The CONCERTA Project
In 2016, Arts Council England (ACE)
launched the second round of calls for proposals to the Research Grants
Programme. The call sought proposals aimed at collaborative research work
to develop the evidence base around the impact of arts and culture. The role of
the Research Grants Programme is to generate evidence:
■ to
better understand the impact of arts and culture;
■ to
make the best case for arts and culture in the context of reduced public
spending; and
■ to
promote greater collaboration and co-operation between the arts and cultural
sector and research partners.
CONCERTA has been a national study of the
benefits, for local community development, of a relatively under-researched
form of creative activity: rural touring arts.
Devised by the National Rural Touring Forum (NRTF)
(Lead Applicant), in collaboration with the Centre for Business in Society (CBiS) at Coventry University
(Research Partner), the CONCERTA
project (Contributing to Community Enhancement through Rural Touring Arts) was
provided with funding of circa £150,000 by ACE under the terms of the Research
Grants Programme for the period from December 2016 until March 2019. NRTF was
the Lead Partner and accountable body, with oversight provided by a Steering
Group, chaired by NRTF and including ACE and the NRTF Board.
CONCERTA has been based on a mixed methods
research design, combining the development of a national, geo-referenced
data-driven evidence base of professional rural touring activity with the
production of a series of more qualitative case studies of the impact of
touring rural arts.
The choice of case studies
included a return to some of those areas studied by Matarasso (2004) Only Connect in consideration of the
potential of the cumulative impact of rural touring through time.
The project was designed to
support NRTF and its Scheme members in their professional activities.
The project encompassed five
methodological strands:
■ Rural Touring Schemes organisational
characteristics, activities and impacts: An on-line questionnaire was sent
to all 24 English Rural Touring Schemes funded in 2016.
■ Mapping the patterns and characteristics of
English rural touring arts activity: a comprehensive, geo-referenced evidence
base of five years of English Rural Touring Scheme activity, for all 24 English
Rural Touring Schemes funded in 2016. This comprises over 700 digital maps.
Activity data collected through
the scheme survey has been combined geographically (using ESRI ArcGIS) with
socioeconomic data from sources such as Census (census.edina.ac.uk),
Neighbourhood statistics (www.neighbourhood. statistics.gov.uk) and Employment
(www.nomisweb.co.uk).
■ Case Studies of the impacts of rural touring
activities:
- Five
Core Cases were selected reflecting levels of ‘rurality’ in Rural
Touring Schemes;
- Two
‘Cumulative’ Cases and an interview with François Matarasso - representing
a return to local rural touring areas previously studied by Matarasso (2004);
and
- Two
‘Non-Scheme’ Rural (touring) Arts Investigations to investigate the possible
benefits and impacts of other, often amateur, arts-based activities, rather
than professional Touring Schemes. In the spirit of co-design and partnership,
these cases were undertaken by NRTF with oversight by Coventry University.
■
Supporting
professional touring development and wider dissemination: a range of
knowledge transfer and technical expertise activities to support NRTF, their membership
Schemes and broader understanding of the characteristics and benefits of
professional rural touring.
Below is an
example of one of the national maps produced from Scheme data, representing number
of different art-form types by location in 2012-2017, by Scheme, mapped against
national Rural Urban Classification 10.
In
summary, the Rural Touring Schemes represent a set of small, relatively stable,
long-established organisations. Overall, annual turnovers are low, and very low in some instances, and
this is reflected in employment structures. These range from between one and
ten employees, often supported by a freelancer or several. The Schemes exhibit substantial
variety in terms of company structure. Some are private companies, some are
effectively franchises or projects run by other companies, and some are
community interest companies. Many of the more established companies are charities.
Between
them the Schemes deliver annually between 2,000 to 2,500 events, incorporating a wide portfolio of art-form
performances and a small number of more interactive activities (including workshops,
training, etc.). These are distributed across between 800 to 1,000 venues
although there is some evidence that venue numbers may be dropping. Over the
last five years, the Schemes have jointly delivered 9,500 events to audiences numbering
just over 700,000. Annual average audiences per event sit at a highly
consistent 70 to 80 person annual average.
ACE
funding is core to the sector, with 21 of the 24 Schemes attaining National
Portfolio Organisation status, and seven in which ACE funding accounts for over fifty percent of
funding. Ticket sales represent around a third of Scheme incomes, with notable
variation across Schemes. Local Authorities remain the other main funder,
although at an increasingly low scale.
Change dynamics are evident across the
sector but one relationship is clear: simply put, the greater the
turnover, the more staff are employed, the more freelancers used and the more
events are programmed.
Table ES1
(overleaf) summarises the range of impacts of rural touring identified by the
research. Bringing arts activity - quality, diverse, and challenging arts activity
- to a substantial range of accessible and remote rural areas, rural touring
has been shown to be integral to catalysing and supporting community life in
English rural areas, especially as other villages ‘anchors’ have diminished.
The act of bringing
touring arts to rural areas (engagement and participation) generates a range of
individual and community benefits, including personal development and
well-being, community assets and capacity and, ultimately, stronger rural
communities.
