Stop listening to loud ghosts
I started as CEO of Barbican Theatre, Plymouth 4 days before the first lock-down. The ludicrous situation and the decimation of our income created a permission for change within my organisation, board and city that has been immense. My team has been so committed, brave and provocative in their desire to work and walk in line with their morals, values and ethics in everything we do. We started to really see this working when we compiled our Covid 19 Impact Report.
This summer, now as the CEO and AD, still enjoying a turnover reduced by a third, I am increasingly disillusioned because I am hearing a lot of excuses being made across the industry suggesting that ‘change isn’t possible’.
I have written this article, from my heart, to prove otherwise.
Change:
It was always MY responsibility to present things in a way that makes it easy for my team and my board to change direction. The We Mean Business Coalition has been leading the way on this for years- providing the evidence that CEO/ COO/ CTO’s need to be able to advocate to commercial shareholders the environmental and financial imperative for dramatic business change. I applied the same principles in my first month when presenting a brand new 3 year business plan building on a 53% reduction in turnover. I will not, personally, forgive you for not being bothered to change your direction of travel.
Recruitment:
We have been running a fully accessible and inclusive recruitment process across all roles at Barbican Theatre since spring 2021, based on the epic, open and honest leadership provided by the Watershed (and many other organisations). We have seen a dramatic shift in applicants for all roles including board recruitment (65% Female/ non-binary, 36% from the LGBTQI+ community, over 50% under 30, 20% world-majority, 27% identifying as having a disability).
It’s much more labour intensive for us - and we have had to give ourselves way more time to assess applications than we originally anticipated. However - that’s a great thing, as it means we hear more regularly, and honestly what people think about us as an organisation. If we slow down in anticipation of the quality of the interaction - the opportunity to meet and talk to new people who are excited by Barbican Theatre we are honouring their potential. Without fail we have had exceptional candidates who are not confident yet in conveying their strengths on paper but who have wowed us with their insights.
If you’re not doing these things as a minimum - I don’t think you are committed to change.
Future Leadership:
After successfully embedding inclusive recruitment practices into the Barbican, I encouraged two other NPO’s in Plymouth to use the methodology for a joint board recruitment campaign. I have ten new Board Members (because I couldn’t turn down such a brilliant set of new voices to help strengthen our future). Over the next three years we want under 30 yr olds to make up 50% of our board (check out Contact in Manchester and Rising Arts and Leaders Unlocked for their leadership in this area). It’s a joy to be creating a pipeline, and to be supporting young leadership growth across a range of initiatives - from young creative leadership support, mentorships to training opportunities.
Responsibility:
The responsibility is entirely ours: it’s hard - but only because it means being brave about not holding power, and about not leaning into our own egos. That’s all. The change work is actually easy - because there are numerous organisations generously sharing their systems, evidence, processes, learnings, and the challenges. I link to a number of them throughout this article.
Every small action we do from switching to inclusive recruitment processes or getting our very different communities to sign our inclusion principles so they know what we expect of them, or making sure we are transparent about pay, contracts are issued in time, getting into the habit of adding image descriptions, is undertaken as a team . We know that it is a continuous, iterative process. Our focus is on starting and then honestly reviewing, learning and making the next improvements so that we are always moving forward.
I cannot trust and support organisations who are extolling their own virtues, when behind the scenes they are discredited and are known to be despicable in their motives, processes or actions.
I will never tolerate the ‘curry nights’/golf/ after hours drinks where decisions are made without due transparency. But I will be here for collaborative leadership without ego that shares resources and that creates change and equitable spaces.
No person is worth more just because they have an access point or understand a coded bias that has been created to support our current systemic biases.
Intentions are great- but actions are better. If you send out lists of information, resources, digs lists, and don’t regularly reassess the quality of those lists then you aren’t taking ownership of your responsibility and are perpetuating risks to our Queer, Female, Global Majority Communities.
If you don’t use inclusive recruitment processes, or don’t enact one-strike discipline processes, or don’t make people sign inclusion principles that explain what’s expected of them then you are, again, not taking ownership of your responsibility and are perpetuating risks to our Queer, Female, Global Majority Communities.
Support:
The consistent change makers are tired after supporting, facilitating, being brave and resilient for 2 ½ years, and they are exhausted at the prospect of what’s coming next. They need support — and not necessarily through them continuously, week after week, writing funding applications for over subscribed and continuously reducing pots of funding.
Many people believe that your actions speak louder than words, and as a consequence they’re not always great at shouting. Funders and Boards: you need to invest bravely where change is really happening- not in dead organisations or dead buildings just because they’re loud ghosts.
Support your Ecology:
Last year alone we paid over a third of our turnover to the Freelancer ecology in the South West. By providing paid internships, paid work, paid starter jobs and by clearly stating wages we are removing barriers for people with other financial and personal responsibilities.
