Ask the Artist

Posted on February 5, 2014 by debdavemason
Last night I went to the first Provocation to come out of the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value – it was titled ‘Are cuts to funding the greatest threat to culture?’

Now the Commission are quite clear that they need some better working definition of ‘Culture’ but it seems to me, and certainly was implied by the panel, that when we are talking about ‘cuts to funding’ we are talking about ‘cuts to funding in the arts’ and in this context we are therefore talking about the value of arts (and how that then becomes a value to culture).

My thinking is this:

Arts are the artist’s interrogation of and response to the world around them.  This results in expression of some kind – not always a product, not always for public consumption.  It may only result in leading the artist to some new process or response.

Culture is the diffusion of these expressions into society – at the strongest level – where they are coming direct from the artist they are what we might traditionally call ‘Culture’ – exhibitions, theatrical performances, symphonies.  At their most diffuse they are in the adverts we watch, the video games we play and the memes and norms we accept as part of our society and national identity (I have a lot more to say about this but I’ll keep it brief here!).

As such the artist is an essential part of any debate about arts and culture. 

Extraordinarily given the theme of this provocation, not a single artist was represented on the panel (the project itself in terms of both Commissioners and Academics is low on any kind of creative worker).   The two rather gloomy economists pretty much suggested that the arts would just have to suck it up and hope to come out the other side of economic austerity by being ingenious and stoic.  That rather incensed me.  This was followed by some debate about funding of institutions and organisations, with interventions about private funding from the floor.  Once or twice Alan Davey from the Arts Council mentioned the need to nurture talent.  Bev Skeggs, a sociologist from Goldsmiths, spoke up for the need for Education to be addressed particularly in relation to maintaining diversity in the arts (another massive topic for another day).   But if the value of the artist was acknowledge it was in some kind of assumed or implied way or referenced as a product: ‘talent’.  This made me cross, so when it came to question time I asked my question, which was something like:

“Where is the voice of the artist in this debate, in this commission?  If we value the arts do we not by implication value the artist? The artists of this country have done far more in subsidising the arts in this country than either government or private investment.  We are the people with two jobs, paying taxes, working at a grassroots level.  On David Cameron’s (alleged) favourite CD there is a track that begins “Everything is free now, that’s what they say.  But we’re going to do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay” and this is the cultural norm in the UK.  If we are going to change that, and I think we should, then you need to give artists a voice in these debates and discussions.”

Well that’s what I think I said, I don’t have a transcript so no doubt I will be corrected.

My comment about the artists subsidising the arts raised a round of applause.  The actual question was greeted with a rather panicky silence from the panel followed by some rather unspecific answers.  I doubt anyone had thought about why there were no artists on the panel, why there was no artist represented except as an ‘arts installation’ outside the room the debate was held in (a fact which to me says something so literal about patronage and the patronising of artists that it is mind boggling that so many clever people couldn’t see it).

Alan Davey, Chief Executive of the Arts Council, was about to answer me when the debate was moved on because of time constraints.  So this morning I wrote to him and asked if he would like to make his response.  This was my letter:

“We spoke briefly last night at the Warwick Commission provocation.  I was the person who asked the question about the artist’s voice (and I should clarify that by artist I mean all those involved in creative practice: artists, dancers, musicians, actors, directors, writers).  I didn’t feel that I quite got my message across to you and that you thought I was in some way attacking you/the Arts Council.  This was certainly not my intention and I could see that you were one of the people on the panel who had some concern for those actually creating the art – rather than just institutions and organisations.

I know that the Arts Council does do valuable work to help artists access funding but my real point was about actually asking artists to take part in debates and conversations about funding and arts and culture strategy – not from a ‘give us some more money’ point of view, but to find out from them what they think needs to be done to sustain the arts in the UK during this period of ‘austerity’ (whether you believe in it or not it’s certainly real enough for the people holding the purse strings). 

It may be that if you involved the artists themselves in these discussions they would not be about ‘more’ money but how that money might be better spent to encourage a pipeline of talent that would feed into the both the cultural world generally (the psycho-social value of culture) as well as our growing commercial creative sector (the economic value of culture).  If we do not value our artists and encourage them at the grassroots then the arts scene will be dominated by art made by and for an elite of rich people and rich people’s children.  Real talent will move away from the UK and with it our dominance of the cultural economy and cultural head space of the world.

There is plenty to be said about the role of Education in this debate.  But I would again urge you to use the Arts Council as a way of engaging artists’ voices in these discussions.  Don’t just talk to the people running organisations and institutions that employ people or commission them.  The majority of artists are not on salaries, are not ‘employed’ in any real sense by an organisation, they live from commission to commission, a day’s work here, a month there.  Their views will be different from those who have buildings to maintain and employees’ jobs and welfare to consider.  You might find those views a refreshing change or you might find them an additional challenge, but I would make the plea that you at least attempt to get them heard, both by the Arts Council itself, but also by those that you, as an agency, interact with in both Government, private philanthropy and the creative industries.

If I was over-emphatic yesterday and appeared aggressive I do apologise – this is a subject I am extremely passionate about and that is sometimes hard to channel into polite conversation!”

