| Open Space, Open Minds (2) |
Theatre Event |
| Lucid , Chapter Studio , November 8, 2011 |
Simon Harris does a brisk summary of the rather good paper he submitted for the Arts Council of Wales on the “savants” and “water-carriers” in management. The paper is in the same series- “what we do/ funding/ investment review/debate”- as a paper by Mererid Hopwood. She makes the valid point that a good measure of cultural activity goes wholly recorded by the commissars and pay-masters. Theatre-makers are great at doing it, less good at talking about it. The small companies, who don't have fulltime marketing and communications staff, can be excused. I learn that Theatr Iolo’s “Under the Carpet” made it to Korea. Geinor Styles' play on Alfred Russell Wallace is currently in Colombia via Brazil and due soon for Singapore. It is not just the big companies winning their awards this month. The little companies, propelled by hope, debt and determination, have a lot to sing and dance about. A spirit of optimism rules. With hard times a-coming maybe large companies with established systems can do the payroll for smaller companies. A nice idea, but outsourcing carries considerable transaction cost. An existing arts company would have little clue how to price a second income source service. Just establishing who is to carry the can for error in a VAT submission would entail a legal cost that would probably outweigh any benefit. The cost of rehearsal space is daunting. Maybe a spot market in available rooms might emerge, a kind of www.late-rehearsal-space.com. Arts organisations do the arts. Yield management software, differential pricing, somehow it’s just not in their make-up. But the optimism is intoxicating. As for that elusive thing, the audience, it’s the only area where I am justified to speak because it’s me. Phil Mackenzie is in ebullient spirit. “I’m just back from Uzbekistan. Theatres there, full every night.” Yes, I say, but Tashkent alone has a population fifty percent larger than the whole of Wales. Look at the numbers. Are there areas, communities of three million, that produce an equivalent sheer quantity and diversity of performance as Wales? “Everyone asks “where is the great Welsh drama?” says Kit Lambert “but it doesn’t come out from nowhere.” “You won't see climate change on a Welsh stage” says another. “Who understands the financial crisis?” asks Louise Osborn. A lot of people do. For a start, the owners of the seventeen thousand swimming pools in Athens who keep them secret from tax gatherers who are themselves too compromised to record their existence. The supposed advantage of cities the size of Dublin, Oslo, Hartford is that they do not suffer from the social silo structure of the mega-cities. I am not so sure that theatre speaks with enough of the people all around in Cardiff. Niall Griffiths in “Real Aberystwyth” (Seren 2008) hangs out gleefully with editors and poets. On Aberystwyth’s doorstep a lot of people, geneticists, bio-informaticists, do world-beating work at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research. “A tad too boring to look at in any depth, really” says the writer. Sad. Boredom is in the subject, not the object. But maybe it is a kind of attitude that means that it is England, be it Caryl Churchill or Complicite, which thrills us theatrically with work on money, molecules or mathematics. Some among the participants have created theatre that I have seen and written about. We have common memories of actors and performances to share. Humans have invented ten thousand activities to pass their time. The Hedgehog Protection Society has a vast and enthusiastic membership. I don’t do gardening, scuba diving, antiques but I do set out at night, week in, week out, to see the work of people like those gathered at Chapter. They, their peers and their predecessors, have left me with the images and memories that have persisted for decades. They, and hundreds of their fellow professionals, give contour and content to a particular life’s choosing. I applaud them in theatres, and now at the odd army range, abandoned library and cliff top. I am a little in awe of their idealism, their sense of mission, their indefatigability. I applaud the whole lot of them. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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