Last week we found out that we didn’t get ACE emergency funding. We thought we probably wouldn’t, but knew we had to go for it anyway. The ‘light touch’ application was pretty involved and took three of us around two weeks. You have to earn public money, we’re not complaining about spending our time justifying getting paid, but it’s not what was said on the tin. A lot of this time was spent speculating about what they wanted and because we knew we weren’t able to speak to anyone from ACE about it there were endless circular conversations.
It hurts not to get the funding. And if we had got it, we probably wouldn’t be writing this. So there’s a margin of pain and bitterness in here probably. We don’t think we deserve it anymore than anyone else, but we don’t know if we don’t deserve it.
It feels like being told “it doesn’t matter if you don’t exist when we all come out and theatre tries to find its way again.” We know that’s not necessarily what was intended, but that’s the position we’re in as a result of the no. Along with many other companies.
There’s also a fair amount of fear in here. Apart from general future fear, we’ve spent our careers so far investing in RashDash and investing in theatre - that’s taken a lot of time and energy - and we haven’t got lots of diverse income streams to turn to at a moment like this.
More context: we had just got a YES on a project (we’d applied 3 times to make) before we went into lockdown. It is possible to repurpose that grant, but it isn’t possible to then make the live show as well. If we repurpose the grant we would risk letting down our partner venues and not leave ourselves any prospects of making live work in the future, which is currently what we exist to do ( though we know this reason for existence may have to change…). Even if there is a project grants pot, there is no guarantee we would get it, especially because of how difficult it has been to get this one. We’ve done a lot of talking about moving our work online, and while we think there are ways we can do this, Oh Mother was a concept for a live show, it featured circus work and full contact dance, it was being made with people in physical contact with each other, who are now not in the same room. That contact work and physical intimacy was and is still very important. We hope we will be able to make it in the future, when contact work and intimacy is going to be so necessary again. How do we touch each other again?! What will it mean?!
We’ve been reading lots online about how theatre needs to and will be forced to change as a result of the closures during this pandemic - among them David Jubb’s blogs ‘time to change’ and ‘time to change the numbers’, all ACE’s guidance around applying for emergency funding, and ACE’s new strategy Let’s Create.
It’s obviously a wonderful idea to make more opportunities for more people to be more creative and feel more ownership over art and feel - and actually be - more visible. It’s the right thing. We’ve been moving far too slowly towards this. We are really excited by the provocation and the necessity to change our artistic practice so that we can contribute to this mission.
At the same time, we’re scared by it. We run a tiny organisation and change can happen quickly as long as all three of us agree, so it’s not Change that’s scary… it’s just a path that we’ve been going down suddenly doesn’t exist anymore. Not just because theatres are closed, but because missions and strategies are (quite rightly) changing.
The last strategy - which we were applying for money to fulfil for the first and only 10 years of our career so far - was to create great art for everyone. The emphasis was on quality and artform development and developing as artists. We thought a lot about how our projects and shows would meet these criteria. (There was also a great importance put on audience, of course).
We are theatre makers and performers. We think we’re at our best when we’re in a devising room, making - sometimes collaboratively, sometimes alone - and performing. We think that’s what we’re for. We also run workshops for professionals and non professionals and love working with and learning from those people. We also love speaking to people as part of the research and development process of a project, and speaking to audiences about their response to our work. But the bit in the middle where we make the show, it’s hard and chaotic, and we generally like working in a room of people who are all on the same mission, without a facilitator or leader probably, who are working towards the same show. Because we’ve been doing it for years and we’re getting better at it, finally.
As we watch people talk about what comes next, about community venues and artists working in communities we wonder what happens to the work we make. It doesn’t sell out big venues (yet) and it’s not community led or centred. We’re wondering if as the new ACE strategy is implemented and the world changes, if it really doesn’t matter if we don’t exist anymore? Maybe we should go and become other things. (We’re not asking for sympathy or fishing for support, we mean it).
We would like to make more inclusive work, and work that enables people to be creative - and we would also like to make the performance work. Sometimes small, experimental, formally inventive performance work.
There are lots of artists who are community artists, it’s when they’re at their best, it’s what they’re for. They don’t need us moving in on their funding and saying - yes please we do that now. We will definitely need to work under and learn from lots of those artists before we try to make our company fit into the new strategy. We can’t suddenly turn the people who have been trying to make Great Art (lol) into experts in working in ways we haven’t worked before. We will all say we are experts on the application, because we’re trying to sustain ourselves, our companies, our practice, and maybe we believe we are - but not all of us can be?
