Indeed, as Kerry said to me recently, the theatre’s high standards are largely due
to the diversity of the work that has been put on here, and especially the diverse mix that makes up the theatre’s local communities and the artists that represent them on the stage.
This tradition is a perfect example of what I want to talk to you about today: That creating diverse audiences, art and artists in every profession is intrinsic to the artistic process. It can’t be achieved by reliance on the management consultant’s toolbox of targets and quotas.
If we reduce diversity to ticking boxes, it puts you in a box. Indeed, we need a transformation of the whole sector – but that can only happen from the bottom up, not through central fiat.
Ten years ago, we started a debate about cultural policy which some people boiled down to a stale argument about which mattered most – access or excellence.
This debate was begun in part around 1997 by the Government’s concern that widening access to the creative world actually mattered. That exclusion from culture had to be tackled as firmly as any other kind of exclusion.
That was the right thing to do. The right battle to fight at the time to achieve a step change in culture.
That approach had merits and needed to be done. It made institutions systematically think through how they would build new and different audiences. It helped us make the case within Government for free museums, where in the course of a single year, visit numbers rose by 70 per cent. It did achieve change in the reach and diversity of audiences and artists in many of our theatres.
But some used the debate to set access and excellence at each others’ throats. As if it was a choice. And it was presumed the only way to measure success was through the setting of targets in the form of Public Service Agreements and the rest. That is to say, that access could only be measured mathematically. That excellence couldn’t be measured at all.
And it is clear that the setting of targets from the centre can demotivate. It can skew priorities. It can have unintended consequences. As the Government’s own Strategy Unit has said, on occasions “Top down performance management may create unwarranted bureaucracy, stifle innovation and local initiative, create perverse incentives and demotivate front line professionals”.
Certainly that is what many people in the arts have been telling me since I took office.
What’s more it can lead to the belief that meeting a target is an end in itself. That the magic is in the percentages, in the ticking of the boxes, not in the end result. And the end result is what I am passionate about: excellence achieved through diversity. A system that produces excellent work because it is diverse, not because I, or ACE or the chief executive says it must be so.
So I believe that targets set us on the right journey. No one serious now says that broadening access means dumbing down. But crude top-down targets have taken us as far as they can. If our goal is to transform the system, we’ll need a new vehicle.
This is possibly the most exciting time in world culture ever seen. The world is shrinking and merging. There are 160 languages spoken at the door of this very theatre. We can see new art forms and new themes emerging all the time.
Think of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Flowering Tree at the Barbican. Zero Degrees by Akram Khan, Monkey: Journey to the West written and directed by Chen Shi Zheng (with music by Damon Albarn and design by Jamie Hewlett), Oily Cart’s recent show Blue, A Disappearing Number by Theatre de Complicite.
And my point is this: that is a list of world class art. Of people who draw on diverse backgrounds and global themes to create something new. It is not a list of things that deserve subsidy because they’ll help get a target met.
And, for me, the only way to see more of that calibre of work, presented to the widest possible audience, is to get this vehicle that I was speaking about earlier. No more tired old debates about access versus excellence. But a debate instead about how to find and cherish the world class. How to give audiences the taste for the excellent.
And world class creativity has to represent the world, and Britain as it is. Or else it can’t be world class.
Diversity in audiences, in content and in leadership is essential to this.
So that is my thesis. To take it forward, Sir Brian McMaster, former Director of the Edinburgh International Festival, is currently carrying out a review of excellence in the arts, set in the context of a policy movement away from targets and centralisation.
We have recently launched our online consultation and I would encourage you all to get involved.
Defining the word ‘excellence’ and finding a way to judge it, without stifling that excellence with bureaucracy, is one of the major challenges.
Brian’s review is involving artists, producers, arts administrators and the public. It will look at how other countries do it, and draw out the connection between really high quality work here and increased investment.
Underneath it all, however, I want us to reclaim the word ‘excellence’ from its historic, elitist connotations. And part of this is giving artists, companies and audiences a licence to innovate and take risks. To say that the pursuit of excellence will sometimes fail, but that it is the pursuit of excellence that matters.
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So I know what I don’t want (crude top down targets) – and I know what I do (excellence through diversity). But I need to listen to many more voices about how to get there.
Because the answer won’t lie in diktat from the centre. The example in some ways of the broadcasting industry may be helpful here with their bottom up approach through the creation of the Diversity Network – supported by Chris Smith - to which all public service broadcasters and others contribute. Yes of course they still have a long way to go, but their approach of self regulation and innovation from and by broadcasters and their staff has been promising as an approach.
In the arts we need to move from change to transformation. We may have made some progress but everybody here knows that we have not even begun to transform the sector and the opportunities for artists, leaders and audiences.
As Mira Kaushik of Akademi – the South Asian Dance organisation - said to me recently, “I look forward to the day where I’m not just involved in discussions about diversity – when I can represent my company as part of the excellent artistic work of the rest of the sector”.
So how do we achieve that? We need to see transformations in the vital areas of leadership and staff in cultural organisations, including our major institutions; in the content put on by the cultural sector and the opportunities for artists. And, of course, once we have transformed staff and content, that will help us to make further progress in terms of access and audience.
And excellence has to be our touchstone. Excellence from institutions that are rooted in the diversity of British communities today, produced by diverse artists, and with a real connection to diverse audiences.
Joan Littlewood hit the nail on the head.
Philip Hedley tells the story of her comment to a young woman from the Royal Ballet. The two of them were holding a shouted conversation in the wings here, to my left, during a particularly raucous Variety night. “Your lot should come and do something here” she said. The young woman simperingly replied that she “didn’t think your audience would like our kind of work”.
‘If they’re [f***ing] good enough, they will ’ Joan replied.
