Jonathan Meth is a dramaturg, extraordinaire, director, curator, very involved in the European theatre and disability arts. He's a lecturer at Goldsmiths. He's worked with many of the major theatre organizations in Britain, and he's a fascinating theatre thinker.

We speak about dramaturgy and theatre as playwright lead and theatre as colloboration lead. We discuss disability arts and a little about what autism has taught us. Jonathan looks at theatre funding and infrastrucutre and what it might mean to build back differently.

We discuss his work with Fence and what he has learned teaching a wide mix of international students.

Jonathan makes a case for the power of questions and curiosity.

A fascinating, wide ranging conversation. See his webite here.

Podcast version below and unedited transcript below.

Transcript:

Benjamin [00:00:06]: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining. I'm really pleased today to have Jonathan Meth. Jonathan is a dramaturg, extraordinaire, director, curator, very involved in the European theatre and disability arts. He's a lecturer at Goldsmiths. He's worked with many of the major theatre organizations in Britain, and he's a fascinating theatre thinker. Welcome.

Jonathan [00:00:32]:  Ben thank you very much for that charming introduction. I'm not quite sure I can live up to all those epithets, but I'll do my best. Lovely to see you.

Benjamin [00:00:42]:  Great to see you. So, we'll go straight in. Do you think Britain has produced relatively little European theatre over the last 20 years? And if so, why do you think that is?

Jonathan [00:00:54]: Well, it probably won't surprise you to know that dramaturgically, I'm going to need to just spend a little bit of time with some of those terms because I need to kind of have a little look at what we think we mean by European theatre. And the reason why I do that is because I'm a huge Europeanist. I am kind of unapologetically in the process of renegotiating my own formal status since the Austrians very kindly changed their laws last September, enabling me to apply for dual citizenship. Previously, I was entitled to the Austrians, that I would have to stop being British, but I quite like the possibility of being both Austrian and British. At the same time, I'm on the course of moving from London, a city that I spent most of my life in up to Florence in September because my wife Debbie has a new job.

And so, the European question immediately speaks to me in a very personal way for those reasons, but also because of the Fence network, which I hope we will come to later. I've got to know a little bit about continental Europe, I'm going to call it because of course two here in blighty are European as well, despite all those Brexit shenanigans. But the reason really seriously why I want to interrogate European theatres is because I don't quite know what it means. They don't make theatre in Romania the same way that they make it in Ireland or the same way that they make it in Portugal. And the idea that they would or should, or could, it seems to me to be slightly far-fetched and not terribly helped. And I wonder whether it's a kind of hegemonic hangover of the tyranny of the English language and its sort of global supremacy.

But we still allow ourselves to kind of in my view intellectual laziness of this notion that there is European theatre but let's stop berating the Brits for a moment and kind of go maybe what we mean, do we, is the theatre that doesn't have the playwright at its center, is that what we mean? That isn't about the playwrights as somehow semi-protected species but actually it's about theatre making presents a different set of hierarchies or collaborative relations in different European countries. And because they don't share with the exceptions of Morton Cyprus in Ireland and Anglophone impetus, shall we say that they occupied a different space than we do. I'm much more sympathetic to that as a working definition. But it's just this idea that we in Britain seem to think that Europe is somehow that place over there and that largely we cannot refer to it as the same. And I think that's one of the reasons why, which some people might think, well, that seems to be a paucity of poverty in that. And I think it begins with the nominal culture and the thinking.

Benjamin [00:04:18]: Sure. I am going to unpack a couple of things there because that's already pretty deep for us. One is this idea of the theatre where the playwright isn't at the center. But I think there is also another idea of a simply call it theatrical or dramatic work made outside of Britain and which comes to Britain in some form. And I hear people speak that both that type of work actually from any country. So, we could almost go globally or things. Maybe there's been some more from America or not. And so, there's the question of that essentially, I guess you could call it foreign work. And then there is this second question of the work of playwright at the center of not. So maybe you can think about both of those things. I get the impression that maybe you think that perhaps there has been more work where the playwright isn't necessarily at the center, collaborative work, other sorts of work or community worker, and perhaps it's a little bit unfair to say that that hasn't, and then maybe for work, which wasn't necessarily produced or originated on sort of British soil as it were.

Jonathan [00:05:31]: Yeah. I suppose uniquely among European countries, we have a West End and the only analog to the West End is Broadway. And so, if we look at the major theatre-producing countries outside of Britain the logical comparator is the German-speaking countries we make theatre for a hundred million people across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with more money, more investment, and better infrastructure, and so on. I make those observations, but partly because I think it's also important that we're aware of a sort of economic picture in all of this, but I do think it's partly our insularity with our language. So, I do think it is about non-English language originated work and because there is a simple equation in people's minds. Well, of course, if you're not making work in the English language then it's going to be work that doesn't center language per se.

I would say that there's truth in all of that, but it's not the full story any more than the royal court story is the story of British theatre since let's say, John Osborne in 1956, it's a great story and it's a very important story, but it's only part of it. So a lot of it depends on where you look and I think there's always been another and indeed other traditions of the theatre-making in this country, they are very rich, but because of the way, the structures of commentary and criticism work, which are fundamental about at least previously the selling of newspapers now, I'm not quite sure, worked out what that looks like in a digital realm, but set that aside for a moment, you can see that there was a kind of hierarchy first, second, third stream critic. And the job of the critic was to communicate with the readership and so to some degree that starts to frame what we might or might not understand about theatre practice. So, I would say that as a rich theatre culture, we have always attracted and generated very diverse theatre-makers. I don't think that is on the reign. I think probably the opposite is true. I think there is a rich complexity of theatre being made in this country. But I would like to imagine that we could talk to a different sort of discourse about how it does or does not speak to theatre made in the German-speaking world or in Romania or in the form of Yugoslavia or in Portugal or anywhere else. Because I think also, we might challenge ourselves to know those theatre cultures a little better than we probably do.

