Open to collaboration

‘Without Walls’, a consortium of seven leading UK outdoor festivals, has embarked on an epic journey. This journey started two years ago with a small group of like-minded Festival directors, committed to working together to do something that had not been achieved in street arts before. They wanted to tread a shared path and see whether it was possible to strengthen outdoor arts in the UK and reach out to new audiences, whilst bringing on board a new generation of emerging outdoor artists.

Our idea was to select a programme of new and ambitious work and tour it across each of our festivals. For both artists and festivals, this arrangement provides innumerable benefits in addition to the clear opportunities for joint promotion. For artists, guaranteed tour dates at major festivals, the opportunity to build strong relationships with committed programmers and, in some cases, access to commissioning funds; for the festivals an opportunity to share information about new work, learn from one another and develop a prestigious strand of our festival programmes.

And how does this work in practice? The essence of the consortium is about partnership working, and this relies on collective decision making. We allocate considerable time to programming meetings and each member brings ideas and suggestions to the table about artists or projects they would like to support. The discussion continues over a number of meetings, until a consensus is reached about how best to allocate the available funds. The model we have developed does not oblige each festival to take every show selected by Without Walls; we have to allow for artistic and practical differences between festivals whilst agreeing on a programme that represents the aspirations of us all. Of course, we all have to make significant contributions of time and energy for this to work, and this can be hard during our busy periods. We all have our own events to run and we are geographically quite far flung. Core decisions are taken at our planning meetings, there is a rudimentary division of responsibilities and we employ an experienced co-ordinator to ensure efficient delivery. [[it is enormously helpful to speak on behalf of seven festivals rather than just one]]

We have learnt lessons along the way, and the second season has benefited from the experience of year one. Organisationally the consortium is functioning more efficiently, and our ability to support the artists we are working with has improved as the organisation has stabilised. We can reflect on some real achievements. We have supported 17 companies to present and tour new work, brokered some exciting creative partnerships between artists and have commissioned some work of a very high standard. Artists and promoters from the UK and internationally have taken notice.
Already we are starting to witness a sea change. Reviewing The World Famous’s new show ‘Full Circle’, co-commissioned by Without Walls, The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner pointed towards a rising bar for street arts by suggesting that outdoor work and pyrotechnic artists such as The World Famous “can tell us as much about the human condition as, say, King Lear”. Such recognition is vital for the Consortium as it starts to envisage how it might help move the street arts sector towards a previously unimagined critical parity with other artforms. But more than this, with a commitment which all consortium members share to engage with audiences who might not otherwise attend arts events, as well as through its work in building closer working relationships with local authorities, Without Walls is helping to put outdoor work at the centre of our national cultural life.

Whilst this positive feedback is a great boost to the Consortium, our journey has some ambitious destinations in its sights: as well as continuing our investment in artists, we want to disseminate work across the UK and beyond so that Britain can compete in the flourishing European street arts marketplace; encourage new and emerging artists into the sector for the first time; commission more culturally diverse and deaf and disabled artists; and, of course, ensure that outdoor arts firmly lies at the heart of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It’s a long and ambitious but extremely exciting itinerary. The key word is sharing. We all have relationships with various international festivals and we are exploring how we can share these contacts to the benefit of the consortium, through joint advocacy and promotion, and perhaps, more ambitiously, by persuading international festivals to buy into the idea of presenting a season of work from the Without Walls stable. We are using our collective contacts with culturally diverse, deaf and disabled artists to ensure that we are giving opportunities to artists currently under-represented in the street arts world, and in building these relationships it is enormously helpful to speak on behalf of seven festivals rather than just one.

We have held a number of meetings with local authority representatives to discuss how we may work more effectively with them as a consortium, over and above the relationships we individually have with local authorities as investors in our festivals. Ideas for a new model of local authority partnership are currently in discussion and will feed in to our forthcoming three-year plan. Discussions are currently considering how Without Walls can contribute to the Cultural Olympiad by supporting the Arts Council’s new Outdoor Arts Plan and ensuring that newly commissioned outdoor work from a new generation of artists can be experienced across the country.

We are not short of ideas. The challenge we face as we approach the end of our second season is to lay out a clear development plan that will build on our successes to date and allow for growth. Of course this demands considerable commitment from all the partners, in time, resources and energy, but our experience of what can be achieved by working together makes this investment worthwhile. The journey has just begun.