A recent week-long symposium at the dormant City Arts Centre explored ways that Irish theatre could get its act together. It was more than just a whingefest, writes Peter Crawley.
Whenever the cultural pulse is taken, a clean bill of health is rarely returned. Even so, according to several practitioners, Irish theatre is in crisis.
State funding has shrunken, many actors feel artistically disempowered, the traditional models of playmaking are considered conservative and stifling, and while there have never been more theatre spaces to fill, both art and audiences seem to be diminishing.
And yet in spite of the bleak assessments that swirled through the still dormant City Arts Centre (CAC) earlier this month, representatives of the theatre sector have found such pronouncements constructive, stimulating and challenging.
"Theatre is crisis," quoted participant and performer Olwen Fouéré (also founder of the new organisation Associated Theatre Artists), "and functions best as crisis or in a crisis, or it has no relationship to what is outside its walls." Next to the inexorable flow of the Liffey and surrounded by intransigent stone buildings of high finance, the CAC held an event called Engaging Theatre within its walls. A week-long series of discussions designed to explore the nature of arts centres and gauge the current state of Irish theatre and assess what is needed for its future, it continued both an ephemeral probing of the meaning and importance of the art form, together with a discussion about the more prosaic essentials of funding, infrastructure and audience development. Such a balance between art and politics seemed difficult to maintain at times, the two strands of aesthetic and social concerns hard to synthesise.
Take the speakers at the final panel discussion. While Fouéré explained that the freelance status of actors, directors and writers gave them "little or no input in the decision-making process" of theatre companies, often leaving them "artistically disempowered and artistically complacent", Tinderbox Theatre Company's Tim Loane assessed a 30-year chequered history of institutional and independent theatre in Belfast, before writer/performer Donal O'Kelly delivered a 10-minute performance, poetically charting his imagined transformation from a hospital patient to a piece of Blu-tac, then a moth, a tulip, a tiger and, finally, a chipped teacup threatened by contact with "ministerial lips".
"I misunderstood slightly what I was supposed to do," O'Kelly sheepishly admitted during the applause. A little disingenuous perhaps, as O'Kelly came closest to uniting the form, content, experimentation and challenge of theatre that others struggled to express.
Declan McGonagle, director of the CAC's Civil Arts Inquiry, the umbrella process including Engaging Theatre, reiterated the problem a few days later. "One of the specific issues identified was the tension between creativity and the funding requirements that individuals or organisations have to meet in order to draw down public resources. As a sector we don't seem to have constructed a language, other than the economic justification, for public resources going to the arts." In other words, theatre needs to communicate its worth to funding bodies and society in general without pointing to a bar chart or producing ticket receipts.
It is this same dilemma that Olwen Fouéré sees dominating current discussions among practitioners in ATA.
"Why we make art has never been more in question," she says, "because the majority of art is completely dominated by market pressure, and I think that's when the theatre really suffers. As soon as its success is measured by its income, you're in serious trouble because people stop thinking about why they're actually doing it . . . Not enough of us have that question in our hearts." During the final discussion, Tim Loane identified a problem in Northern Irish theatre where the policy of funding bodies has dictated the content of art produced. "The arts council will give you money for a theatre show, if you can tell them that you're taking it to underprivileged areas . . . There are those who would argue that it's chicken and egg as to whether the work or the principle should come first. I believe it's putting the cart before the horse. So an awful lot of art in Northern Ireland is pandering to the idea of social engineering - for which there's lots of cash - and it's not actually paying attention to what the art could or should be."
McGonagle saw a similarity in practitioners appeasing the policies of others, identifying a shift in the way public money is allocated by funding bodies, such as the Arts Council, to focus on outcomes over artistic output. "What seems to be happening is that arts policy is being interpreted to a level where the outputs are starting to be prescribed," he said. A further problem with outcomes is how they are measured.
McGonagle continued: "the available models of measurement are economic: bums on seats, etc. I think we have failed as a constituency to provide the state mechanisms with new information about other ways of measuring. If we do not supply that new information, then particularly in this society where conservatism has taken root in the body politic to an extraordinary degree, those narrow economic measurements will be the only game in town." Later, McGonagle explained that "measuring the value of the arts is to say that something fails as well as something succeeds, with the overall outcome being to add value to society. That can be so general as to be almost meaningless. But we are engaged in this because we think art is important and valuable. But we have not constructed a strong enough language to articulate that in a way that is meaningful to society as a whole."
IN the City Arts Centre's small blackbox theatre, the audience warmed to McGonagle's suggestion that an argument had to be put to the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Mr O'Donoghue, "that the arts are not a terminus for public funding. The money doesn't come into the arts and stop". Rather, he insisted, the money comes through the arts to society in both an economic and cultural transaction.
Amid this crisis (and many were quick to use the word), there lay some hope for the future of theatre making and a more sophisticated communication between practitioners and the public. As sectors across the arts become more united in an ever-bleaker financial climate and during a period of deep legislative change, McGonagle cautioned "if you do not connect that collective process within the arts to other potential collectives outside the arts, society will look at you as whingers." Far from resembling a "whingefest" (which was how Tim Loane characterised an artist-led protest against Belfast City Council last month), the discussions in the City Arts Centre found solace in the notion of challenging traditional structures and redistributing funds to support more projects.
A lust for site-specific performances, associate actors within companies, theatre laboratories and collaborative projects seems to epitomise what Fouéré calls "reclaiming the artistic space", what McGonagle describes as "mapping the terrain" or what O'Kelly coins as the imaginative "weaponry of challenge".
An airing for the theatre sector as much as the self-searching CAC, Engaging Theatre may have left many questions unanswered, but hinted at new ways for the theatre to get its acts together.
