Next steps for the arts
WRITTEN BY JUDE KELLY PHOTOGRAPHY BY VIENNA REYES & MARJANBLAN
Venues will close post-COVID, but that doesn’t mean the arts shouldn’t still exist. We need to shift our emphasis from objects and institutions onto community experience. Everything we’ve created has been around the importance of buildings themselves, rather than the people within them and the communities around them.
Build back, but build back locally first. We value the local in so many ways: food banks, the NHS, community initiatives, but we need to have the same approach to local arts companies and initiatives.This is an opportunity to do things differently. Let’s not return to life pre-COVID when our hierarchy was firmly centred on big companies in London with everything else perceived as less than. It’s only by funding the local creative ecosystem bottom-up that young people will feel fuelled to have a career in this industry. COVID will have a devastating impact on our economy, but we cannot let it strip away arts and culture from local areas.
The ‘arts’ are not one industry: it exists across sectors and comprises everything from the most popular to the most avant-garde. Parts have thrived, like TV and gaming, while theatres, music venues, and dance halls have been utterly bereft. Some, like The National Theatre and the Royal Opera House, were able to pivot to an online offering quickly, filming in socially distanced ways and enabling performers to work. Others embraced the new environment creatively: the English National Opera’s drive through La Bohème at Alexandra Palace comes to mind. Going forward, I believe people will continue to embrace culture online and at home, especially via subscription offerings.
The pandemic will exacerbate the lack of diverse voices in the arts. Traditionally, the reason young people haven’t gone into the arts is because they come from families nervous about the financial stability of such a career. First generation immigrants and working-class parents tend not to encourage their children into the sector. COVID has proven these fears: when the chips were down this industry couldn’t look after its own. However, because so much of the innovation we’ve seen has been digital, this means young people really will be the ones who are able to change the status quo. That’s why our most critical job is to support young leadership. They are spearheading the increasing political debate around gender politics, sustainability, racism, and disability rights, and these voices will break through with a new energy.
Our systems were not fit for purpose. We need to create different policy and change our economic methodologies and working practices for the future. Freelancers make up about 70% of our industry and they were simply swept away in the COVID tsunami, with no way of receiving proper financial support. We’ve seen an explosion in concern about the inequities in society: the educational deficit, the digital deficit, the need for Black Lives Matter. All industries need to take this time to think about how we build a fairer system: who gets benefit from the arts and who’s involved in determining that benefit?
My mission is to make sure that government and industry understand that we need to achieve 50% gender diversity in both the workforce and in commissions to individual artists. Women only emerged as writers and visual artists at the start of the last century: it took a long time for them to be given permission, time, and space to work in the creative sphere. The statistics are still painfully low. The burden of home schooling and caring during COVID has fallen to women, placing huge constraints on their lives, which is why I founded the Creative Women’s Forum when the pandemic hit to support women from across the creative sectors. The arts are about supporting future creative activity as well as getting access to great ideas gone before: a return to the 50s won’t enable this.
Jude Kelly CBE
Jude Kelly CBE is the Founder and Director of The WOW Foundation, which runs WOW – Women of the World Festivals – and the former Artistic Director of London’s Southbank Centre. She has directed over 200 theatre and opera productions, founded a range of arts institutions, and has commissioned and supported the work of thousands of artists across all genres. The WOW Foundation’s WOW UK Festival 2021 runs from 1-21 March. The online festival will explore everything from mental health to sex in lockdown, radical childcare to #SayHerName, and being everything from a grandmother to an artist in a pandemic (or both!).