Updates
Producing the future by playing the field – how we support new ideas
I have just done a talk at the Shift Happens conference in York and @rohan_21awake asked if could share the text of my speech: "it would make an amazing article/manifesto/job ad"
So here it is:
Watershed, based in Bristol and the UK’s first media centre, began life over 25 years ago, concentrating mainly then on the exhibition of independent film. These days, after some long hard thinking about what we are, how we work and where we deliver value, we refer to ourselves as cross-artform producer, sharing, developing and showcasing cultural ideas and talent.
Today I am going to talk a little bit about our motivations and approach to supporting new ideas and outline our latest project Theatre Sandbox.
To give you a better understand of our mode of operation though, I will start with a (very quick) overview of our business. Watershed is a Group of three companies operating within a common Brand:
- The Trading company is the revenue generator for the company, but also a neutral space where many of the network we work with are happy to work and play.
- The Art Trust curates a public facing programme, primarily in our own venue and online and is the door to Watershed for most people.
- iShed is the R&D arm, producing open collaborations which bridge expertise and traditional boundaries to promote emergent practice. We also manage The Pervasive Media Studio, a research lab which brings together artists, academics and companies outside their normal institutional spaces to collaborate, share ideas and create new work.
Each of the Watershed companies have specialist expertise and responsibility, but it is through the synergy of the group that we manage to punch above our apparent weight, manage risk, and deliver high returns on public investment.
Over 10 years ago Watershed started working with both HP Labs and University of Bristol on projects which explored, tested and got emerging technologies into the hands of creatives and audiences early in its design life cycle. From projects like se3d, Clarks Bursary, Mobile Bristol and Diffraction, we started to create a model of community learning, early stage testing and sustained support to develop unlikely collaborations and interesting projects.
Over the past three years we have been working with the Bill Sharpe and Graham Leicester at the International Futures Forum to try and make sense of the many interactions we have with the people we support and the complicated space we play in, and this thinking – brought together in Producing the Future – a book we have just published with IFF – has helped us to understand how much we value:
- our role as a producer and supporter of new talent and ideas
- the degree in which collaboration has become central to our practice
- and that however much we contribute to the wider creative ecology, we receive much more back in return.
In innovation terms, from the history of silicon valley to the development of places like MIT or Apple, much has been written about the benefits and value of interdisciplinary working, and we often come back to the work of John Seely Brown in Creation Nets, that to develop and deliver new ideas, you must collaborate with organisations unlike you – in skills, culture, size or outlook. Indeed this thinking seems particularly relevant at the moment -
“Creation nets accelerate innovation across participants. Not only are participants able to innovate more rapidly than they could outside these networks, the pace of their innovation accelerates the longer they participate in the network.
A natural reaction to accelerating change is to turn inward and tighten control. Creation nets require a different mindset, one that recognises that flows of knowledge across institutional boundaries are the key to generating the new knowledge and new practices required to succeed in a rapidly changing world”
So, to Theatre Sandbox and our new creation net:
In the last few years, after producing a series of projects which fused theatre, gaming and film – with companies like Hide&Seek, Punchdrunk and Bristol Old Vic we became interested in:
- how we could support new work which addresses the ways in which digital is influencing and changing the way we live?
- how we could support the development of producers by introducing new tools and encouraging new modes of thinking?
- the production of new types of personalised, located performance where audience members become collaborators, co-authoring their experiences
- And the value of pervasive technologies via a creative perspective - asking how can theatre-makers might unlock new and unexpected capabilities, content and applications early in the technology research lifecycle?
As we were increasingly being approached by people from within the theatre sector for consultancy and partnership, it seemed appropriate to use the format of a scheme called Media Sandbox which we had produced for three years in the south west to leverage greater impact than a series of small, unrelated projects. So we applied to Arts Council and created a scheme which would run innovation labs across the country and then commission six new theatre projects to explore pervasive media.
