About this website: On the 26th and 27th of November 2009, a group of people came together at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham to begin to answer the question "How do we create a better future for theatre, here, in the West Midlands". This website holds the notes from the sessions held over those two days, and allows anyone (whether they were present at the event or not) to continue the conversations from the event. You can read Alison Gagen's full invitation to the event here

The Role of the Venue

Convenor:

Louisa Davies

Attendees:

Liz Tomlin, Michelle Knight, James Dacre, John O Hanlon, Paul Warwick, Sam Fox, Mike Tweddle, Katerina Pushkin, David Bennett, Miguel Ogarzun, Geraldine Collinji, Gillian Twaite, Catherine Edwards

Description:

Venue as physical building: the need to offer a range of affordable rehearsal spaces from sprung floor spaces to spaces where you can make more of a mess.
Venues will always need to charge something for access to spaces unless offered as part funding for co-productions. Funding in kind of this sort needs to be more valued by arts funders.

Should venues choose between being producing/receiving/flexible spaces? Should they specialise? Venues are generally needing to be flexible; should still maintain clear artistic policy and identity; is that the case in Birmingham/the Region? Some said yes, others no.

Venues are turning much more to supporting and developing local companies, for co-productions and week long runs. ‘One night stands’ by visiting companies are no longer sustainable. This is welcomed by local companies – but the need to continue attracting high level national and international work was also felt to be vital. Partnership projects with venues in other regions was seen as a key way forward.

Issues with this model were identified as – excluding companies who didn’t have existing relationships/networks with venue from development; becomes more difficult for companies to tour nationally as less venues taking in work on this basis, local companies might not look enough beyond the region; the ‘selection’ process for production was in fewer hands.

Responses to issues raised: development projects like Pilot help to offer a wide range of companies the opportunity to try out work. Such projects can also ‘broker’ relationships between newer artists and venues.

This was also a good way to introduce your work to venues, but venues should also welcome unsolicited applications, invitations to work, dvd records of work etc. At the very least venues should attempt to make their processes clear and transparent to artists who might be interested in developing partnerships with them.

Should venues be providing information about starting out as a company? A kind of advice shop for emerging artists / graduates? Or is this better placed with organisations like Pilot? How can this link in with training in HE departments who are also offering students this info? Either way a central database of information on where you can rehearse, produce work, who you need to speak to, mentoring schemes etc, would be really helpful. It was observed that sometimes such websites fall into disuse and it might be better placed within one single organisation.