Features – Page 11 – Catherine Love

“We’ve a responsibility to widen the net”

Posted on August 27, 2013September 22, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The Stage.

In 2011, following years of debate around the growing culture of internships in the arts sector, Arts Council England issued a set of guidelines for employers taking on interns. This document outlined the Arts Council’s determination “to open employment opportunities in the arts to all” and made it clear that interns should be paid the national minimum wage. But has anything actually changed?

On the one hand, it would appear that little has shifted. Once again it is that time of year when those hoping to break into the arts look to the Edinburgh Fringe, which promises a cornucopia of opportunities but little by way of payment. While the Festival Fringe Society does pay its staff, as do a number of the commercial venues such as Underbelly and the Assembly Rooms, many more rely on voluntary or poorly paid labour. C Venues, for instance, hires staff on a “semi-voluntary” basis, offering accommodation and an unspecified “minimal freelance fee”, while even the Traverse Theatre has advertised for unpaid festival placements.

Of course, it is not just on the Fringe that interns receive a raw deal. Many theatres across the country operate unpaid internships the whole year round, often for understandable reasons. For some organisations it is the only economically viable model available to them if they want to stay open, and for interns it can provide opportunities that might not otherwise be available to them. Internships also remain something of a grey area, with the Arts Council’s guidelines admitting that “there is no formal, legal definition of an internship”.

There is, however, a new scheme that seeks to address some of these difficulties. The Creative Employment Programme, funded by a £15 million grant from the Arts Council and delivered by Creative & Cultural Skills, hopes to widen access to careers in the arts by supporting paid opportunities for unemployed people aged between 16 and 24. The programme is offering internships and apprenticeships for both graduates and non-graduates over the next two years.

“The aims are to address youth unemployment as best we can, encourage people into the arts through different and fair access routes, and hopefully to change some of the recruitment practices that are in our sector,” explains Paul Marijetic, head of apprenticeships at Creative & Cultural Skills. He recognises that those who currently enter the industry tend to come from a “small demographic”, so one of the key goals is to widen this pool of recruits.

Through this new initiative, organisations looking to establish paid internships or apprenticeships can apply to the Creative Employment Programme for part wage grants, either as individual institutions or as consortia. In keeping with the aim of widening access, successful employers must then sign up to a Fair Access Principle and advertise the positions through the Job Centre Plus.

“With this programme we wanted to meet people who we don’t normally meet when we recruit,” says Emma Rees of the London Theatre Consortium (LTC), one of the first networks to benefit from the scheme. This group of 13 theatres, including the Royal Court, the Lyric Hammersmith and the Donmar Warehouse, is offering 38 apprenticeships across the two years. “We didn’t advertise through the normal channels,” Rees continues. “We thought about how to find people.”

Another early bid to successfully receive funding was from House, a consortium of theatres across South East and Eastern England which will be offering 16 internships in 11 venues. Gavin Stride, director of Farnham Maltings and one of the key figures behind the consortium, stresses that “we have got a responsibility to try and widen the net in terms of the ways people engage in the sector”, adding that “sometimes you need to be ambitious to make things different”.

Marijetic is keen for others to follow the lead of LTC and House, making it clear that the Creative Employment Programme is welcoming consortium bids. By working together in this way, groups of theatres can offer much more valuable opportunities for interns and apprentices, as well as providing them with a broader overview of the industry. The LTC, for example, will offer apprentices a glimpse at the inner workings of all 13 theatres, leaving them with “a really strong grasp of the broader ecology of London theatre”, while Stride says that he can see interns moving between the different House venues depending on their skills and interests.

There is also the possibility that consortia could offer a sustainable model to take forward after this two-year programme concludes. As Marijetic explains, there is other funding available from government agencies to support these opportunities, but the money is often closed off to smaller organisations. He recognises that funding is going to be vital in sustaining these kinds of initiatives in the long term, describing the Creative Employment Programme as “the catalyst, the financial push to enable [organisations] to make that change”.

The organisations themselves seem equally committed to creating long term change. “We’re really, really keen for this scheme to develop into a viable alternative to university,” explains Rees, “not just reaching those people who might otherwise go to university, but reaching those people who most certainly wouldn’t.” Once again, however, money is the stumbling block. “The will is usually really strong, but this kind of work does need financial investment,” she admits.

