Breaking with the past

Strategies do not create art. Famously, Sir Richard Eyre in his time at the National Theatre in London, said: “Policy is not what you say you will do, it’s what you do.” The task of an arts council is to help bring about the most conducive climate for what art does. In promoting 'Inspire', our strategy for the arts and creativity, the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) is not seeking to be prescriptive but is looking for coalition around what we see as important. And by focussing on how art works in our place and times, we are breaking with our past way of strategising around defined artforms.

At the heart of what we do will be the nurturing of creative professionals, to enable them to be their best

Inspire is at the end of one path and the beginning of another – a path that we believe reflects what people are talking about when they talk about art and what it means to them. Over 70 topics emerged when we used open space technology as part of a consultation to flush out an agenda on ‘creating a creative Wales by 2020’. Through this we have focussed on ten key challenges faced by everyone in Wales who values the arts. They are challenges that define the role of ACW in underpinning the arts, and consequently, our activity will reflect the three interlocked themes of ‘Make, Reach, Sustain’. We see our role as encouraging and supporting the best that Wales can make in art, irrespective of media, type and form – and doing it in many ways, not just by giving financial support. We want to emphasise the reach of that art and to favour art that wants to connect and extend that reach, particularly beyond the bounds of its ‘taken as read’ public. But in doing this, the wraparound now is ‘sustainability’, which means new thinking, new approaches, new diversity and connections with networks and publics, new challenges of viability.

At the heart of what we do will be the nurturing of creative professionals, to enable them to be their best. We are looking to our freshly matured and exciting national companies to carry on defining just how they are national. We are seeing our arts centres as hubs for empowering interaction, embedded in their communities, and flushing out creativity in those communities. We are seeing diversity as a key dynamic in the arts. We are embracing a terrific opportunity to be game-changing in increasingly pressing educational debates, by seizing a new opening in Wales for creativity to be added to the rote of literacy and numeracy. We are not belittling the challenges in localities for the arts to survive and thrive with the increased dilemmas facing local authorities and the public purse. We are seeing working internationally, for artists and companies of calibre and readiness, as an issue of sustainability and a calling card for our creativity globally. We are looking to advocate and promote what the arts can do, with the collateral effect of empowering communities and contributing to new economic possibilities and wellbeing. And we know we are doing this in the context of increasing focus on public value in times of austerity.

A picture speaks more than a thousand (or even ten thousand words). Our cover image for Inspire (pictured above) comes from a shared moment, a personal drama played out on the stage of a political stand of many years previously in Theatre Genedlaethol Cymru’s Y Bont/The Bridge. Contemporary art will always help shape identity in a local and a global arena. Strategies do not create art but can foster moments like this.

David Alston is Arts Director of Arts Council of Wales.
www.artswales.org.uk