Art on the Edge: Resilience and Renewal in Spite of Everything
2023/24 Clore Fellow Rebecca Atkinson-Lord examines the future of the UK’s arts and culture ecology against a backdrop of economic instability and shifting societal needs. This paper explores how joy, creativity and meaningful cultural access can be rebuilt to support resilient, connected communities.
In June 2021, I packed up my life in London and moved to an island in the Hebrides. I’d been offered a job running an arts centre whose buildings had been closed for more than a year and which had faced some organisational challenges for several years before that. The first thing I did when I arrived was talk to as many different people involved in the arts and culture of the island as possible. And then I did what they asked: I reopened the buildings.
At the time, it was incredibly hard but the message from the local community was clear: we need a place to be a community in. Although the team worked tirelessly to get the organisation back up and running, we had no way of knowing if anyone would actually come to any of the events. We spent a year producing work in new ways so that our audiences could engage with arts and culture events in the ways that felt right for them. We dipped into our reserves to create life-enhancing art to entice audiences back, and as evidence of our cultural value and importance. Money was tight but we budgeted carefully to make it through to the next round of funding from Creative Scotland. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, people returned. By the summer of 2022 we had three touring shows on the road, a host of live gigs underway, a series of ground-breaking visual arts commissions and some national awards under our belt. A year of determined work had paid off and finally we could plan for a stable future.
And then, in 45 days, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng created so much economic instability that all our hard work was threatened. Responding to the volatility of the markets, Creative Scotland chose to delay the much-awaited funding round for another year. Suddenly competition for donations and grants skyrocketed almost as fast as operating costs. Energy costs rose so suddenly that we found ourselves spending nearly four times what we’d budgeted for utilities just to keep our buildings warm in the Hebridean winds. A perfect storm.
Almost two years to the day after reopening, we took the decision to close our buildings. Not permanently, but for four months over the winter, just so that we could save on heating costs. It was devastating, almost like grief, to see the vibrant, vital organisation mothballed and be able to do nothing about it.
Many of our local community were worried about losing the key cultural hub of the island just as the nights were most dark and lonely. As CEO, my job was to absorb their concern, trying to diffuse it and protect my already over-stretched and anxious staff. It’s a heavy weight to have to reassure a whole island. I, too, was exhausted. All of my resilience had been used up. For the first time in more than 20 years, I began to measure the personal cost of my chosen career against the joy I got from it. For the first time, I began to doubt that I could keep going.
On joy
Have you ever noticed that whenever you talk to a non-theatre person about theatre, they quite often say something like “Oh yes, I really should go more.” Should. There it is. That one little word that tells us everything we need to know about the biggest challenge the contemporary theatre ecology faces. Somewhere along the line, people stopped thinking about theatre as a thing they wanted to do, and started to think about it as a thing they should do because it is ‘good for them’. From its origins as a visceral and primal collective experience, theatre has evolved into something cerebral, contained and more distant from our essential selves. It has been a long and gradual shift as theatres have become ever more formal and separate from our everyday lives. Yet theatre is an ancient art form – we can trace its origins back for millennia and infer the prevalence of live performance and storytelling for almost as long as modern humans have existed. Once upon a time, there must have been something about the idea of live performance and storytelling that was so vital and visceral that it developed independently in unconnected human societies across the globe. Once upon a time, there must have been so much joy and meaning in the experience of attending theatre that people sought out opportunities to make it part of their lives.
So, what happened? When did joy and profound visceral meaning become such rare commodities in theatre? We can still see glimpses of them in some of the very best shows. The film industry, which can still transport and captivate us with reasonable regularity, is built upon a theatrical legacy. Yet somewhere along the line, the idea of having fun, of finding joy, and leaving uplifted and inspired by a truly transformative live experience, has become the exception rather than the rule. In the subsidised sector in particular, joyful experiences seem rarer and rarer as theatre administrations court the good will of their funders at the expense of audience experience. All too often that leads to uninspired shows with instrumentalist aims. In the West End meanwhile, where the appreciation of awe-inspiring spectacle had lingered a little longer, the steady march of market capitalism has meant that the safe bets of juke-box musicals, TV spin-offs and movie remakes have a stronger grip than ever. These shows are comfortable and familiar, safe bets for commercial investors, but it’s rare that they truly surprise and inspire us. We knew exactly what to expect when we bought the ticket. Like the comfort of popping to the same old chain restaurant, the familiarity reassures us that we won’t be disappointed – but we also accept that we won’t be surprised or delighted either. We’ve lost the risk, but we’ve lost the potential too; we no longer remember how to let ourselves be transformed by live storytelling and our lives are poorer for it.
