The Arts Council withdrew its funding of TP back in June of last year (2010). Today, Powys County Council have decided to do the same. This means that all current members of Theatr Powys will be made redundant on April 4 of this year. A company that has provided community theatre and Theatre In Education to Powys for the past 39 years will effectively be shut down, in three weeks from now.
Tuesday March 15st 2011
To All Concerned,
The Arts Council of Wales (ACW), Investment Revue is done and dusted. Nick Capaldi, Chief Executive of ACW, supported by politicians who know little of the actual practice in mid Wales, has celebrated a tough but fair approach to future investment; one which will sustain and develop the best and most “flexible” cultural provision. Even as announcements are made it is clear that UK wide, all future public provision will be subject to a dangerous and socially catastrophic gamble.
Theatr Powys, based at the Drama Centre in Llandrindod, is one casualty of the review process. Revenue funding from ACW is to cease as of March 31st 2011. The withdrawal of funding has entirely jeopardised local authority partnership funding and has dealt the Company and its practice a fatal blow. Theatr Powys has been a pioneer in its fight to sustain this progressive partnership funding between ACW and the Powys County Council for four decades. Less than four years ago, ACW lottery funds contributed towards an almost one million pound investment in the Company’s base in Llandrindod, enabling a whole new development in the life of the Company and its community.
For some years now Theatr Powys has been unique in Wales. It has sustained a core company of actors and production staff alongside an endeavour led administrative department and a body of remarkable and committed freelance artists. Central to its practice has been forging of a theoretically informed, participatory theatre in education provision. This has been offered to every school, in Welsh and English and free at the point of delivery. It has managed a year round youth theatre provision and an annual new writing commission and community touring production for community centres, village halls, theatres and arts centres all over Powys and throughout Wales. No less crucial to its community is the vast and rich technical, costume and personnel resource. This combined resource is consistently called upon by schools, colleges, universities, community groups, and fellow theatre companies, both professional and amateur.
The Arts Council knew that in the current climate and particularly as an integral part of a local authority arts provision, there was no likelihood of Theatr Powys achieving through other or “transitionery” funding, the required levels of income to sustain its material and spiritual contribution to the community it serves. ACW is breaking a deep-rooted relationship, historically built, but consciously and constantly renewed, between artists and the participants in the community they inhabit.
The ACW decision represents the final liquidation in Wales and the almost final liquidation UK wide, of a tried, tested, sophisticated, successful and intensely humanising post war art form; that of Theatre in Education. This is an art form most knowable in the moment of engagement. Those who have witnessed it in Powys, recognise the creativity, artistry and drama involved. However, Dai Smith, the Chair of the Arts Council of Wales has claimed publicly that TIE, is outmoded. Worse, an argument has been proposed, rehearsed and developed as we write, that TIE is not art at all. This is preposterous, and the formal separation of drama, theatre and social education contained in the argument is deeply damaging. And yet, as people - keen to develop a rationale for decisions, or simply relieved to still be funded - allow this argument to gain foothold, then the ACW abandonment of such an intensely valued art form can be embraced. Worse still it may for a while even be welcomed as progressive. Inevitably the drive will be to forget the art form all together.
There is a long and authentic history, a skilled current practice and a huge future aspiration on the part of many participants here in Wales and internationally, that utterly contradicts this ill informed, ignorant and reductive view.
In our view the defining qualities of the theatre and drama practice of Theatr Powys have been:
- A steadfast commitment to a theory of knowledge and to art as a mode of knowing the world and exploring the human relationship to the world.
- An insistence that those in the community who engage with the work are co-creators and co-signers in the moment (shared practice) of meaning making.
- A deeply felt and theoretically understood insistence that in meeting the fictive context engineered through theatre and drama, the capacities of young people to engage intellectually, emotionally and actively can be united in a way rarely achieved in the course of their broader educational and cultural experiences.
- An understanding that this unity of engagement can produce the most authentic and committed struggle to image and action our material relationship to the real world; a struggle through the art form, mediated openly and honestly.
This process requires a courageous and skilled collective of individual artists. The Arts Council of Wales, up until 2010 has consistently made clear their shared belief in the value of the Company’s provision. In their own words:
Theatr Powys is a Company that operates with a high degree of artistic and intellectual integrity.
And further:
The company and its work is held in high regard as an important contributor to the continuing development of theatre in education and theatre with and for young people in Wales…
The value of Theatr Powys to the community at large and young people in particular is very evident and is testimony to the vision, hard work and commitment of all involved in the company.
ACW Theatr Powys Annual Review July 2009
A deeply rooted and integrated provision, informed by the perspectives outlined in this letter will be impossible to recreate in future. Sporadically programmed “Night Out” performances will not fill the material and spiritual void left by the disappearance of Theatr Powys and neither will the occasional live theatre event in presenting houses spaced fifty-four miles apart.
We have no illusions whatsoever. The future ACW strategy has been decreed and the rationale is in the public realm. Powys County Council will inevitably finish what the ACW has begun. More importantly, erosion of public funding to the arts will increase in momentum. There will be no re-consideration of decisions despite the future (and largely invisible to ACW) consequences.
As professionals with much direct experience of the Company’s work, deeply involved in arts provision for young people and the wider community and also responsible for the practical and theoretical education of our future arts practitioners, we wish to register our profound opposition to the engineered closure of Theatr Powys. We write on behalf of thousands of voiceless children and young people and all of those in the community of Theatr Powys, whose dismay, anger and protest is being entirely frustrated by the calm and reasoned arguments of those who support this “flexible”, future vision.
Signed
David Ian Rabey Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies UW Aberystwyth
Charmian Savill Tutor in Theatre Studies UW Aberystwyth
Roger Wooster Senior Lecturer Performing Arts UW Newport
Sera Moore Williams Playwright, Director, Teaching Fellow University of Glamorgan
Hillary Morris Head Teacher Gladestry Primary School, Powys
Tyler Keevil Novelist;
Lecturer in Creative Writing University of Gloucestershire
Chris Cooper Playwright;
Artistic Director Big Brum Theatre Company
Mary Compton Teacher; Joint Divisional Secretary Powys NUT;
Past National President NUT
David Saunders Parent, Participant; Audience Member
Campaign for Creativity in Mid Wales
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