THREE CONVERSATIONS

One with our Industry

One with our Audience

One with our Government

The conversation with our industry is in some ways simple: there is one resource above all others to be protected, supported and indeed raised up: redefined and diversified - the people. All the people who make the work. They must come first, in the words of progressive economists they are the value creators.

They are painters and writers, actors and hairdressers, they are educators and archivists, they sell tickets and make hats, they are designers and dancers metalworkers and musicians, knitters and armourer’s... the list of who they are numbers in the hundreds of thousands. They are the WE of Theatre.

They can make work anywhere, with anything… but without them there is nothing.

Then there is our conversation with the audience. On one level that, too, is simple, as without them there is no Theatre.

So we must find ways to invite them to our new forms .. our new ideas ... our combinations of old ideas ... our trials and attempts .. our misfires and triumphs. We must find ways to invite more of them - new ones, old ones, lost ones, local ones, global ones. At a distance or near by, they too are value creators.

The conversation with our government too, then, is simple, although perhaps not simple to make it heard ... together we and our audience are the Value Creators, both in enriching the fabric of our lives through exchanging our stories, but also yes, in simple big-win economic terms.

The live cultural industries, hand in hand with our millions of audience members, are a force for good, we are a community to be grown not diminished. We are us, we are all of you, and we will all be genuinely poorer without the chemistry we make.

Soutra Gilmour

Original Image by Ben Eine

Photo by Soutra Gilmour