I will be forever grateful to the generations of BAC artists, every single audience member and to Jude Kelly for giving us the Royal Festival Hall that night. There was a special atmosphere, like a massive, everyone’s-welcome, beautifully-weird, family-gathering. It said something about the Battersea spirit that stretches back, even before Battersea’s Town Hall was built. Toby Jones rounded things off with a poem, crowd-sourced from Twitter: each line a personal memory of the beautiful Grand Hall before looking ahead to the future, to our next steps, to rebuilding and renewal.
It was great to finish by looking forwards, edging those spotlights towards a path ahead and to what’s next for Battersea Arts Centre. With ticket sales and donations from the night at £46,000 and all the other remarkable support we have received, we can begin to look ahead with confidence and optimism.
Earlier this year, prior to the Grand Hall fire, we reworked the organisation’s core purpose for the future. Since 2006 BAC’s mission has been “to invent the future of theatre”. It has served us well as a focus for the organisation. But in pursuing theatre’s future, so our definition of theatre and what it can achieve has become much broader, to the point where the old mission no longer fully represents the breadth of our activity.
Whilst we have continued to support and will always support artists and companies to create new shows (1927, Kate Tempest, Paper Cinema, Little Bulb and hundreds more) we have increasingly used theatre-making process in lots of other ways: to develop social enterprises; to kick-start regeneration projects; to deliver the school curriculum; to develop our building; to explore heritage; to reshape our organisation’s structure and so on.
In each different setting, two things have been consistent. Firstly, we have always used Scratch, the creative process we use to make theatre, to test out ideas, to listen to feedback, to reshape our thinking based on the way people respond. Secondly, we have always sought that great live-theatre-moment: the moment when we see something differently, when we understand ourselves and each other better; the moment when we bear witness to change, to something being said or done that can never be unsaid or undone. The combination of using Scratch process and seeking out the live experience has meant that theatre has become a way of life for Battersea Arts Centre.
Artist, Chris Goode said “there’s definitely a constant imperative, especially at the moment, to use theatre as a place to create real liveable experiences of models for political and personal change. Theatre can have a crucial role in reimagining our social relations. What we do all day has never felt more important.” (Maverick theatre, Interview with Eleanor Turney)
So Battersea Arts Centre’s new mission recognises that we not only make theatre but that we use it to create change. It recognises that we are not only an arts organisation, we are also a learning organisation and a social change organisation. It is the combination of these three elements that will help us support civic and creative life in south-west London and beyond. Battersea Arts Centre’s new mission is:
Rather than describing a single goal, the new mission describes an ecology in which one aspect of the organisation feeds another. Our purpose is to nurture this ecology.
I have always thought that the complexity of our ecology has fed in to our most interesting projects or shows:
We will continue to seek out relationships with visionary artists, placing them at the heart of everything we do. But Battersea Arts Centre’s new mission is about everyone’s creativity. We launch it at a time when there is a crisis in creative participation, especially amongst the next generation. Arts Council England’s Taking Part data shows that between the years 2008/9 and 2013/14, the proportion of 5-10 year olds who engaged in dance activities dropped from 43.1% to 30.4%; participation in music activities dropped from 55.3% to 37.2%; participation in theatre and drama activities dropped from 47.1% to 32.1%. This is reflected in our schools. In 2003-13 there has been a 50% drop in the GCSE numbers for Design and Technology and 23% for Drama. In 2007-13 there has been a 25% drop in other craft-related GCSE’s.
We must come together, across different sections of our community, to change this story, to grow creative opportunities for everyone. The personal and prolific response to the fire at Battersea Arts Centre reminds us just how important it is to achieve this. People have deeply personal and valued relationships with organisations and buildings like Battersea Arts Centre. I think this is because these places allow us to express our creativity, they are homes for free expression, where you can truly be yourself.
As we now look beyond the Grand Hall fire, with our new mission, we have clear plans for the future:
Over the coming year we will continue to extend our partnerships. For example, we will work with:
…as well as other new partnerships yet to be announced.
I invite you to become part of the story in whatever way most suits you, to inspire people, to take creative risks, to shape the future.
—
David Jubb, 25 May
Artistic Director of Battersea Arts Centre
Some facts and stats post fire: