KEYNOTES

Hannah Conway
Reimagining the Arts, cross sector

Why, in 2021 is community or audience engagement still considered an ‘add-on’? Why give creative agency to others? Why do non-professional musicians often teach us [professional musicians] the most about music? Why should audiences always be invited to listen to ‘other’ voices? How can the most marginalised voices in society become the most powerful? Why are the arts central to a person’s pathway out of homelessness? Why do we talk more than we ‘do’ or ‘listen’? What do audiences sound like? And - why is opera and the arts an essential catalyst for cross-sector innovation and cutting edge biomedical research?

Charting my own journey from Palestinian refugee camps, to the London Symphony Orchestra, international concert stages to homeless day centres; from Congolese fishermen to leading laryngectomist surgeon-innovators, I will explore how outreach work in the classical music industry over the past 25 years has transformed thinking, approaches and practice. The global pandemic has given us an opportunity to reimagine, re-evaluate and newly recognise ourselves and our work in the arts. How can we galvanise this momentum to ensure dynamic evolution, continued richness and diversity in our work?

 

Doug Borwick
Engagement: Becoming Indispensable

Today, a common question about the future of the arts is “How will post-pandemic life impact us and our work?” Unfortunately, this question illustrates the self-defeating artcentricity that plagues our industry. In this highly fraught moment, we should rather be considering how the pandemic and society’s re-opening has affected/will impact our communities and how we can respond to their concerns and interests.

Arts organizations have been notoriously self-focused. Around the world, this has been a key factor in decades of declining attendance and support. The arts are seen by many as an amenity (at best). That means our organizations struggle in a world that only has time for the essential. To survive, much less thrive, we must come to matter deeply to many, many more people than is true today. In addition, as we all recover from the pandemic, the need to build trusting relationships with new communities will be greater than it has ever been.

Effective community engagement is the key to expanding reach, building trust, and becoming widely valued. This presentation will provide the rationale for community engagement, give definitions, address objections, and introduce principles for successful relationship building with communities. It will also show how this work can (and should) be incorporated into every aspect of an arts organization's operations.