Category: Art & Culture

Return to theatres

James Dodd

A theatrical entrance

This week I went to the theatre. You read that correctly. Some six months since the coronavirus pandemic forced theatres around the globe to lower their curtains and close their doors, I stepped into Regents Park Open Air Theatre for a performance of their great revival, Jesus Christ Superstar.

The irony was not lost on me. This was the very same revival, in the same venue, with many of the same cast and musicians I watched some four years ago, while I was undergoing chemotherapy. I survived, and as I sat there amongst the socially distanced audience, engulfed by that same intoxication only a live performance exudes, I found myself utterly convinced that theatre will survive too.

Even though it was an outside performance, the same strict protocols you’d expect inside remained: facemasks throughout the performance were mandatory; audience members were mostly 

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Report from the museum

Eleanor Morum

Reunite at the museum

For the first time since early March, I bought a ticket for an exhibition last week. And weirdly, the experience wasn’t as weird as I was expecting. I bought a timed entry ticket the night before and remembered my mask. I was greeted outside the Barbican’s entrance and given a run-through of the direction to go and how the exhibition worked. Beyond that, the exhibition felt as normal. Everyone wore masks, of course – which now also feels normal.

There were arrows on the floor to guide people through the exhibition, but really that only felt like a formalization of a rule that’s always been there. In one respect, I liked the arrows as reassurance that I hadn’t missed any room or section of the exhibition. Frustrations with other visitors hovering too long were the same, but now, at least justified. At the end, I did rush past the tiny café and shop area, feeling that I was pushing my luck for spending that length of time indoors with strangers already.

While in the exhibition, I generally felt safe, like there was enough distance between me and others. Although it felt well-attended, I also didn’t struggle to find a space in every room for my own 2-meter bubble. Even a week before mask requirements came into effect in museums, I didn’t notice a single person not wearing one. As a result, my time in the exhibition was much less anxiety-provoking than the bus trip there.

Michael Dixon, the director of the Natural History Museum in London has said, “When people visit the museum over the next few months they are going to get a fantastic VIP experience because they will be able to see things without so many people around them,

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Dark times for theatre unless government acts fast

James Dodd
UK theatre Coronavirus

An empty stage

• Two thirds of performance venues have lost over 70% of revenues, our survey shows

• Government help covers less than 30% of those losses, 87% of venue leaders say

It is clear that the UK is about to suffer a severe recession. But some industries will be hit much harder than others. We have conducted a survey of CEO’s and leaders of theatres and performing arts businesses, and the results are shocking.

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Habit: a formula for success in tricky times

Martin Tripp

A roadmap to success…

Over the last few weeks we have had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of business leaders to understand how they are adapting to the current crisis. These range from global corporates to early stage start-ups across media, information, technology and entertainment – or MITE. Even with such a broad range of organisations, there’s a common thread that unites them.

It sort of works as an equation – and though it may not offer a panacea, it may be a predictive shorthand for which companies will come out of the crisis strongest.

We think you can boil it down to this: Community + Content + Delivery = Habit.

(Reductive, we know: but this is a blog, not a book, and we only have a thousand words.)

First, let’s start with the right-hand side of the equation: the answer.

HABIT

All MITE businesses depend on habit. We need people to have

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Arts funding in the time of coronavirus

Eleanor Morum

In February, I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel that jumps back and forth on a timeline before and after a pandemic that wipes out much of the Earth’s population. Even pre-lockdown and social distancing, it felt a little too pertinent to be a comfortable read.

One of the book’s few hopeful takeaways is its certainty in the re-emergence of Shakespeare and orchestral music, re-enforced by the refrain ‘survival is not enough,’ a quote borrowed from Star Trek.

In our own pre-apocalyptic timeline, Rishi Sunak announced our 2020 budget on March 11, a week and a half before the beginning of lockdown. On initial glance, the budget looked remarkably positive for arts funding, including a £250m fund for local, small museums and libraries, as well as a £90m Cultural Development Fund for outside of London. There is a new allowance of £25k for every primary school to invest in ‘arts activities’, and the DCMS will see a rise in their budget from £1.6bn to £1.7bn.

And, overall, this feels incredibly positive. It’s a surprising turnaround from several years in a row of cuts to arts and cultural funding. And, while not wanting to look a gift horse in its mouth, I did ask why there should be a change of heart now?

At the time, I thought these developments must reflect the changes incurred by Brexit – back when that was the all-consuming story. I assumed the budget was taking into account the sizable loss of funding from the EU at the end of the year. Most significantly, our government announced their withdrawal from Creative Europe, a €1.46bn fund for arts and heritage institutions around Europe, which has been worth €74m to 334 organizations in the UK since 2014. (Our withdrawal seem to be driven purely by nationalistic politics, given that 13 non-EU states happily participate and benefit from the Creative Europe fund.)

But now, I wonder if neither regret for the years of budget cuts, nor preparation for the loss of EU funding explains the sudden investment in the arts. Instead,

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Can ads be art if they aren’t political?

Chris Sutcliffe

The jewel of television advertising is undoubtedly the Christmas ad, which is very representative over the wider Christmas period in that it generally leads to arguments. While families row over Aunt Janice’s timekeeping or What Sharon Did In ‘94, the marketing industry tends to argue about the quality and impact of the season’s TV ads. As soon as those ads become cinematic the argument became about which supermarket was being the subtlest about its commercialisation of Christmas, but now a few years have past there’s also an argument about whether 2019’s batch match the quality of the previous years. Truly, it’s a magical time of year.

2018’s Iceland’s ‘banned’ Rang-Tan ad, which wasn’t approved for broadcast by Clearcast due to being “directed towards a political end”, caused a lot of rows in its own right. The implication, helped along by savvy Iceland marketeers and some celebrities who were generically outraged, was that this advert with its subversive message about what’s really important at Christmas was somehow more genuine and deserving of an ad slot than those of rival supermarkets. Instead, obviously, it was an advertisement for the supermarket that had co-opted a campaign by Greenpeace, which went on to market the character in a number of ways.

No room for art. 

It was effectively an argument about Clearcast’s judgment about political ads on top of an argument about which Christmas ad was the best which was itself the extension of in-fighting among the supermarkets to see who could make the most money. Now I’d like to throw another argument on top of it, and question whether the fact that ads are banned from making political messages in certain mediums disqualifies ads from claiming to be art.

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Protest Art and the Art of Protesting

James Dodd

Top hats

Throughout history, the arts have played a key role in protests. This has happened whether works of art were made for the purpose of serving protests or not: virtually anything can be utilised to serve a cause. Protest art is nothing new: during WWI the Dada movement protested against the violence of war, whilst Picasso’s Guernica drew attention to the bombing of the town during the Spanish Civil War. Protests themselves increasingly

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