Item 2 is an evidence session on differences in cultural participation across Scotland. I welcome to the meeting Robert Livingston from—is it HI-Arts or H1-Arts?
HI-Arts.
Thank you. I also welcome Julie Tait, director of Culture Sparks, and Fiona Ferguson, development director of Imaginate. Liam McArthur will start the questioning.
Good morning. The latest Scottish household survey suggests that almost nine in 10 adults have participated in cultural activity or attended a cultural event over the past year. Although on one level the figure is impressive, it has not changed markedly in the past four or five years. Do you have any inspirational ideas on how we reach into the remaining 10 per cent and try to nudge the overall figure up further?
The difficulty with the household survey is that it does not get at issues of opportunity and motivation. For example, the figure for attendance at cinemas in remote and rural areas is quite high. However, there are two very obvious reasons for that: first, the Screen Machine mobile cinema; and secondly, the network of digital equipment that Scottish Screen and now Regional Screen Scotland have funded in those communities.
This is, of course, the million dollar question. There is still room to grow across the full range of customer segments and lifestyles.
Speaking as someone whose area of research is children’s performing arts, I am quite sure that increasing children’s access to high-quality arts would, in the long term, affect those adult participation figures.
I am interested in the comparison with Denmark. Does it hold for the figures for those in Denmark who access cultural events later in life?
I do not know—I know only about the children’s sector. As far as access to work in schools in Denmark is concerned, there is certainly an incredible array of choice.
Mr Livingston highlighted the point about opportunity and motivation and mentioned the Screen Machine mobile cinema. A number of years back, I had the pleasure of attending one of its shows in Sanday in Orkney; as the wind whistled round the cinema, I found myself watching “The Perfect Storm”, which seemed somewhat appropriate. Orkney is one of those places where the opportunity to engage with culture is almost ever-present. Such an opportunity is not necessarily taken for granted, but I think that the notion that those in rural areas struggle to access culture and cultural events is given the lie by the Orkney experience.
As Julie Tait pointed out, it is partly about finding new ways of presenting work. We need look only at the huge success of Òran Mór’s play, a pie and a pint series, which is all about theatre as something that you can see in your lunchtime hour. In Inverness, a local voluntary group presents a series of concerts with music at 1 o’clock in the Town house; the audience is almost exclusively elderly, partly because they have the time to attend and partly because transport is readily available at that time of the day, they do not have to come out at night and they can see a straight 50-minute concert of fantastic quality. Being locked into the pattern of shows that start at 7.30 pm and run for two or two and a half hours disadvantages many people for many reasons.
One of the challenges is that we talk about this in terms of whether someone is an attender or non-attender. Attenders are seen as being in a particular demographic; they are generally affluent, well educated and professional. However, the research that we are just about to complete and to which I allude in our submission shows a significant engagement over 2.5 million households. If you profile that national picture of engagement, you will find that it spans a huge demographic. There are, of course, regional variations, but I think that the 10 per cent that you refer to is the same 10 per cent that you are challenged with in education, social enterprise and the commercial world.
You seem to be reinforcing the point about the importance of education, whether in raising aspiration levels or exposing children and young people to experiences that they then seek to explore further.
Yes. It is also about the family. Research in Philadelphia, which is of a similar scale to here, is finding that the route to attendance is through practice and engagement, and through the family. A role model might be a parent or a member of the extended family, or it might be someone like Fiona Ferguson, who helps to break down assumptions about what art is and the experience that people might have.
I am sure that Mr Cummings would want me to spare his blushes, but El Sistema appears to be a way in which that has been achieved. Are there other examples that have worked or are working in a Scottish context—or even a Danish or international context—that will help us to drill down further into that 10 per cent?
One example is the organisation Starcatchers, which specialises in arts for the early years. It has shifted from putting artists in residence in a lovely venue and then trying to bring in schools and families, to basing artists directly in family centres in areas where the level of participation is not high. It would be interesting to consider that approach more, because it is about the whole family.
I will give two examples to answer the question. In one of my other roles, I am on the advisory panel for Live Music Now Scotland, which does a fantastic job in taking young musicians from right across the sector—from rock through traditional to jazz and classical—into care homes, workplaces, prisons and special schools. Those are exactly the places where people are having difficulty in accessing cultural activities and where there is perhaps a poverty of aspiration.