Benjamin [00:08:26]: That's a really fascinating observation. In fact, interestingly, I was speaking to Rishi Dastidar, one of the leading British poets we have here, who are making similar observations about poetry, not in the English language. We don't read enough in translation and it doesn't come here, but that's only again to your point, part of the story and that actually there has been a lot of other kinds of arts happening if you go and look for it. Dwelling on that point for one moment, before I think we'll come to the Fence was, I remember perhaps 10 or so years ago, a very running dialogue in the heyday of theatre blogging, I would say between Chris Goode and David Eldridge which is actually somewhat resolved in the last year or two, which is quite interesting on another podcast, but where Chris Goode would talk about a lot I would say the kind of collaborative devised, very different way of making theatre from the playwright center and David Eldridge coming more from a playwright centric kind of viewpoint. But interestingly, when I was hearing the conversations in the margins, in the commentary, as we were talking about it, particularly as a younger theatre-maker, doing some work in kind of both ways, in some ways I thought there was actually a lot more in common from what they were saying than perhaps that which separated them, but that dialogue has been going on for a very long time seen with those two and you could see it today. Do you think that's as lively debate today as it's kind of ever been between those different kinds of theatre-making?

Jonathan [00:10:01]:  I think because we've had a year of theatre online and not at all largely, I don't know those debates. My sense of the way in which the debate was played out, let's just say in the 90s when it was new work versus new writing as a kind of shorthand. My sense was always that was about access to resources in the end, and the perception or misperception by one camp that the other we're getting the toys and that they will not. And that's why I'm always prone to mention the economics within conversations around trends, nomenclature in interesting aspects of central development because I think it's always lurking there and it needs to be mentioned. But in the end, I'm with you. I mean, for me, it was always a forced dichotomy and the playwright is here is a wright a W-R-I-G-H-T they are a maker and whether they are the kind of the soul scribe romantically pictured in the attic on an old Olivetti typewriter or whether they are in the rehearsal room, making work collaboratively with other people in real-time in real space seems to me to be only modestly important to the kind of literary sense, but a lot of it is about the way in which we encode and enshrine things, in things like legal or economic structures or in the way in which companies operate rather than actually about the work or the way in which the work might work.

And I suspected, that if a plurality of possibilities were encouraged systemically, as opposed to what I think often happens, which is we'll know you do that thing in that way and they do that thing in that way then I think we might begin to see the work for what it is, which is hopefully constantly cross-pollinating, cross-fertilizing, looking across stealing, borrowing, interrogating.

Benjamin [00:12:20]:  Yeah. I didn't come to understand that for instance, the funding system in France, the Netherlands, Germany is very different from here and actually influencing the way we make work, and even America obviously very different again. Maybe this is a good segue to tell me about the Fence how it came about? What it is doing? How that is? And actually, I guess its funding comes about from quite a different route as well.

Jonathan [00:12:46]:  Yeah. So, the Fence came about in part when I was director of Writernet, which itself had grown out of new playwrights’ trust. And I was director of those organizations for about 15 years from 1994 to the beginning of 2009, so a while ago. And what I noticed and, in a way, it speaks to what we've been talking about was that the playwriting culture. However, you wanted to see it in this country. In so far as it looked beyond these islands at all. I talk about these islands because we are two members and we would look to one of them very obviously for that rich cultural tradition in terms of writing, but we would look to America and occasionally to Australia, but very seldom would we look at anything that wasn't anglophone. And I wondered about that and I thought, is this really good for us?

Is this a way in which we enrich ourselves as a playwright culture? Are we talking to the rest of Europe let alone the rest of the world, other than in that kind of West End Broadway axis with the exception of a few great playwrights like Ravenhill and Stevens, who would have been networked into the German-speaking world by their agents, because probably there was an economic imperative to do so on the one hand and also creative opportunities to work in different ways with both of these artists would have been embraced and that's well documented? And so, I thought, what if we set up a European network for Playwrights? Perhaps not just playwrights, but people that are interested in the playwright and prepares to encounter and engage with the playwrights so maybe dramaturgs, translators, directors, producers. So, what if that network, I thought was relationship-focused rather than transaction-focused?

So not being market-driven, which is please produce my play, or will you read my script, but rather can I get to know you as a fellow artist. Can I get to find out a bit more about how things happened where you are, and perhaps if you're interested, tell you a little bit about how things happened where I am? And could we do that in a multilateral way as a way of recognizing the crouching hidden tiger in the room of colonialism. So that in that kind of binary exchange, we weren't simply unconsciously replicating those colonial paradigms. Oh, this is how we do, but rather in a spirit of curiosity, interrogation mixing with each other, encountering multiple different versions of how things may or may not happen. And out of that encouraging people to come up with their own ideas and their own forms of collaboration, but also how they might then see themselves back home, perhaps in a slightly different way, having glimpsed other landscapes and other possibilities within.

Benjamin [00:16:11]:  What is the Fence up to today? You've got some relationships and things going and seems to be quite a lot of interesting work bubbling out. And I think this is sort of central to a lot of the work you do is actually centered on people and relationships. So, is there anything you want to comment on, and maybe this intersects with your move to Italy coming up and being back in Europe?

Jonathan [00:16:38]:  Yeah, sure. So, we are still planning perhaps foolishly on two network meetings happening next month. The first in the second week of June in Graz in Austria by coincidence as part of Dramatikerinnen, a festival held jointly between Chargeball house, Graz and [inaudible 00:17:05] which is attached to the university there and run by the redoubtable Edith Draxl who has been a long-time Fence member. And the second being at my [inaudible 00:17:20] south of Paris as part of that rather glorious little towns festival [inaudible 00:17:29] four corners of the world and we have no idea whether you'll be able to get there or not, because at the moment, of course, you can't, you are not allowed to, but we hope that in the intervening month there will be some shifts in what is possible.

And so those network meetings, like all network meetings will have their own particular characters both in terms of the people that go to them and host them, but also in terms of how they function. So, the Austrian one will very much be here as a festival, come and participate, watch some work, be part of the festival debates, encounter some playwrights, meet some new and young and emerging artists. The French thing will be, come and participate. We are going to focus around the theme of Burlingame which is a very particular concept, which is a little bit like sailing into choppy waters, but nonetheless going into those uncharted areas and meeting them with our full face to the wind in a kind of French way. And I still don't quite know what that means in terms of what people will actually do, but there will be three afternoons where we will present to a festival going public, socially distant, et cetera around those things, either through practical workshops with them or in creative presentations too. Well, I suppose those two snapshots, hopefully, give you a quick idea of just the different qualities of advanced network meetings and local characteristics.

