What can community and professional theatre learn from each other?

Cover image © Fevered Sleep, Men & Girls Dance, Malmö 2018. Photo by David Thibel

For the last nine months, funded by an ACE DYCP grant, I’ve had the opportunity to take time out and reflect on my artistic practice to date, as well as to consider how it might develop in the future. It’s been a genuinely fantastic opportunity, enabling me to sit in on other artists’ creative processes, read books I’ve always wanted to but never had time to, chat with mentors, take part in intensive training and build relationships with new potential collaborators.

One of the biggest things to come out of it so far for me is a much greater sense of confidence that my own particular motivation to work fluidly across both the community theatre and professional theatre sectors, is a good thing, that can add great value to both sides.

Theatre tribes are alive and well

I say sides. Is that the right term? You’d hope not wouldn’t you, as surely most switched-on people in the industry would be able to see that both community and professional theatre have their valid and important places in the ecosystem as a whole. Sadly however, the theatre industry doesn’t seem to be immune from the kind of tribalism that seems so endemic in other parts of society now, and as someone who has worked in both sectors, I have often felt an unspoken but subtle pressure to pick a side and prove my allegiance. This is an over-simplification but to make the point, it has often felt that the Artistic Directors and producers need you to distance yourself from community theatre in order to demonstrate your commitment to ‘quality’ and the community theatre folk, for all their inclusivity with participants, have a tendency to want you to confirm that you are ‘one of us’ and not part of the professional theatre gang, which is seen as elitist and rejecting of the value of community theatre. Personally, this kind of tribalism does my nut in!

As someone who has come to the theatre industry from a previous, different sector, this feels like two kids intently fighting over a tiny toy while not noticing that a pack of wolves is circling. It’s seems pretty insular and is not very inspiring.

Thankfully, there are some companies who take a different tack – Quarantine, Fevered Sleep and the brilliant Rimini Protokoll who I’m excited to observe in rehearsals later this year, are all examples of companies who have negotiated this apparent divide in different ways, to create incredible artistic work with non-professionals. So, another way is possible.

Cultivate curiosity

In fact, if both sides were willing to take time to listen, cultivate curiosity and understand, they might learn a lot from each other that could enrich and strengthen the industry as a whole. Perhaps now, with Let’s Create encouraging organisations to engage more seriously with cultural democracy practices that community theatre artists have developed over 60 years (see Francois Matarasso’s A Restless Art), it might be an opportune moment to try?

For example, community theatre projects commonly work with highly diverse groups of people, often people who are socially marginalised in various ways due to their particular identities or abilities. Community theatre artists are well practiced in including and incorporating high degrees of diverse needs into their rehearsal processes as standard. Theatre directors whose main work has been in professional rooms with certain kinds of etiquette and unspoken norms might well learn a lot that could rapidly enhance the inclusivity of their rooms, if they spent a bit of time sitting in on community theatre artists’ rehearsal processes.

Although they vary widely, community theatre projects have often tended to place the participants’ experience of the process higher up the ranking of metrics-that-matter when defining quality, than professional theatre, which tends to place the audiences’ experience of the product at the top of the list of defining quality. However, in a supposedly post Me Too era when significant failures of care for performers continue to bubble to the surface of the press; perhaps professional theatre could benefit from thinking of actors in rooms a little more like participants in community theatre and interrogate their rehearsal processes from this point of view? Are the performers really as comfortable as you think they are, or are they performing comfort because you are paying them, and they want to keep working? Are you brave enough to really find out?

This is not a one-way critique. The above point notwithstanding, community theatre, if anything, can often have such a focus on process as a marker of quality that the notion of the audiences’ experience, and with it a healthy respect for the paying, or non-paying audience, is almost an afterthought. Or at worst, completely goes out the window and their attention is presumed. But what if community theatre took audiences really seriously, grounded in the confident awareness that theatre pieces made by, with and for particular communities have great resonance and artistic power to move even those audience members who may not be directly from that community?

Community theatre ethos and mainstage budgets might just create magic

I’m not saying this is a new thought – incredibly powerful pieces like Rimini Protokoll’s 100% Salford at the Lowry (2016), Mark Storror’s Little Sister at the Royal Exchange Manchester (2016) and the National Theatre’s Public Acts programme – all large-scale, mainstage performance pieces with great resonance, healthy audiences and made with non-professional performers, prove that this is the case. However, there’s not that many of them about considering the potential of this work. A lot of community or participatory theatre work continues to be made on shoestring budgets that absolutely pale in comparison to the kinds of budgets routinely allocated to mainstage, professional shows. Why? What is everybody so afraid of?

I think it would be really exciting to create a mainstage theatre show with a professional theatre budget and a community theatre ethos and methodology. I think you might create something really magical that resonates deeply with audiences in a particular place.

I realise that now more than ever, established venues are fighting to square the circle of theatre economics and the pull towards low-risk programming is fiercely magnetised. But in order to remain relevant and viable, theatres need to engage meaningfully with their local communities and create work that not only reflects the local communities and their concerns but is actually made with them and allows those communities to shape and affect their organisations. This can be done in a myriad of ways in practice and in fact, as the good Artistic Directors out there know, it isn’t really a choice between the either/or options of professional or community theatre but many shades of grey, with the lines between both blurring all the time on a wide diversity of projects.

Perhaps the shift that really needs to happen now is for venues to be louder, prouder and more ambitious about this work; and to take bigger risks by backing ambitious projects with the kind of budgets they deserve? As Netflix, the multi-billion-dollar gaming industry and social media continue to pose the question to next-generation theatre audiences, “Why bother?” it could be argued that they can’t afford not to.