The next of our reports into Future Arts Centres member’s creative dialogues with international partners looks at artsdepot’s special relationship with Vancouver arts centre The Cultch – and what it has led to for audiences, artists, staff and young people living on local Barnet estates.

artsdepot’s team threw themselves fully into their visit to Canada – meeting artists, venue staff, various arts sector leaders, and attending an international conference and local festival.

The direct results have been striking. They include new Canadian theatre shows and international artist residencies at artsdepot; a programme aiming to divert young people away from gangs and knife crime; and a new Director of Programming enticed to Barnet!

artsdepot Chief Executive Tracy Cooper reflects on how their transatlantic adventure has opened new opportunities, ways of working – and thinking:

Our entire exchange was enlightening, from discussing business models to new ways of working and meeting artists in their community.

We share similar geography with the Cultch: the location of an arts centre in the suburbs of a major city and the resulting economic/social/political impact our locality has on our artistic and business models.

Before arriving in Vancouver, we joined the International Society of Performing Arts (www.ispa.org) conference in Montreal. This gave us a valuable insight into the Canadian arts scene, allowing us to develop conversations with local artists far more successfully and with much quicker outcomes than we’d anticipated.

Our week in Vancouver began with a tour of The Cultch with Chief Executive Heather Redfern, and we hosted a creative lunch for the area’s arts community. As the week evolved, we enjoyed an intense series of meetings with individual artists, producers, festival leaders and other venue leaders. We also met many staff and board members at the Cultch and even attended its weekly Senior Management Meeting, all helping inform our own business planning strategies. Our trip also coincided with the International Children’s Festival of Vancouver which allowed us to see artistic work and further develop our international artists’ networks.

We took away lots from the detail of these discussions, and we kept the dialogue going, Ideas which had their gestation in Canada became specific projects, benefiting us and our audiences.

We commissioned Vancouver theatre company Theatre Replacement who will premiere new show MINE with us in Spring 2019, and tour to Cambridge Junction, before returning to The Cultch. MINE is a live theatrical story, using the computer construction game Minecraft as a form of theatre where gamers and performers aged 10 to 45 enact different narratives, creating stories of mothers and sons. We have also attracted match funding in Canada and the UK.

An exciting outcome of commissioning this contemporary, relevant work is winning a Mayor of London ‘Young Londoners Fund’ grant of £25k pa for three years to engage with hard-to-reach young people on the estates of Barnet. We will use MINE / Minecraft to help develop new relationships, and a school holiday programme aiming to keep young people away from knife crime and gang activity.

Our programme for older people who are socially isolated will see Canadian singer Melanie Gall visit to present Stitch in Time: A Knitting Cabaret, featuring lost knitting songs of the world wars from Canada, Britain, America and France. We host Canadian theatre-maker Edith Tankus for a residency exploring ‘sandwich carers’ in Spring 2019, and our Autumn 2018 programme included three Canadian theatre companies.

This is very much the start. Potential future collaborations include a UK-Canada artist development and support programme, led by us and The Cultch, and hosting further Canadian artists and theatre companies for tours and residencies including Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, Marcus Yousef, and Theatre SKAM.

We have developed new networks, relationships and ideas and we found our great new Director of Programming, Louisa Bartlett-Pestell, who I met at the PUSH Festival in Vancouver earlier this year.

Our international creative dialogue has meant so much. Not just these outcomes, but also the confidence it has given us as an organisation. We are repeating the model on a visit to Austin, Texas – and we look forward to what this brings.

Tracy Cooper, Chief Executive, artsdepot
@TBirne