Support New Voices:
Our ReBels programme (12 yrs +) offers interdisciplinary classes that are designed to build confidence in cross artform working, collaboration and co-creation where each class is co-led by two specialists from different art forms. Over half our classes have digital creative tools embedded into their delivery. We’re giving people the tools to find their own creative voices. Since launching 2 years ago we’ve met new music producers and sound engineers, female technical managers, audio book writers, podcast makers, projection mapped ghost story performers (only 14yrs old!), LGBTQI+ comedians, rehearsal directors at 18, teenage choreographers fusing parkour, hip hop and contemporary and exciting film makers.
Check Your Bias and then Check It Again:
After working all over the world, and being part of Keychange I will not programme work without asking myself hard questions about how biassed my own trusted networks, and preferences are.
Gatekeeping in the culture sector is a major problem- which is why later this month we are launching Creative Takeover and next year Exchange for Change.
We’re offering over 600 hours of Creative Take Over space a term. That’s 48 hours of space a week that anyone can book for creative uses. We want all our spaces, from rehearsal and performance spaces to halls and offices to be full of people who feel supported enough to make their own work without gatekeepers. So we’re getting out of the way and aren’t asking anyone to justify why they want space. We are excited about giving people space to grow as leaders, artists and new companies.
Exchange for Change is a nationwide project commencing in 2023 and is about turning regional programming on its head: who decides what is programmed, what’s seen as having value and how we hear about shows. It will be a network of under 35s who will be supported to develop their confidence in their own analytical voices. They will paid to see work and feedback their own views on it. We’re excited to hear about new artists, ways of communicating projects, and finding out where people actually want to go and see shows and then working with the Exchange for Change community to programme the work they are excited by. Let me know if you want to be involved.
WATCH NEON ROMANCE BBC ARTS FILM COMMISSION
Support Your Audiences:
In the last two years my team of six have produced 179 live and 80 online events, with 50 communities, supported over 250 creatives and reached an audience of 2 million. This includes in the last year alone 26 days of dance programming (more than any other organisation in the city), 190 days of dance workshops and 17 shows on national tour- all specifically voices and stories and ways of telling stories that otherwise wouldn’t be seen in Plymouth. Our passion has been about creating new routes into seeing ‘culture’ and that means we have to rethink everything from price, value, how you talk about money, coded and biassed language and advertising, what copy and images actually say to totally new techniques to reach different audiences.
After only a year of programming citywide and inside our theatre entirely within a Pay What You Decide Box Office - where there is no financial barrier to accessing a show - we have a risk-taking audience with an appetite for seeing work. Our data shows 61% new Audiences, who are the holy grail of under 35s non-arts attendees. 40% of our audiences living in the top 1 and 3% uk wide areas of multiple indices of socio-economic deprivation (70 % in the top 10% areas) with over 25% of customers said PWYD was the reason they booked. Our PWYD systems are now being adopted by other organisations in Plymouth.
“If not for the pay what you feel idea, I couldn’t come. I cannot afford ‘normal’ theatre prices.” Audience Member
How the industry can justify £120 — £160 pounds for a family ticket to Panto, I will never be able to fathom. Let alone £400 + for a family ticket in the West End. Let alone selling restricted view tickets for shows for £47. These costs are so prohibitive and there’s no permission there for risk taking. There’s no opportunity for new audiences. It is exclusionary and unacceptable. Prohibitively expensive tickets are a false economy- we stagnate our audience, we don’t build new.
At the Barbican we’ve been running Pay What You Decide on our shows for over a year-thanks to the support initially of the Esmee Fairbairn and Garfield Western Foundation and will KEEP doing it on every show possible.
For Plymouth in 2021–22, we know that the average price people can actually afford to take a risk on seeing a show is just over £9 a ticket. Yes, that has an impact on our box office yield and as a consequence, the amount we can pay in a guarantee or the potential box office split a company might receive. But we’re fuelling a new consistent audience, with shows selling extraordinarily well and with our small venue achieving a reach of over 2 million people in the last two years.
Trust:
Making decisions in line with our ethics and values gives us continued permission to speak frankly, change, take ourselves to task, be transparent and keep rewriting the rules. People need to be able to trust us. So we must be honest and open.
And trust is not in buildings — it is earned, one person at a time, by people
being seen.
being valued,
being heard.
being told that your culture, your understanding, your myths, your questions, your legends, your stories have value.
Being supported
Being financially valued.
Cities are sold solely on their cultural identities. For a city to have culture, serendipity and engagement we need citizens who choose to be there, who feel valued as social leaders, as artists, as communicators, as shop owners, as bus drivers. And to do that they need to feel seen.
It isn’t my place to deny a community’s right to space, to gather, celebrate and explore their stories. And it is certainly not my place to ‘white-wash’ it.
Where do you listen?
I’m on this platform right now because for some reason there are a number of big C cultural leaders that think this is the only place to amplify value. It’s not. It’s just where you guys hang out.
Our audiences however, are over on whatsapp, on Instagram stories. They’re on the street corners. They’re out doing Saturday shopping or jumping off cliffs.
And in all honesty- I’m more interested in them, every-single-day. Because in the same way that we were asking them to trust us, I trust them. I’m gutted when we get things wrong, but at least I know we’ll learn from it, and that we’re walking in the right direction.
You can find our Impact Report here.
Contact Laura
