Below is a transcript of an address LIFT's Artistic Director Mark Ball gave at EUNIC London's Cultural Diplomacy Seminar 2011 exploring the flourishing exchanges between culture and commerce:

 

I want to start by giving some very brief background.

 

I started working in the arts in 1990 when we were in another period of austerity and cycle of recession and government cuts to the arts - history having that predictable tendency to endlessly repeat itself. There was very little public arts money around.

 

My first job was as general manager for a company - Geese Theatre - that worked exclusively in prisons and the probation sector - a pretty niche and you would think not commercially viable area of theatre practice. But we sustained and grew a permanent ensemble company of 15 actors whilst receiving no money from the arts council or local authorities and earning 80% of our income. We had cash reserves that I would be envious of now.  We developed a product - theatre that would tackle offending behavior and provide offenders with key life skills - that the criminal justice sector wanted and needed and that we sold with passion and conviction. And we reduced overheads everywhere we could - including converting a large BMW van to be the sleeping and living quarters for the acting company on tour. As now at LIFT I spend approaching £100k per festival on hotels I often think about the value of the sacrifices we made then.

 

I am always thankful that was my introduction to the arts: working for a socially engaged theatre company making great work that had a spirit of entrepreneurialism seared into its DNA.

 

After that I set up my own company - Fierce Earth in Birmingham - whose core business was the presentation of experimental performance art and live art festivals - definitely not a commercial proposition - but whose core business was underpinned by commercial trading in training and project management. With an annual grant from the Arts Council of £80000 we built a business with a £1m turnover per annum.

 

And now I find myself at LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre. An organisation that has always punched above its weight. It started to bring international theatre into London in 1981 - when the Arts Council REFUSED to fund international work - and has wowed London over the last 30 years with ground breaking international theatre that has challenged theatrical convention and contributed to a spirit of internationalism in the cultural life of the capital. It has also over that period had to be creative in building it's funding base including adopting some very innovative relationships with business and the corporate sector - establishing the LIFT Business Arts Forum that built relationships between  artists and business people not around money but to explore common issues and challenges, enabling artists to apply different strategies to create more sustainable works and business people to form fresh ways of thinking about relationships in the workplace.  LIFT is in my view still too reliant in public funding - 45% of its turnover - and the organisation is focusing on developing a more diverse funding base and on increasing its trading activity.

 

So over that time what have I deduced about the kind of innovative strategies that can be adopted by arts and cultural organisations in a context of precarious funding and public sector cuts across Europe - and I've been following very closely the disastrous public spending announcements for the arts just made in the Netherlands.

 

I want to reflect on 3 key points:

Firstly most artists and companies I work with are inherently entrepreneurial and the stereotypical view that arts organisations do not make good businesses is simply untrue. They make extraordinary things happen with very limited resources. They persuade, cajole and enthuse people into investment.  But costs - not on art, never on art - but on administration and organisation should always be reviewed with a view to driving them down. And now, within the context of cuts, there is an opportunity for radical thinking about collaboration and partnerships between arts organisations in order that services can be shared and collectively developed and costs driven down. That will require bold leadership with people leaving their organisational and personal egos at the door. But the benefits - to the organisations and the sector could be very significant.

Secondly that developing more commercial trading activity should never mean that you move away from your core mission, ignore your values or sacrifice quality as an arts organisation. Because if you do that it won't work. In my view the opposite is true - if more commercial activity is to work it must be congruent with your core mission and values and be of an exceptional standard. Let me give you three examples; the LIFT Business Arts Forum enabled LIFT to build sponsorship relations with corporate companies but these relationships grew out of the activities of the forum - bringing artists and business people together who shared a sense of curiosity about the world around them and a common purpose to engage with the big issues of our time - the relationship between global and local, the communities nestled in and around us, conflict resolution and climate change; At Fierce Earth we built a successful trading arm of the company providing project management and training to the creative industries by putting experienced artists at the centre of the delivery - making the creative approach to our services distinctive and commercially attractive and giving us competitive advantage in a crowded market. The training business in particular flourished because artists were learning business skills not from business experts but from successful artists and creative entrepreneurs who had been there and done it; At LIFT now - where we have a strong focus on working with artists who are working at the intersection of theatre and digital technology - we have realised in our dealings with the games industry that there are commercial opportunities in connecting theatre makers and games designers who are hungry to drive up artistic standards and the quality of the user experience in gaming by learning from theatre directors, dramaturgs and lighting designers - and so later this year we will be running programmes bringing both sectors together that will bring strong mutual benefits. As an aside on technology social media and a wiki culture is increasingly opening up opportunities for new forms of collaborative public funding for arts organisation - and every week I now see arts organisations successfully raising money through social media funding platforms which offer tremendous potential to build meaningful long term relationships with the public.

Finally that partnership is critical to the success of arts organisations - it’s obvious that we can do more better by working together. But not just with the arts sector - partnerships can come from all sorts of unusual spaces and places. And it's essential to try and see the world from the viewpoint of your partner if you're going to broker a successful relationship. Again a couple of examples. Last year LIFT presented Nalaga'at - the world’s only theatre company of professional performers who are both deaf and blind. Bringing over an Israeli company of 40 artists, carers and deaf blind performers with very intensive needs was very expensive and to help make the production happen we approached SENSE, the UK's charity for deaf blind people. SENSE is one of the UK's largest charities but they would be the first to admit they have a very low profile and public recognition which is a key obstacle to fundraising. As we knew the extraordinary story of the Nalaga'at company would generate significant national media interest - and indeed it did - SENSE came on board as the principle supporter of the project providing both cash and specialist in-kind support in order to boost their profile. Since that project they have made a longer term commitment to supporting the arts.   And this year we are working with WWF who have aligned their support to our climate change related work to build new supporters for their own work and challenge the external perception of the organisation. Both of these organisations are not traditional arts funders.

 

To conclude across Europe in a rapidly changing world we are all going to have to think and act differently, refining and sometimes revolutionising our business models. But rather than be afraid of that we should embrace the creative tension that these new opportunities afford.

Mark Ball, 2011