THEATRE AND other production companies will be obliged to tour their work in Ireland as an integral part of their State funding, under a new touring strategy to be announced next week.
The Arts Council has adopted a new policy for touring, to be delivered over six years from 2010. It follows an extensive “action research” project called the Touring Experiment, which involved 49 tours (primarily of theatre, but also visual art, music, literature, dance and traditional arts) between April 2007 and April 2008.
There had been some concern since the Touring Experiment ended that the Arts Council had not moved to formulate a policy on touring. The extensive report, seen by The Irish Times, is set to be published on the Arts Council website on Monday. It is critical of previous ad-hoc approaches to touring, as well as of poor planning and marketing, and of what it calls “grant reactive” behaviour, where securing funding for tours becomes an aim in itself and ultimately “inhibits ambition”.
The new Arts Council policy aims to ensure regional audiences have access to high-quality arts experiences. It will provide specific supports for “audience-focused touring”, where those involved “accept responsibility for ensuring an audience”, with “a prerequisite that all involved agree their respective roles with regard to artistic and marketing issues and the essential requirement to share commercial risk”.
The policy will be based on four elements: 1) schemes that offer once-off funding for individual touring projects; 2) technical supports for production companies and venues; 3) ensuring touring is undertaken by selected production companies as an integral part of their funding relationship with the Arts Council; 4) ensuring a proportion of the Arts Council funding of regional venues is used to present a programme of professional touring work.
Ensuring that touring is integral to production companies’ activity may be difficult and controversial, as touring is very expensive. The policy says the council will “allocate financial resources to support delivery of the policy . . . in relation to its overall resources”. But given the current financial situation, and the cloud hanging over cultural funding, many theatre companies and others may wonder how they can afford to tour, with a decline in State and other funding.
The report, A Future for Arts Touring in Ireland 2009-2014, says the primary reason for touring artistic work must be the audience. “The audience is both the taxpayer who funds touring and the consumer . . . The audience represents an intrinsic reward for artists and an essential force in developing appreciation of the arts.”