INSPIRATION CATALOGUE

In a capitalist attention economy, competition is fierce between institutions. How can we make it easier, and become better at sharing knowledge and experience betweeninstitutions both locally and internationally? We need platforms where we can share failures, find common ground, spread ideas, have critical discussions, and share with an effect. We can strengthen our own institution by looking at something together. To effect large systemic changes in institutions and have broad systemic impact, you can scale the positive impact of investments. You can adopt strategies to scale innovation, such as: scaling out where you try to increase the number of people or communities impacted; scaling up where you change institutions at the level of policy, rules, and law; and scaling deep where you impact the cultural roots of the institution and change the values by creating a deeper understanding and changing hearts and minds.

Subsidies are often handed out based on number of projects planned, and mostly with bureaucratic measuring tools, such as commercial success, accessibility, cultural capital etc. These measuring tools often prevent alternative ways of producing and working. We need new sets of criteria for subsidies that recognize the need for collective reorganization and are informed by the arts. Private funds must prioritize going and seeing the performances. Funds need to give rejection-feedback and enter a dialogue with the artist; otherwise, artists think they must invent new ideas all the time. Long term and flexible funding is important to give artists time, financial safety, and peace to work in longer stretches. Grants for collective reorganization would be a useful starting point to map the needs of the field. Bigger institutions could find ways to chip in and share resources with the independent field.

It is rather the rule than the exception that artistic labour is an irregular, precarious, and intense activity (often with a lot of travelling), which is difficult to combine with any kind of family life. Art institutions can become better in supporting different ways of organizing life by making ´family contracts´ that consider needs in relation to your family situation, children, sickness in the family etc. from the beginning. A prerequisite for a fear-free and safe transfer into these structural changes is a management space with room for emotional caring, where it is possible to make the hidden data visible and create new criteria together.

The body should be a valued agent in all institutions. What would it be like to start meetings in a different way? For example, by having a check in circle where you acknowledge sensations in the body. To connect on a different level and to prevent stress and burn out.

The performing art institutions should be better at giving space to the independent field. They need to invite independent groups in for a critical dialogue, negotiate and remember to ask: What do you need? What do we need from each other? How can we build trust? It is central that the performing art institutions are interested, not only in the result, but in the process. Residency formats in all institutional theatres using the empty spaces would be useful. If your foyer is free—let somebody use the space. Even though it is hard to organize.

To be in a collective or/and to implement radical collaborative working methods into an institutional theatre is hard work – you must choose each other every day. To have fun and feel safe in collaborative work you need structures and methods for everything. We can grow methods by documenting, preparing, sharing knowledge and teaching.

To break the cycle of neoliberalism, institutions can focus more energy on turning the institution into a community or a lager field of communing. We need to rethink community as central to a reconceptualization of politics and democracy for a more sustainable future.