News – Theatre sector criticised on race

An independent report into the needs of Black and minority ethnic (BME) theatre practitioners has called for a network of dedicated buildings to be established for Black theatre to reverse decades of under-funding. The hard-hitting Sustained Theatre report, authored by Baroness Lola Young, refers to the “systemic and institutionalised racism and discrimination” that BME artists face, and argues that mainstream theatre practitioners and Arts Council England (ACE) are not doing enough to support BME practitioners. The report states that that “until a more equitable distribution of resources and power becomes reality, it is hard to see how the system can be made to work better for [BME] theatre practitioners”.
The report, developed in consultation with the theatre sector, was commissioned by ACE last October in the wake of last summer’s decision to withdraw £4m pledged to Talawa Theatre Company’s plans for a Black theatre in London. The withdrawal of funds caused the project to collapse and prompted widespread protests among BME and other theatre practitioners. As well as looking at the sector’s capital requirements, Baroness Young was charged with examining the training and development needs of BME artists and ways of promoting BME work. Chief among the report’s recommendations is a call for the establishment of four buildings in regional centres nationally to “nurture talent, promote excellence, provide career progression opportunities, and foster more equitable relations with the mainstream theatre sector”. Funding for these buildings should come from the £4m originally allocated to Talawa and “substantial additional resources”. The projects should be led by BME artists and organisations with “consistent, high-quality support”. Additionally, more international work should be presented in Britain and BME work should be seen as a tool for representing Britain internationally. The report also calls for improved training opportunities for BME practitioners and for a change to attitudes that lead to professional development being seen as “remedial work with continually ’emerging’ practitioners”.

Whilst acknowledging that ACE has made “significant progress… in supporting diversity in the arts in recent years”, it notes that of the £995m allocated to capital projects in the period 1996 to 2005, only £41m, or just over 4%, was allocated to ‘culturally diverse’ organisations, leaving the BME sector “substantially under-resourced”. The report calls for ACE to “develop more effective ways of ensuring that lessons from the past are learned”, to develop greater transparency, to improve levels of understanding of diversity issues across the regions, and to “develop further its understanding, language and thinking in relation to ‘race’, ethnicity and culture”. Significant criticism is levelled at the way ACE defines companies as being ‘BME led’ or ‘BME focused’: “The suggestion that 51% of the board having a ‘BME’ background constitutes a BME-led organisation can lead to anomalies. The method of identifying such organisations is flawed and in need of revision, as it gives a false picture of the flow of funds [to BME artists and organisations]”. ACE and the wider theatre sector are also criticised for a Eurocentric definition of quality, ignorance about BME audiences and ineptitude with regard to audience development for BME work.

ACE has accepted most of the reports recommendations and acknowledged that it represents “an important moment in time for theatre”. In a statement which described some of the recommendations as “challenging”, ACE announced that a working group has been established to tackle the reports recommendations on a network of buildings and that it expected to make an initial contribution of some £5m to the network. A process has begun to map ACE’s existing BME portfolio and groups representing BME artists are being established to guide its progress.