We don’t think we fully comprehend all the suggestions being made, the ramifications of this, and how we fit in, if we fit in.
RashDash Residency - weeklong workshop with theatre makers and student theatre makers. Photo by Sebastian Hinds.
Reading how the emergency funds have been allocated - we’re not experts and we weren’t in the room where they were undoubtedly making very difficult decisions, and they have a bigger picture than we have access to - it’s hard not to feel like there was enough for everyone who applied, and showed a commitment to delivering Let’s Create to get some, a little. If there were 14000 applications (including individuals and companies) and presumably most people who were eligible applied, and there was 160,000,000 to share around - there was enough? At the moment for self employed artists (who have no idea if government support will be extended until October like it has been for furloughed people) it feels like we’re entering a lottery of whether or not we can be supported through the disintegration of the industry we have fought so hard to be a part of. In the current context of emergency survival if we had been given say 10k of the 30k we had applied for, that would have bought us a little bit of time and made us more able to think creatively about the ways we could serve our communities during this time. Rather than going to into panic mode. Panic or survival mode is not a place from which to be creative. It is the very opposite of being present, listening and responsive.
There is some good that has come from the application process. We are still going to do the digital project we applied for, unpaid, because we think it’s a good idea. And we hope it will bring audiences and participants joy and that it will connect people who are currently unconnected. And certainly so far it it is bringing us a lot of joy and connecting us to people we would never normally have the opportunity to speak to. We will be talking about and sharing more of this process really soon…at the moment we’re being secretive because it’s at secret stage. We are also going to do the work on making our company more able to serve the Let’s Create strategy, not because we think ACE will necessarily continue to fund us, but because we did a lot of thinking about how we can be more useful. And we want to be better.
The other thing this rejection has done is provided the wake up call that has gone from a gentle iphone ‘radar', to a get-out-of-the-building-it’s-on-fire kind of smoke alarm, that we cannot keep looking to the arts council as our main source of funding. Until recent years we had a fairly strong ‘track record’ of receiving project grants and being able to see through the shows that we wanted to make, which perhaps even without Covid considerations lulled us into a false sense of security that we would be able to continue doing that. Maybe that was a massive luxury all along. But it felt like there was a demand, because the shows sold out, in studios yes, but still, that means a lot. And every conversation we had with audience members, students interviewing us for their dissertations, young companies during mentoring sessions, young directors/actors/makers over cups of tea or on email/skype made us feel that we had a role within the sector that was useful. Even though the sector is small. And not forgiving all of the problems it has in its exclusivity and inaccessibility which we all have a responsibility to change.
So what do we do…?
We are not yet a charity which means quite a few trusts and foundations are not available to apply to. We could become one which would open up more funding streams. We are of course not guaranteed to be funded this way.
We could start a foray into the corporate world, using the skills that we have to help corporations with what? Physical confidence? Presentational style? Yes please. But how? We need to think more…any ideas…let us know.
We could stop trying to make money from the company and try to find other ways of personally surviving. And come together and make things when we can, because we think we will still want to do that, even if we won’t be able to demand the same things of each other in terms of time and commitment. But what jobs are even available now? Who wants to hire us? If you do, again please let us know.
We are resourceful people. We have sustained ourselves and a theatre company for 10 years, on project grants, venue support and the support of our audiences. We have been knocked down and got up again many times before. Indeed, RashDash wouldn’t have got past the first show if we had listened to the first person we met from the arts council who told us to stop making work because we weren’t good enough. (And to go to the gym because we were too flabby. Yes, really). But we now have to dig deep for a whole new level of resourceful. Or say goodbye to the company. Or both.
We’ve watched people say - again quite rightly - we need this industry to do better than just shout about money and funding, we need stories. We need to lead the way in finding creative solutions to the immediate and imminent problems faced by our communities. But we’re just three people - one of us with a baby, one of us currently making a baby and living with her parents - who don’t have money to sustain ourselves or our work. And there’s a difference (for now at least) between an industry making a case for more funding and people who can’t afford the next six months. We also think there are probably many companies and independent artists not yet having the conversation about being rejected from the emergency buffer, and we want to be a part of that.
We read Josie from This Egg’s blog about making and unmaking - https://www.thisegg.co.uk/other - a few weeks ago and found it comforting to see someone else was having similar thoughts. So this is here in case someone is having similar thoughts.
xxx