Benjamin [00:19:17]:  Sounds amazing. And obviously, I've been tracking it over the years, and if people are interested can they reach out to have a conversation with you to be involved somehow?

Jonathan [00:19:27]:  Yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? Because I'd like to be able to say yes, because of course one wants to be welcoming but you can't and although the network is informal as much as it can be, I mean, post-Brexit, we needed to move it to Stockholm. So, we've moved it to Stockholm and have been headquartered there for the last three years and we have a board and we have a bank account there. And so, in the lightest possible way, we formalized ourselves. But in order to make sure that we don't flood it, for example, with grits I have a tacit quota system where I kind of go no more than 20% work. And so, the way the Fence developed, it started with 25 people, and it's now upwards to 250, a third of whom are really active, a third of whom I like lurk on a happy lurking and wants to continue lurking, and a third of whom really could care less and should be off the books.

But because we deliberately stay open and wait for people to ask to say, no please, no more Jonathan, I'm good, thank you. And there's a reason for that because its relationship focuses to come back to your observation that is an important thing. I also wanted to do something that reflected the life cycle of people, where they go off and they change jobs. So, they go and have kids, or they move countries. Well, they change their circumstances. And that might mean as, which has been the case with some Fence members. They disappeared for 5 or even 10 years but then came back because they found a different way to engage, a different proposition, a different need. And I wanted to remain open to that because everything else in our culture seems to me to be short-term focused on the transaction, the here, the now, and the immediate future.

And I wanted to do something that is a little bit different, that had a different kind of quality, a different texture, and that was sort of open and flexible to them. But what that means is that the way it grows is through recommendations of specific people from within the network. And then I try to curate that by making sure that we don't have a sudden influx of one particular kind, we might pick up individuals along the way, we might notice gaps, or we might be encouraged to fill those gaps, but certainly, the bricks are well-represented at the moment.

Benjamin [00:22:08]:  And that's certainly something I've been more of a lurker, but I'll come in and out as actually as my own theatre and creator practice is also coming in and out over the last 10 or 20 years as you say, children, challenges, jobs, and there is something nice to an informal longevity. I think it's sometimes I find it's a cousin relationship to the nature of friendship. Like friendships can form, they can ebb and flow. They can break. In fact, broken relationships can be more devastating than broken romantic relationships, which have a clearer arc, I guess, in our perception of what they should be and how they break up, and how we move on. I mean, obviously, it can be very catastrophic as well, but we don't actually have those same arcs and friendship because they are gray hair and looser and ebb and flow.

But when they break can actually be even more devastating and to have doors or windows for long relationships over time, maybe this is quite a good segue back into perhaps Writernet that because that's where we might have first met with some interaction there, but that's probably about 15, 20 years ago. I guess my question there is, that was quite interesting because it had a life, right. It started, it did really great things and then ended. And I wonder what you felt about that. Maybe any learnings you had from that? In some ways, I think back now that it lives on the memory in some ways at a lower ebb than it was at the time like at the time, I think it was very influential and that influence, perhaps hasn't lost it so much, at least in an obvious way and partly in a less obvious way, but maybe that was part of its purpose and point. So, I'd be interested in your reflections on that and obviously Writernet has grown into these other things as you've mentioned.

Jonathan [00:24:12]:  Yes. I mean, the concrete legacy of Writernet is, of course, the Fence, because without Writernet it wouldn't have been born or indeed incubated and developed in the first place, and having a formerly constructed parent company, we were able to capitalize on two bits of European funding A at birth and B an incubator, which meant that we were able to grow some very well-founded and rich tendered comparatively to the foundation. And I think it was on that secure basis that we've been able to build and develop in the kind of casual and informal way that we have. So, I think it's important to acknowledge that but my intention was never that Writernet should be legacy focus. It was always about what were the present needs and how might they be supported.

And when we knew, we were going to wind down, wind up I was very much committed to the notion that our task was to simply as it were exit stage left and leave a space, and then into that space would come something else. That was for others to determine and that my job was to not get in the way simply and a very good way of doing that was by having a single different legacy vehicle to preoccupy myself and therefore that seemed to make sense to me in terms of what it was. Well, I think what it was if I include it was an antecedent new playwright's trust founded by Susan Croft and then taken on further by Polly Thomas before I came to it with other important people like Ben Payne also along the way contributed. It was kind of 20, 25 to 30 years of grassroots support for a playwriting culture, in what was already playwriting rich, but while narrow in the 80s, in terms of what we might understand by diversity. And I think we expanded, we helped to expand that base. We helped to create opportunities for more different people to access them. But I was always more interested in the doing of that than in shining a light on it and going, oh, look what we've done, bits of that. And so, I'm not troubled by whether or not people remember new playwrights’ trustees. We were part of a culture that included all sorts of the different parts of this. I mean, Charles Hart was the new writing officer at the Arts Council in England in the days when there were such things for long enough to make an impact because he was very committed from the policy point of view to literary managers as being the structural device that would help to cement the place of the playground and a new playwriting culture within this country.

And if you look at the development and growth of playwriting in the 90s and the early 80s, you could see literary departments flourish. Now, if one takes a quick temperature test of the waters today, one can see that that model is no longer the model of choice because it's been left to a much more sort of Darwinian self-selection process. Some have stayed, some could not, some have been by the wayside. In those days, the very word dramaturg was not used. It wasn't in my view until Paul Cyrus left Soho to join the RSC and insisted that he had the word dramaturg in his job title but we saw one of the major companies begin to embrace that as a thing. And subsequently one can perhaps see this sort of relative success of dramaturgy and the concept of dramaturgy and a move away from the literary department to some degree.

But also, we were part of a group of different regional organizations. Some of whom had grown out of the trade union movement. One thinks of Northwest playwrights in Manchester, for example, that was a theatre writer union-initiated grouping that was very much grassroots locally based about promoting them. But I think what happened was that a range of different ways of doing things came through in that period. And so, in the same way that you have that organization at that time, and again, that would have lasted probably well into the late 90s into the early teens, but mostly those kinds of organizations have gone now. You still got new writing north in Newcastle, and you still got new writing south in Brighton, but on the whole, they're much fewer and far between. And that might be a good thing because needs change, structures change, systems change. Obviously, a lot of those systems and structures predated the online world, predated the world of social media and you need things to change. They shouldn't be kind of an instinct in my view.

