06/04/2020
Our sentiments exactly! Theatre57’s brilliantly eloquent response
Like many of you, we have been following the discussion over the weekend. On Friday, Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Josepha Madigan announced a number of schemes designed to support the creation of new artistic work and its dissemination online for the public benefit. Included in these are the Arts Council COVID-19 Crisis Response Award which will award 334 artists with grants of €3,000 each following a competitive application process, and Culture Ireland's 'Ireland Performs' in partnership with Facebook Ireland where 100 artists will be awarded €1000 to perform on Facebook Live.
As an organisation that represents 90+ independent theatre artists (that is, mostly self-employed individuals without any regular or guaranteed funding) Theatre57 finds the government’s response to this crisis deeply disappointing on several levels:
In the first instance, the awards are insufficient (€1.1 million) considering they are designed to fund the entire arts sector across all disciplines. Neither do they represent significant additional funding (€500,000 has been taken from already-budgeted monies; it is simply a re-appropriation of funds). In comparison, the Welsh government has announced an emergency arts fund of 7 million pounds and it is worth noting that the population of Wales is approximately 1.5 million less than Ireland.
Secondly, the aim of the announcement appears to be to provide a temporary balm - some kind of ‘poetic first-aid’ for our quarantined state during a global health crisis. This tells us that the department is essentially asking professional artists to be ‘content providers’ and is focused on short-term entertainment rather than on protecting and sustaining the lives and livelihoods of thousands of artists and arts workers who live and work in this country.
A one-off award of €3,000 to make a piece of work in an entirely different medium than many artists will be used to is inconsiderate at best, offensive at worst. It is analogous to telling an out-of-work construction worker (regardless of their trade or skill-set) that you know they can’t work right now, and you’ll only be able to give them a few bob if they source materials and build a little wall in front of their house so people can admire it when they drive past. And it’s a one-off wall. And they are in competition with other builders for the award. And we are giving them this money instead of investing it in protecting the construction industry against the inevitable economic recession we are all facing when we emerge from this.
It is not OK and it demeans what we do. Instead of providing significant investment, the government is asking us to sing for our supper and expecting artists to provide content for their online platforms. We don’t think it is too much to expect the government department who serves our sector to have a basic understanding of what we do and how we work, especially when we are going through a collective trauma, especially when our existence was precarious before this happened.
Thirdly, and perhaps most disappointingly, is that this entire initiative further confirms the absolute lack of value the Irish government places on artists and arts workers: the individuals who make the work happen. That the award does not make provision for technicians, stage managers, company managers and the many, many other individuals who are pivotal to the creative process is problematic; that it shows a complete lack of understanding and absence of any real value toward artists and their work is reprehensible.
In Theatre57 Manifesto January 2019 we outlined some key values which are more concerning today than ever:
“We are concerned about the commodification of the arts and the prevalent valuing of artists under economic terms.
We believe creativity is fundamental to society and that those who work in the creative sector make a vital contribution.
We are concerned about the sustainability of our careers and of those coming after us.
We are concerned about not being heard and not being valued as citizens because we represent neither power nor money.”
We stand with the National Campaign For the Arts, our fellow artists, arts workers and arts organisations across the country who have been speaking out about the over the weekend. We hope that a unified response from the sector is the catalyst that leads to genuine engagement and consultation with the Irish government and a more understanding care package being delivered by the Department.
We are also parents, siblings, carers and like everyone the world over, we are looking to our government, willing them to do the best for our future. We understand that everyone is struggling, because we are struggling too, and we hope we can count on public support for the arts during this time.