The problem does not seem to be a lack of examples. Is the issue a failure to sustain the approach over a period?
Absolutely—yes.
Yes.
Building relationships in the most marginalised communities is hard and takes a long time. Even in bringing together agencies, there are issues about learning one another’s language to sustain the approach. We are great at creating new projects and initiatives—El Sistema, for example, is great. However, the real challenge is connecting people to the existing infrastructure and encouraging them to take the opportunities that are on their doorstep but that they would never dream of taking unless some person or organisation facilitates that. That is the challenge, rather than organising new things. What is the right answer to the question? The key point is to consider what issue we are trying to solve. There are plenty of examples of new initiatives. Pretty much every arts company works in communities and with the education world and parents and children, but the question is why that fizzles out.
As we have discovered in the past few weeks and months, some people are currently having difficulty feeding their family, never mind going to the theatre, the ballet or even the cinema. What impact is the recession having on cultural participation?
The only figures that I can give are on ticketing revenue. We have software that has pulled out transactional data from ticketing sales at some of the major box offices in Scotland for the past five years. We are seeing a similar pattern, which is that there is a flat line, but with a small increase in yield. That means that people are running to stand still. In essence, organisations are sustaining themselves by increasing price. They are doing all that they can to generate revenue, but that is not sustainable. If things do not improve in the marketplace, there will be nowhere for the figures to go but downwards.
Surely that has an even greater impact on the 10 per cent of people who are already marginalised—they will be marginalised even further.
Yes.
Many organisations have moved away from concession ticket prices or have concessions that are so small that they make no difference, such as a couple of pounds. Quite a few festivals simply do not have concession prices any more. Even that slight inducement that might be there is disappearing under the pressure to balance the books.
Yes, and we see a corresponding increase in yield.
I think that people are still coming in the same numbers, but it is relevant to consider who is coming. People cannot afford various things, and there is a spectrum. In my previous post, I found that many people came to the theatre rather than do more expensive things such as go into town. However, that 10 per cent of people are being pushed even further out of the way.
To return to the beginning, Liam McArthur’s initial question was about the fact that 90 per cent of people participate in cultural activities and that, therefore, by implication, 10 per cent do not. Based on what you have said, if we are to encourage the expansion of cultural participation, rather than think simply about the 90 per cent of people who engage in some way, we should break that down and consider the proportion who go to see plays or live music. The 90 per cent figure suggests a healthy and thriving culture in which everybody is participating, but when we look at the different parts, the picture is much more complex. Should we look at the figure sector by sector rather than as a whole? According to figures from the Scottish Parliament information centre, 31 per cent of adults in Scotland attended a live music event in the past 12 months, 6 per cent attended a classical music performance and so on. That breakdown seems to give a better picture of the nuances.
A sector-by-sector approach is an interesting one because it tends to reduce the question to “What is it about classical music or contemporary visual art that is the problem?”, as opposed to “What is it about the 10 per cent of people who never participate in cultural activities that would influence their engagement?” and “Do we know enough about that 10 per cent?”
There is another aspect to your question, which Julie Tait touched on. Many people who would be classified as non-attenders by arts organisations because they have not been to an arts event for the past 12 months would think of themselves as attenders; it is just that they have not realised that it is more than 12 months since they last went. That is the time-poor sector of the community. Those people are very difficult to reach, because they think that they are supporting a particular organisation; they are in favour of it and would call themselves theatre-lovers, but they do not figure in the calculations. When they are asked the stark question, “How much have you done in the past 12 months?”, they are not in the 30 per cent who have attended a music event or the 6 per cent who have been to a classical music performance.
Another issue is what we want that 10 per cent to get from a cultural experience. We always tend to think that the arts means ballet, opera and so on, but the range of cultural experiences and what people get from them is such that it is necessary to know more about the 10 per cent in order to be able to present something that is relevant to them or which has a resonance for them.
We have focused on the 10 per cent of people who do not engage in cultural activities at all. I want to ask about those groups that participate but which have low participation levels. As a member for West Scotland, I am particularly interested in participation in small urban towns and deprived areas. What are the key factors in increasing participation among those groups?