The commissioned projects - and you can read all about them on the posts- range from a hearing impaired performer who wants to develop captioning which responds dynamically to her delivery, to an audio led fairy tale which explores a parallel magical world glimpsed through keyholes and cracks in the pavement.
Built into the very DNA of Theatre Sandbox is an emphasis on familiarisation, investigation and training for both the partner venues and the commissioned projects to feel confident, informed and able to engage with digital technologies. We have a brilliant advisory group including Lyn Gardner, who is on stage tomorrow, and a wealth of technology and theatre experts for the commissions to tap into.
We staged the first meeting for participants last week and are at the exciting beginning stage of development where they get to do some free thinking and we get to work hard in the background trying to work out what kind of support they might need.
But the scheme isn’t just about offering an opportunity to these six groups, so here is a 3 minute video showing the ideas generation process of the 5 labs we did across the country:
View film: http://www.dshed.net/theatre-sandbox-2010
Marcus asked me to speak personally today and this video illustrates everything that really excites me about working in this space: Bright, open, generous, hungry people, looking to do something new – either in terms of a medium, the audience or their own practice.
But what are the skills and qualities I think are expected of me as a producer, in order that we keep finding and supporting new ideas? How can I continue to be what Seth Honnor describes as a midwife – keeping open channels of exploration whilst maintaining quality and relevance?
I need to engender confidence – to ensure the people I am working with don’t obsess about the technology and are able to concentrate on their idea. Sometimes this confidence is built through introducing them to people who can help them realise their idea, sometimes it is simply permission to spend time thinking, or recognition that their idea is worth pursuing.
I need to be a translator, negotiating across sectors and in a new medium where the language and possibilities is both exciting and daunting.
I need to be promiscuous, to say yes to many meetings even when its not clear why, and then be opportunist about spotting potential and moving quickly. I need to Understand and bridge the research, technology, the commercial digital industry and the cultural sector. Curating conversations and situations where brilliant people can flourish.
I need empathy and care – to work with people over long periods of time… and patience to stick with them when they are wondering what its all about.
I need flexibility and open-ness – I am reminded of David Jubb’s contribution to the Jerwood book The Producers – you rarely make what you set out to make – especially if you look to test, share and iterate ideas during the development process.
I need to be an advocate and spread infectious enthusiasm, to make sure the ideas have a life after the research period.
I need to understand and manage expectation within a collaboration – making sure communication is clear and learning is shared.
I need to shield projects from bureaucracy, cash flow, application forms and pre-defined outputs – taking care of liaison with funders etc.
I need to embrace and share failure – mine and that of the projects that we have worked on – if your success rate is 100% you haven’t taken enough risks. But we can certainly all learn from things that didn’t work.
Watershed is a creative ecosystem, operating in many and different economies. A healthy ecosystem will always be generating new ideas, possibilities and meanings – this is a creative process. Equally creative I think, is the process of negotiating the interaction between the multiple economies at play. Its what excites me and its what I love about my job.
Whilst there is obviously loads of brilliant and extraordinary ideas being made, as a sector I don’t believe we yet know how to properly support or even identify potential interdisciplinary producers. We have been lucky enough to have Katie Day working with us on Theatre Sandbox as part of the Cultural Leadership Programme and we have both learnt a lot during the learning and reflection process.
Digital producers are brilliant value for money in that they leverage connections and opportunity, and their mix of tacit, commercial and cultural production skills will deliver across projects, but leadership development in our sector often doesn’t cater to those working in this way.
I believe there are many more brilliant ideas and people out there ready to fuse artistic practice and digital tools, but don’t think the ideas necessarily come ready to make or that organisations and individuals have the skills or confidence to realise them.
You can throw money at the problem but it won’t result in a flourishing and innovative sector. For this you need to engender open innovation, collaboration, peer to peer learning and time for experimentation.
You need to empower organisations and individuals to think outside of their disciplinary silos
And you need the producers to make possible, recognise and support the development of new ideas and talent.