There’s no shortage of visceral experiences in our society, but they rarely hold the unique potential for both emotional and intellectual transformation as part of collective experience that is the province of wonderful theatre.
It’s easy to look to the increasingly impossible economics of producing theatre for the absence of truly joyful and awe-inspiring experiences but that’s probably more convenient than entirely accurate. Spectacle and glamour help to captivate us but it’s the sense of meaning connecting us to other people, of a shared understanding of something deep and true, that feels most satisfying. And then there’s joy, ever elusive and slippery. Most of us, time-poor, disconnected and hum drum in our daily lives, almost never find opportunities to be truly delighted or to feel ourselves swept away by the effervescence of real joy. How often do we as theatre makers try to help our audiences feel joyful? How often do we conjure intense and enveloping emotions that don’t rely on trauma and tragedy? How often do we appeal to an audience’s primal, visceral instincts over their controlled intellect? In our efforts to professionalise and marketise theatre, we’ve worked hard to make it commercially viable and socially responsible, minimising risk and maximising value. In doing so, we’ve removed a touch too much emotional risk for our audiences and created a formulaic and conformist theatre landscape which, while it may not disappoint, will never delight us either.
On hope
In the publicly subsidised culture sector, there’s a pervading sense that art, and especially theatre, must be relevant (or at very least resonant) with contemporary life. Project funding application forms from state and trust funders frequently focus on key contemporary themes and instrumentalist impact as measures of fundability. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that. Asking for relevance seems a simple way to stop art becoming too highfalutin, esoteric or self-indulgent, and an easy way of making sure that ‘ordinary people’ can see themselves in it. But it also encourages artists to set their gaze at ground level rather than high amongst the stars. Demanding ‘relevance’ encourages stories about what we know instead of what we dream and stories that keep us focussed on real-world struggles rather than imagining possible futures filled with hope. That means that all of those ‘ordinary people’ are denied opportunities to imagine themselves becoming extraordinary. It denies them the chance to imagine a life, or world, or universe that defies pessimistic expectation to offer a better way of being.
When did we get out of the habit of gazing into the future with gleaming-eyed anticipation?
Humans are obsessive storytellers. Our whole society is woven out of the stories we tell about it and a person’s life story defines who they are. The most important thing artists can do is keep telling as many different, hopeful, inspiring stories as possible because our lives are shaped by the narratives we know and the possible futures we can imagine for ourselves. Art exists to help us imagine better ways of being. Not just by showing us what needs to be fixed, but by helping us to envision new philosophies and endeavours beyond the scope of any that currently exist. Just as the sci-fi of the 1950s created the conditions for the first space expeditions, stories that speak to the wonder and brilliance of all that humanity could be are the surest way to create wonderful and brilliant humans to make it so.
On money and power
The concept of ‘ordinary people’ looms large in the cultural discourse. Usually as a synonym for ‘people who don’t care about art’, either because the art is too left-wing or elitist, or because they are too busy being oppressed, depending on the political allegiance of whoever is speaking. ‘Ordinary people’ are routinely reduced to a passive and disempowered monolith dependent upon paternalist cultural leaders to speak for them. State funders and philanthropic trusts want to know that the art and culture you’re planning to make has been ‘co-created’ specifically with the people who will enjoy it. On the one hand that’s fair enough – taxpayers deserve a say in how their money is spent after all. Yet co-creation is a term that is rarely specifically defined, encompassing anything from consultation to full authorship and everything in between. That makes meaningful evaluation of the concept as a cultural methodology almost impossible. In the worst cases, co-creation is simply a buzzword used to justify cultural gatekeepers holding on to their own authority by giving the illusion of devolving power while controlling the available options and frameworks that people can choose to ‘co-create’ within.
