Photo from Cologne, 1945, photographer unknown.
Welcome
This is our first monthly newsletter. You’ll see the structure is pretty simple: a short extract from Tactics for the Tightrope; some thinking that relates to ideas in the book and my ongoing work; some tools you can try, including ideas from people other than me; some parish notices and an indulgent playlist for a pomodoro session. I want this newsletter to be a bit different to a blog, and something that’s more than a set of links. It might take a few goes to find the best balance, but let’s give it a go, eh? If you enjoy it or find it useful, please encourage your friends to subscribe. If not, please keep it to yourself, obv.
If you need or prefer an audio version, I have made one which you can find one via Anchor.fm or the embedded player below. For now it’s me reading this newsletter to you, basically, but who knows what may happen. It’s a bit of an experiment too, so forgive any glitches or clumsiness, but hopefully it may help someone access it. I’d love to hear if it is useful to you.
Tactics for the Tightrope
Book launch discussion
Last month I was delighted to be ‘in discussion’ with my old friend and colleague Alison Clark, Head of Culture, Tourism and Sport at Durham County Council, to mark the publication of Tactics for the Tightrope, at an event at ARC Stockton which combined people in the room and people online. (Launching a book in a pandemic is even odder and harder than usual.) You can catch up with or relive the discussion in this video. Thanks to Alison for a great conversation, and to the team at ARC and Future Arts Centres for sorting everything.
Book extract: Dreamers on the Tightrope
This is the opening of Chapter Two: Dreamers on the Tightrope. In many ways it’s actually the first ‘proper’ chapter, but I wanted to open with the poem ‘Cornucopia’, which is in part about creative abundance. Both the poem and the opening to Chapter Two are also a kind of allergy warning: this book contains metaphors.
Imagine a person on a tightrope, juggling cups and saucers. One foot keeps them up there, weight running up and through bent knee and tightened core. Or they’re on a unicycle, or using a wheelchair or crutches. Or they’re even walking on their hands and juggling with their feet, if they have feet. It’s your imagination, you decide. Their eyes fix on a cup and saucer in mid-air, apart, but not too far – the crockery is still a set. On the tightrope walker’s head (or feet or shoulders or lap) sits a whole pile of cups and saucers. Their arms and hips and thighs are ready for the next shift. Around them the crowd has chosen not to worry, or to worry only from the far edge of wonder.
The spotlights single out each walker, though a host of others hold them. The room is full of others who make this moment happen. And now more make their way onto the tightrope, moving in accumulating patterns and singular forms, juggling different objects, every step and shape revealing another angle. Members of the crowd, or people we thought were members of the crowd, start to come forward, to climb, to dream. Some begin to erect their own tightropes and slack wires, many a foot from the floor, some in the rafters. Soon people are leaping between the wires, somersaulting, vaulting, bouncing off the trampolines and rubber tables that others manoeuvre at a run. They make sure no-one hits the ground before they choose to. The multiplying tightropes help them escape the linear.
Movement and stillness meet where balance dances with the drop, with flight. The wire walkers unite in concentration, flow and muscle memory. They explore and improvise, confident that practice has replaced their tentative beginnings. Close, fresh attention to the moment, and the coming moment, and the one after that. They look each other in the eyes. They reach out knowing touch will come. Sometimes there is shouting. Those around them play their part too, add their silence, encouragement and will. The watchers have their own tightropes at home, at work, in the heights of their dreams. For this is a process of dreaming something unachieved into life, of finding better arrangements, closer ways of being. Culture is wideawake dreaming.
This is the image I want to start with, and invite you to hold as you read this book. For me, this is one image of an artist, of the freelance cultural worker, of all those working in theatre and dance companies, publishers, galleries, museums, artist collectives, producing hubs, magazines, festivals, arts centres and a thousand more variants, hybrids and mutations, and of those organisations themselves, and of the communities they serve. Themselves, with others, not alone, multiplying.
THINKING /
Agency and the Connected Self
Thought, feeling, perception and imagination are fluid things. Data is often ever-changing. A book is, though, usually a fixed thing: a way of capturing or distilling something so it can, at least, be seen more clearly. However, when you publish a book you immediately come across things that make you wonder about what you just put into print. I want to point to and think about a few such things.