Table ES1: The Impacts of Rural Touring Arts
Promotes participation in the arts and
creative activity
|
Engagement
Participation
Inspiration
|
·
Provides and catalyses high-quality,
accessible, affordable, arts activity in people’s own local rural communities
·
Encourages engagement with the arts and
creative activity, including a broader appreciation of the arts and its
diversity
·
Inspires audiences to attend other, and a
wider variety of, arts and culture events
·
Inspires people to take up a personal interest
in the arts and creative activity – and raises the aspirations of those who
already participate
·
Potential individual health and well-being
outcomes given generation of emotion, thought, challenge, captivation,
empowerment, etc. through engagement and participation
|
Builds art and community assets
|
Activities
Buildings
|
·
Develops new programmes and strands of village
activity, including the identification, rethinking and re-using of existing
assets
·
Provides an income stream for local activities,
facilities and employment
·
Supports
the provision of new community centres and facilities, including their
development as arts venues
·
Acts as a ‘magnet’ to other arts activities to
encourage the development of cultural hubs, venues and events
·
Contribute to, and potentially form,
‘community anchors’ – and their capacity to deliver broader services, and
social, economic and rural development
|
Generates individual and community capacity
|
Volunteering
Skills
Networks
Activism
|
·
Brings local people together to plan and
support activity in arts and culture – volunteering
·
Develops individual confidence and skills
·
Generates volunteering, interest groups and
social networks
·
Generates voluntary activity and self-organisation
beyond the arts – community activism
|
Builds stronger senses of community
|
Inclusion
Identity
Cohesion
Safety
|
·
Brings people together:
-
Reduces social isolation and builds (new)
social relationships
-
Provides non-threatening environments (e.g.
for challenging experiences/ people with protected characteristics)
-
Promotes diversity and challenges stereotypes
-
Develops community cohesion
·
Develops a sense of pride in, and belonging
to, community
·
Reduces fear and contributes to community
safety
|
In providing an
updated national overview of the organisational characteristics, activities,
and impacts of the ACE-funded English Rural Touring Schemes, a number of issues
were raised by interviewees (Table ES2). These centred around aspects such as:
funding and sustaining the rural touring arts model; strategy and rationale
(and achievement of them); and, operational effectiveness.
TableES2: Issues
for Rural Touring Arts
Issues
|
Description
|
Funding Quality Performances
|
The reducing subsidy model
reaching a point where it is becoming unviable to programme
Financial models and pressures
leading to lack of risk and ‘safe programming’ – can communities be rewarded
for riskier programming?
What is quality anyway?
|
Limits
of the model
|
Touring model focusses
companies on touring performances only - missed opportunities for innovative
workshops/ community arts/ targeted commissions etc.
Contradictions of promoting
high-quality professional events through unpaid volunteers – and the growing
challenges of ‘professionalisation’
Skills concentrated in the
hands of a small number of people
Spread too thinly?
|
Diversity
|
Achieving cultural diversity
throughout the rural touring model
Lack of work around protected
characteristics
|
Succession
|
Narrow and shrinking group
of ageing promoters – and volunteers
Limited work to develop
skill and succession in communities
|
Who benefits and who comes to
events?
|
Are touring shows catering for an
audience who would access the arts anyway?
Could the spending have more
impact if it was better targeted?
What do we know about the local
people who do not attend?
|
The research
was able also to point to examples of responses to such challenges across the
Schemes. Table ES3 overleaf provides some examples of Good Practice identified
during the research programme.
Table ES3: Good
Practice Examples in Rural Touring Arts[1]
Organisation
|
Description
|
NRTF
|
Programmes to
promote quality and innovation at a local level e.g. Rural Touring Dance
Initiative (in partnership with The Place, Take Art and China
Plate)
|
Schemes
|
Targeted
development schemes for promoters (Young Promoters Scheme Black Country
Touring and Creative Arts East)
Collaboration
and joint projects between schemes for strategic outcomes (Shropshire and
Black Country “My Big Fat Cow Pat Wedding”)
Using
programming to challenge racism and promote diversity (Spot on Lancashire,
“The Chef Show”)
Targeted
support for Promoters (Village Ventures/ Live and Local - patch based link workers)
Tailored
support schemes for artists (Developing Artists For Rural Touring (DART)
Scheme, Live and Local)
Transparent,
tiered risk-based subsidy rating for different performances (Spot on Lancashire)
Pitching
Meetings bringing local promoters together before each season to consider the
whole menu of shows as a group, talk through what would work for them and
organise dates together (Carn to Cove)
|
Venues
|
Volunteer support
and training (Wem Town Hall)
Community
capacity building (Borwick and Priest Hutton)
Driving wider
programming through the use of rural touring programme to test out/ pilot approaches/art-form/
artists (Bulkington Community and Conference Centre)
|
Recommendation 1: Given learning from
this research, further enhance the NRTF Annual Survey instrument. Consider how
this supports regular sector-level development of impact reporting.
Recommendation 2: NRTF to consider
further the role of Rural Touring Schemes within current policy horizons over
and above engagement and participation in the arts, such as in ‘supporting
anchors of local community/rural development’, ‘contribution to civil society
capacity’, ‘enhancing social cohesion’ and, ‘delivery of health and
well-being’.
Recommendation 3: Continued recognition
and development of NRTF sector support to Schemes – communication and feedback;
training, dissemination of reports, guides and resource packs (‘help fuel’);
and, strategic programmes to promote excellence and innovation at a local
level.
Recommendation 4: For the sector and
its stakeholders to consider strategic responses to key challenges raised by
this Report: Succession and Sustainability; Sustainability: funding and finance;
and Diversity and Cohesion.
Recommendation 5: To consider research
on Rural Touring Arts and Health and Well-Being as a substantial emerging
research priority.
[1] These
examples are drawn solely from the Report Case Studies. Good practice examples
exist across the Rural Touring Schemes
FULL REPORT - https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3Aa7dcb49b-e59e-436b-ae89-06a03dafdea3
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