Claire Marshall describes Cornwall’s vibrant arts scene
Carn to Cove is Cornwall’s performing arts touring scheme – we bring professional artists into rural areas, helping small communities to put on something 'different' in their local hall and create a social event for the village. We underwrite the costs of professional acts, reducing the financial risk to the hall, but at the same time giving the community an incentive to maximise audiences and make some money for its own use. Carn to Cove is part of the National Rural Touring Forum and we also work in collaboration with the other small-scale professional venues in Cornwall such as the Poly in Falmouth.
We are extremely lucky in Cornwall to live in a vibrant, thriving artistic environment and we are spoilt for choice when picking home-grown shows to offer our village hall promoters. As well as long-established Cornish companies such as Bash Street and Miracle, we have a new generation of younger professional companies working in dance, theatre and film. Thanks to an Arts Council England (ACE) and Cornwall Council partnership over the past three years, the FEAST programme has enabled us to commission and tour new work and to increase our reach in market towns as well as in villages. This has been challenging, as our model of working with local volunteer promoters in villages does not easily lend itself to replication in a town, but we are starting to make an impression in towns which have been lacking in cultural activity for some time.
Of course the current funding situation is affecting us – we have less money, but there’s constant demand to increase the number of venues participating in the scheme. We try to keep ticket prices as accessible as possible, but that can also lead to cutting back on fees to performers – often by choosing smaller shows. We’ve taken the difficult decision to limit the number of subsidised shows each hall can book per season, but we’re delighted when they book shows independently of us – that’s a testament to the growing confidence of the promoters and their loyal audiences.
We work with a range of partners to keep the programmes diverse and lively as well as building our audience. We’ve developed close links with the Young Promoters scheme in Cornwall to increase this section of our audience, and we were part of the ACE ‘A Night Less Ordinary’ programme with other Cornish small scale venues, giving away nearly 2,000 tickets to young people. It’s a shame that this scheme has ended, but we are looking at ways to build on this and to continue to target this audience by offering substantial price savings for groups of young people.
We’ve been able to promote some great international work in tiny venues through collaborations with other rural schemes across the UK – these have often relied on extra Grants for the Arts awards but perhaps in future will be supported by new ACE touring funds. We’re investing a lot of time in creating relationships with partners in Brittany for a potential project – very complex negotiations and financing, but with strong support from our local authority we hope that this cultural exchange will give us a big return on our investment by 2015.
So while times may be harder than they were, audiences are still looking for somewhere to go and have a night out – we make sure they don’t need to go much further than their own doorstep to see some amazingly talented performers.