The Paradox of Agency
Agency is a word I introduced into the set of characteristics of creative resilience to reflect both the limits and possibilities of what we are or feel able to do. As academic Katrina Brown says, from her research into disaster zones and resilience in global development: “Considering resistance as an element of resilience necessitates that power be explicitly examined. Above all it puts agency at the heart of resilience.”
The artist and consultant Robert Laycock alerted me to a project called The Paradox of Agency, ‘A multi-description exploration of the Paradox of Agency in Complexity’ by Marcus Jenal. The work includes contributions from Robert and others. The contributions grapple with a paradox I explore in various parts of Tactics, and the difficulties of recognising how power and systems or cultures shape what can be done (living in capitalism as some might shorthand it) whilst acknowledging and drawing on the personal agency/responsibility each of us has within and beyond that system. (Not to mention the option to attempt to leave the 21st century.)
Robert’s contribution is an examination of time and work, which I’ll return to later. Professor David Byrne and Gill Coleman consider agency from a complexity perspective, especially in relation to the extent to which economic shifts determine agency. Nora Bateson challenges ideas of individual agency, and by extension traditional ideas of leadership: “Agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture… So leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual.’
Free, Fair and Alive
This relates to the idea of the Connected Self I talk about in Tactics, and my approach to ‘leadership’. To the ‘Inside-Outside-Beyond’ framework I first sketched, I have added more explicitly the Connected Self, and the ‘livelihood assets’ each person may draw on as a result of not just their own individuality but their context. In this I benefitted from thinking about the commons. In particular I want to recommend a book by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. You can read the introduction here: http://www.freefairandalive.org/read-it/#introduction
Bollier and Helfrich’s idea of the ‘Nested-I’ and my idea of the Connected Self both centre on the view that, as they put it, “There is no such thing as an isolated ‘I’… We are not only embedded in relationships: our very identities are created through relationships.” This also leads to rejection of overly individualised notion of resilience or success.
They connect this, as I do, to Ubuntu, which I learnt about from several inspiring South African leaders when with the Swallows Foundation, connecting North East England and the Eastern Cape. Ubuntu is a Southern African mindset or belief system summed up or translated by philosopher John Mbeti as ‘‘I am because we are and, since we are, therefore I am.” This helpfully complicates the heroic mode of leadership, bootstrap notions of creativity and grit depictions of resilience, into something more complex.
The book also introduced me to a lot of other ideas and frameworks to do with ‘commoning’, such as Elinor Olstrom’s Eight Design Principles for Successful Commons.
There was a lot more in this book I might have referred to in Tactics, had I not been conscious of already running the risk of putting too many raisins in my pudding. The section on ‘the social life of commoning’ very much chimed for me, calling for cultivation of shared purpose and values, use of ritual to build togetherness, and contributing freely in a practice of what they call ‘gentle reciprocity’. (This latter a sharp contrast to the ‘pay me for every conversation’ argument I sometimes hear.) The ideas around peer governance are also very much live for the cultural sector, balancing culture and structure. The third part of their triad is ‘provisioning’ which should be compulsory reading for funders.
The book is a very rich but practical guide, applicable in many different ways by those who want to connect, collaborate and multiply.
/ PRACTICE
In this section I will share links to things you can do and practice.
Livelihood Assets Canvas
In Tactics for the Tightrope, I set out a framework of five ‘capitals’ or types of assets that form a creative’s ‘livelihood assets’. (This draws on work around sustainable livelihoods.) These influence the extent of one’s agency as well as being shaped by the personal and complex system factors that might also shape that agency. The areas are summarised as creative, social, financial, physical and environmental. For each there are factors that might boost or reduce ‘capital’ in those areas. (After much debate I stuck with the ‘capital’ word despite its associations and drawbacks, as it still seemed less inaccurate than others. I want to stress that creatives have things they can draw on.)