If we’re truly serious about democratising the power dynamics of the arts and culture ecology, then we need to pay more attention to remaking the hierarchies and structures they sit within. We call our society democratic, but we also acknowledge that nothing meaningful can happen without the money to make it so. Giving people the illusion of power by letting them vote to express their opinion, doesn’t change the material reality of capitalist market economics. We might hold arts workshops with people we have labelled ‘hard to reach’, but it’s still the same funders that will have the final say on who gets the money to make work. While it might look like our cultural processes are democratising, but the reality is that the real power still sits with the same few people tasked with arbitrating what is worthwhile to fund – people who are themselves under pressure to meet the agenda of their own financial benefactors. Perhaps it’s the national government, a wealthy founder or some other member of the cultural hegemony, but no matter how much co-creation happens at grassroots level, the real power will always reside with the person holding the money.
I run a small arts centre in the Hebrides and, every day, I am faced with treating the symptoms of this inequity. We’re a publicly funded organisation, but the impact of Covid-19, the cost-of-living crisis and our remote location has meant that we’ve seen costs rise around 60% since our working budgets were created. Like every other arts organisation funded by Creative Scotland, we’re operating on a shoestring and hoping to make it through to the next multi-year funding round in April 2025. That means that our public programme is hugely reliant upon receiving work from independent artists and companies who are reliant on the same state and philanthropic funders we depend upon. To have a rich and varied programme, we must take whatever touring productions that can afford to come to our island, and our ability to curate a programme specifically for our audience is curtailed. In practical terms, that means that our remote, rural and historically culturally disenfranchised audience is treated to a raft of works that those funders believe are important and that, in an urban centre, might feel resonant but which here, on the remote and windswept western tip of the UK, can feel oddly tone deaf.
In richer times, it’s my organisation’s job to remedy that: we exist to advocate for the vanishing culture of the Hebrides. When we have the money, we commission works that are conceived to represent the voices and experiences of our island community on the national and international cultural stage. But these aren’t rich times. Over the past two years it has become painfully clear that when times are tough, it’s those with money who have the power to choose whose voices get to be heard. That means that in hard times, our national cultural output is more likely to revert to the same old same old; stories that are recognisable and resonant to the people who hold the money and have the power to distribute it. Those people tend to be more wealthy, more white, more male, more culturally mainstream and more privileged than the average. Not that this is a criticism of our state and philanthropic funding organisations – they are staffed by people doing the best they can against disheartening odds. But they work within a broken system. No amount of good intentions can undo millennia of inequality or compensate for the fact that the funding structure within which they exist is in need of revolution.
At the organisation I work for, we expend a huge amount of resources and effort on ‘co-creating’ our work with our community. In our case, that means that we were founded as a community owned organisation where local people had voting rights in the governance of the organisation. We have a Community Advisory Group dedicated to ensuring local voices and opinions shape what we do, we regularly commission new artistic works of all kinds by and with local people, and our entire programme is Pay What You Decide. That’s because we want to ensure that ticket price is never a barrier to cultural enfranchisement. Despite all that, we struggle to sustain community co-creation structures in the long term because people simply don’t have the resources to dedicate the amount of time needed to participate fully. Our island has a fragile, seasonal economy. In our community, it is normal for people to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Most people simply don’t have the capacity in their lives to take on the power (and associated responsibility) that long-term co-creation relationships need. We might try our hardest to be democratic and generous, but it is impossible for our one, small arts centre to dismantle the antidemocratic influences of the capitalist structure upon which our whole society is built. It doesn’t matter how hard we try; we can only work with the materials available to us. Without wholesale political and cultural revolution, true co-creation is an impossible dream.
On giving up
It felt shocking to me to realise that I wanted to give up on arts and culture entirely. It has always been a hard sector to work in, but for the past five years or so, it has become exponentially more difficult. At first, I thought it was just me; that somehow, I was failing as an artist and cultural leader. For a long time, I told myself that if I just worked harder, hustled more, developed more and more exceptional skills, then I’d get there; to a place of ease and comfort at the top of my profession. But I felt like the goalposts kept moving – like there was always another, bigger hill to climb. I watched my peers in other industries mature into the comfort of professional seniority, having children, buying homes, feeling professionally secure and fulfilled, and it became harder and harder to keep on climbing.
