REMEMBER the date. Friday, October 24, could mark the beginning of a new era of co-operation among Scottish arts companies to counter years of funding cuts.
More than that, it could see new efforts to stitch the arts more securely into their rightful place at the centre of the country’s political and business culture after decades of being sidelined by an obsession with the bottom line.
The State of The Nation arts summit lacks neither ambition nor vision. Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, artistic director of An Tobar and Mull Theatre Company and one of the co-hosts of the event, described its mission statement in the press release announcing it as “an event that’s unapologetically about hope, ambition and collective action … I hope this gathering sparks a renewed sense of agency and solidarity across the sector, and marks the beginning of a movement towards lasting, systemic change”.
When we meet this week to talk in-depth about the event, she is no less determined that it will have a real, important and wide-ranging effect.
“Humans are just animals but we’re animals that can imagine, and we can imagine new ways of being, and can imagine possibilities,” she says. “The way that we make sense of our world is through storytelling.
“Art, music, theatre, visual arts and film … they are different ways of storytelling that one, shows how we make sense of our lives, and two, how we imagine new ways that our lives could be, new ways that the world could be.
“If we don’t have those structures to imagine together, we can’t change anything. And so we are going to be stuck in this, frankly miserable [system in which] money is more important than human situation until we go extinct, unless we really, really think about how we build those stories and the capacity to keep trying new ways of being and explore new ideas through stories as a way of rebuilding the world.”
These are big ideas, but the summit has to first tackle the practical problem that there just isn’t enough money being poured into the arts sector to go round.
“For my whole career, the arts ecology has never had enough money. But now I look back on it 15 years ago, and that feels rich. It has just been getting slowly worse and I think it has reached a particular crunch point,” Atkinson-Lord said.
“After Covid, so many organisations had a bit of a reserve, because they had not been doing as much stuff, but then we just hit a wall of really massive price rises and big costs and having to work to get audiences back in.
“Things suddenly got very hard and everyone was very exhausted already after going through all of that emotional stuff [with Covid]. And then, because Liz Truss did the thing that she did, the Holyrood government delayed their confirmation of funding for Creative Scotland, and that meant that they couldn’t make decisions.
“So then Creative Scotland chose to delay those decisions by a year. That created this perfect storm where people who already were at the end of their tether had to hang on again for another year.
“When the funding decisions came in, it still wasn’t enough. So there’s just never any light at the end of the tunnel.”
After Atkinson-Lord talked over these problems with her friends Louise Stephens, creative director at Playwrights Studio, and Dominic Hill, the artistic director at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, they decided to take matters into their own hands.
“We decided we can’t keep waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel that never comes,” she said. “We’ve got to be our own light.”
She adds: “We were all having problems around needing resources and not being able to afford them. But there might be resources that exist somewhere in the system. So initially, this was about trying to find a forum where all of the people who are in that position could come together and try and find ways to collaborate and share resources to do more.
“We’re trying to find a way to have almost like a database of resources that were available for free.
“The State of The Nation is essentially a first conversation to put in place a forum where people can come and talk about what it is they need, what it is they can offer, and how we might be able to meet each other’s needs within the ecology that exists.
“It’s not Creative Scotland’s fault there isn’t enough money. They don’t have the power to magic money out of nowhere.
“And it’s just that there isn’t enough, or there is enough, but it’s in the wrong places and people don’t know about it.”
The gathering was originally envisioned as involving around 80 people but the demand for free tickets was such that it was soon sold out. Capacity was increased to 200 but that has now sold out as well. It could have attracted around double that.
What does that response say about the arts in Scotland today?
“There is a really clear need for this event and I think there’s also a really clear sense that there has to be something new,” Atkinson-Lord said. “There has to be a change in the system.
“Either we give up, or we find a different way to do it.
“Maybe that’s about finding more commercial, entrepreneurial ways to do it. Maybe it’s about sharing resources more. Maybe it’s about finding commercial companies that fund art. And maybe there are ways to convince the audiences to pay a bit more. I think now it’s very much about this system being broken.”
Those taking part in The State of The Nation event include A Play, A Pie and A Pint, Beacon Arts Centre, CatStrand, Eden Court, Federation of Scottish Theatre, Lung Ha, Lyceum Theatre, Lyth Arts, North East Arts Touring, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Wonder Fools, National Theatre of Scotland, and Tron Theatre, as well as Citizens Theatre, the Scottish Society of Playwrights, and An Tobar and Mull Theatre.
So what is the effect of cash shortages on the arts world throughout the country? What effect has this situation had on its ability to produce art?
“At Mull, we used to produce between three and five shows a year, and now I can afford one and a half,” Atkinson-Lord said. That’s a quarter of what we used to do before the pandemic.
“The cost of living increases affected us hugely, because all of a sudden we’re going from spending a couple of grand a year on our heating costs to spending close to 20 grand a year on our heating costs.
“Similarly, the cost of living on islands is 65% higher than on the mainland because of the cost of running boats. That means that I can’t not give my staff a pay rise because if I don’t, they can’t eat.