This was his response:

“I never really got onto the involving artists bit – which I really do believe in – and we have to make sure we do it.  Only on Monday we involved some artists in looking at our approach to ‘Rebalancing Cultural Capital’ and the result was brilliant.  We were told firmly where our arguments missed the point and where we should be stronger.  I think we need to involve artists as we evolve things or we’ll be irrelevant”

Both the evolution and the involvement will be good if they happen!  I’d make another plea though.  Don’t just involve the artists you know about, that you fund, or have achieved success.  Try and talk to the ones who aren’t emerging, but who emerged and then retreated, who were full of promise but have been stalled by lack of opportunity, lack of space, lack of financial security.  There are a lot of things that artists need in order to do their work that aren’t anything to do with money – not cash money.  They need space, they need a voice, they need opportunities, they need supportive networks.  They need these to not be bound by stupid briefs and rules and regulations that tick some funder/sponsor/investor boxes.   Or provided by people who want to guide them and mould them and ‘mentor’ them into the accepted mainstream or the accepted alternatives.  Ask us! Ask us what we need.  Ask us what we think the strategy should be for supporting arts and culture in the UK, because we are the people who are going to have to make it happen and we are the people with the creativity and imagination that might find solutions you haven’t even thought of yet.   As Robert Peston pointed out – this is something that computers and robots can’t do!

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Say No to the Status Quo – how to use your vote to make change happen

Posted on October 25, 2013 by debdavemason

Step 1: Find out who is standing for election – not just the big parties who will be letter-bombing your door with leaflets… Make a list.

Step 2: Cross out anybody you would never vote for – whether the person or the party

Step 3: What’s Left?

Some parties you’ve voted for before but are now disillusioned with

Some parties you’ve considered but don’t know much about

Some independents you know nothing about

Step 4: Do some research

Find out about parties you’ve never voted for but might now consider

Find out about independent candidates and what they stand for

Step 5: Draw up a list of things you care about that are affected by Government policy – health, education, airport expansion, train fares, badgers, whatever.

Step 6: Cross check your list of what you care about with the parties and people you might consider voting for

Maybe have a scoring system – you can weight it – say 5 if they match on an issue you are really passionate about and 2 if you care about it, and 1 if it’s just something you think is an ‘ought to do’ rather than particularly emotive for you.

Step 7: You’ll either have a clear winner – that you can now vote for – in the event of a tie vote for the woman candidate, or if they are both women – toss a coin.

If you still can’t find anyone to vote for – spoil your ballot paper – be counted as disenchanted not disenfranchised – people died so you can vote.

For info on how things are run in the UK: http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/

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Show me the evidence!

Posted on October 11, 2013 by debdavemason

George and Dave may still be intent on showing us the money but I say “show me the evidence!”

In the last decade, with almost global access (and input into) the internet and its many web-based resources, we have moved towards (and continue to move towards) a culture and society based on evidence.

In the 21st Century it would be impossible for the writers of Chariots of Fire (to pick one small example) to get away with the number of historical inaccuracies it contains and which probably allow it to be a ‘better story’.  Any real-life drama can be checked against documentary evidence and if it ignores the truth then there will be a backlash (Argo/Ben Affleck).

There should be little room then, you would think, for woolly, opinion based, emotional policies and decisions in business and politics.

Alas no.  Whilst we increasingly demand that our friends and colleagues back up their casual assertions with ‘proofs’ (often drawn from that miracle of the modern world Wikipedia), we do not seem to put the same onus on government when it comes to policy.

Why not?

Well, I would put forward (the only semi-evidence based) opinion that successive UK governments have failed to see the increasing importance of data gathering if they are to create policies that address (and utilise) the increasing complexities of the world we live in.

SIC codes (Standard Industrial Classification) which the government uses to analyse growth in different areas of the economy have not been significantly revised since the 1940s.  How can you know which sectors to prioritise and where government investment and incentives should go for maximum effect – if you don’t have an accurate picture of what’s going on?

Health data is currently inadequate to the task of needs based commissioning.  And yet if we were able to implement commissioning based on what was needed now and looking at evidence based trends for the future we could probably achieve massive efficiency savings for the NHS.  The catastrophic and expensive failure of the NHS National Programme for IT is helping to hold progress back.  Everyone is scared of making another massive mistake.  And yet we now have technology that is more connectable and work could be done at least at local level to redress the data gap.

I’m happy to admit that I don’t have any hard evidence or data to support my hunch that not having the right data might actually be useful to politicians.  An incomplete picture is more capable of interpretation than a complete one.

Gathering data is a tedious business, for those who set out to do so.  And for us, the public, endlessly filling out monitoring forms and surveys. But I think we must bit the bullet and ask for MORE!

I’m not advocating a Big Brother exercise here.  The data can be anonymous and/or anonymised.  Before we challenge the right of government to ask for more details – to help it plan better our services, economic growth and the governance of the country – we might stop and think about the data we regularly give away for a free to purely commercial organisations – such as supermarkets and marketeers – just in return for a few pence off our shopping or a free gift opportunity.

We must demand and encourage proper evidence based spending by our councils and CCGs.  They should be pulling data from all available sources – understanding it through a ‘sticky note’ process of querying it with those putting it together and using it to commit our limited resources, whether manpower or budget, to the areas that have greatest need and greatest benefit.

We must have an economic programme that places emphasis on sectors of the economy according to their proportionate value to the future prosperity of the country – not based on an emotional attachment to one type of business or another – manufacturing giving way to financial services as the favoured child – whilst creative industries – as profitable to the GDP as finance – fights on despite lack of real government investment.

You rarely here any pundit – even a creative one – complaining that the creative industries will up-sticks and leave the UK due to some new economic policy produced by the Government and yet were they do to so the impact would be enormous.  Even the so called ‘subsidised’ sector might be better called ‘not for profit’ – and even then often turns a profit through other spin off vehicles.  Those ‘subsidies’ and ‘grants’ should be seen as investments – ones that often produce a good financial return directly to the tax-payer and where they do not provide investment in the talent pool that the Creative Industries use to leverage billions of pounds of GDP.  Returns on tax payer investment in the arts are often greater in terms of tax revenue than the original grant – can the same be said of our subsidised banks?

