Partnership working and long-term collaboration with venues can improve the working lives of touring artists, claims Chenine Bhathena.
Recently I have been exploring working practices with numerous touring companies to try to identify new routes for their artistic development. Companies seem to be questioning the reasons for excessive touring. They have become increasingly frustrated at having no real links with the audiences, and their sense of artistic isolation is quite prominent. Coupled with this is the artists? desire to be more settled and to undertake less frenetic touring schedules. Speaking with touring venues, there also seems to be a sense of a need for closer collaboration.
With this in mind, CB Projects working with venues that are keen for sustainable collaboration and with companies who want to explore new avenues. Much of our work now revolves around brainstorming, route planning and linking partners together. We have found a variety of routes, including outreach/participatory programmes, co-productions, work made for venues/audiences, and artistic collaboration with venues and with local artists.
Benefits for artists include opportunities to develop work in a theatre space; develop their practice in the workshop; explore artistic collaboration; create work for particular audiences and for specific spaces; and to explore new mediums for their work.
One of our current projects, The Cassowary Plum (planned for 2002),is a wonderful example of partnerships between companies, venues and locally based groups, schools and colleges. It involves Jade Theatre Company working with Salisbury Playhouse, Arc in Stockton, Blackpool Grand and Riverside Studios in London, over a five-month period. With each venue we will undertake a solid outreach programme, individually devised with locally based groups in association with venues. The result will be a live interactive installation in each theatre as part of a whole performance experience.
This type of partnership working will lay the foundations, from which companies can build and grow. It provides the venues with solid and sustainable developments in their longer-term education strategies, as well as developing new audiences, and for the local participants involved it will be a massive project, which we hope will have long-lasting effects on many fronts ? both educational and social. For companies like Jade it will be artistically challenging and will ultimately refresh the spirit in their working lives.
Chenine Bhathena is Director of CB Projects. She was previously a co-director with Bhathena-Jancovich Productions e:chenine@cbprojects.co.uk