Publication Day
A first proper post for this newsletter to mark publication day for 'Tactics for the Tightrope', out now from Future Arts Centres.
Introduction
This is the first Thinking Practice / Tactics for the Tightrope newsletter. I am going to start these properly in September, after a bit of a break over the summer, and some time to plan content for the first full ‘season’. But as today is Publication Day for the book, it seemed wrong not to mark the occasion. Below you’ll find some reflections on the writing process, and then a summary article for Arts Professional setting out the main arguments in the book. It also gives early adopter subscribers a little something if you scroll right to the end: a specially curated Tactics Tomato playlist. (So-called as it lasts as long as a Pomodoro session, 25 minutes, a technique I use to help with my focus.)
A few reflections on writing Tactics…
You can now buy Tactics for the Tightrope, if you haven’t already. I thought it might be interesting to reflect a little on the process.
The idea to put together a book came to me one sleepless night last August. For a number of years something along these lines had lain undisturbed in the folder marked ‘THINGS TO DO IF THE WORK DRIES UP’, a folder I had been consistently happy to do no more than stuff scraps of ideas into. (The outline of my Brexit Country and Western Spoken Word Musical ‘Don’t Leave The Leaving Up To Me’ is still available, producers!) But as I lay awake, fretful about Covid, family and furlough, Brexit, the need for BLM and the world in general, and the work I had on amidst it all, I started to join the dots between various elements of the work I’d done through Thinking Practice over the last decade.
Somehow my brain made a leap to connect this to work I had been doing with the brilliant leaders of the Future Arts Centres network, work which had been put to one side whilst they found their way through the impacts of lockdown. Might something be repurposed to give me the stimulus to actually write this thing?
Happily, the ever-positive Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow, co-leads of Future Arts Centres, also thought that this would be a timely thing for many people in the cultural sector in the UK and perhaps beyond. In September we agreed to do the book. That seems ages and no time at all, and is certainly quick for the whole process. But it felt urgent to get it done – apart from the anxiety of getting Covid and disappearing. Although this is not a book about culture during/after/with Covid, we wanted to put it out ASAP so it might be useful. Be used and adapted.
Inevitably, my brain had tricked me (and maybe Annabel and Gavin) into something that was much more complex and complicated to do than I would have admitted at the start. The writing process proved not simply one of elegantly bringing together previously published or unpublished work – freelance life being good at giving me the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. I wanted to update, research and revise in the light of experience. I wanted to put my own stamp or slant on ideas developed first alongside others. I wanted to show an argument that the overextension and inequality within the sector undermined both resilience and creative community, and for it to be coherent and easy to read. I needed to bring in some new ideas and connect to other potential sources of inspiration for those who might read the book.
By nature, habit, budget and poetic leaning I am a bricoleur: someone who makes things from what is to hand. I prefer the hybrid, heterogenous, juxtaposed and borrowed, even the slightly awkward, to the pure. I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and expect people to work out applications themselves, so they fit the shape of their worlds rather than mine. But this also needed to be practical.
This was harder than I thought. A lot harder. I came up against all the things I didn’t know enough about, all the things I thought I knew about but didn’t, all the things I’d got wrong or changed my mind on. All the things I thought would finally expose me as an imposter. All the things I didn’t have time to learn or do or research or synthesise adequately. All the things I was not the right person to say. Not to mention the to and fro of design and proofing. Yes, it was stressful, and became a more personal project in some ways. Just this week I came across a phrase in The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (brilliant book, by the way) that rang a bell about writing at such length and pitch: ‘A Repetitive Strain Injury turned into a personal tendency.’ There were times I wondered what I was doing.
Fortunately, lots of people helped with reading parts and helpful suggestions and some reassurance and encouragement. This meant the process was also rewarding and had some ‘breakthrough moments’, and satisfying as it came together. I so hope it is useful to those that read it. Doing this alongside ongoing Thinking Practice work, during a pandemic, was both a bit daft and absolutely necessary. I can see imperfections and limitations, but I have never published anything that was not true of. So it goes.
Massive thanks to Annabel and Gavin of Future Arts Centres for backing the idea. They, Becca Pratt at the Albany Lisa Taylor at ARC, and designer Jason Barningham, all worked hard to get the book ready for publication. Do please order a copy if you can for Future Arts Centres's sake, not mine. If you find it useful, buy your friend/CEO/chair/board a copy too if you can. (A digital version will be available online free in October, and we’ll share some extracts before then.)
