boys to theatre-going”.

Case Study 2: Preston

The tiny theatre visited by Fuel in Preston makes a dramatic contrast with the expansive, multi-purpose mass of the Lighthouse in Poole. The venue is attached to the back of a pub – The Continental – a little outside the city centre. This space is programmed by They Eat Culture, a small organisation who are involved in organising cultural projects across Lancashire. The Continental itself serves a relatively broad purpose as an arts venue, hosting live music, comedy, spoken word and theatre. As the staff explained to Fuel, music and comedy tend to draw the biggest crowds, while theatre remains more of a challenge.

The only NTiYN show touring to this venue was The 14th Tale, which visited for two successive weekday nights. More difficulties were encountered in this area than in Poole, and despite the efforts of LES Chantal Oakes to bring in new audiences, attendance was relatively low. Once again, planning was an issue; Inua was unable to run a workshop in this area due to schedule clashes, while it has since been suggested that it would have been more sensible to programme one night rather than two. Other challenges included a lack of engagement between the arts scene in Preston and the University of Central Lancashire, stretched resources at They Eat Culture, some difficulties with the show’s marketing material, and the disappointing lack of interest in a theatre bus to provide transport for theatregoers.

There were, however, some successes. A relationship with local young people’s outreach organisation Soundskillz proved fruitful, with a group visit on the second night achieving good attendance. There are also a number of areas, such as the university, where definite potential has been identified, suggesting promising possibilities for the future life of the NTiYN project.

Key Findings – Building Conversations

The results of NTiYN’s attempts to engage new audiences in these first six months were largely successful, with the Audience Agency concluding that “NTiYN undoubtedly achieved significant new audiences”. According to the Audience Agency’s evaluation, at least 25% of those attending a NTiYN show were new to the venue they visited, while Fuel attracted at least 10% new audiences to every show on the tour. NTiYN was also shown to engage with some particularly hard to reach groups for the first time and the direct feedback from audiences was overwhelmingly positive.

I enjoyed the event very much! The venue is great and the effort to put ambitious performances on in Preston is much appreciated.

Audience member at The 14th Tale, The Continental

It was an amazing piece in an unusual setting. Not what I was expecting but a lovely surprise. Loved it!

Audience member at Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, Lakeside Theatre

 This was my first experience of this type of performance. I though the first few minutes came across as pretentious but was soon won over by the honesty and humour and emotion. The stories told weren’t outlandish or extraordinary but were told with grace and power.

Audience member at The 14th Tale, The Lighthouse 

Really enjoyed the show, a breath of fresh air for Malvern and just what is needed to attract a different audience.

Audience member at The Victorian in the Wall, Malvern Theatres

While these audience development results are encouraging, there were also several other outcomes from this six-month research project. As the case studies from Poole and Preston begin to suggest, there are a number of important lessons to be taken from this early phase of the scheme and carried forward as NTiYN continues to develop. While there are many different findings, these can broadly be divided into two key categories: collaboration and planning.

As already identified, one of the problems that the touring model often faces is the failure of companies, producers and venues to work together successfully. Where audience development initiatives have been most successful, there has been open and productive collaboration between Fuel, the venue and other local organisations. Equally, on the few occasions when these relations have broken down it has caused problems.

In terms of collaboration, the appointment of a suitable LES is vital, as they are able to play an essential role at the centre of the many relationships involved. The LES’s local knowledge has in many instances proved to be deeply valuable, while clear communication between the LES, the venue and the NTiYN project manager is key. One particularly successful model was that in Malvern, where an LES was paired with an employee at the venue. Malvern Theatres found this to be an extremely positive partnership, once again highlighting the value of collaboration.

The concept of providing additional support to a venue through the employment of a locally based LES was viewed very positively as a strong approach to reaching new communities and groups. The fact that this person came with their own contacts and skills and was ‘independent’ of the partner venue was also commented upon as very useful.

Audience Agency Evaluation Report

Planning, meanwhile, has emerged as a decisive factor in determining the likely success of audience development efforts. There have been a number of issues around timing, such as difficulty with scheduling workshops around artists’ other commitments and programming conflicts with other events in the area, which could in most cases be avoided with more comprehensive planning in the early stages of the project. Despite students being highlighted as a target demographic, several shows coincided with university holidays; elsewhere, there were frustrating missed opportunities, such as a comedy festival in Colchester that would have been an perfect fit with The Victorian in the Wall.

