Ethics and the End of Theatre

Apologies for the rather grandiose title for this post, actually a conflation of two things – a heated recent exchange with the co-ordinator of an artist network in Berlin, and a first tentative observation, based on a series of enquiries and applications received whilst still 3 weeks to go to the application deadline.

The ethical debate, that to be honest took me rather by surprise, was the issue of whether a festival for new artists should pay those artists, and if not, whether it should exist at all.  My surprise, I should hasten to add, was not at the idea of paying artists, but that a festival that is putting pretty much all of its hard-earned funding into creating the best experience it can for its participants, should find itself arguing for the right to exist, and not with some governmental or funding authority, but with an unpaid artist network co-ordinator in Berlin. Writing this I still feel like I’m struggling for the moral high-ground, and yet the other option, the option to not exist at all would be an option to not support new artists and the health of a poorly acknowledged sector of radical arts practice, to not fight a difficult corner, and to opt for a much easier life.

If the experimental theatre sector in this country was properly respected and funded, able to easily pull a substantial public audience based on a high national profile, then I could see how a new festival with limited funding could be accused of trying to cash in, and at the expense of the artists involved. But we know we are fighting not just for new artists but for a whole area of the arts that will always struggle in this country - against TV, against the Great Literary Tradition, against that idea that proper theatre involves proper actors and proper plays and a proper posh night out. A festival aimed at raising the profile and status of experimental theatre in this country has got its work cut out - one of the reasons why we have tied our flag to the ongoing creative health and self-belief of the participating artists, and not to the number of column inches that even the local press will give us.

But moral indignation aside, it does expose the more intriguing question of when should we pay for the output of a ‘new artist’? When they are famous? When they’re dead (see most of history)? And can anyone tell the difference between a new artist on the way up, and a young person who has already exhausted their creative potential and will soon be doing something else? And if there’s no real ‘market forces’ to determine cultural value, who is to tell when a putative performance event is going to be ‘worth it’?  Is there supposed to be some omniscient being in touch with the absolute, able to predict and determine absolute value in a way that those lower down the order will happily accept? Oh dear, is that supposed to be me? Is that what a festival curator is?

And so to the end of theatre… I know it’s early days, but the applications, recommendations and enquiries are already falling, for the most part, into two piles. Bearing in mind our bold claim to represent the future of theatre, (and not wanting to identify any of the applicants at this stage), one of these piles is made up of work tied closely to long established theatrical practice, and the other is made up of work difficult to categorise as ‘theatre’. The pile of others, good and bad, is much smaller. I know I’ve yet to share a definitive definition of what theatre is, but it still looks like the future of theatre is either its past, or the future of theatre is no theatre.

Whichever it is, and still smarting from recent apparently ethical debates, this job is feeling a little harder going than it looked like it was going to be a couple of weeks ago...

Update

So, tentative emails are being fired off to any institutions or venues likely to be supporting emergent theatre makers, applications are starting to come in, various conversations are underway, questions being answered. Important and deceptively simple questions too - about the kind of work we are interested in ‘is it experimental theatre or live art?’ (asks a producer in Germany), or about space and scheduling ‘can you accommodate a piece for 10 people at a time that needs to take over 8 different spaces?’

Formal and informal networks are becoming activated. Rumours that there was a lovely two hander in Huddersfield last weekend are dripping in, that there are some great students coming out of Fine Art in Nottingham, that there are loads of great emergent companies in Brighton. Dublin’s looking very promising, Portugal are getting back to us, Belgium’s got a lot of options.

Quite a few solo shows are being mentioned, worryingly as we’re guessing at 22 performance slots and 150 participating artists (that’s an average of 6.8 participants per show), even though some of them look really exciting. We’ve also got four venues centred around largish end-on studio theatre spaces, whilst a lot of the work being mentioned seems to have left that frame behind long ago.

I was going to call this post What’s it for/Who’s it for? or Who needs Who? as questions about the target participants are starting to raise their heads. There seems to be a significant divide between the confident and articulate middle class theatre graduates (you can tell from the group photos on the websites), who will no doubt weigh up the pros and cons before deciding to come, and those who came through access courses into ex-polys, with shakier grammar but an earnest desire to be there, and with work that sounds much more challenging (perhaps no surprise). I haven’t divined such distinctions outside of this country, but I have been reminded of my moral responsibility, particularly given the imminent demise of ‘higher education affordable to all’ in this country, to maintain a breadth of social diversity.

And definitions of emergent are clearly varying – both a German and an Australian have recommended work by (different) artists well established on the small-scale touring network in the UK, work that I have programmed previously at the Axis Arts Centre. It needs to be newer than that, their generation is already up and running – we need folk that will really welcome what such a festival offers, folk that will really contribute to, and really be affected by, the intensity of the communality of experience, the contextualising, the networking, the shared and diverse aesthetics and influences.

Because in many ways we are co-ordinating a meeting, planning a wedding feast, bringing together those who have so much in common and so many differences, those who might share in the sense of occasion, in the optimism, in the opportunity for creative fraternisation (whatever that might be). But still, at the centre of it all, there needs to be really good work – vital theatre that reminds, or surprises us, about what’s possible, of what it can do, of what it can be, and why the moments when such events can happen are worth making, why a lot of people should bust a gut for a long time to pull together all the necessary components. That’s why I’m doing it anyway. Last time, a huge wall of beer crates crashed to the floor as five people in antique costume, gold helmets and squid masks slowly, so slowly, raised their arms. And two boys in high heels kicked holes in the walls. And someone behaved a little too much like a mad dog. I want to know what’s going to happen this time…