If such opportunities are able to continue, there is even the suggestion that they could spark more widespread change. Stride argues that perhaps the most important thing about the Creative Employment Programme is that it will bring in “people who think differently” and who might be able to breathe fresh air into theatre organisations. “We need to be looking outwards, not inwards,” Stride insists. “We’ve got to take down the barricades, because actually they’re not defending us, they’re killing us.”

Photo: Briony Campbell for Creative & Cultural Skills.

Theatrical Matchmakers

Posted on August 27, 2013September 28, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The Stage.

If there’s one thing Old Vic New Voices can’t be faulted for, it’s ambition. Last year, the Old Vic Theatre’s talent, education and community arm took a season of five plays to the Edinburgh Fringe, showcased a handful of brand new pieces from the US, supported several new productions in London, created a series of short films and mounted its ever-popular 24 Hour Plays – not to mention its extensive work with schools and local communities. At the heart of all these projects, it soon becomes clear from conversation with director Steve Winter, is an impulse to bring people together and link up emerging talent.

“We’re theatrical matchmakers,” is how Winter puts it. “That’s what we’ve always been and that’s what we want to continue to be.” This statement of intent comes as Old Vic New Voices implements a major overhaul of its Talent strand, reassessing the support it offers to emerging artists. Driven by a shift from project-by-project support to initiatives that will nurture talent over longer periods, the new opportunities being introduced this year include start-up funds to get fledgling projects off the ground and a dedicated venue for projects supported by the organisation.

Alongside hooking up like-minded artists and venues, Old Vic New Voices will now be connecting emerging artists and companies with the space to develop their work, offering free slots in a rehearsal space it has dubbed the ‘LAB’. The aim is as experimental as the name suggests; Winter describes it as “a place to fail and a place to succeed and a place to try things out”. Most strikingly, the emphasis is on process rather than product, with artists under no pressure to present a performance at the end of their time in the space.

“That’s one thing we’re absolutely clear about; it shouldn’t be a performance space,” says Winter. “If there’s one thing London doesn’t need, it’s more theatres.” Instead of being driven by the end goal of a full performance, Winter hopes that the LAB will be used “to develop and make work, to allow people to get together and talk, for writers to go somewhere to write quietly, for people to hold meetings, to invite people to watch a piece of work that might need funding – anything that propels creativity forward”.

The initiative has emerged from discussion with artists themselves, who highlighted space as one of the most important resources they could be offered. “I think there comes a point with any application or any job you’re doing where space becomes absolutely key,” Winter explains. “It’s an underrated, simple idea to give space away for free, because it’s so expensive in London – it’s expensive for the Old Vic, it’s expensive for the National, it’s expensive for everybody. And so it stops and stagnates many projects that I think would go on to be successful.” To fight this stagnation, Old Vic New Voices is offering companies and individuals the opportunity to book up to five weeks in the LAB across the year, asking only that applicants tell them what the space will be used for.

The response to this offer has been hugely varied. Winter tells me that more than 40 projects used the space in the first three months, including everything from devised theatre companies to poets to comedy performers. This represents something of a departure for Old Vic New Voices, whose focus in the past has been firmly on traditional theatre artists, primarily supporting writers, directors, actors and producers. While he’s keen to emphasise that this is not a complete break, Winter is enthusiastic about the possibilities of these new influences, saying “it’s been nice to get a different energy in the room”.

The only problem with this initiative, as Winter freely admits, is how to assess its impact. “I think for us this year the measure of success will be how much work gets off the ground and to what end,” he says, at the same time acknowledging that this evaluation might not satisfy everyone. He also suggests, however, that evaluation across the industry is beginning to shift, with definitions of success no longer as clear-cut as they once were.

“For a lot of people, their barometer of success is that they’ve got a rehearsed reading together, and they’ve had people see their work and they have felt creatively satisfied. I think the way that people are getting work out there is very different, and it’s about that too. If you get 20 new Twitter followers or you have an online phenomenon, then that’s a barometer of success; if you do a piece of work in a fringe venue that has less people than you might have on your Twitter account, is that less successful or more successful?”

