Here are Chris Kirkwood’s reflections on Lincoln’s recent Creative Dialogue with Cork:

Following an earlier blog where I talked about a creative dialogue we’d undertaken in Lithuania in 2017 we’ve been lucky enough to explore further learning with overseas partners. This time though we were able to do so in partnership with another organisation in the network.

It made sense for us in Lincoln to work alongside Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Based within a mile of each other, both venues have similar capacity and, although we work closely to avoid overlapping each other’s programming, our scale means that this is sometimes inevitable.

After a great deal of discussion and research we chose Cork in Ireland as our place of enquiry and really wanted to explore how small cities with multiple arts provision collaborate on things such as marketing, programming and audience development. Cork was of interest as it has a similar population to Lincoln, has a range of scale in terms of arts provision, is a University City (with current links to the University of Lincoln) and is a place that has had to deal with significant austerity.

We decided that we’d take three trips at different parts of the summer and involve a range of colleagues to enhance learning from the trip. The first trip in June 2018 was undertaken by Craig Morrow and I as the two executive leads for our organisations. We went over one weekend of the Cork Midsummer Festival and booked tickets to see a number of festival events and take the opportunity to meet one of the festival organisers, Kath Gorman.

What was striking from the trip was that, if we directly spoke to people about the festival there was an awareness that it was happening, but from the airport until we were stood right outside Cork Opera House to meet Kath, you wouldn’t have been aware that there was a major cultural festival taking place. This is something that I’ve felt about a lot of UK festivals (Edinburgh apart) that I’ve attended. Until you are directly engaging with a venue as part of the festival the world seems often to go on around it regardless. However, what was interesting across both this and subsequent visits was the pride in Irish work programmed. ON the Friday night in Cork we went to a show in one of the local parks that started at 10.30 – but which was incredibly busy with approximately 150 audience members watching a site specific piece. This would have been largely to do with it being CorcaDorca Theatre Company, but it was interesting to see a loyal audience at what we’d normally consider a difficult programming time!

This theme of audience development ran throughout our three visits. It is clear that audience development is approached really differently from us. There appears to be a much larger core loyal audience for performance work in Cork, so there isn’t the same focus on audience development as we’d see it. On our second trip, where we took our Marketing leads both reported that they felt that ingrained audience loyalty meant that their approach to both collaboration and audience development was less strategic. We also felt though that from across the sector there was a sense of a more ‘pro-culture’ environment and certainly more government engagement in the arts locally and nationally.

I think the main thing we took from our second trip, having met with both the Local Authority arts lead, plus the artistic directors of Graffiti Childrens Theatre Company, The AD at The Everyman Theatre (the main producing theatre) and the Director of the Crawford Arts Gallery was that there was a palpable sense of trust and an active willingness to support each other, albeit with much more uncertain time frames for public funding – Graffiti Theatre Company only has annual funding arrangements for example.

It became clear from our three visits that Culture is clearly viewed as a way to rebuild/develop the city in post austerity Cork. That felt really important. This is also true as the City learned from their experience as the European Capital of Culture in 2005.

The main thing that we took away from this dialogue, and something that we all agreed we felt we could make work was the potential to replicate the Culture Night experience. Craig and myself, along with Kieran, a colleague from the Centre for Culture and Creativity at the University went back for a third trip in September 2018 to experience Culture Night in Cork. This is a version of a night that takes place across the city – and indeed in cities across Ireland where for one night all sorts of venues, businesses, community spaces, nightclubs, bars, restaurants and parks among others throw open their doors and offer free cultural activity.

The experience was a strange one. We saw a range of different activity. A packed open rehearsal of a new opera being produced by The Everyman, an exhibition of the Press Photographer of the Year exhibition which was held in a branch of the sponsoring bank and a discussion event with the AD of CorcaDorca about the evolution of their company. We also took in a fire show on one of the main streets and an ambient light show in a nightclub.

Again it was a mixed experience. The activity was engaging largely, but if still felt that Cork was having its usual Friday night and this was happening around it, rather than the other way around. As activity was so varied and spread over the whole city, there was no sense of a joined up whole – apart from in the accompanying brochure. However, the aim, which is incredibly successful to draw in large number of people to enjoy the city culturally was certainly true once you were directly engaging with the different events.

I think the main things that I’d take away overall is that there is a pride in their own heritage and work from Cork and Irish artists that runs through both performance and visual art – the use of the collection at The Crawford to frame the work around the theme of Heroes and Villians for instance. However, I think we also felt reassured by our own approach to collaboration here in Lincoln. It certainly felt as if it wasn’t as high a priority and perhaps happened in a more ad hoc way.

It appears that organisations largely can also rely on a known core audience that will remain loyal across all of their programmes of work.

We will be looking in the future about Culture Night and how that might replicate in Lincoln – even if in a small way. It was a hugely useful learning experience and also one that reassures us that we do many things well.

https://www.crawfordartgallery.ie/
http://www.corkmidsummer.com/
https://www.everymancork.com/
https://graffiti.ie/
http://www.corcadorca.com/website/

Chris Kirkwood
Chief Executive
Lincoln Drill Hall