Do you mean apart from availability of a programme and a place to go?
It needs to be a quality experience. We are long past the day when a pioneering company such as the 7:84 Theatre Company could go into the most ramshackle venue and turn it into a ceilidh for the evening. Quite rightly, people expect that if they are to leave their house for the evening, they should have a comfortable experience. In the Highlands and Islands, we have seen huge benefits in that regard. We have seen community schools being built, village halls refurbished and the opening of new venues such as the expanded Eden Court theatre and the An Lanntair arts centre. For many of the smaller towns, that is part of the issue. If they have venues, they have not been upgraded or they have been closed, or they lack a proper facility, with the result that, unlike with Screen Machine, it is not possible to experience an art form in the way in which it should be engaged with.
There is also the basic issue of accessibility of information. If I had £1 for every time someone said that they would have gone to an event if they had known that it was on, I would probably not need to be here. How easy it is for people to get information and how visible that information is are factors. The digital world will help us to accelerate that, because people’s conversations are now online and visible. Without even speaking to anyone, we and people who are digital-savvy can learn an awful lot about engagement simply by grabbing a bit of code and using Google. There is an issue to do with how people receive information, and the internet is a key vehicle in that respect. For all the challenges that VisitScotland has faced in creating a portal to bring together information on travel, transport, geography and provision, it is at least trying to create a kind of home for all that. I do not want to labour the point, but I think that that is certainly a barrier.
As I have said, we need to use resources such as schools and village halls better—and, indeed, have more tours. A show that we have put together with Mull Theatre has gone into 26 schools from the Borders to Portree and Aberdeenshire and is now about to go on another big tour of 32 village halls across Scotland, including those in Rum and Muck. That has been able to happen because the company has created a piece of work that it can roll up to a school hall with, no matter the size or technical capacity of the hall, and perform for the whole community. The company performs in the school in the evening; in fact, the show is called the wee night out tour, because it is all about the community coming along to the school in the evening.
The main reason why you could not get access to schools in one local authority area was that no one would staff the event in the evening.
That is right.
And that happened only in Edinburgh.
We wanted to bring the show to Edinburgh because that is where our children’s festival takes place in May, but that was the local authority that we had problems with.
Mr Livingston mentioned 7:84 and the problems with engaging people in new approaches. How were companies such as 7:84 able to engage people in deprived areas? Secondly, what problems do such companies face now?
When 7:84 started putting on “The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil” and such shows, it introduced a new paradigm and completely broke the mould of what theatre should be. It broke through the fourth wall and came off the stage. The play was like a variety show; it was engaging and, at the end of it, the audience was caught up in a ceilidh. The play, a pie and a pint series that I mentioned earlier is one of the current paradigm-changing approaches. We need more of those.
The point, though, is consistency. A practical element of engagement is the fact that people need time to plan and the ability to say, “I know that if I miss it this time, it will come round next year.” Such an approach gives word of mouth time to grow. If you have a busy life or a busy family, that is not a “wouldn’t it be nice”, it is a “have to”, whether you are a highly engaged family or not. There should be consistency, rather than a boom-and-bust project relationship.
It is important to note that 7:84 was consistently touring over 20 years, and the audience that it built up over that time was significant.
Because the companies that we try to support in the Highlands are—with the exception of Mull Theatre—entirely project based, they might get a tour out only once every 18 months or so, which means that they cannot build familiarity. That tour might play for only two or three weeks, after which the investment in the show is gone, and there is no funding to restage the performance, even if it has been a success. Continuity is a crucial factor.
Yes. Shows become commercially viable when they are restaged, and they can then tour around communities in the longer term.
I want to drill down a bit further into the idea of engagement and the multi-agency work. The Scottish Book Trust is working with vulnerable families. As well as providing free books to all children in Scotland, it is providing books specifically to vulnerable children. The hope is that those children will be encouraged to go along to library events with sing-songs and nursery rhymes and other cultural activities.
In my previous job, I worked with East Renfrewshire Council, and we programmed a lot with bookbug. That was a fantastic way of working, as we had quite a strong early years programme of theatre and dance anyway.
