The Australia Council for the Arts is the national government agency which funds artists and arts organisations nationally. Its Major Performing Arts (MPA) Board oversees funding to Australia’s 28 major performing arts companies, and monitors their financial sustainability, audience access and artistic vibrancy. For the past ten years, the Australia Council and the MPA companies have been focused on building financial sustainability – to great effect: nearly all of the companies are much stronger and more financially viable than they once were. The companies, therefore, have indicated that it is time to focus on artistic measures of success.

In response to company requests, the MPA Board has spent the past two years researching and developing a set of resources for arts companies, designed to help them to better assess their artistic vibrancy. The Board started work on the resources with one goal firmly in mind: to create a way for companies to understand and monitor their artistic vibrancy to give them meaningful guidance in artistic planning, rather than forcing them into yet another box-ticking exercise. The Board held conversations with the companies, reviewed existing literature and research into performance measurement in the arts, and collected good practice case studies on self-assessment in Australia and the UK. It used these materials to develop a set of four resources now available on the Australia Council website.

PINNING IT DOWN
On the basis of the conversations and research, artistic vibrancy was defined as: excellence of craft; development of artists; freshness of approach to the development or preservation of the artform; community relevance; and audience engagement and stimulation. It is important that the definition of artistic vibrancy is not restricted to “artistic excellence.” To be artistically vibrant, companies must also consider the level of their audience engagement; what the company contributes to the wider artform and artists; and how relevant the company is to the wider community in the company’s city, or sub-groups within the community which the company especially wants to connect with (e.g. youth, culturally diverse communities, Indigenous Australians). The papers on the website include a self-reflection tool, listing the questions companies can ask to assess their own artistic output against the five key criteria.

HOLDING UP A MIRROR
The self-reflection tool suggests a variety of ways that companies can answer these questions. For example, to measure its excellence of artistic craft and its contribution to artform and artist development, a company could set up a panel of peers to provide frank feedback. A company could also survey its guest artists, its own staff and ensemble, or hire an independent researcher to interview trusted artists from the wider artistic community. A company might also consider benchmarking itself against companies it identifies as equivalents overseas, or companies that it aspires to be like. To look at audience engagement, a company could run an audience impact survey, looking at the audiences’ experience of the performance – was the audience moved by the work? Did the work get them thinking? To consider community relevance, a company could identify the communities it wants to develop a closer relationship with, and conduct focus groups with these communities. This could lead to new outreach programmes or programming decisions in the future. It also gives a company an understanding of its role and impact beyond its audience – an essential consideration for many publicly funded arts organisations.
The Australia Council is currently testing the tool with two MPA companies, to see what works and what doesn’t in the real environment and to develop further templates for peer assessment panels, and artist and audience surveys. To date, the artistic vibrancy resources have been welcomed by the MPA companies. Some have already used the tools in planning discussions, noting how useful it is to have a way to talk about this elusive concept. The definition of artistic vibrancy, and suggested ways of measuring it, give companies, their boards and funders a shared language to talk about this contentious topic. Most importantly, companies are feeling more empowered to assess their artistic vibrancy. They are not merely fulfilling yet another reporting exercise for government: they are collecting and acquiring meaningful perspectives on progress against their own vision and aspirations. They now have a way of describing their journey, successes, artistic impact and vision to funders and boards alike, and use this information to shape their own artistic future in a process which involves frank conversation and self-awareness on the part of both companies and funders.