Coming from the thought that life is no longer linear…
At D&D4, I joined a discussion about Andy Burnham, the current Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (although not for much longer). The question was this: since Andy has recently announced that he will be reviewing theatre funding soon, what do we want to say to him while we still have time to influence his decisions on whether or not to make cuts?
Someone observed that back when Peter Hall ran the National Theatre, he acted as a sort of spokesperson for the arts, in a way that Nick Hytner doesn’t really do now. It was suggested that we need such a spokesperson, and that the person holding the office of Artistic Director of the National Theatre seems ideally placed to be such a person.
If Nick is willing. He does clearly care about how he’s spending public funding. We agreed that he seems very willing to assume responsibility for the public, but not one of us felt that he was as willing to represent the theatre community.
Bearing in mind the lack of linear…
The argument arose: do we really want a figurehead? Does society work that way these days? In this time of Web 2.0 and grassroots movements, aren’t we better served by acting together as a community and bring our issues to Andy Burnham en masse?
An action plan was made that a letter should be drafted which we could all send, individually, so he’d see us as a group and we’d have more pressure, more power.
It was further agreed that three main points should be observed: the political, financial and social cost of cutting funding for the arts.
Political, we said, that’s easy: look how many votes you’d be loosing if you piss off the arts community.
(Although even if hundreds, or hundreds of thousands of us write, there are 60 million people in the country. So I don’t think this is the way to a grassroots movement in support of the arts. But I do think there is a way to have a grassroots movement in support of the arts.)
Financial, also easy: look how much money the West End alone brings into the country. I don’t have the figures to hand, but they’re not going to be hard to get hold of. Besides, I suspect Andy Burnham already knows them.
But social? What is the social cost? - I asked, and everyone said well, the social, you know, the social cost. What you lose in the social, you know, value of the arts. Of theatre. Yes, but what is it? Exactly? - I asked. And none of us could really say.
So I determined to think about that, and it’s become a much bigger thing for me than I anticipated. Hence, this web of blog posts that attempts to find a language for describing the social cost of cutting arts funding.
This leads into how the experience of theatre is changing.