Ultimately, the answers to Winter’s questions are down to the artists; amidst all the changes taking place at Old Vic New Voices, the determination to listen to the needs of those they help is key. “We just want to bring them together and facilitate creativity,” Winter says simply. “In principle that sounds rather empty and worthy; in practical terms it’s massively important.” While the future of Old Vic New Voices might be far from certain – Winter would love to install the LAB as a permanent space, but at the moment it is only secured for a year – the organisation is adamant that its direction will be steered by the artists it supports. “Rather than us leading and expecting them to follow, we’re being led by them.”

Lack of female role models? Make one up

Posted on August 23, 2013September 17, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The Guardian.

At the last count, there are currently more than 40,000 Disney Princessproducts on the market. It has been estimated that pre-teens now spend seven hours a day staring at a smartphone, computer or TV, and witness many thousands of violent acts online each year.

These are just a few of the startling facts performance artist Bryony Kimmings uncovered during research for her latest project. Part social experiment, part educational project, part theatre show, Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model – now showing at the Edinburgh fringe – is a response to Kimmings’ mounting anger at the commodification of childhood and the pop industry’s objectification of women and young girls. In her attempt to push back, she has recruited an unlikely ally: her niece, Taylor, now 10.

“I was a bit shocked at what was available to her,” Kimmings explains during a break from rehearsals. As the two talked, it became clear that the female role models on offer in the media were worryingly limited, and that they all seemed to offer the same bland version of success. Kimmings names flesh-baring pop stars such as Rihanna and Katy Perry, who perpetuate a similar idea of femininity. As she points out, young people can get “a really limited view of what women are”. So the pair decided to take matters into their own hands – and invent an alternative.

Dreamed up by Taylor and brought to life by her aunt, Kimmings’ new alter ego is a pop star created with a child, for children. Catherine Bennett – CB to her fans – is a dinosaur-loving, bike-riding, tuna pasta-eating hero who squeezes in a pop career around working in a museum as a palaeontologist. As Taylor explains, it was important to make CB “very different” to the female celebrities children usually see. Where most stars straighten their hair, CB wears hers defiantly curly. While other singers opt to bare their flesh, CB’s skirts are kept firmly below the knee.

But, like all pop stars, Catherine Bennett wants to be famous. Kimmings repeatedly refers to the project as “the fame experiment”, approaching it with all the hope and mischief of a kid with a chemistry set. To help Bennett hit the big time, Kimmings has assembled a true pop-star entourage: real-life makeup artists who have worked with Girls Aloud, i-D magazine stylists and a PR company. The team have offered their expertise to turn Catherine Bennett into a viable superstar, giving her the best possible shot at fame. “I just copied what they did with real pop stars,” Kimmings says, noting the enthusiasm and generosity she has met from those in the industry – many of whom feel just as disillusioned about how the system works.

Catherine Bennett’s successes so far include recording two music videos, closing the Children’s Media Conference in Sheffield in July and appearing as part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre in London. For her to be considered truly famous, however, Taylor has decided she needs to achieve a series of “fame aims”, including reaching a million hits on YouTube and making three celebrity friends. But the ultimate target, Kimmings adds, is to spawn a copycat.

While it might be said that the project’s fixation on fame runs the risk of reinforcing dominant definitions of success, it is important to Kimmings and Taylor that their creation makes her mark. If CB’s influence can be seen elsewhere, says Kimmings, the duo will know that they have “changed a bigger thing”.

The theatre show, which debuted as a work-in-progress at the Almeida festival in London ahead of its run in Edinburgh, is rejecting the “show and tell” format of Kimmings’ previous fringe successes, Sex Idiot and 7 Day Drunk, which dwelt, respectively, on Kimmings’ acquisition of an STI and her problematic relationship with booze. Instead, Kimmings is adopting a more “abstract” and “fantasy-based” approach, taking inspiration from the aesthetic of shows such as Game of Thrones to tell a coming-of-age narrative with a twist. “There’s quite a lot of symbolism,” Kimmings says, “but hopefully not in a cheesy way, hopefully in a cool way.” In the show, she and her niece appear together on stage to explore the darker side of growing up, from inappropriate dance routines to internet violence. The version I see is still being developed, but you can expect fake armour and a healthy amount of leaping around.

