Last year, Future Arts Centres embarked on a series of creative dialogues with international partners, designed to stretch our thinking and provide an international context to our work. Here is the first of our reports:

A Creative Dialogue between Lincoln Drill Hall and Arts Printing House, Vilnius Lithuania.

In 2014 I was approached at Lincoln Drill Hall by a former colleague who was carrying out some community engagement work with representatives of a growing community of Lithuanians living in the city. The Lithuanian community had been very active in Lincoln, getting to the point where members of the community had stood in local elections.

They had strong community leaders and they came to see me about using our small studio space to host an evening of stand up comedy – they were bringing two stand ups over from Lithuania. Happy to help, the event grew beyond our expectations finally being moved into the auditorium and having an audience of 270 people who had a brilliant night.

What made the evening such a success was that we printed off a batch of tickets and the community sold them directly which was why there was such a large audience, but leaving the venue with only very few contacts for future work.

So when, through Future Arts Centres the opportunity to undertake a creative dialogue with a European country came up we jumped at the chance to try and explore the cultural scene of Lithuania and to increase our knowledge of how work is made to try and help us continue longer engagement with our own communities.

I made contact with Arts Printing House in Vilnius, a venue we felt had similarities to our own, similar capacities, and a similar rooting in our community. They also had a commitment to contemporary circus practise, an art form with which Lincoln Drill Hall had developed good audiences.

So, in September 2017 three of my team – Artistic Programme Manager, Marketing and Comms Manager and Technical manager travelled to Lithuania to experience their Contemporary Circus Festival. It gave staff the chance to experience work that they wouldn’t normally and to meet their colleagues.

We learned a lot. There was strong audience engagement with the range of work on offer, from the black box pieces to site specific installations. The work included a strong element aimed at families. Their marketing of work takes place largely on Social Media and specifically Facebook. They market to what they called the Hipster generation, with small runs of monthly brochures backing this up and being distributed around bars and clubs.

One interesting thing is that they don’t use Twitter. Having just returned from The Edinburgh Fringe where for a number of years a lot of my itinerary has been drawn from recommendations by tweet, their account is dormant.

They operate a different model for wider programming. When they hire to outside companies it is more as a hall to hire, the venue doesn’t deal with marketing or ticketing for those events, meaning I suppose that they don’t gather audience data in the same way we do.

We also learned that there is not the same job security for their workforce. Many staff in the venue are on fixed term contracts with organisation refreshing their team with new people after that time.

Overall I was really pleased with many elements of our Creative Dialogue. My team got to experience a range of international work and to culturally explore a very different city. The learning outcomes we wanted to achieve will certainly help us as we seek to forge ever deeper relationships with our own communities back home.

I’m already planning our next exchange, closer to home this time with the cultural sector in Cork. Learning how others operate will only continue to help us grow as an organisation. And at the end of the day that’s what I’m striving for. A strong, sustainable independent venue valued by communities across our city and beyond.

Chris Kirkwood, Chief Executive, Lincoln Drill Hall
@ChrisK1906