EleanorTurney.co.uk

There was a lot of talk at Shift Happens earlier this month about innovation and making mistakes, with soundbites such as “we learn more from our mistakes than our successes” flying around. Attractive though the rhetoric sounds, I wonder if it stands up to scrutiny. For a start, it ignores the question of funding: how can you justify asking for (more) money if your previous project flopped?

Failure is an expensive luxury. If you lose the confidence of funders, audience or staff – or, worse yet, all three – the way forward is less clear. NT Live! can run in the hope of widening audiences and eventually breaking even, because the National Theatre receives millions of pounds from Arts Council England annually, has an ongoing sponsorship deal with Travelex, received additional support from Nesta, and can absorb the loss, even though each broadcast costs around £150,000. For most artists and arts organisations, though, no matter how fantastic an idea is, a financial failure makes it harder to convince anyone to fund your next project – whether that’s Ace, sponsors or philanthropists. However eager the audience may be to experience a risky, exciting, innovative project, it has to get off the ground first.

Even those with the most genuine and generous philanthropic leanings might find their patience and pockets tested by failure. And, in the current economic climate, it feels somewhat irresponsible to be encouraging people to make mistakes, however useful the lessons might be. The risks that pay off may be worthwhile, but the risks that don’t could end careers. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but it is a fact. The problem, in part, is the tick-box mentality associated with public funding, which requires you to know the outcomes of your project before you start.

Depressingly, this is borne out by a survey conducted by ArtsProfessional magazine and released last week, assessing the financial outlook for the sector. More than 500 people working across the arts and cultural sector responded, with around one in five self-identifying as the leader of an arts organisation. The survey revealed that 41% of respondents will be programming more “popular” work, and 37% will be reducing the amount of “challenging” work that they commission.

Risk in the arts is usually a good thing. Risky means creative, edgy or innovative. Can an artist who does not take risks be interesting? Maybe not, but this is at odds with the demands of public funders. Creative risk is good, but financial risk is bad. Let’s hope that risk-aversion is not contagious, and that those who are not planning to reduce the amount of challenging work they programme hold their nerve. Otherwise, audiences could have a dull few years ahead.

This article first appeared on the Guardian theatre blog.

Just read this on the Guardian theatre blog, and am angry… here are my thoughts:

ANLO was a poorly-thought-through scheme which never had the budget to do anything useful. The DCMS had this money which ACE could not turn down, and ACE was therefore forced into launching a project far too quickly. It was never enough money to make a real difference, it was rushed into being, the marketing budget was spent with nine months of the scheme left to run, the targets were quietly revised when take-up was lower than hoped… It has been mostly disappointing.

If you don’t live in London, and especially if you have a job, then available performances are few and far between – many theatres used the scheme to get rid of tickets they wouldn’t have sold otherwise, often at matinees, which are obviously no use if you work a 9-5 job. Add in a train fare to London, or taking a day’s holiday, and suddenly the “free” ticket becomes a bit pointless.

“A socially inclusive model for accessing theatre did not exist for young people until now.” This is just a ridiculous thing to say: theatres across the country offer cheap tickets (the RSC’s tickets start at £3.50 for students, the Royal Court has a ‘pay what you can night’, for example) and have excellent schemes designed to widen engagement, develop audiences and get young people into theatres. The ANLO money could have been far more productively used to promote existing campaigns on a national level.

The scheme claimed to be in place to encourage non-attenders, such as the author, to go to the theatre, as the ACE press office told me forcefully when I said that as a committed theatre-goer I’d never found a way of participating. My response then and now is this: if it’s designed for non-theatre-goers, then why advertise in theatres? That’s simply encouraging those people (such as me) who would have bought a ticket, to get a freebie instead.

I don’t in any way support cuts to the arts budget, and dread the damage that will be done if the Spending Review hits as hard as the arts sector currently fears. I urge you all to join www.ivaluethearts.org.uk, to sign the petition. But, I can’t mourn the end of ANLO, even if it only clawed back £100K. Stopping funding for projects that patently don’t work is a sensible way to start saving money, whatever your politics.

The author sounds as thought she is doing the PR for this “ambitious two-year pilot”. It wasn’t ambitious, the targets were lowered. Further, these targets were not met in the first year of the project. We await the full evaluation with interest. In the meantime, I strongly believe that the article devalues the important work that theatres are constantly engaged in trying to widen access off their own backs, and without a pittance from ANLO.