It is so often the way that before you know what show you are making, you are required to summarise your project into a pitch, in order to secure money enough to make it.
Of no more than [number] words please describe your idea and indicate all intended outcomes and audience outreach… Upon receipt of funding, please display the appropriate logo of no smaller than [size] in all publicity and be sure to [list of rules to which your company must comply in order to be eligible]… Following your funded period of R&D it is a requirement that by means of scratch, feedback forms or other materials, please supply evidence of your impact on [list of demographic groups]…
Having just returned from the Darkroom, an initiative devised and organised by China Plate where two companies are invited on a two-week blind date with two writers, I am now convinced there is a better way to get the most out of an artist.
I will admit to having my doubts before embarking on the Darkroom: What’s the catch? What do the organisers of a non-product driven initiative get out of this? And how do they sell something without a tangible output to an output-orientated funding body?
However it now occurs to me that these producers know a little something about the ingredients needed to create a product and that, in fact, a product can take on many forms. So perhaps there is no such thing as a non-product driven process? For whether you leave the Darkroom with a Three Act play, 400 pages of beautiful prose, the solution to that troublesome stumbling block in your process which has long been responsible for the flaw in your final shows, a regained pleasure in making work with your collaborators, or simply the knowledge that you don’t want to - or can’t - continue as you have, a product will emerge.
They choose companies that find themselves at a very particular point in their development, a point 5 or so years into their company’s life, where they are attempting to define themselves and, in part, the act of doing so is affecting how they make work. They are asking themselves who they are, how they are perceived, whether they are enjoying themselves, what they need, who they need, who they are, what they want as individuals and what that means to their collaborative work. They have experienced the ecstatic highs and crushing lows that come with the industry and have an understanding of how life can get in the way both to the detriment and the benefit of the work they make. And mostly they want to know, what next?
Returning from the Darkroom, I am awash with what I have learnt and fearful that I may not be able to keep hold of it. I feel armed with the teachings of an invaluable exposure to an entirely different writing process and excited at a potential piece of work that didn’t exist in any form whatsoever less than two weeks ago. But also there is everything in between. The stuff that would not fit into the cordoned off answer boxes on a funding application.
In the middle of nowhere, there is the space and distance you are allowed from the common distractions that hamper your creativity, the knowledge that someone is looking after you, relieving you of the day-to-day routines that otherwise occupy your mind. There is the enlightening conversations with those five to ten years your senior over a pint or an avocado and marmite sandwich where both the more and less experienced leave having learnt a little something about where they are and what they might want in the future. There’s the opportunity to witness another company’s process, share the concerns and difficulties that you think are just your own but are in fact everyone’s, and identify what might be lacking from your own work by the impact of theirs on you, without any sense of competition.
Of course this is a luxury and it would be naïve to expect such an opportunity from every working process from now on. And yet why shouldn’t we demand more of this kind of thinking? Why does the Darkroom stand alone among a sea of initiatives with a very one-dimensional view of product? We have long since known that arts do not deliver in the same way as other sectors – proven if nothing else by our annual wrestle with HM Revenue and Customs – so I wonder why it has not had more of an effect on the opportunities offered to artists to encourage them to make work?
Either way, we feel very lucky to have been involved in the Darkroom and grateful for the combination of artists, thinkers and facilitators that made it what it was. It is no overestimation to declare that Analogue has only been made better by this opportunity, the difficulty China Plate has, of course, is how they communicate that to their future funders…