Sense about Science has an ‘Ask for Evidence’ campaign – I think this should be broadened to all tax payer spending, all government planning and policy:

Ask for evidence from our council about why and how they are spending your money

Ask for evidence from your MP about the reasoning behind policies that affect you

Ask for evidence from government (and any political party you might vote into government) for their policies

And then check that evidence against what you know, and what you can find out – after all the evidence is out there waiting to be found.

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Punishing the Unloved

Posted on October 2, 2013 by debdavemason

Yeah, well, thanks Dave!

I’d like to be married.  Maybe I’ll still get a chance at it.  As I head over the hill of 50 though it is statistically unlikely.  Sadly, I just haven’t found love.  I’d like to say it wasn’t my fault but I have had feedback:

“too fat”

“too loud”

“too old”

“too opinionated”

So maybe, I am somewhat to blame.  But you see I didn’t want to compromise. Not on love.  After all, I’m not a politician, so compromise isn’t in my nature.

Instead I’ve diverted my energies (that might otherwise have been directed at my partner and my children should I have been so blessed) into my career, into volunteering, into creating things and generally into doing my best to help make the world a better place.  Which would benefit not just me, my family and friends, but also all those happily married family types as well.

And yet, for some reason, the government thinks I should be punished for this.  Punished for being unloved.  I’ll be paying more in tax than those happy couples who have officially joined themselves together.  Who enjoy the long term security of a loving home and get all the emotional benefits of marriage.  Now they get extra money for it too.

Someone will have to fund that tax rebate – once again it will be me – working, single, healthy.  Because we’re the people who pay in: taxes, voluntary effort, support and care, and don’t take out.

Thanks Mr Cameron, thanks a bunch.

 

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Challenges for the Arts – response to Maria Miller (et al)

Posted on April 26, 2013 by debdavemason

Maria Miller has made her speech and many have responded, mostly we are rehearsing the old arguments, couched in terms that Government can understand.  I am going on Monday to a meeting of the movement ‘What Next’ which seeks to look at what happens to the arts now and in the future.  In preparation for that meeting I wanted to clarify what I thought were the key issues we should, as arts practitioners and supporters, focus on.  So here are my thoughts – comments are very welcome (although trolling not so much so) as creative input is really what it’s all about.

Education

Arts education has been demoted by successive governments to either an ‘add-on’ subject or only valued as vocational training.

We need proper arts education pre-exam choice in order that all pupils understand the value of arts for themselves – creative thinking and engagement rather than creation of products, or development of specific skills, should be the aim of any pre-exam curriculum.

Examinations – all pupils should be able to select at least two arts subjects for both GCSE and A levels – there should not be restrictions on what people choose.  More focus should be given in the arts curricula to understanding the basis of art and creative thinking than demonstrating specific skills – vocational training has a place in education but not in academic examinations.

Vocational training – more value should be given to vocational training in the arts so that it can be a truly parallel stream for those who prefer the practical to the academic – conflating the two has done no favours to anyone.

Degrees and Research – funding for degrees and research should be reinstated –more needs to be done to encourage existing arts funders to fund scholarships, bursaries and fellowships in the arts to strengthen the academic basis.

Intellectual Property rights

The premise on which the Government is pushing through open access publishing should ring warning bells all over the arts world.

That premise is that when research has been funded from tax payers’ money the tax payer should get free and open access to the published research and be able to use the information contained therein on a Commons licence basis – only being required to attribute it to the original source.  This is a strange precedent to set and one that I believe the Government has not thought through.  Does that mean that anything funded by tax payers’ money should be free?  Are the rights to plays developed with Arts Council money now ours as tax-payers rather than the authors?  Let us be vigilant about the wording of any funding contracts.

More importantly this sends avery clear message to the public about their rights to access and use this information. This reinforces what we are already seeing, that the easy accessibility of images, writing, video, music via the internet creates in people the idea that everything is free and theirs for the taking.  I know of quite responsible law-abiding people who think that if they can download an audio book from a library cd then why not? They would, of course, think it crazy to take the same book in paper form and have it photocopied, and would never dream of actually stealing a library book.  However, because it is so easy, convenient (and untraceable) they don’t see it as theft – it does not remove the object from use by other people, they simply get a free copy.

Whilst loss of library income isn’t going to cause many publishers sleepless nights – the loss of income in the music and cinema/dvd industries is much more significant and more needs to be done to educate the public about IP and copyright – right from the point at which children start using computers.

Funding for the Arts

I have put this last, because education and IP tend to get ignored under a flood of highly emotive comment around funding.  I just think that if there was better arts education and better understanding of IP there might also be better understanding of the debate around arts funding.

Looking at the comments by Telegraph readers on Nick Hytner’s response to Maria Miller is interesting!  It is clear that our main challenge is changing not just the minds of those holding the purse strings but those voting for them and that is a challenge indeed!

The mechanisms of arts funding have changed little in the last 50 or so years, the Government funds some things – including big festivals, national events and some institutions, private philanthropy and corporate sponsors fund other things or part fund with the Government, and commercial organisations do manage to make a profit and self-fund other things.

What has changed in those years, and particularly since the late 80s/90s is the idea of why the Government should put money into the arts.  No Government money should ever be spent without demonstrable benefit to the people of the country of that Government – that’s a pretty basic democratic ideal – the problem comes in the way in which we define ‘benefit’.

