Breaking bread

Touring isn’t easy, but how can we work more strategically together to make sure art reaches its audience? Especially if that is a young audience.

Theatre Centre has been touring new plays into schools and venues for nearly 60 years and its founding principle still underpins the company’s vision today: that every child and young person should have access to quality theatre wherever they live. It is this vision that determines our national remit. We are in a great position to make schools across the country into places of cultural capital, but simpler ways of stringing schools together to fit tours must be found.

I like to see a tour as loaf of bread that gets sliced into manageable portions, and handed out to schools to take bites out of each portion until the bread is all eaten up.
But this work is becoming increasingly complex as schools’ habits and priorities are changing. Not every school has the same appetite or funds for a slice of bread and all eat it in different ways. Each school sees the arts – its place within the culture of the school and its value to learning – differently. This impacts performance bookings and, in turn, affects the touring strategy of companies like Theatre Centre. With the fall of local authority influence and the demise of the role of the Drama Advisor, companies are having to form countless individual relationships with schools. It is a challenge to a company’s capacity to balance quality communications with the quantity of bookings needed to be financially viable.

It is crucial that new plays get taken into schools, because that is where they can really stimulate young people and inspire them to see the theatre as something made for them; something in which they can participate. It is an incredibly effective way of exposing young audiences to the very best work of today’s playwrights. It may, for some, be the beginning of a great love affair with theatre.

We want to take a more networked approach to our national touring and are looking at the possibility of having key partners that work as local linchpins across the country. Could this be a new partnership role for theatres in our fragmented education landscape?

By working together, touring companies and theatres can create a viable network of school venues for strategic local and national touring. We have the show, they have the contacts; a national tour becomes the sum of local tours. It is a great way for theatres to reach a young audience without taking too much time and investment away from main stage activity. They can continue to take artistic risks with new writing, while promoting their name across the country and building new audiences for the main stage of the future. The RSC have announced a similar scheme to take their productions out to schools in partnership with a consortium of venues. It’s obviously a model that has legs so surely we can make it work for new writing and take that risk.

At Theatre Centre, we are going to continue to produce new work and invest in the quality of our output. And we hope we can involve partners in this process, giving theatres a stake in the art produced. This could easily lead to theatres sub-contracting a schools’ tour from Theatre Centre, for only a proportion of the costs needed for a production. Investing in a share of a tour means a theatre can extend its reach into the school hall, increase outputs cost-effectively and develop audience demographic. For Theatre Centre, providing shares in one of our tours will help bring cohesion to touring patterns. It will maximise the marketing potential of shows and help build our profile in local areas.

If you would like to develop the thesis further and see where it goes then please get in touch. I hope by working together we can find out on what side our bread is buttered.