It is interesting to focus on the audience as opposed to the art form or the sector. If you take that approach, you can ask, “If someone has been brought in to the experience of reading, where else would it be natural for them to go and how can that connection be made stronger?” That is a different question from “What do we provide?” We can think of the issue in terms of a map and ask how to lead people through their cultural life so that someone else does not have to do it all for them.
One of the difficulties that I alluded to in my paper is the reduction in staff resources in individual local authorities—for example, the loss of cultural co-ordinators, who would be the natural interface with a project like GIRFEC. That puts an extra burden on companies such as those that Fiona Ferguson works with to try to plug that gap.
I became a lifelong opera fan because of the opera in the round that I experienced as a primary school child in Shotts. From observation, I am aware that the thing that most enthuses young people and brings in families is the ability to participate, rather than simply to be consumers of the arts. Are there particular projects, present or past, that work to bring in audiences?
The example that you gave is a terrific one—Scottish Opera is doing good work. I am not as familiar with everything that is going on, but the point is that we need to go to where the communities are. That work is hugely beneficial. We got you that way, for a start. Companies are doing a lot of that work, but we need to think of what the next step is, once that interest has been stimulated.
There must be a combination of participation and being excited by something you see. People who work in the arts always tell you that something that they saw in their childhood made them pursue an arts career. If we want equality of access, we need people to have that experience, whether it is participatory or sitting in an audience watching professionals doing something exciting. That needs to be across the board and not down to the choices made by individual head teachers or local authorities, which is a huge issue. That said, when I go to other places in Europe, people are excited by the curriculum for excellence. However, although culture is part of the curriculum, we need more resources to get into all the schools to ensure that everybody has access to the professionals, whether they are coming in for participatory experiences or a performance.
That applies to both schools and family. Certainly in North America the route in is through schools and families that practise arts—so the route in is through practice and by participating or engaging with something. However, that is not necessarily seen as a linear thing—you do not practise arts just to attend events. Practice has many benefits in and of itself and it might be that people end up doing some other form of cultural activity.
The issue is related to the discussion that you have just had about music provision. If one local authority charges £200 each year for music tuition but in another local authority it is free, where is that sense of entitlement to music? Who is being missed? Who might have come into music and become either the audience in 20 years’ time or the next Nicola Benedetti? The 10 per cent who have never participated in culture are mostly in our schools, so how will you ensure that children have equality of access? How will you reach them all if we have a postcode approach to provision?
It is important to return to the point about 7:84 and to talk about content rather than structures, which we have talked about a lot. It seems to me that the reason why 7:84 was so popular, along with Wildcat and the other touring companies of that era, was that it provided content for people in a language that they spoke—Scots—and that directly related to their experience. I am probably showing my age, but I went to the first tour of “The Steamie” when it came to Greenock. The play was sold out, and in every community around Scotland where “The Steamie” played the halls were packed out. I think that that was because it directly related to the cultural experience of the audience.
I can talk only about theatre, but there is a lot of work in Scots and “The Steamie” has just done another big tour. Work that is good keeps touring and keeps going. I used to be on 7:84’s board. It was a good company—it created work that was not only in Scots, but was about issues that people are interested in. It had a successful work model.
I am a fan of opera and ballet and it is great that we get those art forms into all communities, but there is a specific issue about building confidence so that people hear their language spoken and performed and can participate. We have a Gaelic strategy; do we need a similar strategy for the arts? Would that build people’s confidence and encourage them to participate more?
The Gaelic example is interesting. There was a strong feeling that Gaelic needed theatre provision. Historically, over two major efforts, that has not proven to be successful. It was put in place as a strategic intervention, rather than coming out of the artistic and social drive of people, as happened with Wildcat and 7:84. We need to be sure that we are not missing the people who want to do this kind of work, but the danger is in creating something top-down, rather than supporting the grass-roots ambition of particular creative people.
That is a really important point. I cannot talk as much about artistic product, but I can talk about the notion of difference among populations. To have a sense of “it’s about Scots language, and therefore this is the policy on theatre” perhaps does not reflect the majority of people’s lives. I am arguing for a greater understanding of the views, needs, opinions and circumstances of individuals, because it is from there that great work comes. For example, visual artists will often immerse themselves in communities. From that comes work that people might not recognise but that has a resonance, not because it is Scots per se, but because it reflects the needs, culture, history, background and language of the people who live in those communities. Those differences are expressed very clearly in various parts of Scotland, so it would be difficult to have one policy. You can see where that might go—the danger is that everything would be like “The Steamie”, be based in the 1940s or be in Doric. That would not reflect the needs, opinions and backgrounds of the majority of people.
