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I am responding on behalf of Eastern Angles, the regional touring theatre company for the East of England. Much of our work is very similar to that of Gavin Stride and Farnham Maltings, which I know provides a valuable and enlightened service in your constituency, mixing access to rural areas and regional provision with development or artists and creating original work. We serve an area from Peterborough to Ipswich and all spaces in between. We would be delighted to see the Lottery return to the original good causes and thereby increase the amount it contributes directly to the creation and delivery of theatre for the following reasons: - it helps small companies thrive and gain resources to expand their output - it reaches the areas other grants do not, especially rural regions and hard to reach communities in urban areas like Peterborough. - it enables successful work produced locally to be delivered across the national grid, thereby rewarding success and delivering to greater numbers - it allows already funded organisations to export their successful model and create work in other circumstances - it automatically increases the work of young and developing artists giving them opportunities to work alongside experienced organisations - it is strategic and can be directed to areas with a low cultural offer - it allows for integration with other resources to maximise value - it is flexible and promotes boundary crossing in artistic, geographical and economic terms. We have benefited from a number of Lottery awards, all of which have directly increased both the delivery of our art to audiences and the number of productions we can create, thereby providing great value for money. 1997 We received a grant towards a new van and lighting equipment for our touring theatre programme to village halls, town halls and new “found spaces” across the East of England. 2001 We received a major grant to acquire a mobile raked seating system allowing us to construct an auditorium of over 300 seats in all sorts of configurations from end-on to traverse and in the round. We have been able to deliver residencies to small market towns, perform in large but narrow tithe barns and put on a spectacular site-specific production in an old aircraft hanger on an old USAAF airfield. This enabled us to improve the quality of experience of our audiences, many of whom live many miles from urban venues. This grant included funding to upgrade our in-house box office and computer systems. The funding has enabled us to generate additional earned income for the company, through hires of the seating system and providing box office services for other local arts organisations. More importantly this equipment allows us the flexibility to take the idea and the art to wherever the project work is needed. 2002 A RALP enabled us to create East Anglian Psychos, a production for over-16 school and college students exploring the reasons why they should stay in their home town or go after their exams. 2007 Truckstop by Lot Vekemans (translated by Rina Vergano) toured to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to local schools and then to national venues. The Lottery investment in the Edinburgh element allowed the tour to reach a much larger audiences and achieve a far higher publicity profile than if it had merely been toured locally. It turned a local event into a national event. 2008 The same can be said for I Caught Crabs in Walberswick by Joel Horwood, which built on the previous success of Truckstop and delivered even greater audiences. It secured the company’s ability to play on a larger stage and attract press attention, which resulted in a season at The Bush Theatre in London. This is not success in merely financial terms, but also in regional artistic terms and meant that kids in small East Anglian towns could see their own stories catapulted onto a London stage and paid proper attention. Without Lottery support, we could not have taken these productions to Edinburgh and without the national profile that the Festival attracts, the regional and national tours would certainly have been shorter and might not have happened at all. The story is simple, lottery investment pays off in spades for companies like ourselves who already have the infrastructure in place and spare capacity for developing and touring new work to new audiences. For 2012 we will be applying for a lottery grant to re-mount our successful adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea (probably in association with Farnham Maltings), looking to take an “in the round performance” to specially constructed portside auditoriums for all the family. Once again a small amount of lottery money will ensure that locally produced work reaches a wider audience and provides good value and a shared and efficient use of resources. In the future, as our work in Peterborough develops, we will be applying for lottery money to mount a community play and build on the heritage projects that we are also partnering. All of this will re-invigorate a city that desperately needs the arts to bring its different communities together. Again the Lottery funding is important since it is not tied up in core grants and long-term commitments so can be brought to bear where the activity needs the pump-priming opportunities. This mix of strategic intervention with direction from experienced arts organisations working in a new setting is precisely the kind of developmental use that avoids expensive new buildings and maximises resources. It must also be stressed that in many of these projects, because they are additional to our core work, they necessitate the use of additional artists, often young and developing, who otherwise might find it difficult to access funding because of inexperience. In short it allows organisations with capacity to oversee additional projects to lend their infrastructure to other artists and companies and create precisely the shared resources the government is looking for companies to do. Also In this way the Lottery will be vital for ensuring the talent development that is necessary to keep the artists and their organisations on their toes.