"So, what is it you do again?"

I’m at family wedding

And - someone asks, “So what is it you do again?”

Sometimes I lie;

Camel racer

Cocaine smuggler….. Google me..the top hit in Google used to be grandmother Sue Clarke who got sent down for smuggling cocaine in the false bottom of her suitcase while on a Mediterranean cruise.

I mean it's an approach to fund-raising isn't it?

And other times I start explaining it.

“In 1985

If you weren’t a banker in the city of London, life was really shit 

Politicians were taking backhanders in exchange for government contracts.The police were battering new Age Travellers. 

Striking miners in Staffordshire were finding it hard to put food on the table.

So Gill Gill and Hilary Hughes and I started a women led street theatre company. It's called Outdoor Arts now. 

Our thing was to put to women’s stories front and centre, 

Put the work where people could find it,

And smash the patriarchy.

We were the only women led street theatre company in England  - imagine!

To give everyone a clue we called it Beavers 

And guess what

Literally no-one noticed.

And then the internet happened,

so we couldn't be called Beavers anymore.  

Schools wouldn't open our emails and we were basically stuck in everyone's SPAM filters.

Now we’re called B arts, and yes what do we do?

We make work with people who don’t think they’re artists.

And we use all sorts of arts, (no not really painting) 

Making plays, radio, theatre with food, lanterns 

non-permanent art things, 

experiences, events, festivals, 

(Like Glastonbury? err without the £50m budget)

And we do it where people are.

Yes- not even in a theatre…I know…

It used to be called community arts, or participatory arts

Mostly it’s called co-creation now.”

And then whoever you’re talking to …their eyes glaze over and they go for another piece of quiche.

ALL that makes it sound dry and worthy, and it doesn’t feel like that.

I feel like we’re training people for the revolution, stretching the muscles of resistance making a fairer world come into being.

Yes, in those 38 years some things have changed- some  people are no longer here and different people have arrived, new tools are available, we have a building.

​

The world around us shifts, policy switches are turned off and on AND OFF AND ON AGAIN, what’s fashionable to fund keeps moving around.

We’ve grown in numbers and changed shape from an artists' co-operative to a registered charity

We have 5 staff members, make work with over 2,000 people each year. That work is seen by 60,000 people and we employ over 70 artists every year.

But in other ways, nothing has changed.

We still employ artists in work that is thoughtful, intelligent and contributes to a process of cultural democracy. Working creatively for change

These have been our strap lines since the start.

How are we doing this?

We practise (What my colleague Rebecca calls) 

Radical Hospitality .

From the beginning We worked a lot with partners in Europe 

We found ourselves eventually in Bosnia at the end of the Bosnian conflict working with displaced and traumatised people

In 1997 we came home to find lots of disbursed refugees and nothing in place.

In Stoke-on-Trent our local refugee support group invited us to offer weekly social and creative sessions at the first large hostel for refugees and asylum seekers. An ex-convent with lots of small rooms, shared bathrooms and sticky carpeted social spaces with little or no furniture. 

We brought in oranges and tea, musicians, radical hospitality

And over 50 Wednesday nights later in 2000 we had made a show; Crossing Frontiers, that was performed by a mixed group of Asylum Seekers, Refugees both from the immediate global crises and elderly Polish contributors who had arrived in North Staffordshire 45 years earlier. Together with our artists the group performed at the Support group’s AGM for an audience of Hostel Staff, local dignitaries and supporters.

At the suggestion of a couple of people in that group we set up a support scheme for young unaccompanied Asylum Seekers and Refugees, called 'The Bridge", providing social time, eduction, creative skills, a space to be teenagers.

Out of which and 200 more interviews, came Reading the Book of Freedom - performed again by mixed company which toured with a workshop to schools for the next 5 years.

We showed radical hospitality- not only in making a welcoming space where there wasn’t one

But also by radically listening.

We are genuinely open to wherever ideas, skills and creativity come from

Whatever they look like

And at B arts we make an environment, 

A set of circumstances where this creativity can grow.

B arts resisted having a public facing building for about 28 years and then 10 years ago we moved into No72 Hartshill Road.

Of course we hold ourselves always ready to welcome people at all times

And work hard to get the barriers to taking part really low

Part of the work with displaced people showed us how key food was as a cultural tool; an immediate and visceral way to talk about yourself and to create connection between people

So here we were making a new barrier- a front door- 

How do we make it as easy as possible to get THROUGH

We made that door not a door to the arts but to a bakery and cafe.

Food first

Then the arts

Then you can find the Poetry. 

We are all overwhelmed with the issues that face us

Our politicians and leaders seem self serving and corrupt

Having broken communities up, let our loved ones die, partied while we stayed home.

Now it feels like 

they are now taking hammers to the shards and smashing us all into bits.

The internet gives us more and more reasons and ways to drive us all apart.

Children are being buried under rubble, living in fear of the deadly rain that falls from the sky, starving not playing. The world is on fire.

And the questions we are asked in our civic spaces close to home;

• What shall we do about climate change?

• What would you like to see in your high street?

are all so huge

Never mind

How am I going to put tea on the table?

The landlord says he’s evicting us next week

Our solution?

​

• DO YOU WANT TO MAKE A LANTERN?

Outrageous! Facile! Flimsy! Irrelevant!

The opposite.

What we offer everyone at B arts

Is not just respite from this overwhelming world 

But a metaphor that gives us a way of collectively processing 

What’s going on.

Fegg Haye Mysteries was a show made with residents of a

Former mining estate on the north eastern edge of the city of Stoke

Left behind…left behind…they call it. We invented, with local people a Character called Left Behind.

Our artists team radically listened to residents about what was happening in their place; the flood of bad things that threatened to wash their community away, and then found all the things that they felt was where their essential spirit lived and where they found hope. These things were brought to life in their re-working of Noah's Flood, in which they used the spirit of place to drive the devil of redevelopment out and save on their community ark.

So why do we use co-creation to make work- and this is my provocation to you all - why and how are you using co-creation?

​

I am using co-creation because I want to see a complete bonfire of the vanities in the arts and cultural sector and a complete redistribution of resources and power.

I want cultural justice.

Not everyone engaging in or funding co-creation is in the same place as me.

Because let’s be clear at B arts

- We’re not not performing in theatres because we can’t get into a theatre.

-We’re not working with people because we don’t know where to get actors.

-We’re not making work up because we can’t find a play that we like.

-We’re not making our stuff out of cardboard because we can’t afford, or we don’t know where to find canvas. 

These are ALL choices, they’re all there for a reason. 

-We make work with people because that’s who should be making work, 

and are not. 

- We make up the content, the poetry because these are the stories that need to be told NOW

- We make work out of materials, that anyone can get their hands on, because anyone should be able to make art. 

We don’t work in theatres because

I want people to experience where they are, and who they are, differently

I want people to say: this place, this world doesn’t have to be like this, it can be like this. 

So when someone asks again - what is it you do again?

Maybe I’ll try,

"Revolutionary poet making theatre with people 

in places that are not theatres

But together we make them so ………and camel racer."

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