Also, I was happy with the work that Writernet and new playwrights did particularly in the world before the internet, around information, advice and guidance, when that was a necessary and important contributor to enabling greater access and greater diversity to the playwriting picture, but also subsequent in the days of the internet before the prominence of social media when the transfer of information advice and guidance opened up things I think opening up things is what we were really about, whether that was the four-day extended program that we did in 96 or 97 with Jack Bradley at the National Theatre Studio, where we invited around a 100 different theatre-makers, either to give workshops in real-time or to make presentations on how they did, what they did. At that time, you didn't know what people's practice was because you didn't get into rehearsal rooms unless you were in their show.

And there was a sort of mystique somehow around how people work. And I think either in those live events, or through the systematic organized presentation of information, advice, and guidance online, which we now take for granted because we can look at it in seconds on the phones, but in those days you couldn't and there was a certain basic level of value, but you can't really trace that back. You can't really go and say, well, you know, 10 years on, do you remember getting that piece of information? Did it change your life? And your kind of going huh. It's very hard. You have a sense that you're hopefully just part of the fabric in a sense of the culture, but as the fabric shifts, and needs emerge that you shift and change a little bit with it, but at a certain time, it seems to me it's absolutely fine to go well, that was great, but now they're going, let's leave a space.

Benjamin [00:31:44]: Yeah. And I am a very important part of the ecosystem then that's interesting and fascinating that history and legacy, which I think is maybe one of the things that at least for me in British theatre, maybe it's of every generation, but we don't have actually that same sense of our own quite modern theatre history have just gone by in the last kind of 5, 10 years before, which I think is quite interesting. There's a lot of talk about build back better. And I think a lot of people have talked about building back better within theatre as well with very many different lenses from your point of view, what do you think this might mean for theatre and what might we do? I guess there's a European lens. There's a kind of lens about the people who come into the theatre. There's the economic lens, which actually now that you mentioned it, a couple of times, I think is potentially underappreciated, but I would be interested, build back better. What should we do? Can we do anything actually with it? And how are you thinking about it?

Jonathan [00:32:55]:  So, I suppose anything I would want to do is go well before we do any building. Can we have a little look at the landscape? What might our analysis about landscape want to tell us? Well, so far, I think what it tells us is that the Arts Council says, well, we think we got this largely right in our response to the pandemic, says Nick Sorelta to the government. In terms of spending your money, the government aka the taxpayer well but perhaps our trickle-down thinking didn't really get as far with freelancers as it might've in an ideal world, but we are very convinced that without the built infrastructure, there is no work for freelancers and therefore we were right to prioritize that. So, I think that needs a little bit of challenge, doesn't it? A little bit of unpicking and unpacking. And you go well if everything is geared towards the infrastructure, and to what extent does it trickle down, and does it trip you up? And if you want to build back better, do you start with the brickwork and the masonry in your flagship institutions, or do you have a different concept of what it is and how you might not go at all?

And so, I would hope that work might be done, that one might need to involve perhaps looking into some different places because if you go back to the same builders' merchants, you're probably going back to the same kind of building materials and the same kind of architecture and the same kind of way of thinking about what it means to build a tool.

Benjamin [00:34:47]: Yeah, I think that's quite an astute observation. I hadn't heard it put like that before. And I do think now that I'm kind of moderately distant from a lot of practitioning theatre, but having read and spoken to people, I'm actually not convinced there is going to be that much of a difference in this build back. But I think it is to that point that you've raised is because you're essentially going to the same builders' merchant. And so, it's completely unsurprising that you're going to get roughly the same type of things coming out. Now, some of the people are somewhat different and maybe they have somewhat different ideas, but they are dealing with approximately the same infrastructure and building blocks. So, with that sort of analysis, I do think that actually that probably doesn't come across too much change actually.

Jonathan [00:35:39]:  Well, there's that, and then I kind of go, well, in a discourse about building back better, who is talking to whom about what? And it seems to me that this government is kind of saying to the Arts Council, you're talking to us, and in talking to us, we are telling you what we would like you to do. Now, of course, the DCMS has a contract with the Arts Council, there's nothing new in that. There's nothing totally specific, but I do think that in assessing the landscape, as well as looking at builders’ merchants and the contract, but the time it would also be kind of illuminated to ask, well, how does the Arts Council see itself in relationship to those discourses? How does it parlay, on one hand, its obligations to the government through its contractual obligations to the DCMS, but on the other, how does it speak to and listen with the sector?

Benjamin [00:36:44]:  Yeah, no, I think that's really fascinating. And in fact, opening up to sort of wider than just theatre arts and arts or creativity in general, there is this move by the government to have that level of board and trustee sign up to government policy, my history of this is not very good, but as far as I know, at least in the last two or three governments of different colors, I don't believe that was such a thing that they got trustees to sign up to. So, I think that's quite interesting. And then, one of the things over my own work over the last 10 or 20 years is actually, I was going to say subtle, but it's not that subtle, the enormous influence that board and trustees has on their own organizations and the ecosystem it's mostly unpaid, but it's probably the loadstone that these organizations kind of worked with and all of that tricky negotiation, Arts Council, government policy funding, money, economic, could you alluded to obviously I think the vast majority of people who think independent trustees are the thing kind of like, oh my gosh, where does that lead? But it's a thing today, we have had two or three resignations, some high profile already and it's going that way. So yes, interesting that if we go to your thesis, if we want to build back better or differently, you have to take a pulse of the landscape, check where it is, and then check who you are speaking to or with. But I'm not so very sure that this government is very allowing of such a thing to happen.