The complaints were pretty damning: poor pay, few benefits, limited parental leave making having a family seem impossible, lack of career progression irrespective of merit or experience, lack of training or professional development opportunities, long hours, poor conditions, poor or non-existent pension provision, lack of social standing and respect, lack of supportive structures, and lack of any meaningful regulation. In short, the arts and culture industry is one built upon lack; founded upon the assumption that those working within it will consent to their own exploitation in exchange for the privilege of being part of the creation process.
Suddenly, I knew that this feeling of disappointed exhaustion wasn’t just a symptom of my own failings. I spoke to friends and colleagues, and time and again I was greeted with a rush of sadness, anger, disappointment and almost desperation at how to get out of the trap we found ourselves in. It was shocking. These were people that I knew to be exceptional, intelligent, talented, hardworking individuals. People that in another world or another industry would be nationally lauded, leading thinkers adding meaningfully to the sum of human knowledge. Every one of them could have chosen a more lucrative, socially valued profession as barristers, doctors, academics, accountants, politicians, businesspeople or pretty much anything else they set their mind to. Yet they had chosen to dedicate themselves to arts and culture. And now they all felt doomed to a career characterised by wasted potential and disempowerment. It was heart breaking. It still is.
For a long time, art had been my solace in a difficult world, and I had been sustained by hope; that things would improve, that I’d get ‘that job’ that made everything better, that there’d be a general election and the devastation of the last decade and a half could be undone. But hearing that almost every other artist or cultural practitioner I spoke to felt similarly gave me permission to find a different hope: that perhaps there might be a better working life for all of us outside the cultural sector.
It’s an incredibly hard pill to swallow. For the past 30 or so years, my identity has been heavily defined by my love of theatre and the arts, my practice as an artist, my role as a cultural leader. If I leave, who will I become? And, perhaps more immediately worrying, where would I go? I have lots of transferable skills, but making a career change after 40 feels incredibly risky. Is it more or less risky than clinging on in an industry that undervalues, disempowers and exploits me? I don’t know.
Many of us who work in this sector have spent our careers fighting for better for ourselves and the whole ecology; for more money, respect, understanding and engagement with arts and culture across the board. We’ve fought for more grassroots arts activities, more high-quality, life enhancing experiences, more joy, more solace, more hope, more complex civil discourse. We’ve fought for more of all of the good that arts and culture brings to the world. But it has become harder and harder to fight.
We are living at the dawn of the Great Unravelling, a period of significant societal, political, and economic upheaval that is likely to see the disintegration of all the established systems and structures upon which our lives are built. Amidst that uncertainty, it’s increasingly hard to make the case for more resources to make art and, as a result, global expectations of what humans can hope for are sliding incrementally down Maslow’s Hierarchy as the structures we have built to protect ourselves begin to crumble.
In the face of all of that, with no mechanisms to help us imagine a hopeful future, I just want to retreat into escapism and binge watch 80s movies.
On solace
Netflix is brilliant, isn’t it? The complete indulgence of losing yourself in another world, another life, for hours or even days at a time. It’s not just TV. Books, movies, a brilliant play or a particularly evocative painting or song can do the same thing. There are days when it feels like the most wonderful solace to be able to just step out of reality and into the imagined world. It’s rare to find those moments when my mind is quiet and my body is at ease, but stories of any kind will usually do the trick. The other place that I find that kind of peace is when I’m doing practical tasks with my hands – the best moments are when I’m at my pottery wheel. There’s something utterly unforgiving about a ball of clay spinning at ridiculous speed under your hands. You can’t think too much or get distracted for a moment or it’ll all fall apart. You just have to surrender yourself to your intuition, feeling the idiosyncrasies of the clay as it runs between your hands and giving yourself up to the higher powers of mud and water and centrifugal force. You have to trust that somehow, under your hands and attention, the mud will become something wonderful. It’s mediative and calming and is the fastest way I know to let go of something I’m worrying about. Experiencing and making art is one of the most comforting, consoling and joyous parts of being human. On the very worst days, it can make life worth living.