The Livelihood Assets Canvas invites you to
Think about yourself and your situation and what have or have access to,
Consider how confident and powerful that makes you and what you can do with that,
Think how to strengthen yourself and others, and how you might work with others to tackle issues inside or beyond the system that make sustainable creative livelihoods so hard to sustain.
Balance
Balance is a toolkit of videos and tools to help creatives ‘balance your mind’ and ‘balance your books’. It is produced by The Hub, with mindapples and the Creative Industries Federations and has lots of useful things to try. There’s lots of common ground with my own thinking, although perhaps more of a leaning to the individual psychological applications of resilience than I’ve focussed on, and less explicit focus on collaboration and addressing systemic issues. I’d encourage individual creatives to think about the role they play in the sector, how they connect and work with others, as well as how the sector influences their work. (The horizon scan approach to the environment sometimes leads to forgetting that we are always somewhere in the picture.) Some will find the use of video useful too, as it’s all done in a very user-friendly way.
Life-work-art-agency
In his contribution to The Paradox of Agency, Robert Laycock shares a quirky thought-provoking look at his own life-work-art balance which perhaps only an artist who also trained as an accountant could produce. (One thought it provoked in me was what a sloven I am when it comes to car care, very much unlike Robert.) There are also some useful tools to assess how much time you have for work, volunteering and active citizenship, alongside life, and what influences the decisions we take about time allocation. You could adapt these to reflect your own priorities and needs. (I’d be adding a specific ‘playing the guitar’ category, for instance, unless I count that as exercise…)
Multiplying leadership questions
Tactics includes a set of coaching or self-coaching reflective questions relating to possible aspects of the ‘multiplying leadership’ approach. I thought I’d throw a set into each of these newsletters, for when you have a minute or 10 or 20 for some reflection. After thinking about one or more of the questions, I always end by asking “So what does this mean I/we should do, stop doing, or do even more or better?”
n. POWER
How does power shape your actions?
What power would you like?
What has power ever done for you?
You can find the original ‘pack’ of questions on the Creative People and Places website.
Upcoming Events
8th September, 9pm (BST) Centro Gabriel Mistral, Santiago, Chile (online)
As part of GAM’s fourth international seminar on cultural development, I’ll be looking back on a year of resilience and resistance since I spoke for them last year, and why I wrote Tactics for the Tightrope. (Session will be in English with Spanish and sign language translation.)
5th October, 4pm: North East Social Leaders Network (online)
Annabel Turpin (Arc/Future Arts Centres) and I will explore key themes and how the approach and tools such as Most Significant Change have been used at ARC, including at board level. There will be chance to explore tools and frameworks in small groups.
7th-9th December Creative People and Places Conference (online)
I’ll be exploring themes from Tactics for the Tightrope with Annabel Turpin (Arc), Gavin Barlow (The Albany), Leila D’Aronville (Tyne & Wear Cultural Freelancers) and Ryan Calais Cameron (Nouveau Riche Theatre).
Tactics Tomato #2
This is a 25 minute ‘pomodoro playlist’, containing some music I like with some relationship to the book themes, or that I was listening to it a lot whilst writing. Put it on. Work without stopping for 25 minutes and 51 seconds. Then take a five minute break. Repeat to taste. (This 25+5 technique is known as the Pomodoro Technique.)
Those who have already read the book, or who know my story well, will know why and how Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry means something special to me. One of my life’s presiding geniuses. Rest in Power.
Just one more thing…
Dave Harper
Last month, Dave Harper, the drummer of Frankie & The Heartstrings, co-founder of Pop Recs in Sunderland and part of the thriving creative community in Sunderland died. There was a real outpouring of love and loss, not just for a person but for what he made happen in his city, his creative community. I didn't know Dave personally but met him a couple of times at Pop Recs, and saw the band several times too. I did see enough to know the truth of what people have said about him. I’ve spoken previously of how unusual Sunderland has been in recent times in the particularly close and productive relationships between its artists, some business leaders, its university and the local authority, amongst others, and how that connection and collaboration have changed the city. Dave was clearly a big part of that. My condolences to his family and friends. A fund has been set up for his family, to which you may care to contribute if you are able: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/the-family-of-dave-harper