Adopted by the boards of both the Irish and UK companies on 8th June 2022, and published in July 2022.
- This manifesto is our response to an increasingly uncertain world, characterised by pandemic, climate change and warfare. Planning has become hugely challenging, and risk is high. However, this has always been the state in our collaborative, intercultural devising spaces. We embrace uncertainty as a catalyst to creative practice.
- Our work - in theatre, in other art forms, in education, in community cultural development and online - is not an attempt to represent the world, but to change it.
- Our predominantly white artistic leadership and management team will engage honestly and self-critically in evolving, creative, intercultural dialogues with marginalised artists, communities and stories.
- We reject the commercial model of theatre as “production”. For us, theatre is a participatory process, all aspects of which need to engage with the communities we serve. Performance is a public ritual, a ceremony that brings our communities together.
- Our work going forward will therefore focus on “events” rather than “productions”; channelling energies towards generating real impact in terms of social and environmental justice, cultural and spiritual renewal.
- We now work through two charitable companies, one in the Republic of Ireland and one in the UK: both dedicated to intercultural dialogue through the arts. In furtherance of this international mission, we will engage more substantially with European partnerships and develop a range of key funding relationships, including core funding.
- We will deepen the relationship between our live and digital work, recognising the complementary nature of live and virtual experiences, and the different ways in which these inter-related approaches can generate reach and impact. We believe that any art form is regenerated and developed by its interaction with other forms, and so we will enhance our theatre through digital practice and our digital work through our theatre.
- We will be more risk aware in our financial management, more conscious of the evolution of projects through their processes, and more sensitive to the need to keep cultural work free of charge or very affordable. We will therefore ensure that contingencies form a larger element in our budgeting.
