The Arts Britain still Ignores?

Acta community theatre’s ‘cycle of engagement’ and foundation worker programme: creating pathways into cultural participation and work

“…Acta is an Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Organisation (NPO;2018-2022, with the NPO 'core grant' funding approximately one-fifth of the company's annual turnover. The remainder (majority) of acta's funding, supporting a varied programme of work run from the acta Centre in Bedminster, derives from diverse sources including UK and EU arts and cultural funding bodies and third sector/civil society trusts and foundations.…”

“…Community can, as Hawkins notes, mark a strategic concern within cultural (funding) policy for underrepresented or excluded constituencies, cutting across social differences such as class, race, ethnicity, age, sex/gender, religion, ability (1993,(22)(23). While this construction of 'community' and 'participation' risks obscuring the struggle of those, such as artists/people of colour, with specific grievances concerning rights to be recognised within the aesthetic mainframe of British art and its institutions, and not just in terms of anthropological -collective/'folk' -definitions of culture (see Khan 1976;Araeen 2010;Daboo 2018), community theatre's broad recognition of the heterogeneity, and potential intersectionality, of excluded constituencies (and cultures) promotes an alternative recognition of cultural difference and pluralism in stark contrast to current policy concerns to ameliorate purported cultural lack via participation (the deficit model of participation, see Miles and Sullivan 2012;O'Brien 2014, 68). The Foundation Worker programme will be examined as an extension of a participatory community theatre practice that is concerned to ensure that its theatre workers reflect the diverse society it engages in promoting a more pluralistic public (funded) culture and civic society.…”