What these examples illustrate is the importance of a holistic planning process with greater lead times, working closely with programmers to eliminate any scheduling clashes and drawing up plans for audience engagement activity from the moment a project is given the green light. This is reflected in the feedback from the Audience Agency, who have recommended “taking a more informed approach to planning particularly around timescales”. However, it is unsurprising that there were some issues with planning given the considerable ambition of NTiYN and the exploratory nature of this research phase, and the intention is that these findings will inform the next stage of the project.

 A number of the NTiYN findings correspond with the experiences of other touring companies, producers and venues. Just as conversations around this first set of shows have revealed some of the potential problems with the ways in which work is being marketed to different audiences around the country, Gavin Stride emphasises the need to rethink how audiences are communicated with. He argues that more work needs to go into making companies understand that “what they might think makes their show sound esoteric and clever in their world isn’t necessarily the same language that needs to be used to get a show to an audience”. Through the research phase of NTiYN, Fuel are beginning to learn what marketing material is most likely to reach and engage audiences, with the video trailers for each of the shows proving to be particularly successful.

There is also a widely recognised need for “bespoke planning”, as David Jubb puts it, acknowledging and adapting to regional differences. This planning includes a course of action for engaging with both the receiving venue and other organisations in the area, encouraging greater collaboration. As well as more obvious ways of working together, such as sharing of audience data and getting the venue staff behind the work, this collaboration can stretch even further. Jo Crowley, for example, says that a “cross-marketing effort would be useful”, connecting arts networks across different genres to reach people who might have an interest in the work – a strategy that Fuel are beginning to develop through the strength of the LES model.

In terms of audience development, there are a number of strategies that keep reappearing in different guises. Returning to the same areas to build an audience, as Fuel intend to do, is important; Hanna Streeter, an associate producer with Paines Plough, has observed “dramatically” increased audiences in areas that the company has kept going back to. This in turn has a knock on effect for those venues’ programmes throughout the rest of the year. As Fuel and others have discovered, direct contact, conversations and word of mouth cannot be underestimated.

When we return to each of these places, we hope that people there will have made a connection and will maybe have been to see one of the shows and say ‘that’s by Fuel, I don’t know this new artist that they’re bringing, but I’m going to go because it’s a Fuel produced event’. And we hope that by having a deeper engagement with the people that live in these places that will be possible, not only for what we produce, but for the wider theatre landscape.

Louise Blackwell, co-director of Fuel

It is also important not to underestimate the gamble that companies are asking audiences to take on their work. As squeezed budgets makes the purchase of a theatre ticket a relatively significant financial decision, perhaps theatres need to find ways of minimising the perceived risk for audiences without making the work artistically conservative. This might mean remounting work that has already been successful elsewhere, as ETT are doing, or it might mean offering audiences added value with their ticket, like the Theatre Club and Theatre Salon events. And, as a number of different individuals stress, these initiatives should all be executed with the aim of building shared audiences for the future. As Caroline Dyott points out, creating a sustainable audience appetite for this work in the long term has to be the aim.

At the heart of all these tentative lessons is the need for collaboration and dialogue. That can be with and within venues, with local arts communities, with audiences, between different touring organisations around the company. Ultimately it is about people and about relationships. As well as the necessity to work together in order to make any given touring project work, the myriad issues that the UK touring model currently faced are perhaps best overcome through shared learning.

It all starts with conversation.

Sources

• Arts Council England – Strategic touring programme [http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/apply-for-funding/strategic-touring-programme/]
• Audience Agency Evaluation Report
• Devoted and Disgruntled 8 – “what can we do about touring?” [http://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/events/devoted-and-disgruntled-8/reports/what-can-we-do-about-touring/]
• Fuel [http://www.fueltheatre.com]
• New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood blog [https://newtheatreiyn.wordpress.com/]
• New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood project documentation
• Independent Theatre Council – March 2013 newsletter

 

Interviews with:

• David Jubb, artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre

• Caroline Dyott, associate producer, English Touring Theatre

• Ed Collier, co-director of China Plate

• Gavin Stride, director of Farnham Maltings

• Jo Crowley, producer, 1927

• Hanna Streeter, assistant producer, Paines Plough

This report was commissioned by Fuel as part of the New Theatre in your Neighbourhood project.