In the past that benefit from the arts could be seen as the psycho-social benefit that arts bring to the individual, to communities and to the nation as a whole (for example the Festival of Britain or the Cultural Olympiad) – that psycho-social benefit could be seen as enough in itself – it did not have to relate back to economic benefit or a balance sheet of pounds expended versus pounds made/saved in other areas.  Adding to the ‘good’ of the nation was enough.

Since Thatcherism and the increasing immersion of not just the UK but the world into a Capitalist Reality all human interactions are becoming transactional.  Everything has a value in relation to everything else and fundamentally that value will be able to be defined economically and monetarily.  Because this has become a normalised way of thinking about the world around us, arts professionals have been forced to adopt this way of ‘thinking’ when dealing with government and commercial funders in order to ‘speak their language’ – many of us don’t believe in this but if the majority of the people we are presenting our arguments to do, then we must argue on this basis.  Our arguments are still strong – as demonstrated by many commentators on Maria Miller’s recent speech.  The problem is that arguing on this basis endorses the commercialisation of arts.  It also leads to the question  ‘if the non-profit making sector is supporting the profit-making sector, how come the latter isn’t putting more back into the arts?’ – which is whole different can of beans.

I think we need to find ways of formulating the case for the arts that don’t pander to an economic value system but demonstrate more clearly that the arts can help to create a new more sustainable UK, where wellbeing, happiness and social cohesion are the most important indicators of the country’s standing in the world rather than just a better balance sheet.

The government (and politicians generally – I am not excluding the opposition from any of the remarks above as the previous government was equally culpable) has a vested interest in not promoting the arts – certainly not as something that engages people in creative thinking above simple consumption.  With creative thinking we might be able to find a better way to run this country and a better way to create a sustainable economy (for just one example see Tim Jackson’s excellent book ‘Prosperity without Growth’) – we might create citizens who question and challenge the status quo and who ask for more than our current political system gives.  We might demand more than zombie politics and zombie economics.  Now why would any government want to support that?  Demoting arts education and cutting arts funding are politically driven acts – this could not have been made clearer than the recent egregious spending of £3.5m on the hagiography of Margaret Thatcher: “No money for the arts, but we do have money to spend on our own propaganda” – and let’s not just blame the Tories for that because the Labour front bench and past Prime Ministers were hardly standing up and protesting about it – they too have bought into the monetary thinking so let’s not kid ourselves that a change of Government will solve all ills.

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O Tempora O Mores

Posted on April 11, 2013 by debdavemason

In 1974 I was eleven.  To be honest I enjoyed the three-day week, its regular power-cuts, the romance of doing homework by candle-light (I was a romantic child, who loved the books of Frances Hodgson Burnett), I appreciated that we were fortunate to have a gas fire and a gas stove so that we could stay warm and have hot food and drink – I probably didn’t give a thought to those who were less fortunate.

I grew up in a family where socialism (or perhaps more accurately welfare-state-ism) was a given and it was important to be a ‘good citizen’ and have the right ethics.

I don’t think my father ever voted conservative in his life, but my mother confessed to voting for Margaret Thatcher in that first critical election that brought her to power.  The reason she did so was because the old-man politics of Heath and Wilson and Callaghan had truly brought the country to its knees.  Thatcher was something new and something different and something definite.  She absolutely had the courage of her convictions – and even if you didn’t agree with any of her convictions you had to give her something for bravery and integrity.  By the time I was 18 and ready to vote and the Conservative government were well under the spell of ‘Thatcherism’ everyone in our family thought differently (except my father who was by then dead).

At University it was fashionable to demonise her, and not too difficult to put every government decision on her head – I went on an anti-thatcher demo, no doubt signed a few petitions, felt equivocal about the Falklands conflict, and voted Labour at my first chance.

Moving to London in the mid-80s, and despite a rather Champagne swillingly pointless job in advertising, I still ‘hated’ Thatcher – did I have any alternatives to her policies? No. What I had was that simple, easy, peer-group led antipathy that does nothing for real politics and everything to create the divided world we are now in.  I didn’t know that at the time, and also didn’t see coming with New Labour the merging of opposing ideologies into the grey gloopy mess that would make them electable.  I just saw my ‘team’ winning.   I now despair of the incessantly confrontational nature of party politics, the endless point scoring at PMQs which makes both leaders look like petulant schoolboys (and is surely part of what puts women off politics – who wants to work with a lot of antagonistic adolescents who live to score points?).

I helped to create this situation, with my Thatcher-hating, my unquestioning, Labour-must-win voting (without actually checking what their manifesto contained).  Others helped to create the conditions in which Thatcherism flourished – both those who endorsed it, who grabbed everything available with both hands (cheap council houses, shares in once national companies, bonuses, pay rises the spoils of capitalism) as well as those who protested – our rhetoric ramping up the divisions.  The people who really helped to keep the legacy going were those in politics, on pretty much all sides (except the extreme nationalists), who also didn’t come up with alternatives, just re-packaged old policies with a new ‘spin’.  I thought that all those labour and liberal politicians being so polite in their tributes to Thatcher were being hypocritical, but on reflection they are genuine, they bought into Thatcherism, spun it round and put a new face on it.  It made them as politicians.  The Lady gets the last laugh, because There Is No Alternative.  Well not right now.

Maybe in all this reflection on her death, maybe in the showing of the true colours of our current crop of politicians, something will come out of it, a realisation that nothing has changed very much since she walked out of the door of No. 10 into retirement.  We don’t need to let this divide us.  Right now the difference between them and us, is that most of us are us – struggling with austerity whether in work or out, seeing the welfare state on the verge of collapse and seeing that actually we do care, the ‘them’ now is a few people at either end of the spectrum – ‘them’ is the extreme; the untouchable rich and the untouchables (the problem families, the voluntary tramps, the political extremists).

