Getting the shows back on the road

Since the Arts Council's touring support dried up in 2000, few companies have been able to take productions around the country, but a new project aims to get theatre moving again, writes PETER CRAWLEY

A MAP OF the nation, featured on the website of Druid Theatre Company, shows an almost unrecognisable Ireland. At first glance it seems unfamiliar, so blanketed with blue pins, each marking a place to which Druid has toured a production since 1975, that the country looks more like a porcupine with all its quills extended. But if this Ireland now strikes us as a foreign place, it is because, even for a company as committed to touring as Druid, such activity is almost a thing of the past.

In 2000, the Arts Council discontinued its direct touring support for production companies, and has existed without a coherent policy on moving art around the nation until now.

“The saddest thing about the last nine years,” says Druid’s artistic director, Garry Hynes, “is that we had built a relationship with audiences over the previous 25 years among smaller areas where there wouldn’t have been an arts centre, and all those audiences were left to rot on the vine.”

Druid persisted with domestic touring, as have several companies across various art forms, but on a more limited means. The most remarkable example of Druid’s commitment to bringing its work beyond the pale may have been the logistically audacious tour of DruidSynge to Inis Meáin in 2005, but their touring agenda was based less on symbolism or extravagance than the more meaningful business of forging consistent relationships with numerous audiences.

“If we toured regularly to a number of key areas over a two- or three-year period,” recalls Hynes, “they began to regard Druid as their own. They build a relationship of trust with us. That’s the kind of situation in which, instead of bringing something that the audience necessarily knows, we may be able to bring something they don’t know, because they trust Druid.”

The building of such relationships, and the building of a brand, is precisely what has been encouraged by A Future for Arts Touring in Ireland, a recently published report whose recommendations have been adopted as Arts Council policy, to be implemented over six years from 2010-2015. This follows the Touring Experiment, a €2.5 million “action research” project facilitated over two years by the Irish Theatre Institute and Temple Bar Cultural Trust in 2006. The resulting document, which includes Phelim Donlon’s eye-opening case study of Livin’ Dred’s Conversations on a Homecoming (an invaluable account not only of the process of touring theatre but also of making theatre) recommends placing the audience at the centre of the discussion.

It is hardly a revolutionary concept and the report’s elaborations often tend towards tautology: “The Audience represents an intrinsic reward for artists and an essential force in developing appreciation of the arts.”

Yet the Touring Experiment itself was resoundingly successful, assisting 50 producers across six art forms – theatre, dance, literature, music, visual art and traditional arts – to tour 56 productions over two years, among them Conversations on a Homecoming, Rough Magic's Improbable Frequencyand The Taming of the Shrewand Landmark's Underneath the Lintel. The most comprehensive analysis of touring to date, it identifies the capabilities of venues and producers to deliver work, underlines the importance of marketing and the demands of audiences, and cannily identifies the conflicts in ad hoc policies adopted by the Arts Council while venues continued to spring up around the country and producers were inadequately resourced to serve them. In the words of Garry Hynes, though, "they are a series of findings that basically add up to what we know already."

ACCORDING TO Jane Daly, co-producer of the ITI and a producer with long experience in touring, that was partly the point. “It put all the anecdotal evidence around touring to bed, and let us base it on actuality and the on-the-road experience of artists, programmers and producers.”

In advocating audience-led touring, while emphasising the importance of a brand name, a recognisable writer or performer, the report could be construed as engendering a more commercial, bums-on-seats ethos for subsidised arts, one in which the public gets what the public wants.

Daly disagrees; indeed, the report specifically cautions against conservative programming. “It’s not about driving a commercial agenda with touring or a populist agenda, irrespective of what art form you’re working with. I think it’s about delivering high-quality artistic experiences.”

That is Hynes’s interpretation; she is also alive to the report’s artful anatomisation of “grant-reactive” behaviour – where, for example, a company might undertake a tour when offered the incentive of grant aid or a venue’s guarantee against loss. “Touring can’t be opportunistic,” says Hynes. “What [the report] does confirm is that the art has to be of high quality and it has to have an understanding of where it’s going, rather than following a series of points on a map that only make sense from a geographical point of view. I believe it emphasises quality and emphasises the relationship with the community that it goes into.”

The Touring Experiment concluded last year and the report – heavy with appendices, case studies, insights and recommendations – was submitted to the Arts Council in September 2008 and left unpublished. In a letter to The Irish Timesin June of this year, Hynes drew attention to its dormancy: "For those of us who are committed to touring and who actively participated in this research, and for audiences throughout the country, I suggest this is just simply not good enough," she concluded.

It is unclear what prompted the Arts Council’s decision to publish the report and its touring policy a few weeks later. Better late than never, goes one applicable saying. But in suggesting that selected companies must tour as an “integral part of their funding relationship with the Arts Council”, the Council is committing to an expensive undertaking in a time of economic meltdown – less a case of “too little too late” than potentially “too much too late”.

Val Ballance, the Arts Council’s head of venues, explains the timing as a result of the Council’s own complicated circumstance, when a lag of several months in the appointment of new members and chairperson to a depleted council created a log-jam in approving policies.

“It was actually published as soon as it could be, believe it or not,” says Ballance. There followed the process of condensing an 850-page report to a one-page policy document. “There was no thought that this would be a strategically good time to release it,” he says. “Actually, this is not a good time to release it at all.”

Daly might agree. “It’s published in a different climate to the one we anticipated. Nobody anticipated that, two years later, there would be an economic implosion and the arts would be fighting for its life, rather than actually trying to create added opportunities for the artist and audiences and the taxpayer.”

WHILE THE Arts Council waits to discover its own budget, following ominous rumbles from An Bord Snip Nua that Government may shave €6.1 million from its budget, many artists may look at this imperative to travel as a potentially ruinous gift: a white elephant tour. But, without seeming fanciful, another argument construes touring as an instrument of social, cultural and economic stimulation.

“It would be a brave thing for the Arts Council to channel money from a shrinking budget into touring,” says Daly, “but I think in order to save the arts audiences and other available audiences that are not currently extending to arts activities, there is a potential to use touring very imaginatively and productively in this particular period. But something has to suffer as a result of that, clearly.”

“I don’t envy the council in the job they have to do,” says Hynes, “but they have to deliver. They have to find a practical way to deliver on this unequivocal validation that audiences want high-quality theatre and want it on a consistent basis, regardless of financial circumstances.”

There is almost a moral urgency in Hynes explanation following the frustrations of the ad hoc nature of touring for nearly a decade, something alleviated by the exemplar efforts of recently established venue-led touring networks such as NOMAD and NASC. “The taxes that fund the Arts Council are paid by the entire country,” says Hynes, many of its citizens without immediate access to theatres. “I believe it’s the right of those people to experience theatre in their own communities.”

The Arts Council’s policy document is unequivocal in its adoption of a touring strategy and is sensitive to its difficulties while identifying its primary purpose as ensuring that “regional audiences have access to high quality arts experiences”. Hynes won’t use the “r” word, aware of its implicit prioritising of urban centres; Daly, too, was struck by the phrase. “I hope that ‘regional’ also includes Dublin,” she says. Indeed, looking back at Druid’s website, or the high quality of theatre across the country, Dublin is just one of countless pins now that touring has been put back on the map.

Livin' Dred's production of The Dead School, produced by Nomad, will be performed in three Dublin venues as part of this year's Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival