The Participation Revolution and Pandemic Resilience

We didn’t set out to create a company that would be resilient in the face of a pandemic, of course. So it’s natural that, right now, people should be asking us and we should be asking ourselves this question. What is it about the way that we are set up that is not only helping us maintain service but is actually opening up new opportunities for us?

Maybe a little history will help. Back in 2011, when we were beginning, we were a socially-engaged performance company. We wanted to make socially relevant work but, if we’re honest, didn’t truly understand the meaning or power of participation. There were clues in the literature, however, to set us on a new path. Lyn Gardner, the Guardian’s star theatre reviewer at the time, was writing about the need to develop an “army of advocates”. That theatres needed to stop thinking in terms of audience and more about active participants. In 2011 Charles Eisenstein, in his Sacred Economics, exploded the myths of capitalism by showing us that money itself is just a construction, an agreement that we’ve made. At the same time the music industry was under-going an extreme revolution and in 2013 Amanda Palmer gave her “The art of asking” TEDx talk explaining how she’d funded her new album simply by letting her fans pay for it directly. She showed artists, of all kinds if they were keen to see, how they could cut out the middle man and develop a direct symbiotic relationship with their fans/supporters.
Most influential to us though was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, republished in 2012 but, in extraordinary prescience, first written in 1983. The Gift is a manifesto, a beautifully poetic exposition of the transformative power of giving something away. It was through Hyde that we came to understand the meaning of “community”. Hyde demonstrated that in order for gift to be transformative, it needed to be passed on. More than this, it needed to be visibly passed on. The giving had to be witnessed.

All about the Place

So, by early 2014 we had made some important decisions. We had started as a socially-engaged performance company but now we would operate within, and serve, a specific geographic community. A defined area where the gift we offered could be witnessed as it was passed, around and around within one square kilometre of landscape – a Squilometre. It’s an archaeological concept in fact, to place a square metre grid down and to study in detail what is enclosed within. We just threw the net a little wider so that we were capturing the essence of “place”. Its heritage, landscapes – green and built – and of course its people. In all honesty, we hadn’t encountered the term at the time but, thanks to Hyde, we had become truly “place-based” even before the term was in common use in the UK.

Community gathering to take part in a performance in the Heavitree Squilometre

Circularity within the square

We started by creating a performance on an ordinary suburban street, with a script inspired by the characteristics of that street. We gave the performance away to the residents and 200 of them processed with us, taking time to stop and view it anew, together. They stayed and chatted with us at the end, popped pay-it-forward donations into a hat whilst making nominations for which street, in their Squilometre, they’d like to see celebrated next. Now, five years and nine street-based projects later, they continue to commission and support their own street celebrations. With a little help from local authority small pot grants, the first Squilometre is a completely self-sustaining, community-led, creative enterprise, going around and around their square kilometre in community perpetual motion.

Travelling light

More than this, we took the important decision to be light on our feet. Again, inspired by Hyde who constantly alludes to the deep and spiritual relationship between creativity and the natural world, we understood that we needed to take our performance out of doors. To take it to suburban streets and alleyways. Not only to the green spaces but right there to where people lived – car parks, waste ground and back alleys. If we wanted to make a real social difference we had to help people re-imagine and re-connect with their own spaces.
So, we’ve always fought the pressure to maintain premises for rehearsal or performance. We’ve never insisted that people come to us, we go to them. We don’t keep equipment and we work with our communities to beg, borrow (not steal!) and re-purpose what we need. We’ve always said that if the script calls for a sunset – then go out of doors when the sun goes down! The pressure to have a building of your own is immense of course. It’s a classic sign of success in the old capitalist construct. The bigger your palace, the greater you are. Resisting that pull and becoming inured to the judgement of others takes patience but, of course, we have come to realise that this is one of the most important decisions, for sustainability, that we have ever made.

Constant communion

Taking to the streets in this way, where there really is no barrier between you and your community, teaches you many things – you learn very quickly to let go of the creative ego. If your community is not enjoying what you do, they simply won’t come. Or they’ll walk up to you on the street and tell you – in that sense, evaluation is very easy! You’ll soon know if you’re not doing it right. To get it right, you have to maintain a constant conversation. This conversation is part of your art. This is the other reason that it is so important to define and restrict your community – to make effective two-way conversation possible. Very early on we established an online open forum where we chat daily. Our relationship is ongoing, not time-bound. Our communications are open and two-way. Again, in this climate of pandemic, this has turned out to be incredibly important. Our service to our communities (there are now four separate Squilometres – with four separate online forums) has been seamless and uninterrupted.