As we could have done in all the General Elections since Thatcher came to power, we have the power to make a difference and to demand an alternative.  We have about two years, so the clock is ticking.  Don’t put all the blame on Margaret Thatcher, we all need to take a little bit of it for ourselves, and do a little bit to make things right.

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Les Miserables and Zombies

Posted on February 23, 2013 by debdavemason

A lot of people have seen Les Miserables the musical, now a lot of people have seen Les Miserables the film, and some, like me, will also have attempted Victor Hugo’s mammoth novel.  I was heartened to read that even Tom Hooper, the director of the film version, didn’t manage to read every word! Like me, he found some of the digressions into things like convents (why they aren’t a good thing) and a full blow, by blow description of the Battle of Waterloo (which happens before the action of the novel and only has a small minor incident to add to the plot),a few thousand words too far.

However, some of the digressions are more material to the subject of the book:

Hugo deals with the horrors of being poor, of being an outcast in an unremittingly unforgiving system – Fantine falls foul of this and Jean Valjean (eventually) triumphs over it – but only by becoming part of that system.  The character of Marius is more interesting.  In some of his interviews about the part, Eddie Redmayne has pointed out that the character of Marius is not quite as straightforward as the original musical version suggests.  In the film there has been the opportunity to bring in a bit more of the original story.  In this Marius is the grandchild of a bourgeois grandee, he breaks away from his family (and all the comforts associated with it) to join the Revolution and to live as a ‘common person’.  However he falls in love with Cossette (who has gone on the opposite journey from impoverished urchin to well off bourgeoise maiden) and in marrying her returns to the ‘class’ he came from.

One of the chapters that readers of Hugo’s novel might be tempted to skip is a long disquisition on the Bourgeoisie.  I found it fascinating, echoing as it did my earlier blog posting about Zombie-Citizens.  In Hugo’s description of the bourgeois grandfather of Marius he paints a picture of high conservatism, of money and acceptance by one’s peers being of greater value than love or free-thought.  That do be exceptional is to be an outcast.  That everything must be in moderation and everything must support the status-quo (assuming that the status-quo is one that supports high conservatism and the rights of the bourgeois).  Although in Hugo’s time this related to a very specific class of people, he does show later in the novel the people of Paris shutting up their shutters against the revolutionaries and refusing them aid.  These are not so much the Haute but the common bourgeoisie – equally keen not to become embroiled in anything outside the realm of their day to day lives, equally keen to preserve what they have, rather than explore what they might have.  This is where the parallel lies with our own society today.

Few of the ancient class divisions remain in British society – but that does not mean there are no divisions.  There are workers – the huge majority of the population work and the scale on which they are paid for that work divides us.  Again the majority ‘get along’ and the minority live high (but often work hard for it).  There is an even smaller number of actual aristocrats still living off their estates and investments.  However, we no longer accord power to lineage – only to money and means of making it.  There is also a minority who don’t work, who live off government handouts – most of these fall in and out of the worker category on a regular basis, a minority (probably as small as the aristocrats) will never work.

So the majority is us – the workers – scraping along – some more comfortably than others.  And the majority of this majority are in essence bourgeois – zombie citizens who take no interest and make no effort unless it directly relates to threats to their own comfort and aspirations (for a larger house to accommodate their two children, or a bigger, faster car).  They take no interest either in society as a whole, or even in the smaller community of the towns or areas they live in – unless again whatever changes proposed adversely effect their own lives.  They are not interested in politics, the environment (although they may reluctantly recycle as they need to fit in) or inequalities that affect other people.

The minority of the workers, with a few of the non-workers and quite possibly a few of the aristocrats and even the high-living-workers – will care – will seek to actively change things for the better, but how can they ever succeed?  How could the revolution of Les Miserables ever have hoped to succeed?  Not just outnumbered by the forces of the government but also outnumbered by the forces of indifference.  The answer then, for any revolution – whether of government or simply (more importantly) of thought – to succeed – is to activate the zombies – to cure them of their zombie-dom and to build the group of active citizens from minority to majority.

But if they are not interested in taking part how can we do this?  Won’t we always be preaching to the converted with our protest marches, our documentaries, our occupations?  On the whole yes.  Or the zombies will merely spectate, shaking their heads (or nodding them) but not taking part.  So we need to reach them through something they do take part in – culture – low or high – it is consumed, it is part of ‘normal’ behaviour, it insidiously affects the psyche and the imagination – no wonder our current government is trying to take it right off the menu!

We need to fight (fellow revolutionaries) to keep culture alive and kicking and relevant – keep it working to subliminally convert the zombie citizen to the active citizen.

I’ve set up the Possible Theatre Collective to do this – what are you doing?

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A manifesto for a reimagined world

Posted on June 30, 2012 by debdavemason

There are many things wrong with the world, many ways in which it could be improved and we can only all do our bit to bring about the changes that might make those improvements.

I can do small things to help the world as a whole, recycle, waste less, sign petitions, protest against injustice and highlight wrongs.  I can pay my taxes and abide by the law and be a good citizen and offer my time to others.  I can try to be patient and I can try to be kind.  But the impact from these small things may join with others and make bigger impacts than any of us can know.

But can I make a bigger difference? Can any of us? I think so, but we need to stick with what we have the talents for – I’m not the person best suited for sorting out banking regulation or providing emergency healthcare in war zones – I don’t have the skills.  What I can do is address the ongoing inequalities of the society that I actually live in, here in the UK and I can do this through creative work – particularly in the theatre, but in other areas of the arts too.