I would like to develop some of the very interesting themes that you have spoken about. You have all spoken very strongly about new initiatives, but in terms of getting people to come back to things, do you have specific examples from across Scotland of where there has been a high degree of success of the consistency that Julie Tait mentioned, with people returning to the same type of production? What are the examples of the biggest success and what are the specific features of the projects that have worked?
I do not think that it is specific shows, because usually they do not come round often. Particular art forms that we have looked at have their fans. There have been some simple initiatives around retention, with commercial companies offering promotions and incentives. Subscriptions, memberships and loyalty schemes are practical things—the simplest things often work. Some of the larger companies are able to do that because they have the resources to focus their effort. They also have the information to help them. If someone does not know the pattern of attendance and they cannot gather or access that information, they cannot do anything with it. There are some examples of success. I hate to use the terms, but loyalty schemes and subscription packages are two that can be seen across Scotland.
The festival experience points to that. Festivals are one area where we see loyalty being built up very quickly. New festivals in the past two or three years have built up loyal followings that become the core of what they want to do. The lesson of that is that festivals are predictable. People know that, although the next event will have different content, it will be roughly like what went before, with something surprising and unusual.
The practical equipment and infrastructure that allows tracking is also really important. There can sometimes be a sense of “if we build it, they will come” and people just fire things out. However, Òran Mór, for example, is very specific. It is predictable, it charges the same price for each event and it is highly targeted—simple stuff like that.
Is there specific evidence to suggest that the communities in which there is a high degree of success are those in which the local business community and the hotel network pitch in to a greater degree? Pitlochry Festival Theatre, for example, speaks very highly about the fact that the local business group and the hotels pitch in. Do we need to do more to help in that regard?
Those relationships are crucial. My understanding is that the attitude in Pitlochry changed when the theatre was closed and the business community realised that there was a gap. There is considerable scope for showing other communities those examples of how to make better relationships.
To go back to the point about 7:84, the discussion that we are having now is endless. It has been going on for generations—hundreds of years, I suspect—and it will continue. It is about what makes something good and why people want to see it. My opinion might be that something is good, while your opinion might be that it is awful.
What you are saying has a lot of relevance, but I ask members and witnesses to keep questions and answers brief, please.
It was just an observation.
There is another side to the 7:84 story. The other company that opened up the Highlands for theatre at the same time was the Medieval Players, who were a bunch of graduates from Cambridge. They did that in exactly the way that Jean Urquhart described. They arrived in the community and processed down the street with a cart and a guy in devil costume accosting all the wifies. They made it exciting. Relevance is what you make of it, and it is about how you reach out to engage people.
Of course, relevance is all about knowing about the people with whom you are trying to engage. What slightly depresses me about the conversation about 7:84 is that the world is changing; the fact is that personal connections can be made more easily in the digital world and people are looking for a connection to something that is relevant. We have the tools to do that without having to parade down the street or knock on people’s doors. More than at any other time, we are in people’s hands.
I will resist the urge to make an observation about that and will instead move on to an issue about performance-related culture that I think we have slightly avoided up to now: museums. According to the figures, 28 per cent have visited a museum in the past 12 months; I will get my knuckles rapped by my party’s positivity brigade for being glass-half-empty about this, but that leaves 72 per cent of people who have not. In its submission, HI-Arts highlights the importance and changing role of small, independent museums and the difficulties that they are facing in keeping up with larger, better-resourced—and indeed free—counterparts. Given that this is clearly an important area on which Government policy directly impacts, where do you think we should be going with museums in Scotland? After all, given the very important contribution that they make, we do not want the value of small, independent museums to wither on the vine.
The creation of the new national development body out of Museums and Galleries Scotland is a big step in that very direction, because, as I understand it, it will look at heritage as a totality and will be able to involve itself in the work of Historic Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland and visitor centres that are not accredited museums. That ability to see the sector as a totality for the first time—in the same way, for example, that the Scottish Arts Council and now Creative Scotland have been able to see the arts world—will be a huge plus.
