The Great Outdoors

2008 has been an important year for arts activity that takes place outdoors, perhaps even a watershed year. Arts Council England (ACE) released ‘New Landscapes’, a four-year development plan for Outdoor Arts, and made a number of favourable funding decisions as part of its review of revenue clients (see AP172). Similar positive developments have taken place in Scotland and Wales. Now, in the week that London has become official host city to the Olympic Games, there is renewed speculation that outdoor work will be one of the cornerstones of the Cultural Olympiad.

Apparently, everything in the open-air garden is rosy. However, those of us who identify ourselves as working primarily in the outdoor sector will have no difficulty in keeping our feet on the ground. We are conscious that a serious critical debate on the value of outdoor arts has still to take place; a fact that was underlined by the hostile reaction to the changing priorities revealed by ACE’s review of its revenue clients. If some of the bloggers were to be believed, serious arts organisations were being deprived of support to fund jugglers and the like.

Advocacy and understanding

It would seem that ACE is ahead of the wider arts community it serves in its understanding of outdoor arts. This is not particularly surprising. It is notoriously difficult to get open-air performances and events reviewed. They conform to few of the norms of reviewable work, and are subject to the vagaries of the British climate. In the absence of information or first-hand knowledge of outdoor arts, how can a consensus on their value be achieved? The answer must lie in an advocacy campaign to encourage sceptics to see for themselves. This will have to be carefully targeted. ACE’s Outdoor Arts Development Plan covers an extremely broad spectrum of work, though New Landscapes provides a helpful definition. This notes that “There are specific areas of work within the overarching definition… including (but in no way limited to) street arts, tented circus, carnival, celebratory and participatory arts, spectacle, community arts and art in the public realm.”

Highlighting the must-sees and the areas of best practice in that little lot is no easy matter, and the task is further complicated by the varying motives of those who promote and present outdoor arts. Programmes of work designed to support the local tourist economy or retail sector are not necessarily the best places to look for artistic excellence. Equally, community arts, carnival and participatory arts can and do encompass a gamut of possibilities from the hopelessly naïve to the gloriously inspiring.

Value and excellence

Having identified some of the barriers to developing a greater understanding of outdoor arts, it’s time that I did some advocacy work of my own. The preamble to New Landscapes notes the positive impact of outdoor arts events in such areas as the animation of public space, neighbourhood renewal and urban regeneration. This is a view shared by DCMS: even at ministerial level, the contribution of outdoor arts to key agendas such as social inclusion, and community access and involvement has been acknowledged. The value of reclaiming our public spaces for purposes that are peaceable, celebratory and inclusive is not to be underestimated. Anyone who has walked safely as part of a night-time processional event or enjoyed the company of strangers at a large-scale outdoor performance will appreciate this. At such times, Britain feels far from broken, and the arts achieve this impact as easily as sport. This was clear during the triumphant staging of ‘The Sultan’s Elephant’ in central London in 2006. Huge crowds experienced the Elephant over the course of three days, and the mass media (and Government) were duly impressed.

Actually, the Elephant in many ways set the seal on an impressive growth in the popularity of open-air festivals and events that had been going on for more than a decade. The fact that these events were generally free to the public and easily accessible was part of the reason for their success. The strength and quality of their event content was another, and here we get to the nub of why ACE and similar national bodies in Scotland and Wales are prepared to support outdoor arts. New Landscapes repeatedly stresses that ACE aims to “prioritise investment in high quality artistic practice”. Though the authors are too polite to say so, street entertainers per se are not a priority, so indignant bloggers can rest easy on that count. Rather, ACE sees the aesthetic importance of outdoor arts events as based on their relationship with the environment in which they are presented: “The work uniquely links its audience to the landscape [whether urban or rural] in ways that cannot happen within buildings.”

Growth and funding

The street arts sector in the UK is now well developed, with two thriving membership bodies, the Independent Street Arts Network (made up primarily of promoters and producers) and the National Association of Street Artists. We believe we had adequate opportunity for consultation and input during the rather long gestation of New Landscapes. In effect, the Outdoor Arts Development Plan identifies street arts as a sub-set of a wide area of arts practice. This gives us no particular concern. We feel a strong affinity for the other areas of outdoor work that the plan identifies and wholeheartedly support its emphasis on the creative possibilities that working ‘without walls’ offers to all artists and performers. Actually, street arts practitioners and the curators and commissioners of street arts events have been exploring the opportunities offered by the outdoor environment for years, whether as a field for cross-artform experimentation or as an area to define new relationships with audiences and participants.

There is no doubt that the (still relatively modest) uplift in arts funding for open-air work in recent years has had a positive impact. Finally, British artists and performers have an opportunity to catch up on the 25-year head start granted to French companies by the high status that ‘les arts de la rue’ enjoy within the French funding system. There is now every chance that many of the outdoor highlights of the Cultural Olympiad will be provided by British companies. Over the past few years the best British outdoor work has wrought a sea change in international perceptions. It’s high time that the same thing happened within the wider arts community at home. As a starting point, look out for names like The World Famous, Wildworks, NoFit State, Mischief La Bas, Wired Aerial Theatre, Nutkhut and Prodigal Theatre.