By Rebecca Atkinson-Lord
THERE’S been a lot of coverage in the last weeks and months about the difficulty of reopening our theatres and arts venues following the pandemic. I’ve become used to casual acquaintances bemoaning the difficulties that the theatre and arts ecology is facing and offering their sympathy that my already precarious industry has been shut down and on the brink of collapse. For a lot of companies, that is true; for the bigger cultural flagships that have huge staff and large production budgets and who rely on high ticket prices and low wages to sustain themselves, the enforced closure has been close to a death knell.
In many sectors of the arts industry, we’d grown accustomed to thinking about our audiences and communities purely as consumers, with programming decisions driven not by what was the most brilliant or fulfilling show but on what would bring in the most money. Whole organisations have grown used to pinning all of their hopes for survival upon the annual pantomime, complete with overpriced plastic merchandise, or on the latest piece of cynical star casting. But with the Covid-19 pandemic, it became clear that when it feels like the world is ending, our audience stops wanting to consume, and instead of spending money on trinkets they hunger for meaningful connection and understanding.
Whilst the commercial producers have been laying off their staff and threatening to sue the government and the state subsidised flagships have been struggling slowly to adapt, elsewhere the ecology has been quietly regenerating and flourishing. Smaller, more nimble companies have been much quicker to adapt to new ways of working while theatres and arts organisations more deeply embedded in their communities have worked tirelessly to distribute as many of their resources as possible to local artists to keep them afloat. Across the country small and mid-scale arts organisations have been finding ways to stay connected to their communities and to provide cultural experiences to help them process and endure the pandemic and find joy amidst the gloom.
I was appointed as the new chief executive and artistic director at An Tobar & Mull Theatre in the cold, dark days of a lockdown that felt interminable. But here at AT&MT, and at other organisations like us, it was never truly dark. As the cultural hub for Mull and the surrounding islands, we have a responsibility to serve our community through thick and thin. Throughout the pandemic, our arts programme has continued to the best of our ability, with music and theatre streaming online to an audience 2000% bigger that we could ever reach in person. Our Creative Learning classes have moved online, with whole productions created through the magic of Zoom and we’ve worked as hard as we can to offer paid work to as many freelancers and artists as possible. This week, I have been planning the tour for our first live and in-person theatre production this autumn which we aim to tour to every village hall on Mull and the surrounding islands so that our community can experience it in a place that feels safe and familiar however the pandemic proceeds. Sometimes, it can feel scary to be reopening again after so long, perhaps we have forgotten how to do it, and perhaps we should stay closed and locked up safe. But then I remember that we’re not reopening, because, along with hundreds of other small arts organisations serving our communities, we never really closed.
Mull Theatre’s Cailleach opens this week, a co-production between the theatre and aerial performance company Sonder Circus filmed on the Isle of Mull and Aotearoa New Zealand. For full details visit https://www.comar.co.uk
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