Next I may learn how to actually walk the tightrope, I think that might be easier…
Arts Professional article: on the tightropes
(First published by Arts Professional on 22 July 2021)
This week the brave people of Future Arts Centres publish my book Tactics for the Tightrope. It starts with the image of people on an interconnecting network of tightropes. People of all kinds, some walking, some dancing or juggling, on feet, hands or moving with wheels and sticks. Some watching and catching. People coming together as movement and stillness meet where balance dances with the drop, with flight. Balance and movement. Change and stability. The risky, paradoxical, wide-awake dreaming that is culture.
Those on the tightropes want to take risks, do good and beautiful work, be healthy and to care for each other. Yet the sector is surrounded and beset with chronic conditions including systemic ableism, overextension, racism and sexism that call for tactics rather than the grand strategies of the powerful.
People who were most disadvantaged before Covid have been disproportionately hurt by it. The limits of conceptions of resilience as simply ‘developing diverse income streams’ have become ever clearer. Those on the tightrope are often pig sick of hearing about resilience.
Why we still need creative resilience
And yet, I still find the word a useful one, eleven years after writing Making Adaptive Resilience Real for Arts Council England. I have come to think of resilience as resistance to the damage done to our creative communities, in keeping with a long history of self-organisation such as trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions and other coping mechanisms.
For many things in culture, longevity matters. It helps accumulate memory and innovation into evolving traditions. It creates spaces for people to work long-term, and for others to come in, learn and pass through. It also demonstrates a set of values counter to the ‘stick it up and tear it down’ values of much commercial activity.
This requires creative resilience at all levels: the capacity of organisations and communities of people to be productive, valued, and true to self-determined core purpose and identity. This may involve absorbing disturbance, adapting with integrity in response to changing circumstances and positively influencing the environment.
There are some concrete actions being taken such as the Seven Principles set out by We Shall Not Be Removed. Growing networks and collectives of freelancers, arts centres and others give me hope that healthier approaches may become part of a reconfigured ecology.
Multiplying leadership and connecting communities
You cannot be resilient alone. There are an infinite variety of ways to do the tightrope with an infinite variety of people, but only if we abandon top-down heroic models of cultural leadership and governance. To achieve this we need to consider four domains: the self, inside (the organisation or practice), outside (the art form or cultural field) and beyond (in society).
An asset-based approach to sustainable livelihoods has potential to develop more agency for individuals and communities. This is not theory: starting with assets helps people make their own choices and find their own power. Who are you, what do you stand for, and what have you got to draw on? The book has lots of practical tools for people to try, adapt and improve in finding their own, unique ways to be on the tightrope.
Arts centres and creative activity can be a welcoming ‘potential space’ where people come together to explore and play. This starts with human connection and discovery. Having somewhere to go that is cultural or creative but can also be used for social, or even practical, purposes – to meet friends, to get a cup of tea, to get out of the house – is too often taken for granted by educated, connected frequent engagers in the arts, especially those involved professionally. The ‘welcoming space’ is both profound and everyday, and the basis of a fairer cultural sector for everyone.
From hurt to hope with a handful of principles
I wrote Tactics for the Tightrope because I am convinced of the potential for transition in the system, changing how the ecology works, and the norms, practices and distribution of power and resources. Multiple, ongoing transitions and changes at system level, using all our senses, muscles and imagination will be both more exhausting and more necessary than visions of overnight transformation by either burning it down or changing the locks.
A murmuration of birds takes shape and moves without top-down leadership thanks to highly nuanced and responsive networks, beginning with individuals and moving through groups to the edge. Creative communities can continually refine our values and actions similarly, using the frameworks of creative resilience and multiplying leadership in the learning space of self, inside, outside and beyond. We can resist selling ourselves and each other by plotting our own courses while self-organising as creative communities.
To do so we will need to remember a handful of basic principles that make creative resilience a form of resistance instead of co-option. How we work must build resourcefulness and creative capabilities in ourselves, in others and the collective. We should ditch hierarchical leadership models to connect, collaborate and multiply many, many voices. Our creative resilience should be a process of resistance. We should make ourselves useful and make space for others, even as we take up our own. Finally, we should keep some slack for ourselves and resist all temptations to ‘give 110%’ and thus undermine our own creative resilience.
Tactics Tomato #1
Put this on. Work hard for 25 minutes. Then take a break for 5 minutes. The playlist reflects some of the themes from the book, things I listened to while writing it, and a tiny visual joke for my own amusement.