Culture plays a vital part in the way in which we see the world.  It is particularly vital in the interpretation of the past, without the imaginative interpretation of writers, artists and film-makers many important events would be lost in dusty archives, unstudied by future generations.  For example, our ‘historical’ understanding of people like Cleopatra or Henry V has been for many centuries almost entirely based on Shakespeare’s dramatic portrayals; portrayals that history might not support.  Inevitably, in Europe at least, our culture reflects the long dominance of the white male on history.  With each representation of this historical fact the imagination of a generation is focussed on the possibilities of what a white male may achieve – perhaps inspired by this to their own acts of history.  But the audience for such imaginings is no longer predominantly white male – it is more than half female – and in a cultural centre such as London – almost certainly contains a large proportion of different ethnicities.   How do they interpret these imaginings?  Do they spur them to action, to revolution – or to a complacent acceptance that such things are ‘not for them’ – perhaps none of these  a conscious choice.**

What might happen then if we reimagine both the existing cultural treasures and new works as a way of envisaging a better, fairer future, rather than reiterating the old unfair, unequal past?

If we present (as I have done) a modern version of Julius Caesar where any character can be male, or female.  Where the dominant political figures are at least equally male and female, where both ‘good’ characters and ‘bad’ are equally male and female we can bring the play into the modern world – it is not inconceivable that such a political landscape should exist – it just doesn’t happen to exist in the UK at the moment .

Through The Possible Theatre Company* I hope to create works that reimagine our cultural icons and through them our historical past, in order to imagine a better and fairer future.

The phrase “black swan” was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility deriving from an assumption that all swans be white because no-one had ever recorded seeing a swan of any other colour.  However once the black swan, native to Australia was discovered, the phrase changed to denote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. By seeing the thing itself – the proof of its existence – even those who had not, could begin to imagine that it was a reality.  By presenting to an audience a vividly realised world of equality and diversity, the audience may begin to imagine that this can also be made real in their own world.

Wikipedia suggests that you may determine a ‘Black Swan’ event thus:

-The event is a surprise (to the observer).

-The event has a major impact.

-After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data was available but unaccounted for in risk mitigation programs. The same is true for the personal perception by individuals.

This is the kind of theatre I want to make – surprising, impactful and leaving the audience with the feeling that this is how things have been and might be – that this is all possible.

*This doesn’t exist yet, but here I imagine that it does – perhaps it will come to be real – if you would like to help it into existence through funds, voluntary effort or other assistance please do get in touch with me at thePossibleTC@gmail.com

** I wrote this in 2012 at the beginning of my cultural activism journey. I now realise that what I have written here is a kind of passive (unintentional) racism. Thanks to colleagues in the What Next? movement, Women’s Equality Party and many random strangers I now (in 2021) think quite differently about diversity in the cultural sector.

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Of Men and Fringe (yes it’s NOT alliterative)

Posted on May 28, 2012 by debdavemason

For the last two weeks most of my spare time has been taken up with Bits of Obits, a new writing mini-season featuring pieces inspired by obituaries.  I got involved because @bitsofobits and I mutually followed each other within about 5 minutes.  I love obituaries so having found out more about them I asked if I could be considered as one of the directors for one of the pieces.  Happily they agreed.

The piece I got fell into that category of 10 minute play that is ‘character’ rather than ‘plot’ or ‘joke’.  I discovered that it had in fact been taken from a number of scenes in a longer work – which probably explained the lack of the through line, but the better development of character.  For a piece like this to survive, not to say, stand out, in an evening of 5 or 6 very different works, it would need some really fine acting, and a little bit of directorial manipulation.  I contacted my A team, the actress I asked to play a 7ft tall Spanish ghost (she’s not 7ft, not Spanish, not in fact dead) agreed with alacrity – adding that she was keen to practice her Spanish accent.  The actor I asked to play the writer on a journey of self-discovery was more reluctant, couldn’t see what was in it for his career, wasn’t interested in doing fringe anymore, and I pretty much had to beg him to take part as a favour to me.

Now I’m the kind of actress who will leap at virtually any opportunity because I just love doing it, on the other hand I can see where my male friend was coming from.  How much would he really get out of the experience (apart from good karma for doing me a favour)?  Yes, he gets a chance to ‘practice’ his acting and keep his hand in, but even though the event was a sell out, it didn’t provide enormous exposure to a lot of people, and I don’t know how many ‘industry’ people came along – or whether they were more on the literary rather than casting side.  I argued that it would put him in front of a number of directors.  But on the other hand they would be, like me, directors who were working mainly in the fringe or smaller venues, he’s looking for a move to the big time, or to be precise, Hollywood.  Certainly there was no money to be had, and some expenses to be defrayed – so financial gain was never on the cards.  Me, I did it because I thought it was a good idea, because I want to direct new writing and this gave me a credit in that area, because I liked the people organising it, because it was fun.

Now I’ve titled this piece ‘Of Men and Fringe’ and combined the two, but splitting off the first, in conversation with the producer (and director of many pieces) of Bits of Obits we agreed that on the whole female actors were more likely to be enthusiastic about taking part – pretty much in anything, whether its auditioning for fringe plays, taking part in free workshops, paying for classes, there will always be a huge number of women outnumbering men.  Now of course as far as casting goes, this is because there are so often a huge number of men’s parts outnumbering women’s parts.  This is particularly true on the fringe where there is a reliance on older out of copyright works where men often dominate, but also, sadly, in new writing.  We found we had common cause in trying to redress this, from my point of view in creatively casting the classics, but also in encouraging writing that provided good parts for women.