After Edinburgh, the show will tour until the end of 2014, while the mission to meet the fame aims continues. By the time Kimmings says goodbye to Bennett, she would like “just the tiniest of shifts in the brains of loads of children, or just a couple more cool representations of feminist women in the media”.

Kimmings is realistic about what she and Taylor are up against, but she remains resolutely optimistic. “I’ve got this blind hope that it’s going to happen,” she smiles, making it clear that this latest show is not about to let audiences off the hook. As Taylor adds cheerfully: “It’s a bit like being kicked in the stomach.”

Hunt & Darton Cafe

Posted on August 7, 2013September 17, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for The List.

Go looking for a snack in Edinburgh city centre during August and you might just stumble upon some unexpected art. For a second year, live art duo Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton are offering festival-goers food for the stomach and the eyes at the Hunt & Darton Café, their unique pop-up installation on St Mary’s Street.

The idea behind it, Darton explains, was that ‘a passerby might just come in wanting a simple cup of tea and a cake and before they knew it they were involved in the installation’. The café first opened in Cambridge in April 2012 as part of the Cultural Olympiad, and has since visited Edinburgh and East London. The pop-up venue will be back at the Fringe this year, offering the addition of a bar in the evenings and an expanded programme of performances.

‘It became much more political than we realised,’ says Hunt, describing how the café unexpectedly transformed into an alternative, artist-led venue on the Fringe. In 2012, the pair was amazed by the huge response from artists looking for somewhere new to present their work. This year, that demand has been satisfied with a varied evening line-up, which Hunt and Darton hope that they are ‘framing slightly differently by it belonging to the café’.

As well as ‘shamelessly’ programming themselves, the pair have invited shows such as Chris Dobrowolski’s performance lecture All Roads Lead to Rome and Richard DeDomenici’s Popaganda, a piece that’s ‘very much about the now and popular culture’. But the art is by no means confined to the performances.

‘We say that every element of the café is art,’ Darton explains. ‘There are never any paintings on the wall or anything, because we don’t want people to be like – that’s the art!’ So the waiter serving you might be a performer, while everything down to the salt and pepper shakers has been carefully designed. Even the menu is something of a statement.

‘We thought quite long and hard about how creative we wanted the menu to be,’ Hunt admits, explaining that they eventually settled on an aesthetic that reflects their personalities. ‘We’re both born in the 80s and a lot of it references our childhoods,’ says Hunt, while Darton chips in to describe it as ‘comical, performative and kitsch’. Popular dishes include Battenberg cake, bowls of Coco Pops and their signature roast dinner sandwich.

Hunt and Darton describe Edinburgh as ‘a bit more in-your-face’ than the other cities their pop-up café has visited, and they already have plans to make it even more animated this year. As well as the popular return of ‘Christmas Day’ on 25 August, there are other days themed with tongue very much in cheek, including Austerity Day and Health and Safety Day. As Hunt warns, however, visitors have to be prepared to get involved: ‘We really like allowing our customers to perform as much as we perform.’

I Predict a Riot

Posted on July 30, 2013September 15, 2013 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Fest Magazine.

“What makes people act?” Director Clare Quinn’s question sounds simple enough, but its answer is anything but. As her company Gramophones Theatre bring their new show The Smallest Light to the Edinburgh Fringe, the subject of political action feels particularly raw. While television screens beam over images of unrest in Turkey and Brazil, the UK continues to reel from the impact of Occupy and the 2011 summer riots amid a building sense of dissatisfaction with the current government. For Quinn, however, the question of inertia is just as pertinent as that of action.

“I think that we’re actually in a situation now where people believe that protest does not work and so disengage from it,” she explains, partially blaming the way in which protests have been reported in the media in recent years. “Just as the systems of government in this country have failed us, I think traditional forms of protest have as well. I think that protest has been marginalised to the point where it doesn’t really relate to most of our community.”

