THE Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) building at 350 Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow – which closed its doors to the public in January – is the subject of a proposal for a new cultural hub.
Some of Scotland’s most respected artistic companies and artists – ranging from performance groups Vanishing Point, Shotput, Groupwork, Disaster Plan and Superfan, to creators such as Mamoru Iriguchi and Craig McCorquodale – have developed a blueprint for an innovative reopening of the venue.
The proposal is that these companies and individuals, collaborating as a collective, move into the building, making it a vibrant centre for contemporary performance.
Matthew Lenton – artistic director of the acclaimed, Glasgow-based theatre company Vanishing Point, and a leading light in the redevelopment plan – says, “we, as a group, have collectively seen an opportunity that’s quite exciting”.
The project is, Lenton adds, “uniting artists and companies in Scotland, and particularly in Glasgow, in ways that I’ve never seen in the 30 years that I’ve been here”.
Part of the group’s motivation is to save the building for the arts. “There’s a possibility that it might become something that isn’t the living, breathing thing that it should be,” warns Lenton.
The building began its life as an arts venue when the great Scottish writer Tom McGrath established it as the Third Eye Centre in 1975. That venture came to an end in 1991, but the building reopened as the CCA in 1992, a time when the cultural life of Glasgow was flourishing in the aftermath of the great success of the European Capital of Culture events of 1990.
In the current period, by contrast, arts companies are struggling to recover from the impact of the Covid pandemic. They are also still reeling from massive cuts to state arts funding which caused such consternation and alarm that the Scottish Government felt compelled to step in with what amounted to a cultural rescue package.
Lenton and his colleague in the new collective, Jim Manganello (co-artistic director of the dance-theatre company Shotput), believe that the recent difficult period for the arts has led to a climate of artistic conservatism. Innovative and experimental work is being sidelined, they believe, in favour of the kind of work – such as stage musicals – that is considered to be more commercially viable.
“There’s a real lack in Scotland now of what I would call mid-scale, technically and artistically ambitious theatre,” Lenton comments. “So much subsidy is going into work that aspires to be commercial, and I think that’s creating a homogeneity in Scottish theatre.”
Manganello agrees: “I think something is going on in Scottish theatre right now where almost every National Theatre of Scotland production satirises Margaret Thatcher in some way, and yet Scottish theatre seems to have swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the Thatcherite line that ‘there is no alternative’.
“We are saying that there is an alternative way to make work and an alternative way to engage with audiences.”
The proposal is “an opportunity to run a building in a completely different way”, Lenton enthuses. If the project goes ahead, the new venue will be, he says, “artist-led, by a collective of companies that work together constructively.”
Lenton describes the artists involved in the nascent collective as “visionaries”. They are, he says, “not people who are climbing institutional ladders and becoming stale”.
Rather, the group,“have made their own way, ploughed their own furrow, and to be able to do that, you need to be an entrepreneur. Too often it’s frowned upon to talk about entrepreneurialism in the arts, but all of these people know how to get things done, and they can do it in a much more maverick way than people who have been institutionalised.”
Lenton and Manganello are, surely, correct in identifying a current imbalance in the Scottish performing arts, whereby the most innovative work is being sidelined to a considerable degree.
Lenton is concerned, for instance, that the planned international tour of Vanishing Point’s acclaimed show Confessions Of A Shinagawa Monkey (a beautiful piece based upon the writings of the great writer Haruki Murakami and co-produced with the Kanagawa Arts Theatre of Yokohama, Japan) will not play at Edinburgh’s major repertory theatre, the Royal Lyceum. The reason for this is that the Lyceum – which, last week, trumpeted the Duke of Edinburgh as its new Royal Patron – will be, as Lenton explains, “doing the next big commercial musical”.
The plan for 350 Sauchiehall Street will, Manganello explains, create a venue “where the citizens of Glasgow and of Scotland, but also visitors to Scotland, can see work on any given night in one of the spaces. That work will be, at the very least, interesting, technically robust, ambitious and experimenting with form.”
Crucially, Lenton insists, the plan for the former CCA building offers arts funding quango Creative Scotland “value for money”. “All of the companies would use proportions of their funding to cover some of the overheads of the venue,” he says.
“We will learn what the building needs and how it can be run efficiently. We can, to some extent, run the building from within the infrastructures of our own companies.”
Lenton is clear that – whilst the collective is made of performing arts people – they are absolutely open to bringing the visual arts back into the building as the project progresses. Likewise, they are already in advanced discussions with leading people in the restaurant trade about creating a new café-restaurant within the venue.
The people in the collective – who range from artists, such as McCorquodale, who are relatively new on the scene, to slightly older heads, like Iriguchi – would not be “wasting our time” on a project they were not serious about, says Lenton. “This is something that we – as a group of people, and as a group of companies – are genuine in seeing as an opportunity, and we have been genuinely pulled together because we think in the same way and are excited by each other’s ideas.
“It feels to me like it has the same potential that must have existed in Glasgow in the 1990s.”