Many, not very good, male actors get cast in fringe plays because ‘there was noone else and I guess we can work round the stutter, physical awkwardness, inpenetrable accent’, whilst brilliant female actresses end up being judged on ‘too tall, not sure about the freckles, was really thinking blonde not brunette’, because the choice is there for the director to make.

Yet when it comes to classes and workshops women always dominate.  I have never been to any theatre class or workshop where men outnumbered women, in fact most of them are either all women, or at best, have one or two men.  So the not very good men are feeling self-satisfied because they keep getting cast, whilst the women are constantly improving and learning, trying to find that elusive USP.

I recently attended a free workshop from the Perdekamp Emotion al Method – two and a half hours, no sales pitch, just a very honest introduction to their work.  There was one man – he was a journalist with no interest in acting, but was covering it for a film magazine.  To give him his due he joined in with an open mind despite having no background in acting at all.  Another man turned up just before the start, but it turned out he was looking to collect something from the office next door.  Over an hour into the workshop a third man arrived. He walked in, sat down, then asked (interrupting what was going on) ‘Is this what the workshop is like, is this what the whole workshop will be like’ – given his 30 second appraisal time, one hour into the workshop, you’d have to say, ‘hard to say’ but the practitioner leading the workshop said ‘yes, most of it will be like this’, to which the man said ‘I don’t think it’s for me then’ – rather than simply politely leaving, he then marched across the room and into the cupboard (mistaking it for the loo to my internal schandenfreudic delight), then went into the loo, washed his hands and left.

If more people read this blog, there would probably be a slew of comments suggesting I was sexist if I suggest that this is typical behaviour for a male actor – but sadly it is.  Not every male actor of course, but a large proportion seem to think that being in demand is the same as being good and that being good means not having to be polite, or show up on time, or do the work if you don’t feel like it.  I’d just say ‘show some respect’.

So that takes me to the Fringe, where men are in demand and women are cannon-fodder.  Why do we persist.  Well yes, we’ve all read David Mamet’s ‘Truth and Lies’ – the bit where he says he doesn’t understand why actors take classes when they could just ‘put on a play right here’.  I’m guessing that the latter came under the ‘lies’ bit of the title or Mamet isn’t living in the real world, because actually ‘putting on a play right here’ is a huge undertaking that is likely to cost you more money than you have, even if you are just the actor – no pay, rehearsals interfering with your day job (that pays the rent), travel costs – not reimbursed,   nagging all your friends to come in the hopes that tickets sold might even equate to actual profit share.  The problem is, as the producer undoubtedly knows at the outset, that profit share isn’t going to happen, because profit isn’t going to happen.

Here’s the math:

Theatre has 58 seats

It costs £1400 to hire for a week – 6 shows – provides a bit of lighting and some marketing support.

You sell out all 6 shows = £12 a ticket – you’ve got £4176 – so a surplus of £2776

But you printed some flyers – say £100

You hired some rehearsal space for a couple of weeks – say £500

You needed some set/props/costumes – say £200

You now have £2,000 with which to pay your actors for 3 weeks work, your technicians for   10 days, and if you were hoping to give up your own day job you’d better think about paying yourself as well.  So even if there are only 4 of you – Director, Actor, Stage Manager, Lighting Operator – that’ll be a bit less than £200 a week if you’re lucky and no other expenses come along.

And OK you can run it for maybe another 3 or 4 weeks – but then the chance of it selling out for 4 weeks is quite low – so let’s say you average 50% capacity and then you actually end up with a bigger loss and less money per week for the actors and yourself.  So really fringe is a lose/lose situation, financially at least.

In most Actors/Directors/Writers’ heads it is a ‘springboard’ to getting seen, getting work, getting reviewed – at the very base, just getting a credit to put on Spotlight this year.  But, in London, where there are 100s of fringe productions, that spreads the ‘influencers’ a bit thin – for the same outlay writers/directors could probably just take a couple of influential people out for a very expensive lunch and pitch to them face to face!  But the actors do need to be seen actually acting, and that’s why fringe survives – it can’t make money but maybe once in a while someone gets a lucky break.  I think as long as that the actors aren’t under any illusion that this is any more likely that winning the Euromillions then that is fine – but to those producers ‘selling’ their shows to actors as ‘opportunities’ I’d say, maybe rein it in a bit and tell the truth and lets be honest about why we are doing this and what that means.  The line between amateur and professional is very faint out there in the edges of the fringe.  An amateur – as the name implies – does it for love, a professional for money.

My grandmother always used to insist that at tea-time you had to have a piece of bread and butter before you could have cake* – the theatre world rather sees it like that for actors – but it used to be that bread and butter was rep, and cake was West-End/film/tv, now we just have the crumbs of the fringe and cake is being paid less an hour than that day-job in the call-centre.

*my grandmother was born in the 19th century and the theory was that you would be full after eating the bread and butter and not eat the cake.  This did not work on either my sister or myself and might account for the fact that all our family tend towards fat!

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Engaged or manipulated – you decide… Or do you?

Posted on May 3, 2012 by debdavemason

This week I have been to two very interesting theatrical experiences.  The first on Tuesday was at the Royal Court.   It was a traditional format, realistic play set in some nice box sets on a proscenium arch stage.   If it hadn’t been for the cultural references it could have been written anytime from about 1930 onwards.  So why was it so brilliant, why did it hold its audience in thrall – and we were – the packed house was clearly gripped for the whole 3 hour experience – but why?  Well it was written by the very talented Mike Bartlett and acted with passion and precision by the cast, so that helps.

Having only seen two other Mike Bartlett plays – ‘Earthquakes in London’ and ’13’ I was expecting it to be political – to have some kind of question or message.  But I am still pondering what that was… Perhaps ‘the baby-boomer generation destroyed the world’ .. ‘you never had it so good mum and dad, we never had it so bad’… ‘selfish is as selfish does’?

