Manifesto

A MANIFESTO for today’s local, national & international theatremakers

Theatre as small, intelligent, highly mobile units

A plan of action from the Other National Theatre & Alternative National Theatres

[ Limitless Strategies ]

ONE: Celebrate the difference within diversity, seek out the Other. Respond to each community’s spectrum. Be inclusive yet share those stories without diluting them.

TWO: Balance the reality of money. Pay the creators, subsidise the audience, enrich the community by spending there. Embrace ‘fringe’ values, create ‘EasyJet’ circuits.

THREE: Local is national is international. Quality is in the mind and requires no more than an audience. To create meaningful hubs and circuits, everywhere is connected if you want it to be.

FOUR: Listen to your audience, learn their language. The language of dialect, class, education, generation, region and Otherness. Speak to your audience before, during and after.

FIVE: Children are the present, not ‘the future’. NOW is the moment, always show them what is possible. Remember they will come if their parents also know what is possible.

SIX: Publish, disseminate, spread the word. Creativity demands a living legacy, to be discovered beyond the locale. Consider your audience’s potential, let no one be missed out.

SEVEN: Leave a trail in plain view. Leave traces and tools to inspire the community, its talent, its visitors. A path to be picked up by those who follow you.

EIGHT: Community is the nation’s true stage. A community is not there to be rescued but to be met on equal terms. The community has the same right to Lion King as it has to Hamlet.

NINE: Rediscover the idea of ‘folk’. Think beyond living museums for past traditions. Platform the lost voices, the emerging voices, the Other voices, the smaller nation’s voices that speak within every nation.

TEN: Accept the cultural monoliths, the cosmopolitan hubs, the funding elites. Show them how it’s done but don’t let them take credit. And remember always that ‘culture’ assumes a meaning that is different wherever you find it, wherever you take it.

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