Autumn Stroll

A seven month gap between blog posts is acceptable, right? I have just read through four half finished blogs which were all attempted at moments where I thought that my brain was working enough to write and that I wouldn’t fall asleep or become distracted. Ridiculous!

What this says to me is that my year is bookended by quiet, reflective moments and everything in between is an absolute riot...which is a tad depressing. Posting now is also indicative of the influence the change of season has on me. A lazier writer would bore you at this point with clichés about enjoying the crispness of the air, the change of colour and smell around you, shorter days and all that Autumn jazz. And I do enjoy all those things but mostly Autumn feels like breathing space to me, which is the main reason I like it.

In between sentences I am creating a playlist called Autumn Stroll, which you can enjoy here, if you are so inclined. Creating playlists is a recent habit, I quite like it.

So what am I thinking about at the moment? Recently I read a blog by Pony Pie entitled Art, Money and Reasons We Do It Our Damn Selves and the way it resonated with me was almost like a physical sensation. Akin to being shaken vigorously and told no, really, you are not the only one who has thought and worried about this. I was particularly affected by the paragraph on the “DIY practitioner”, because of the stark and profound truth of it. When you are an unfunded artist or theatre-maker just trying to make work and forge a path for yourself, fighting against becoming downhearted, upstaged, exhausted and ready to quit is half the battle.

When I started Rhymes with Purple it was in response to knowing something that I didn’t need to be told. That ultimately not being a genius, a graduate of a certain institution or lucky enough to find oneself in with the worthy crowd were serious barriers, potentially insurmountable ones. If I wanted to create and stage my ideas then I had to do it myself. And nothing has been harder, more soul destroying and painful than the result of that decision.

Being deemed “worthy” has been a five year long argument and even after all that time we still haven’t reached maturity for the very reason that holding down other jobs to pay the bills and laying the foundations of a theatre company, even a tiny little one, requires a vast amount of work and energy. Don’t get me wrong, I am proud of what we have achieved, but we aren’t setting any creative fires yet because after the needs of the day are met fatigue begins to leech on the desire to experiment and create. I used to worry that this was making excuses, that in fact I wasn’t very prolific even though sometimes it felt like I was having a hundred ideas a second. Ideas that called on me to grab and anchor them but the weight of getting by prevented me from being quick enough before they flashed by.

When I read Pony Pie’s blog I felt relieved, reassured and a little less like an outsider. I’ve been at this since I was 19 and at 26 it has made me feel old and I am not going to pretend the thought of quitting hasn’t entered my head. But then, I’ve come pretty far; the job that pays my bills is in the arts and provides me the flexibility to be creative and thoughtful even though it’s extremely hard work. Despite always having a day job of some kind I have carried on producing, creating and making because for me failure is not an option. I can’t let being a DIY practitioner exhaust me because I have come too far to quit now. I believe what I am doing is worthy, the artists that I collaborate with and the audiences that come to the shows all appear to agree so stopping because it’s hard just seems like doing myself and my peers a disservice.

Reading Pony Pie’s blog on this debate, which does encompass and cast a critical and informed eye on all the wider issues facing DIY and subsidised artists, came at exactly the right time for me. Because although I know there is a wider discussion to be addressed, that it’s hard for everyone and that a solution is not rapidly forthcoming it inspired me. Like Pony Pie, I’ve always known that I am doing it all myself because no one will give me any money but now rather than seeing that as the catalyst for “artistic death”, I feel more than ever it’s a call to arms, the motivation to continue and fight because I value my artistic output, even if those handing out the “worthy badges” do not. And with that value I can survive. Pony Pie passed onto me her sense of knowing where I stand in relationship to “worthy” community oriented practice and practitioners, which is firmly on my own two feet right alongside them.

IETM Glasgow 2010: Reflections, Part 1

One thing that I have enjoyed is the opportunity to reconnect with my own city. Even before I started spending five days of my week in Edinburgh I hadn’t really engaged with Glasgow properly in a long time. Pounding the streets during IETM has allowed me to do that and in some ways perceive it a new.

By visiting all of my home towns significant cultural locations I’m feeling imbued with a feeling of pride, confidence in what my country has to say in the Europe wide cultural dialogue and, perhaps most importantly, a feeling of security in my own participation in that conversation.

Round table discussions about the mobilisation of arts advocacy across the European Union has helped me to identify more with the cultural landscape in which I work and play, create and enable.

Over the course of three short days I have created links not only for myself, as a creative individual, but for the Edinburgh Fringe Society, the organisation I represent, with Barcelona, Poland, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

I also won £5.40 on the euro millions which I have decided to take as significant. Perhaps it is representative of the fact that primarily I am Scottish but I am also European.

All this cross-cultural interconnectivity has been illuminating not only in the context of what I already know but also on where my knowledge could do with sharpening.

A point that has been addressed more than once this weekend is that it is so easy to work in your own little bubble and forget that there are entire continents out there with whom we can communicate and work alongside in order to make things easier and better, creatively and politically.

It is important to remember that we, the current generation of creative practitioners and professionals, leave the legacy for the next and therefore we should endeavour together to make sure that it is a good and sustainable legacy.

We should be aware of what our colleagues and peers are doing and what we can to do to support each other.

One of the key issues highlighted during the sessions of IETM is, of course, the universal problem of budget cuts for the arts and the societal value of arts activities, or lack there of.

What stood out in my mind, and it is a symptom of where we are going wrong and a consistent bad habit within the cultural sector. It is, to paraphrase John Holden, that arts policy debate takes place between experts when it should be a conversation between audiences.

Linking into that is the fact that the fate of cultural funding is always in the hands of politicians who will campaign for what is important to society at large.
Society at large is your audience; you take the debate on policy to them then you create value in cultural activity where perhaps it hasn’t existed before. That will inevitably translate into influence on how they use their vote. You instill value for what you do in the people that can consume it then it follows that you instill it in the policy makers, because they have to respond to their audience just as much as we do.