“Those things are magnified in very rural places, but they’re happening everywhere, just to a more incremental degree. And so, it just really felt like hitting a brick wall of ‘how do I square this?’ Particularly in my organisation, because being so far away we don’t have access to freelancers, so I have to have all the skills I need on staff.
“If I make someone redundant because I can’t afford to keep their salary on, that might mean that the whole organisation falls apart.
“You know, there isn’t anyone that I can spare. The whole ecology has been going through a version of that because Scotland has a really high proportion of organisations in quite remote places or with populations that are quite dispersed.
“So people are finding it harder to make a living. That means that more of them are leaving the sector. It’s so unstable. Why not go and be a Tesco delivery person and then find your creative fulfilment after work?
“Really, really vital skills are leaving the sector, which then makes it even harder to find good people to do the art. It’s a kind of vicious circle where it just gets harder and harder to make, particularly theatre.”
Atkinson-Lord has been in Mull for the past four and a half years. She’s spent her life in the arts world. Her parents are potters so she grew up watching them make ceramics. She’s trained as a singer and as a director before moving into her current role. She believes that the importance of the arts has recently slipped down the agenda.
“We’ve got swept away in this kind of neoliberal belief that money is the only thing,” she said. “And that’s quite a recent development. In the 1980s and 90a that wasn’t how we thought about things, even post-Thatcher.
“Something has happened and I think it’s probably around the proliferation of digital networks, where people are having abstract digital experiences, rather than rooted, human visceral ones. I think that makes many people value experience less, or maybe they just experience less so don’t know how to value it.
“If you think about the complexity in the conversation around private and state education … there is not a private school in the country that would cut its arts and culture programme. They understand that is the thing that enriches life and makes you a cultured person.
“So why is it that the state, which is driven by the same people that are paying to send their kids to those private schools, feels it is acceptable to cut those things in education?”
In her time in Mull, she has seen first-hand how culture can enrich lives. Asked to pick projects in her own time at Mull which have done exactly that, she chooses two.
The first is the theatre’s support for the local Pride march. Started by the island’s youth theatre in 2015, with the full organisation’s support it has grown into a strong, popular annual event Atkinson-Lord says: “It has gone from just being this one little empowering idea, with one group of kids saying, ‘we believe this, and this is how we want our world to be’, on an island where traditionally that wasn’t a thing folk felt comfortable shouting about.
“In just 10 years it has become an Island-wide celebration that everyone turns up to.
“That’s just because we were there, giving them the resources to do it, just to imagine a different way to support that.”
The second was an international playwright’s exchange in 2023. It involved three playwrights from North America and three (Alan Muir, Stef Smith, and Elspeth Turner) from Scotland.
All six spent two weeks in Scotland – in Mull and Glasgow – and two weeks in the US in New York and Cape Cod, and they then produced new work based on the experience. “The work was about the crunchiness of the ripples that can happen with colonialism and the Scottish diaspora,” she said.
“The artistic director of one of the theatres involved in New York is a guy called Graham Guinness. He grew up in Nova Scotia, but Guinness is a surname from Mull, it’s a Hebridean surname. He didn’t know that.
“And so all of a sudden there’s this thing of like, OK, not only am I genetically, ethnically rooted in this place, but the structures on this world that I live in, some of which I like and some of which I don’t, are also rooted in something that happened in this tiny place that I’ve never heard of.
“All of a sudden, we’re important in a global scale. And the experience of people here is important and can be thought about in a bigger way.”
When those involved in The State of The Nation summit move on to advocating for a significant change in the importance society places on the arts they will certainly have their work cut out. Atkinson-Lord doesn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge they face.
She says: “More and more we see people as cogs in a capitalist machine. And so we’re not raising humans to be fulfilled, happy members of society. We’re raising humans to be contributing members towards an economic, financial production.
“You don’t need to be fulfilled to answer the phone for Amazon in a call centre. You don’t need to have a rich, creative life to pack boxes. But you do need a rich, creative life to imagine that Amazon is possible.
“It’s about saying that we as humans believe that these stories are important for the fabric of society, of humanity.
“We can either keep bashing our heads against the people that don’t believe that or we can start making the change ourselves and demonstrate how important and valuable it is.
“Because as long as we’re asking for permission to demonstrate the value, it makes it really hard for us to make the case, and the more underfunded, the more exhausted everybody is, the fewer resources, like human, personal, emotional resources, cognitive resources, we’ve got to advocate not even for the sector, but for the very nature of culture and creativity and art as a fundamental part of being.
“The hope is that if we can get to where everyone’s got a bit more resources because we’ve shared a bit better, the next level is that then maybe everyone’s got a little bit more emotional and cognitive resources to start speaking in a meaningful way with policy makers.
“And the more brilliant things, brilliant art and culture experiences that are happening in people’s lives, [that] they can access, the more they can feel the loss of what’s missing more. Hopefully more people will start to advocate for us as something that’s important.
“I’m going to be dead before this but it’s really important to start the process, because, because otherwise it won’t ever happen.”