I don’t know but I keep thinking about it – it still has me gripped, engaged and wishing it had had a couple more acts – I’d have happily sat and watched till midnight.

The second piece of theatre I went to see deliberately set out to engage the audience, to debate with them, to quite literally and physically interact with them.  This was Uninvited Guests ‘Make Better Please’ at BAC.

I had booked to go and see it with someone I am working on an interactive/audience engagement writing project with.  Both of us are really interested in how audience engagement and politically engendered arts might actually make a difference – might indeed ‘make better please’.  So we turned up yesterday very keen to find out more and to take part fully.

After the show we sat down and discussed what we thought we had experienced, whether we understood what Univited Guests had hoped for us to understand – what had been their intended outcomes in creating the piece.

Clearly they wanted us, the audience to be part of it.  The evening started with the audience divided into 4 groups around a tea table piled high with the day’s newspapers.  We were asked to help ourselves to tea and browse the papers for stories that upset, shocked or angered us – ‘bad news stories’.  When we found one we were to write just the headline on a piece of paper (provided) and keep hold of it.  We then went round our table and read out our headlines and explained a bit about the story.  We were then asked to choose one story to have a further debate on.  Eventually someone came round and gathered up our written out headlines and we were asked to sit in a circle and nominate one person to tell the rest of the groups about the story we selected.  We chose the ‘Ugly women shouldn’t be on TV’ story, there was also the story about two girls jumping off a bridge, two relating to the increasing divisions of society and the increase in extremism, one of which focussed specifically on the French Elections.

The ‘actors’ then came into play – they told people that they were characters from these stories – except that these weren’t our stories but some others they had chosen, and then got us to ‘imagine’ these stories.  For me this just didn’t work, the stories felt imposed, it felt like I was in some kind of forum theatre training exercise, that the audience were being manipulated rather than engaged with.  They then went on to tell us that they were certain  people from ‘our stories’ – except again they chose rather blatant ‘topical’ figures – Cameron and Hunt, Boris and Ken, that no-one in the room seemed to have identified except the actors themselves – we had to put questions to them.  We enjoyed this.  But not the fact that they didn’t answer them.  We were engaging with them – but were they with us?  Then it all kicked off and became a bit 1960s/70s New York Art Scene – a lot of noise, a giant paper phallus, masks for the dead, more exciting, a bit disorientating. However, slightly disconcertingly, one of the things that got banished in this quasi-shamanistic section was ‘ugly women on tv’ – not quite our point in fact!

Finally the curtains were pulled back the windows opened and light and air let in.  The actress turned and told us a happy story about May Day and her wedding anniversary.  We were invited to reflect.  Invited to think about a happy story from the news and then, when we were ‘moved’ to do so, to tell it to the group – Quaker meeting style.  Interestingly  only a very few stories were from the press (and mostly about sport), but people happily shared a good moment or a good thing for their lives.  It was a cathartic thing – probably the most genuine thing about the whole evening – one woman was actually in tears having told us that her good thing was ‘I’m proud of my daughter’, a man sat smiling so happily having announced ‘I have fallen in love’.

But what did it mean, what was the point.  The thing I took away from it was that whilst we can find plenty in the media and in politics and in society to be upset and angry about, it is the small things in our own lives that make us happy.  That we are turning inward and away from politics and ‘society’ to provide us with anything positive, we find it only in our own lives and our micro-societies – a lot of the good things offered were random acts of kindness in this big City of ours.

Although I think (perhaps I’m wrong) that the intention of Univited Guests was to genuinely engage with the audience, to help us psychologically rid ourselves of the bad, what in fact happened (for me at least) was a mirroring of what they sought to anlayse.  The facilitators  of each group took notes of our discussions, these notes then made up graffiti on the walls, which the actors used as jumping off points and inspirations.  But the notes were distilled, unthought through, not necessarily representative of the views of the group, nor of the depth of feeling about one topic over another.  In the case of our group they completely reversed the thing we were upset about – not that there are ‘ugly women on tv’ – but that people should think this is a bad thing and call for them to be removed or have make-overs.  Although we shared our choices with the actors – they didn’t seem always to listen to them – they continued to use stories that they wanted to use rather than giving more weight to what we had given them.  To me this was akin to the politicians saying that they had listened to the nation about the NHS (for example) and then doing the opposite of what everyone was saying – but insisting all the while that they had ‘listened’.  It is also akin to the way in which the media tells us what stories we are interested in – ‘The Nation is up in arms about this…’ – actually it would seem that we are not! If our choice of stories last night was anything to go by we were more incensed by poor care for the young, by divisions in society, by sexism, racism and poverty than we were about Murdoch or mayors, or the so-called Government!  Perhaps in the end Univited Guests simply reiterated and reinforced the notion that our voices are not heard, that a system of representation by an elite few, of a diverse many, will always be flawed no matter how good the intentions of the few.  On the eve of the London mayoral and assembly elections this was an interesting message to take away.

One thing is certain though – if you don’t join in – if you don’t make your choice and defend it and speak for it – then it will never be heard – or even misheard – and there is a chance that even if the person you wanted to speak for you doesn’t – others have heard, others will join their voice to yours, eventually there will be enough people saying ‘stop you’re going the wrong way’ that there will be a change of direction.

Make your own mind up!

Make Better Please is on until 12th May – info/tickets here:

http://www.bac.org.uk/whats-on/make-better-pleaseUG/

Love Love Love is on until 9th June info/tickets here:

http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/love-love-love

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