Gramophones Theatre’s response to this disengagement has been to commit to positive action. Performers Hannah Stone, Ria Ashcroft, Rebecca D’Souza and Kristy Guest have each chosen an issue they care about, from food waste to domestic violence, and set about trying to instigate change. The eventual show will chart their progress. “It’s not very high concept,” Quinn says, almost apologetically. “It’s just about what happens if you try and change something.”

Theatre-maker Daniel Bye agrees with Quinn that the media’s presentation of protest has led to a level of apathy. “There’s a huge amount of misrepresentation of the act of protest, of the people protesting and of the ideas behind the protest,” he says. Of course, as he adds, “the generation of that fear and anxiety is actually quite useful to people who would rather that there wasn’t more widespread protest.”

His new offering, How to Occupy an Oil Rig, finds a solution born from that ubiquitous modern source of both knowledge and frustration: the instruction manual. “For quite a while I’ve been completely fascinated by ‘how to’ videos, instruction manuals, self-assembly kits – all these instructions which purport to make simple the complex,” Bye says. Taking inspiration from ‘how to’ videos on YouTube, the show engages with demonstration both in the political sense and in the sense of explaining how to complete a task.

As well as providing a practical set of instructions about the act of protesting, which exists in constant tension with the irreducible complexity of the issues that protest might be in response to, Bye hopes that this format will begin to demystify political action. “It’s a way of saying this is really a normal thing to do – it’s not an outlandish act.”

This demystifying of protest also takes place in Hannah Nicklin’s A Conversation With My Father, which is just what its title suggests: a conversation between protestor Nicklin and her retired police officer father. While the piece is unavoidably political, Nicklin emphasises that it is personal first. “I’ve always thought it has to be about me and my dad,” she says, “because we can debate the issues, but actually that’s the story only I can tell.”

It is important to Nicklin that this personal narrative is told as simply as possible, because “I didn’t want it to look like it could have been made up.” Her hope is that by relating her own experience as honestly as possible and admitting the complexity of the issues she’s addressing, she might prompt audiences to think and talk about these ideas. Above all, she is emphatic about the power of stories: “I think that storytelling is a vital civic act.”

The work of Kieran Hurley, who had Fringe success last year with Beats, is also steeped in storytelling. “I’m kind of obsessed with stories,” he admits with a slight laugh. This was evident inBeats, which told the tale of a teenage boy caught up in the rave culture of the 90s, and is equally important to the new play he has co-written. Chalk Farm, receiving a new production from Thick Skin for this year’s festival, is a response by Hurley and theatre-maker AJ Taudevin to the “reactionary kneejerk conservatism” of the media’s coverage of the 2011 riots. Through storytelling and empathy, Hurley and Taudevin hope to offer an “alternative perspective” on these events.

“It’s just a story, but simplicity and complexity are often two sides of the same coin,” says Hurley. He describes the riots as the play’s backdrop, explaining that it is more about social class and the demonisation of certain sectors of society. While Hurley thinks that all theatre is inherently political, he’s not interested in what he calls “agit-prop polemic”. Instead, he talks about the power of “collectively sharing a little bit of space and imagining possibilities about how we might relate to each other”, and through this process exploring political alternatives.

Nicklin defines political empowerment as “the ability to re-see, to reflect, and to react to the world around us.” Considering theatre’s potential for offering such empowerment, she suggests that it can achieve the first two through providing a space where the world can be seen anew, but that the third is ultimately out of its control. “I don’t think theatre will ever make anyone act,” she concludes. “I think it will just bring you to the point at which you can choose to if you want to.”

Bye equally believes that is up to the individual to choose to act, expressing a certain queasiness about theatre that hopes to provoke its audience to action. “If guilt is what moves an audience to do something when they leave the room, I’m almost not sure that I want them to,” he says. “I would rather recruit an audience’s genuine positive sense of will to act on something.”

This aim to reposition political action as something positive is echoed elsewhere, contrasting with the negative presentation of protest in the media. “If anything, I’d say what we’re making is a celebration of protest,” says Quinn. After all, as she puts it, “having an opportunity to do something about the things that you feel are wrong in the world is a positive, happy, joyful thing.”