Jonathan [00:38:32]:  Oh, no, I'm in quite the opposite. I think we can see that if you look at the Arts Council guidance it's kind of saying we need to lean more heavily on boards and I've got a problem with that because boards should be accountable. It should be responsible. I remember a rather wonderful publication, probably 30 years old now, of care, diligence, and skill that I think came from the Scottish Arts which was a tremendous little pamphlet, which basically set out really what it was to be a good accountable trustee. I've got no problem with that at all. I think good governance. It's fundamental to help many sectors. So absolutely but if you're saying to a community of artists. Well, it's the boards, these people who were appointed that must shoulder the responsibility. The subtext is because you pesky artists are children and we don't trust you, and so we're going to infantilize you by not respecting you. And we're going to twist the Arts Council's arm to simply say, now you must be the bearers of this news and you must enshrine it in the next 10-year plan and make sure that you deliver, and this is not just structural and then we've seen a different high in level of appointments. As you can see, where the government's going, no, we're not renewing you, you're from Goldsmiths, we really don't like them and we really don't like you. And so, you're gone and you're thinking, well hang on, where's that in the care diligence and skill manual around good governance. So, there's a kind of profound paradox since on one hand, we're being asked to organize ourselves in a more disciplined and accountable way, but we're being met with no accountability and the imposition structural and individual. From a top-down government that frankly is prosecuting a kind of active cultural vandalism. It seems to be on our culture systematically.

Benjamin [00:40:45]:  One way someone explained it to me is that they just view too many organizations, as the majority of them make up being at least not aligned to where government thinking is. And that's too big of a gap for them.

Jonathan [00:41:02]:  I don't even think they care about that in the same way that they haven't bothered to replace creative Europe funding. I was called in as a group of people to go in and talk to some people in government and basically be asked the question, by civil servants. The government's looking at different options, this is two or three years ago looking at different options about Creative Europe. Can you say, why Creative Europe has been a good or bad thing? If we were to replace it, what would we replace it with? And so, when we get thinking and we came up with different ideas and we advocated as to why something multilateral had a different kind of value and they all went, well thank you very much, that's really useful. But I don't even think the government kind of goes, we don't have to care about that and so we won't.

Benjamin [00:41:55]:  Yeah, I've got increasingly skeptical over Britain has this almost consultation culture, and I'm now no longer certain of what the consultation actually ever achieves.

Jonathan [00:42:12]:  It feels like. The simple question is, do you matter? We don't think you do, but we really just like to test that so that we don't get too much flack. And wheel you all in and we'll listen carefully to what you said and we'll feed it back up to the powers a bit. But they'll blink at it because, for us, we give it hours, days, weeks, months of thought because it means something to us. To them, it's a line in the briefing document that is taking up time that could be spent on more important things. And really all they're doing is going, do I need to blink at this? No next, and that's important. So, I think that for me is the reality rather than, oh, well, these are a group of naughty left-wing people who really need to be re-educated.

Benjamin [00:42:58]:  Sure, well maybe riffing on the theme then of visibility, we talked a little bit about European or say playwright versus collaborative theatre. The visibility, I guess, of what we might call disability arts or theater has perhaps also been neglected over the years, but maybe not so in community arts and some other creative practice. So, I'd be interested in what you think and perhaps you could also tell us a little bit about crossing the line.

Jonathan [00:43:31]:  Sure, well, to answer your wider question first. I did a little piece of the guardian, I think, five or six years ago in which I tried to set out my sense of the landscape at that point in which I was celebratory of what had been achieved in the five years previous to that but also slightly warning that the flowering might not last unless we continued to do the tending work.

But I also recognize that there might be a growing appetite for the expertise that this country was able to produce in terms of disabled arts and disable artists elsewhere. And if I think about, what has happened in the last five years is the macro-economic situation has simply continued to get worse for disabled people. So, nothing to do specifically with the arts and culture, everything to do with much more basic human rights in terms of the law. In terms of access to support, access to be able to have paid support to be able to continue working all those kinds of things that disabled people need in order to even begin their day, practicing as artists let alone in anything else have been either demolished or partly removed all problems or we can see now for example with the last few days, the news on plans for judicial reviews, one of the last bastions that disabled people and their allies could get hold of is itself under significant assault.

So, whether economically or legally the position of disabled people in this country has continued to be, I would say murderously bad. Despite that of course, there has been some fantastic work, we've still got unlimited funding to make commissions and interventions strategically within the landscape. You've still got great work coming from artists and arguably we're kind of well beaten, but the way that just tells you how poor everybody else is doing. There is a recent report called "Time to Act," which “On the Move'' we've just published for those of you who don't know "On the Move," let me commend it to you. It's the kind of European entity that is really about mobility. And that includes mobility disabled people and together with the "Europe Beyond Access” project funded by Creative Europe, led paradoxically by the British Council, they've investigated what the current temperature is in 40 different countries across the world in relationship to disabled artists and disabled audiences. And it doesn't mean you won't be surprised to hear.

So, there's a kind of paradox, which is even though things are worse than they have been here, even though things are particularly bad outside the arts of disabled people, there's still some fantastic work being made. And to some degree, we are still the envy of many European countries. I think it's interesting that Germany has just acknowledged Claire Cunningham with a dance award. And I wonder whether Germany, which is an economic superpower when it comes to the arts, by comparison to us, whether Germany is now starting to get disability in a way that it's taken them a while. And that might be an interesting development.

Benjamin [00:47:24]:  Do you ascribe, we'll come to crossing the line, do you ascribe them at all to one of the theories that actually adversity or oppression sparks this kind of creative resistance at all, or I mean I have a little bit of credence to it, but I feel very worried by it because it's also like let's just treat you extremely badly because then you make black, which is like, obviously seems wrong, right?

Jonathan [00:47:54]:  It's the whole romantic, the dignity of labor thing, and you kind of go, yes, of course, there's always an element within everybody whereby if someone says what you can't do that we'll turn around and go, well, I'm going to anyway. And you go nothing wrong with that, perfectly healthy, but that's not specific to disabled people. It's about everybody, what I would say is that disabled people have, have been innovative since day one because they have to encounter a world that is not designed for them and on the whole, not prepared or even aware that it might usefully make some adaptations to comfortably accommodate them, participating in the life of society. They've had to innovate their way out of that either noisily or quietly or seamlessly or individually or collectively forever and so they're natural innovators. So, what we should be doing is placing them in the center of the crucible, if you're talking about, what would you want to do in terms of build back better? I'd abandoned the building merchants entirely and I kind of go diversity is the crucible of future culture and society. So, let us be gathering ourselves and let's begin with them because they are going to innovate in ways that us in the mainstream don't even imagine. And that's about it, that might be equally romantic, but we're due a little bit time to just test that, it seems to me.

