Culture 2025 – I wouldn’t start from here at all!

What should an effective Cultural Policy look like?

It would accept and work with the UNESCO definition of Culture (as the new Dublin City Cultural Policy does for example)
It would understand the critical importance of every citizen’s individual creativity throughout all of life and every strata and section of society.
It would explicitly state it’s understanding of the relationship between Creativity, Culture, Arts and Heritage, and point out that arts and heritage are the result of the culture.
It would grasp the opportunity to replace the current outdated, patronising and divisive legislation with laws that enshrine, protect and celebrate all of the above,  and all the people earning a living from the culture industries.
It would understand the impact of a vibrant culture on health, welfare, community, citizenship, creative industries and the wider economy.
It would understand that Culture works through every agency and department of government.
It would understand that culture cannot be controlled by a central agency and that culture constantly changes.
It would understand that policy and strategy must respond to culture not attempt to direct it.
It would state actions that would free creativity not constrain it.
Actions that would free creativity not constrain it
Culture2025 will do none of these things and here’s why.

Continue reading Culture 2025 – I wouldn’t start from here at all!

When is a theatre company a Theatre Company

A couple of years ago I had to end a business relationship with an old friend. Something I would rather not have done. However, it was necessary when I realised that that person’s company wasn’t a company.  It was a legal fiction, necessary if he was to receive grants and commissions, it had no assets, no investors, and no long term plan. It did one thing (one set of tasks) and repeated it again and again – whenever it got a grant or a commission. Essentially this friend did one thing and hawked that skill around: they were a freelancer. Not a company. Not really. And this came as a shock to them.

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What kind of Arts Council do we need?

As Peter Brook once remarked, theatre is now, and always has been, in crisis. Whatever the nature of the continuing existential threat that Brook Identified the truth is that theatre in Ireland (as in many other parts of the world) is facing a sustained economic and ideological challenge that will change how we conceive of, create, and experience theatre.

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“What shall we do, now that we are happy?” – Reconciling the intrinsic and the instrumental in the Culture Industry

I was in conversation recently with one of our leading theatre artists. The topic of the government’s impending national culture policy discussion document, culture2025, came up so I asked their opinion. They looked up from under lowered brows and uttered, in that tired contemptuous tone, a single word: “Instrumentalist”.

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Dreamwalkers, Boundary Scanning and Antoine O Flatharta

Antoine O Flatharta is – in my opinion – one of the greatest, and most under-acknowledged Irish playwrights. He is the only one whose plays I would go to see again and again (five times in the case of Silverlands). He wrote a beautiful play for TEAM many years ago called Dreamwalker. I won’t go into the details of the plot but at the end the protagonist gives this great speech about what he learned living with a tribe. The tribe believed that the borders of their land marked the end of the world. They would elect (or select, I can’t remember which) a person to walk beyond the borders into the non world. Their job was to travel the non world and dream the dreams of the tribe. On their return they would share the stories of their dream travels, describing what lay beyond the borders of the known. In doing this the dreams were made real, and the borders of the tribe, the borders of the known world expanded. These people were called Dream walkers. It fascinates me how much of the hard, rational language of business is built on mythic stories just like this.
Continue reading Dreamwalkers, Boundary Scanning and Antoine O Flatharta