Deep in the labyrinth that is Creative Scotland’s website lay the announcement of an open meeting to discuss the recent Theatre Sector Review. I only heard about it through social media and then found the details with a bit of creative googling. Maybe this explains why the turnout wasn’t higher. It wasn’t bad, but for something that matters to so many theatremakers, it should have been higher.
The production values weren’t bad, I’ll give them that – the meeting took place in a huge, fancy-looking room, all plate glass and white walls. The tea came in proper crockery. The couches in the waiting area are colour co-ordinated with the Visitors’ badges. It looks slick.
Yet for all its professional appearance, the meeting got off to a late and somewhat rambling start. Indeed, it was never clearly stated what the purpose of the meeting was. To ‘reflect’ on the Report, yes – and yet that’s the one thing we were never actually permitted to do.
Without being given an opportunity to discuss it as a complete group, we were messily divided into three sub-groups. Despite the presence of at least four Creative Scotland staff, only two of the three groups had anyone facilitating, which suggests either a failure to organise properly or a certain indecision as to how things should be run. I’m all for discussion with no facilitator – you know, ‘open’ discussion – and it would have been simple enough for the CS staff to have watched and listened and taken note of what was being said.
In fact, this might have been a much better way to do things. In the first place, it would have resolved the issue of taking minutes, since the CS staff could have done that. Instead, volunteers were required from each group to take responsibility for minuting the discussion, typing it up and sending it in. As anyone who has ever taken minutes will tell you, there’s a knack to minuting effectively without being left out of the discussion, and it seemed to me rather unfair to ask people who had come to join the discussion to take on this task, especially as it means typing it up in their own time.
In the second, if Creative Scotland had simply been facilitating a discussion between theatremakers it would have felt less… guarded? Contrived? Slippery? There was something problematic about the way questions about the report itself were dismissed and any attempt at wider discussion shut down. We were there to agree with the report in broad terms, supply a few nifty soundbites and allow the box marked “Public Consultation” to be ticked. Linking Creative Scotland directly with the report was strictly forbidden – it’s a report commissioned by Creative Scotland, it’s not their report. Why the need to make that distinction? Why distance themselves from the report unless they don’t trust it, and if they don’t trust it why steer us away from any in-depth discussion?
It was all the more conspicuous when we were refused clarification of other terms. The Report makes mention of a desired “20% growth”. When I asked what this meant I was told it referred to a 20% growth in “resources”. Is it just me, or is that basically the corporate synonym for “stuff”? Likewise, when I asked why “new work” was taken as being one of the “great things about Scottish theatre” without any explanation on interrogation of the term, I was told “We’d rather not go back over the report”. Right. So anything new is good, the fact that Scotland makes new work somehow makes us different to pretty much everywhere else and we’re supposed to accept all this without question or comment.
For added irony, the conversation moved on to a discussion of quality and how we measure and feedback on it. If this meeting was anything to go by, it would seem Creative Scotland plans to measure it by taking a unilateral decision on whether something is a good thing or not, then sticking by it without further evaluation. I really hope that’s not the case, but an organisation that has been so roundly criticised for its lack of clarity and failure to engage in any meaningful way with the artistic community might want to take a little more care over the way it presents itself. However sincere and well-meaning CS may be, they can’t afford to pay no attention to anything that makes them appear otherwise.
It’s infuriating to find yourself in a room with so many creative, intelligent people who all have plenty to say (and I’m not just talking about airing our funding grievances), then to be unable to have a proper conversation with them because you’re trapped in a discussion which is so tightly controlled that it feels almost scripted. It made me long for another Devoted & Disgruntled session, where conversations are free and self-governing. We’re not little children who are incapable of sticking to the point unless we’re properly marshalled. The conversations at D&D were remarkably non-chaotic. They achieved a lot. It felt like we were making progress. Perhaps that was because we weren’t spending our time on corporate jargon and keeping everything ‘on message’.
By the end of the session I felt upset and vaguely angry. I found myself wondering how I can ever make any headway in this industry if it means penetrating the Byzantine workings of organisations such as Creative Scotland. And yet I’m not the only person who feels this way. There are plenty of practitioners out there who find CS confusing and stressful. Some of them speak up. Some of them don’t, because you mustn’t upset the people who write the cheques. Personally, I’d rather trust the individuals at Creative Scotland to be mature, sensible people who can take criticism and learn from it, adjusting how they engage with artists if necessary.
I strongly believe that we need more communication with Creative Scotland – more discussion, less corporate jargon, more trust on both sides. Perhaps the first thing we need to do, before we spend more time going round in circles having unproductive, box-ticking discussions, is learn to talk to each other.
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