Benjamin [00:49:26]:  Yes. Let's give it at least one shot at some point. And so, what have you learned from crossing the line? Maybe tell us a little bit about it and the possibilities that it's opened up.

Jonathan [00:49:39]:  Sure. So, the crossing line is now partnership currently with six European theatre companies who all make professional Touring Theater with learning disabled with more artistic artists. The partnership is behind the gap in Bradford in the UK [inaudible 00:49:55] in Malmo, Sweden [inaudible 00:49:58] in Blue Bay, France, Blue Teapot in Galway Ireland. Theatre 21 in Warsaw Poland would get a bubble in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and since 2014 we've been working on three projects funded either by Creative Europe or [inaudible 00:50:15]. What have we learned? Well, I think we've learned quite a lot, partly because two of those projects were with the Brits, the French and the Swedes were the original three partners we have subsequently grown to 6 and we hope to grow again in the future.

And they've all been working for between 30 and 40 years, but they've all grown up almost as autodidactic companies. They had no peers, they kind of pioneered the way. Obviously, you've got hi-jinks in Wales as a sort of analytical of more than a gap in the UK, but certainly nothing like [inaudible 00:50:52] France and Sweden. And so, they've never really had an opportunity to come together and look at somebody like them over a certain period of time, either to exchange artists or to interrogate the company's culture structures practices. And that's been incredibly useful, I think both for the companies and for me as the project, dramaturge kind of looking on and looking in. And as someone that also has a kind of foot in the cultural policy camp, which I work on at Goldsmiths it's always been important to me to try to understand the wider cultural context in which things do and don't happen.

And so not surprisingly the differences between how things happened in England, France, and Sweden are enormous. So even though we're all part of Europe, and even though we're all part of wealthy northwest Europe, there are still some huge differences that take some time to negotiate and figure out. The work has been fantastic in its difference. So, the French will not have an artistic lead in their company and they will be a producing house with wonderful facilities, a company of 23, but their whole way of doing things is they get guest directors in and every show is different. And so, the audience never knows what to expect and that's exactly as they think it should be. Because of [inaudible 00:52:26] translated probably rather badly as secularism. They don't have the same attitude or discourse around disability as we do in this country.

And so much of the disability arts landscape has come out of the kind of political movement over the last 40 or 50 years in this country. That's not the same in France at all in some ways they kind of jumped over that and gone absolutely towards the mainstream. Disability isn't part of the dominant aspect of their discourse. It's all about audiences, it's all about the quality of the work and the variety. So that's been incredibly useful and illuminating for me. Then again, opening things up to particularly Poland and we tried to extend an invitation to colleagues in Serbia, but actually, they've become part of that Europe beyond access partnership project, which is great, which means that they're moving forward. But it is very interesting to look at how things happen outside wealthy Northwest Europe as well, where they don't have anything like the same level of infrastructure support, but nonetheless making some very interesting work, both [inaudible 00:53:45]. The crossing the line partnership, as well as being about exchanging artists and learning more about other companies' systems and structures also comes together to present work at festivals.

And we began this with the first festival in Ruby in 2017 which went tremendously well and we had hoped to follow that up with a second festival in May last year in Galway, as part of that city's European capital culture. But of course, despite enormous preparations and extensive work by our colleagues at Blue Teapot, six weeks before opening the festival, we had to stop everything. And so, we haven't been able to do it and we won't be able to do it because the Galway European capital culture extended for a further three months, the first quarter this year, but has gently wound up its windows kind of pulled in its forms. And so, we will have to think again, once we're able to get back to face-to-face working. Well, what will be the next incarnation and manifestation? Instead...

Benjamin [00:55:03]:  Thinking of Florence.

Jonathan [00:55:05]:  Well, I don't know. Certainly, we need Italian partners and I have been down not to Florence but to lecture to see the wonderful work of the company who did lovely [inaudible 00:55:20]. But marvelously, I managed to sneak away last October during the pandemic fly to Italy and get to watch and meet them, which was one of the highlights of my working year. So, I'm hopeful that there's an Italian conversation to be had. I don't know where it will be. We'll do something online as part of a kind of digital program later this year just as a way of saying, we are really sorry we couldn't bring you all together. Please don't forget about us, we're still here, we're still working. Here are some examples of all that let's be keeping in touch, but the commitment, I think more widely is very much to continue to grow that work and to grow the platform for it and the profile of it.

Benjamin [00:56:06]:  So, yeah, that's a pretty exciting bunch of things, maybe we'll wind up with two or three sorts of final questions. There's so much still to cover actually, but one would be that you lecture Goldsmith and it would be interesting to know what being a teacher lecturer or sort of getting somewhat academic has also brought to your work or your understanding of the world.

Jonathan [00:56:30]:  Yes. Well, I have a kind of culture of a job at Goldsmiths and in that sense, I'm a culture of an academic. I would say that I lack both the knowledge and the credentials and the expertise to be anything more than a part-time academic but also chiefly the design because I enjoy all the other things I do outside the academy and they do too. And that's why I'm in the department in the way that I am because they value the fact that I'm working in all the other ways which I am and that will inform not just the presentations that I can give but perhaps the way I'm able to engage with students. I think particularly the fact that much of my work is international because so many students are international in the department and particularly on the programs in which I work, which are all master's programs.

In terms of teaching, I did a year as a school teacher in 1983 immediately after leaving university and that was my formal experience of teaching. It was a kind of baptism of fire in that I learned far more in that year of course being a school teacher than I had in the previous three at university. So, I had a sort of little mini-introductory crash course to what teaching was per se, but I guess if you're functioning as a dramaturg and you're working in the center of those that do, in a way you're constantly operating in a mode that is not quite teaching, but it's similar in that you've got to prepare your lesson and then be prepared to abandon it in favor of something better that presents itself at the moment. And you've got to hopefully develop the skills and practices to know whether you need to retrieve a bit of your lesson in the ensuing improvised chaos that you confront or not. They're not quite the same thing, but I think there's a link. What I think I've learned is that in a way I see my Goldsmith work in several ways but in some ways, I see it as paid professional development for me. I see it as a way of undergirding all my freelance work because I'm paid to encounter almost invariably younger. 

