RSA collaborative arts Peter Aspden

RSA Collaborative arts Peter Aspden

Collaborative arts The creation of art is both a solitary and a collaborative business. The western imagination has long been wedded to the idea of the lonely genius, ever searching for inspiration and toiling for hours at his or her craft to produce exceptional works that will change the way people look at things.

But this is to ignore the supportive network around the artist that enables such works to flourish. Teams of young and eager students worked at the elbows of the great Renaissance masters. Patrons supplied them with material comforts and, in some cases, spurred them to produce ever more impressive works. No artform is more dependent on individual graft and dedication than that of symphonic music; yet where would the composer be without the fluent, seamless playing of all those largely anonymous orchestras?

The issue of how art is produced and supported has become more than theoretical in recent years. After a period of welcome stability and generous funding settlements, the arts in the UK find themselves having to retrench. The economic crisis has forced central funding bodies and local authorities alike to ask hard questions of a sector that is frequently dismissed as a ‘luxury‘ relative to the harder-edged demands of health and education.

One of the central concerns of the paymasters, not unnaturally, regards value for money. Are institutions doing their best to make themselves efficient and properly managed? And if they are – and there has been outstanding progress in arts management in the last twenty years – are they using every opportunity to share their resources and expertise? Can a sector that occasionally shows the competitive edge and desire to succeed of Premiership football, swallow self-interest and learn to play like a team?

It may be a fanciful question. In an age of performance indicators, league tables and febrile public scrutiny, arts institutions are dedicated to the provision of quality: that means finding the best artists to perform in front of the widest possible audiences. This inevitably puts them in competition with each other. There is an understated yet palpable jousting between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House and English National Opera. These are institutions which would not dream of scoring cheap points off each other, preferring instead to emphasize their interests-incommon; yet, all want to be the leading light in their own particular artform.

But they also agree that to see a memorable performance at, say, the Royal Opera House is likely to encourage interest in the art form in general, which would also be good news for the English National Opera. So how can the complementary nature of arts bodies' activities be harnessed to produce a genuinely collaborative atmosphere: one that will enable them to steer through forthcoming financial hardship, and perhaps produce a new creative synergy?

Leadership One way is to provide leadership. London's National Theatre, for example, has led the way in co-operating with smaller theatrical companies to help them with box office expertise and technology, human resources, legal advice and marketing. These are hard,

practical areas of collaboration that cost time and money, and yet they are willingly embraced by an institution that sees itself as something of a beacon amid the gloom.

The National Theatre's artistic director Sir Nicholas Hytner has constantly stressed that the National is prestigious and successful enough to deal with the troubles ahead: as a result, it has a wider moral responsibility to come to the aid of institutions that are not so strongly placed. The prerequisite for this kind of scenario is, of course, that ‘leaders’ are widely recognised as such by their respective communities, a factor that is not always as straightforward as it might seem.

Another approach is to search for common aims. The Free Word Centre in London was formed with the help of Arts Council funding to act as an umbrella organisation to promote and protect the power of the written and spoken word. Its founder bodies – Apples and Snakes, Article 19, Booktrust, English PEN, Index on Censorship, The Arvon Foundation, The Literary Consultancy and The Reading Agency – overlap in their concerns but are united by an abstract but powerful philosophical impulse, to safeguard the freedom of expression in the world.

Collaboration and well-being A third channel for collaboration lies in culture's increasing importance in the well-being of cities and regions. On Merseyside, the Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium is an alliance of eight of the city's major cultural organisations, and was set up to play a leading role in helping to regenerate the area. It forges links across the cultural sector and promotes its engagement in various aspects of the region's economic renewal, partnering with local authorities, health trusts and schools. Members include such heavyweights as Tate Liverpool, the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Once again, there is a robust philosophical principle guiding the collaboration: that a healthy cultural scene is a primary, rather than marginal, force for regeneration that can act for the benefit of all.

The West Cumbria Arts Partnership, another consortium, which includes regional bodies such as Prism Arts, New Directions and – the lead organisation Theatre by the Lake – started life as an informal network of creative professionals. It was given formal standing following a grant from Arts Council England's Thrive programme and showed some immediate and tangible returns, in the form of economies of scale and collaborative ‘clout’ when dealing with strategic partners.

The partnership now finds itself winding up, lacking the funds to continue, and arguably having had its intended effect: Theatre by the Lake, the only organisation able to afford specialist staff in what is an isolated region, has asked itself new and difficult questions about what it sees as its default cultural leadership role. The channels of communication which had opened up continue to flow.

Partnership and public benefit Leadership is all very well, but it relies on the complicity of the led: there can be nothing more threatening to a small and cash-strapped institution than a seemingly benign senior partner heading towards it like a basking shark. The same impulse that makes arts

organisations justly proud of their commitment to freedom of expression, risk and experimentation, makes them wary of being subsumed by well-meaning elders. This can be a powerful obstacle to the inculcation of a greater team spirit.

