Download Eastern Angles Theatre Company

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.