Let us say, usually considered the main minds across all subject areas, because in working in arts-administration, cultural relations, cultural diplomacy. We have students all over the world whose backgrounds are in every art subject imaginable, museums, galleries, or none. And they are all writing about things that are as different as you could imagine. So, I'm getting a continual feed of their thoughts, their ideas, their questions, their challenges, their investigation but sometimes, occasionally, intersect and overlap with my areas of specialism, but fundamentally don't. And so, I'm getting enormous generalist input from all those younger minds which enables me to start making different kinds of connections in my own head, asking different kinds of questions in my own head. If one of the functions of the dramaturg is to try to ask timely, salient, challenging, productive questions of a process of a group of people to be catalytic and to add fun. It seems to me that there is a relationship between some of my work at Goldsmith is contributing and supported. And of course, yes, I have responsibilities. and so, it's not simply paid professional development. I wouldn't want people thinking that.

Benjamin [01:00:41]: What do you think is maybe the most misunderstood about dramaturgy or maybe your practice of being a dramaturg?

Jonathan [01:00:51]:  Well, I think hopefully the word has started to gain a little bit more widespread engagement. And we've moved beyond the sort of skepticism of the new. Or the idea that the officer class is somehow being challenged by these upstart enlisted men, and what's going on, of course, they're largely listed, women. So, I won't pursue that analogy any further, but you get the idea it's a different kind of power and energy. One that perhaps shapes us transforms, it's not designed to overpower or to overcome or to supply. Now often the dramaturgical function is delivered perfectly well by the extant team in the room and there is no need for any kind of dramaturge person because the directors, playwrights, actors, anybody else in the mix is all doing that beautifully. But sometimes particularly if you're working in very different contexts or with very different audiences or very different ways, sometimes, having someone who's got that focus on the catalytic a little bit like my work with the six companies, my work isn't necessarily about getting the work on stage or even looking at it in script form. It's about being the person that's paying specific and focused attention to the fact, the partnership, the program, the collaboration, the work, that, without having to worry about all the other aspects of what a director or a company might have to think of. And so that concentration on the catalytic seems to mean to me the specific function of dramaturgy where they can now [inaudible 01:02:37] but not always.

 

Benjamin [01:02:40]:  Yeah, and what do you think you learned from your work with Ambitious about Autism? So, one tiny other pivot before we come into the home stretch.

Jonathan [01:02:51]:  So 'Ambitious about Autism' is the national charity for children and young people with autism or autistic people, depending on how you like to formulate that. And the organization grew out of the treehouse, which was a school at which my son went from the ages of 4 to 12. And that was my connection into the organization, but being Ambitious about Autism, they grew from 1 school to now 3 and a couple of colleges a research and advocacy facility, a wider community facility because all of those things contribute to hopefully improving the quality of autistic people's lives and certainly their education. They've realized that if you are going to do that, you've also got to think about employment and employability. 

I learned a great deal from my time of being a trustee with them for 7 years, partly because I haven't worked for an organization at that scale either as an employee or in a governance role. I've been vice-chair of the playwright studios Scotland or vice-chair of ATC, which is fantastic, but it's a much larger organization. And so, you're having the same conversations, but you're having slightly different conversations too. I think I learned more about potentially what I could bring because I wasn't in the same kind of art media. And so, I could well I can bring some sort of authentic experiences as the parent of an autistic boy. I'm not going to try to speak on behalf of the parents because we don't agree and there's no point in pretending that we would. Where I think there might be common goals, I might advocate in certain areas. But fundamentally 

I'm going to try and see what the bigger picture of the organization is and bring me and my sensibilities of what I know from the areas that I have worked in and what I have learned to bear to that as part of the united team. I was able to, in a sense extrapolate the basic experience that I've learned from the back to care diligence and at rather wonderful Scottish arts slim publication, that's 30 years ago. Simply to a wider organization with a different ecology I hope to operate in a media that wasn't full of people like me. I had to find a way to engage with people whose backgrounds may be politically very different.

Benjamin [01:05:51]:  Fascinating.

Jonathan [01:02:40]:  And I was trustee from 2006 to 2013, so we moved from a labor administration to conservative administration and that brought very specific challenges and opportunities, actually. And so, looking at that was incredibly useful to me because I was able to A: look at things and B: used lenses that were not afforded to me within the arts sector. So, I was very grateful for that. I learned a great deal from the other people who were there, I learnt a great deal about the culture of organizations, I learnt a great deal about autism and just how different people see it and different people think about it. I was very pleased to be involved with them in certain areas of their work and so they began a program of moving beyond focusing on the schooling of autistic young people with quite considerable needs. To also including youth voice and so work...

Benjamin [01:07:07]: And employment and all of these other areas.

Jonathan [01:07:09]: Indeed, and I remember going to a presentation from the state department, U.S state department: the ambitious facilitated, which was tremendously useful. In terms of a really, really good history of all the interventions and changes and successes within the American education system, since America started paying attention to autistic people in education in the 70s. And it was a series of fabulous kind of graphs that were fundable and to me, upward diagonals in terms of all the milestones, all the progress, all the outcomes, all the increases in advances in educational offer and attainments to, and for autistic people in the United States in the 45-year period. But there was one slide that she showed that struck me and that was around employment and that was a horizontal line. And I've never had that quite so starkly presented to me before that it flatlines completely. And so, it caused me to rethink the way in which I thought about the education of young people is not starting at 2, let alone 5, but actually starting at 25. I'm kind of going, but then you've got to reverse engineer, you've got to start at 25 and reverse engineering back to 2 and that's the way you've got to fundamentally think about it and construct it and work towards it. Because there is absolutely no point in all those fabulous graphs with all those wonderful diagonals, rising diagonals if in the end, they fall off a cliff because of the employability when they stopped being quote and quote educated.

Benjamin [01:08:50]: Yeah, I haven't seen it as a flat line but it doesn't surprise me. So yeah, I mean, and it's interesting because more so a very say market-orientated government or some stripe would actually think, well at 25 or 30 or 40, we want these to use their language people to be productive and so not a net cost to society. And so, you would actually think that wire everything in if you think of a government entity as this sort of selfish thing, if they're trying to balance these things, that that's where they would head to because then they would think, oh, all of this is an investment because suddenly they're not a cost on our books, right? But obviously, that's not how we think of it, but it's how these entities could do. So, it's kind of almost remarkable that we haven't got to that place, but actually, strangely I could see that maybe we will do because it makes sense to that market machine. It could make sense under that framework, as well as any human framework that you'd want to do. It's a strange way where they could marry.