The success in persuading arts organisations to work together is largely dependent on the view that is taken on what the arts are actually for. So far, the sector has pulled several threads together in its case to convince the government of its worth. Uniquely, it has twinned both pragmatic and philosophical arguments. In the wake of Richard Florida's pioneering work, the arts sector has demonstrably shown that it is good for local economies, employment and (less tangibly) regional self-esteem. The ‘Bilbao effect’ has become almost a cliché in support of those who champion the regenerating effects of prestigious cultural projects. The world's wealthiest nations – Abu Dhabi is a striking example – are heavily investing to prove the point.

Yet this sharply practical argument for the arts is underpinned by the widely-shared philosophical belief that they are also, quite simply, good for you. Good on an individual level – encouraging self-expression and reflection – and on a societal level, bringing communities closer and fostering the imaginations of young people.

With this double whammy of justifications, there have been few dissenting voices in the discussions over the cuts in arts funding. This is in sharp contrast to the 1980s, when it was fashionable to decry the wilder excesses of Britain's arts scene. The argument has been, on the whole, intelligently compiled and put forward and has been largely accepted. That the arts face substantial cuts is not as a result of the argument's failure but of the proverbial forces beyond all of our control.

It is the acceptance of those twin arguments that is driving the need for wider collaboration. If the arts are intrinsically good for you, then they play a vital role in the nation's education and even health. If they are good for local economies, it becomes crucial to forge links with the wider infrastructure of a region or city. The momentum that has been built over the last twenty years to democratise the arts sector – few people today talk of its elitist tendencies – has forced it to become more integrated in wider society. In this reading, culture has already collaborated in an organic way with the industries, public services and people all around it.

That does not mean such integration happens automatically. While organisations are threatened by cuts, it is hard for them to find the time and spare cash to make these links happen. There have been a range of Arts Council initiatives to encourage greater collaboration; now that very institution finds itself under more pressure than ever, receiving a 30% cut in its grant, and a 50% cut to its own administration. In addition, the government has urged the Arts Council to give most of its money to bodies that actually produce art, and less – a lot less – to projects with more abstract intentions.

The Big Society There has been a lot of talk about a more widespread and effective use of volunteers, shrouded in the government's philosophical commitment to the Big Society. Yet there is widespread skepticism that this change in emphasis is anything more than an attempt to disguise the more profound effects of funding cuts. There is also a contradictory element at play here: organisations that have tried to make themselves more professional, lean and mean are suddenly being asked to rely on the well-meaning but often woolly ways of the

voluntary sector to cope with the cuts. If the arts are to be about quality of experience and professionalism, they will need expert and reliable resources. It can be frightening, trying to survive as a small cog in a Big Society.

It may be that the most compelling force that drives arts bodies to greater collaboration comes from art itself. And this brings us back to our lonely artist: we are still in thrall to the western tradition of individualism. But we are beginning to get over that; not only have the conceits of the Romantic tradition been found wanting, but the western way is in any case losing its stature as the geo-political shape of the world changes.

There is an eclecticism and impatience with tried and tested tropes among today's young audiences that are forcing organisations to move outside of their comfort zones.

Artists too are becoming less isolated. This has been shown in recent developments in dance, in many ways the most instinctively collaborative art form. Choreographers have to forge relationships with both musicians and set designers to create their work. There are no set texts and a relatively loose sense of canonical hierarchy. In recent years they have worked more and more with visual artists, who bring a mental suppleness and conceptual audacity to the stage.

The collaboration between Antony Gormley, Nitin Sawhney and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui – a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural affair – in the creation of zero degrees at Sadler's Wells was a striking example. Gormley's most renowned works consist of forlorn figures standing passively over dramatic landscapes. Could there be a more powerful expression of individualism? Yet he has been working in a team, and one that came from outside his discipline entirely.

This is the changed face of 21st century culture, It propels artists and institutions to embrace breadth, exchange and the fertile swapping of ideas. There is after all more than one reason to work together. As back offices huddle together to weather the storm of forthcoming cuts, there is a complementary mingling of ideas and projects front of house.

It is what artists want to do, and what audiences want to see. There may be less money in the pot for the arts; but there is also less ego. It may be that collaboration is being forced on culture in the short term, but it is also part of a profound and lasting shift in our artistic sensibilities.

Peter Aspden is arts writer at the Financial Times and writes a weekly column on culture in the Saturday FT, for which he was nominated as cultural commentator of the year in the 2010 Editorial Intelligence awards. He has also been the paper's arts editor, and has written on a wide variety of subjects including sport, books, travel and religion.

State of the Arts This essay will be published to coincide with the second annual State of the Arts conference on 10 February 2011, organised by the RSA and Arts Council England. This brings together a wide range of creative voices to debate issues around resilience, audience and the value of arts and culture and seeks to explore some of the key questions facing the arts sector: in a time of austerity, what are the priorities now? What is our vision for the long term? What imaginative and practical approaches are needed to sustain the arts through this period? What new opportunities are there to deepen the value of the arts to individuals, to society and to the economy? The other provocations include: Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society Remaking the case for the arts?

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