I write this from the National Rural Touring Forum conference in Nottingham – which includes everything from spoken-word poetry in pubs to contemporary dance in village halls. Last week I spoke at the National Trust’s training conference for 200 volunteers and participation managers. Yesterday I ran a Fun Palaces workshop in Stoke with local artists, heritage activists, learning disabled arts participants, and scientists.
Last week Kings College London published a new report – Towards Cultural Democracy, Promoting Cultural Capabilities for Everyone. As a novelist and theatre-maker for more than three decades, and having spent the last four years growing and promoting the Fun Palaces movement, I find the report painfully timely: “In the context of the deep and widespread political division expressed through the 2016 EU referendum campaign and vote, it is increasingly clear that new approaches to many of the UK’s political processes require urgent and radical attention. This includes how cultural policy operates – and who and what cultural policy is for. Questions about how culture is made and by who, and which creative activity gets recognised and supported, are matters in which we all have a profound and ever more urgent interest.”
Culture shows us who we are; it reflects who we are now and supports us to become who we might be. If we are not engaging everyone in the creation of culture – and any number of studies from the 2015 Warwick Report into the Future of Cultural Value to Dr Dave O’Brien’s work in social mobility in the acting profession confirm we most definitely are not – then the culture we are sharing and consuming is not that of our whole society. It therefore not only fails to represent us, it risks contributing to the divisions we are now experiencing.
The reform championed by this report and the work of many organisations such as Fun Palaces, 64 Million Artists, Voluntary Arts and Get Creative is a move away from culture by and for an elite, however well meaning, to culture by and for all. Those of us who work with everyday creatives, with local communities, know that not only can everyone “do” culture but that when we include everyday creativity in our cultural landscape we see a far wider and more diverse range of people. The work we are talking about – grassroots, created by professionals and non-professionals together, often in communities rather than on main stages and in recognised venues – largely takes place outside the funded mainstream. Allowing everyone to join in, not simply as audiences and consumers, but as active participants, as creators, will result in a far greater array of work to engage with.
Because the pool we’re drawing from is wider, we’ll get better art and better artists – and because science is culture too, better science and better scientists. We desperately need to bring everyone into the cultural ecology, not for audience development (though that’s a happy by-product) but as artist development.
Further, it is vital to engage all ages in this work. It is never going to be enough to encourage children and young people into cultural activity if we’re not also supporting their families to be creative. We need to work with disaffected parents and grandparents, those for whom the cultural world was alienating when they grew up and for whom it remains so.
We will never achieve an inclusive arts ecology until we acknowledge the far too many areas of exclusion. We’re living the violent results of exclusivity and a stratified culture. The question is not why, but how we create inclusion and how soon. Those of us working in culture talk a lot about the arts ecology, but in any ecology some parts must die for new ones to thrive. It might be time to let go of some of our outdated practices. Our commitment to “excellence and quality” as defined by mainstream, metropolitan-based thinking many decades ago, might need to shift to a new version of “excellence and quality”, one defined by a new generation of makers and creators – and this time from every part of society.
If we want cultural democracy, genuine culture for all, elitism must make way for creativity and community-led culture. We need to offer everyone not only access to the products of creativity, but access to the means and processes of creativity – only then will we have an inclusive culture for, by and with all.
• Stella Duffy is the co-director of Fun Palaces. Her new novel, The Hidden Room, is published this week by Virago.