Jonathan [01:09:54]: Well, I think that you've hit the nail gloriously on the head. It's that idea about how do we characterize those two pictures? How do we characterize those two lines? In the fact that they are profoundly different angles and, in a way, they're two different worlds and perceived as two different worlds. But of course, they're not the same world because it's the same person stepping, stepping across the threshold at 20 something. So, they're not different worlds at all but how to reconcile the two worlds seems to me to be about, can we on the one hand value human capital, for life, that isn't just saying, let's keep finding ways to invest in them in the first 25 years, and then let's please God, not have to do anymore investing for the next 50 and that's not a way to do anything with anybody ever.

Benjamin [01:10:47]: Yeah, exactly. I make an agreement with that. Okay, final two questions, because I've taken up so much of your time. So, if we continue them in order to do it again[unclear], is what does a productive day look like for you? I think people find this very interesting to sort of say what works and what doesn't, it's quite individual. And the last one would be any advice you have for creators or artists, I guess, particularly young creators or artists, or maybe disabled ones too, but generally thoughts over your long career. So, what does a productive day look like?

Jonathan [01:11:19]: It never looks like the day before; it never looks the same. And there's no romance in them because it's in avoiding the tyranny of repetition? I think Beckett said, "Habits is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit." And you can kind of go, yeah, God forbid I should be sat in front of my desk doing this day in, day out. But of course, if you're not going to do that, you've got to invent every day a new. And what I would say is a successful day, might be a very productive 40 minutes. Sometimes it's 10 hours of battering because you just have to do that, you have to get something done on a deadline and you have to do it, and you cannot either distract yourself or delegate it or for somebody else to do it, you just have to do it. And so occasionally there are those days and you kind of slide off the chair at the end of them, completely exhausted into bed. And you're not even aware that it's been productive, you're just grateful that you can stop, but on the whole, it's not that it's the 40 minutes. It's looking back and going what have I done today?'' And it's not a great, big, long list of things. It's actually, yeah, that was a really rich 40 minutes and sometimes it's just because I have a thought that I haven't had before that unlocked something for me and enabled me to move something forward. That was joyous because I felt like, I didn't know I was going to get that, I didn't know that was coming, and that was really nice sometimes. I put my hand on that person's shoulder and I know that made a difference and that's enough, that's fine Sometimes it might be just stopping in the street and having a conversation with a neighbor. I'm not one of these people that has five-year plans and that kind of...

Benjamin [01:13:36]: Three-hour writing day.

Jonathan [01:13:37]: No. I'm just like that, I don't do eight-hour days, usually, there are exceptions. But there's seldom a day that I don't work.

Benjamin [01:13:51]: That's something, yes.

Jonathan [01:13:52]: Because those are the rhythms. It is occasionally, there'll be a Saturday where I don't do anything. But, on a whole, I kind of like I dip in and out, I like a lot of my work and so it's not like, well, why are you working? I like it.

Benjamin [01:14:07]: That aphorism, find a job you love and never work.

Jonathan [01:14:11]: Yeah, something like that. I mean, it isn't always like that at all, but on good days, it is. So that was that one.

Benjamin [01:14:21]: Nice, as for creatives, young creators maybe, but as you said, that's actually and I've had this now young creators are useful, but actually older creators or just creatives generally. I end up talking about, actually, you can restart at 40, 50, 60. I mean, we should -- That kind of statistics suggest that today we should be living well into our eighties.

Jonathan [01:14:52]: I'd be wrong if I can't characterize that bit of it, anything other than this I'm 60 next year. So, I vacillate between on the one hand passionately believe that my best work is ahead of me. And at the same time going, oh, another 20 years of this, surely not. Right? And in a way, my task is to try and creatively inhabit the space in between. The advice I would give to anybody is ask and it sounds really simple, but it's really hard, it's really hard. And it's a skill, it's a life skill that people have to keep working on, but largely I do things not always, but largely I do things because somebody asks me.

Benjamin [01:15:42]: So, never stop questioning. Is that ask as in ask for a mentor, ask for help, ask to do things, or is it also ask as in unpicking the curiosity of why something is, how it could be, or is it both? I guess it's the whole package.

Jonathan [01:15:56]: All of that and more, I mean, it seems to me that mostly what we can do in our allocated full school years is to try and ask slightly better questions.

Benjamin [01:16:09]: Great, okay. Well, thank you very much, I don't know if you wanted to end on any future upcoming project or thought for us at all? I think you kind of ended it by saying ask.

Jonathan [01:16:22]: I think so, I mean I think that trying to find the pleasure in asking rather than the fear. And I think that may just be something that is a benefit of being 60 and 20 because I just don't care anymore. It's like if you don't like me, you think I'm an idiot, that's fine. You could say that, but let me try and focus on asking things of myself, asking things of others. Can I ask in a better way? That kind of a question may seem like a modest ambition, but I think it's probably a good place to be. But to ask you Ben, is there anything that you would want to say to me.

Benjamin [01:17:13]: Thank you very much for the whole conversation. I think that was very rich and I look forward to hearing your sort of niche adventure episode from Florence. So, we should definitely speak again and I kind of hope that maybe we might be able to get at least one in-person meeting before September. If not, I'm sure we will continue these conversations, over the years

Jonathan [01:17:43]: I look forward to them. On this, I'm hoping you would want to know that one of our nicest conversations was in New York and so there is...

Benjamin [01:17:52]: Yes. So, that was where we reconnected after 5 or 10 years or something like that.

Jonathan [01:17:58]: That's right, and so there's a long and noble tradition of these conversations taking place in other parts. I hope you will join us at future Fence meetings when your circumstances...

Benjamin [01:18:07]: Yes, I hope for another opportunity at some point, yeah.

Jonathan [01:18:17]: And thank you so much for asking me and for facilitating this conversation.

Benjamin [01:18:19]: No, that'd be great and so you'll have links to Jonathan's website and all of that on the blog and that just leads me to thank Jonathan once again for being dramaturg extraordinaire. Thank you.

Jonathan [01:18:34]: Take care.