Going back to our discussion about ensuring that these things remain relevant and talk to people in their own language—and, as Jean Urquhart suggested, are as much about them as anything else—I wonder whether there is a danger of our being too wedded to particular bricks and mortar or exhibitions simply because they are there and of a tendency to recapitalise them instead of moving things on and providing seed funding for something else that might well capture the imagination more.
You are absolutely right. Part of the difficulty is that we frequently have groups who, in trying to save a particular building, think that turning it into a museum or arts facility is the solution. Too often, such an approach just creates a white elephant. The proposed cultural facility probably needed something that was not shackled by being shoved into a 19th century former school or hospital with access, accommodation and heating problems but needed, say, a purpose-built building such as Mull Theatre’s lovely new production centre or the Moray art centre.
Jean?
Is it my question, convener?
Yes.
I am sorry—I was just listening to the conversation.
Earlier, I talked about the difficulty in setting up a unique and dedicated Gaelic theatre. There is much more scope for being able to encourage and resource artists and arts organisations in all fields—visual arts, music, theatre and so on—to make more use of Gaelic in their activities. If we do that, it will—to use a horrible phrase—become normalised. The way to do it is to permeate the use of Gaelic through the artistic community.
Is there any evidence that links an increase in how many times someone attends cultural events—or, indeed, the commencement of that attendance—to a culture of participation in creativity? Has any exercise tried to trace the links between the two?
I am sure that some work has been done on that, but no specific report springs to mind. The assumption is that increased access and participation leads to more frequent participation and a deeper range of experience, but whether that turns someone into the next Bill Gates, I am not quite sure.
To give a specific example, Eden Court runs drama and dance qualification courses for teenagers who are not able to receive those courses in schools in Highland. On the whole, those youngsters do not go on to study drama and dance at college and university level. However, their roundedness as people is enhanced by taking those courses—these are people who are travelling 50 or 60 miles every weekend to take part in those courses.
Is there a growing recognition of the more informal activities that are going on in the community? For example, I would much prefer to go to my local miners welfare club and watch a comedian than go to the opera or ballet. That is just my preference—someone might want to go to see the football at Hampden, but someone else might prefer to watch an amateur team in their community. Is there a recognition of that, and how can we ensure that funding gets to some of those more informal cultural activities, which are hugely important to the localities in which they take place?
You probably need a Jean Urquhart in every village in Scotland, making sure that things happen. I am thinking of the folk club scene and other things that are run on a much more informal level.
I sit on the board of a community development trust in my area—I have done since it started. We run various things, but a lot of the musical activity involves young people who are inspired by two or three older people. They run a host of charity events at which there is fantastic talent on show, but they get not a coin of funding for any of that. How can we ensure that they can access funding? The trust does something in that regard, but it is difficult in the current economic climate, and it will only get worse. Such activities go on in every community, but they are unrecognised and unsupported.
The real threat to that sort of activity is the disappearance of discretionary grants programmes. That is the route that it is natural for those community groups to go down. I do not want to single any area out but, in Aberdeenshire, the grant budget of £600,000 has disappeared in the space of two years. That is a huge resource, which was going out in grants of a few thousand pounds or a few hundred pounds here and there. However, the important word was “discretionary”—the funding was not statutory.
Is that an example of a situation in which, now, an organisation that wanted to access that money would have to have a constitution, a bank account and all the other bureaucracy that prevents organic, community-based arts from taking off?
Even with the local authority grants that I am talking about, all of that was often required. However, because of issues such as the ones that you raise, access to funds such as the LEADER fund is way beyond the reach of any small community group, whether formal or informal.
There is another aspect to that, which is almost the reverse of it. How do we encourage the self-starting groups, which are getting on pretty much without us, to create a link back into the resources in a way that ensures that they can influence the resources that are already being spent within the sector? There is a tremendous sense that we can do something for certain groups, but there is still a huge number of individuals and households engaging in the sector. We need to bridge that link rather than find more money. However, I completely agree with Robert Livingston: small amounts of money go a significant way, but such grants do not exist any more.
I thank our witnesses for their evidence and wish them a safe journey home.