Two community members standing either side of The Wonford Great House information panel

Releasing the creative ego

You’ve guessed it – we quickly learned too that performance, and certainly scripted performance, isn’t the best way to work within communities. At the beginning we were socially-engaged but we weren’t participatory. In truth we had to learn that. We explored Boal, of course, and tested some of those practices within our communities but, in the end, nothing less than bowing completely into service would do. We came to see at local grassroots, as others had nationally (Fun Palaces, Creative People and Places and the ArtWorks Alliance) that culture already sits firmly within our communities. They don’t need to be taught what it is, they don’t need to be engaged with someone else’s vision of it or to have their stories re-framed and they have every right to express it how they please. Now, when we start a street project we never know how the creative expression will look. Our role is simply to facilitate and, if asked, hook communities up with an appropriate artist or expert to help fulfil their vision. And every once in a while, they ask us to help them perform! Finally in 2019, through Matarasso’s beautifully crafted clarification of participatory practice, we came to recognise ourselves as operating at grassroots “without help and without permission”. We’d slid under the radar and established a direct relationship with our supporters, our communities. In this new world there is a levelling between audience, volunteer, funder, partner and artist. It means releasing your creative ego but it is what some are calling a “Participation Revolution” or “New Power”.

So what of the future?

And what of these “new opportunities” mentioned at the outset? Well, we have long planned to extend our networks online. To create place-based resources that allow people to connect with their neighbours and their neighbourhoods and to give those resources away for free in order to build community, just as we did with our early performances. We also planned to create an online portal, where that gift can be witnessed and passed on and where communities can upload the product of their place-based creativity. More than this, a place where each Squilometre community can connect easily with the product of others. From Beijing to Turin and Adelaide to Aberdeen, a beautiful, open access expression of acting local but thinking global. But we believed that was blue-sky thinking, something for way off into the future. Because of Covid19 though we now have the resources and most importantly the networks to start making this happen. The first two Resource Packs have already been distributed with an online reach of around 10,000. Most extraordinarily, new funding opportunities for the online portal are opening up too. It seems that our blue-sky vision is now shared by others.

References

Boal, 1979 Theatre of the Oppressed.
Eisenstein, C 2011 Sacred Economics – Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition
Gardner, L 2013 How theatres can make everyone fight for the arts
Gibb, N, 2018 The Participation Revolution.
Hyde, L 2012 The Gift – How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World.
Matarasso, F 2019 A Restless Art: How participation won and why it matters.
Palmer, A 2013 The Art of Asking
Timms, H & Heimans, J 2018 New Power – How it’s changing the 21st Century – and why you need to know.

Notes to editors

About Interwoven Productions CIC
Interwoven Productions CIC are specialists in Creative Placemaking via Circular Economy and are the authors of the Squilometre technique for sustainable community animation.

About the Squilometre technique

Community-led, placemaking Squilometre projects have been running in Heavitree, Exeter on a circular, pay-it-forward basis since early 2015, with one street paying-it-forward to allow the next street project to happen – around and around inside one square kilometre. And now there are four separate Squilometres in the City of Exeter, all running in the same way – in perpetual community motion.

o Burnthouse Lane
o Heavitree
o St Thomas
o West Quarter

And you can vote to bring the Squilometre to your place too – http://www.interwovenproductions.com/bring-the-squilometre-to-my-place.html

Further information
JoJo Spinks
Interwoven Productions CIC
Exeter, Devon
www.interwovenproductions.com
07855 93513

JoJo Spinks is a member of ESSENCE, the Social Enterprise Network for Exeter. If you are a social enterprise based in Exeter, Devon, Torbay, Plymouth or Somerset and are interested in joining the Enhance Social Enterprise Network, visit the Enhance Social Enterprise Network for Devon & Somerset webpage Enhance Social Enterprise Network for Devon & Somerset.

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The Heart of the South West Enhance Social Enterprise Programme is receiving funding from the England European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020.