In my corner of the arts ecology, we spend so much time talking about arts and culture as world-changing and activist, about its responsibility to reshape society with the stories it tells, that we all too often forget about the power of art to provide solace. There’s an unpleasant tendency to sneer at the escapist and fun bits of the industry, in favour of worthy and intellectualised cultural events that can sometimes feel like trauma porn. In our eagerness to perform our ideal version of the world, our moral absolutism can ostracise and disenfranchise people from taking part in arts experiences that should be open-heartedly universal. As the ‘culture wars’ have gathered momentum, it has been heart-breaking to see parts of the arts and culture sector entrench themselves to try and conquer a cultural landscape that was once fertile with pluralism.
When someone dares to deviate from the accepted groupthink, they are shouted down and insulted, attacked not just for their ideas but on personal grounds. There is no allowance for redemption or change, just the overwhelming avalanche of contempt. It’s bad enough that more and more people within the sector are coerced into conforming to a moral orthodoxy whether they really believe in it or not, but it’s even worse for our audiences. Outside the hothouse of the arts industry, many of the things that obsess arts people on the internet simply do not matter, and as we give over more and more of our attention to the moral optics of our work, we have less of it to give to considering the real impact and experience for our audiences.
That’s a tragedy. The transformative power of engaging with arts and culture is well documented, contributing to better mental health, longer life expectancy and dramatically improved social outcomes, including improved civic responsibility and community cohesion. In a world increasingly plagued by loneliness and isolation, the opportunity to feel welcome as part of a shared cultural experience can be literally lifesaving. The publicly subsidised arts have a responsibility to help as many people as possible reap those rewards by making it easy to engage with our work, irrespective of their political beliefs. It may feel like we have a duty to shout our moral values from the rooftops, but when doing so alienates large parts of society, denying them access to all the benefits that come from being actively engaged with arts and culture, then we should consider if we are doing more harm than good.
It should be our job to offer a model of respectful plurality. If arts spaces don’t offer a safe haven for debating genuinely diverse ideas in a civil public discourse, where will?
On Littlenose and Two-Eyes
One of my earliest memories as a kid is of my dad explaining Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs to me. He’d been reading the Littlenose books to me at bedtime, stories about the adventures of a Neanderthal boy and his pet woolly mammoth, Two-Eyes, who, in one of the stories, stumble across some cave paintings. So, my dad, being a potter with an obsession for archaeology himself, paused to show me some pictures of cave paintings in our massive and dusty family encyclopaedia. Somewhere in the conversation, we started talking about why the paintings existed, and about how prehistoric life must not have been completely desperate if people had the time, energy and motivation to paint wonderful scenes on cave walls. Learning that from their very first existence humans felt the need to make art, to communicate something important about their understanding of the world and share it with others, was a seismic shift. These weren’t people who’d been to art school or who visited museums. They weren’t trying to create a product to be consumed, worried about the rules of aesthetics or concerned with the golden ratio. They were using their innate creativity to examine the world around them and imagine how it was or might be.
From our earliest existence, the arts have been an essential way for humans to understand the world and their place in it, and to imagine how it might be better. Why then have we come to think of them as luxuries, inessential fripperies that are the preserve of the privileged few? If creative endeavour and the art it produces are such a fundamental part of who we are, how our minds work, how we make sense of life, and how we have met the biggest challenges our species has faced, why aren’t our lives filled with opportunities to make and share art?
It has been a long journey from early humanity’s wandering bands of hunter-gatherers to the complex consumer-capitalism of the modern world and, as society has developed, perhaps the needs of the individual have become more and more subordinated to the need to maintain the structure. For many of those who pause to think, life as a human in the modern world can sometimes feel like being a tiny cog in the huge and insensate machine of capitalism. Add to that the currently pervasive sense of impending doom that comes from living at the dawn of the Great Unravelling, and it can feel like we’re trapped on a runaway train hurtling towards our own demise. It’s overwhelming and disempowering, and most people simply don’t have the time, energy and motivation to imagine a better way of living. Like the flowers born to blush unseen in Grey’s Elegy, how many solutions are we missing out on and how much human potential are we wasting simply because we don’t cultivate places for it to flourish?
But that needn’t be the case. We know that regular opportunities to be creative, to make and share art of all kinds, make people feel happier and more connected to their community. We know that creativity and imagination are the root of all innovation, and that fostering the conditions for people to share new ideas is the best way to solve complex problems. We also know that if we are to not only survive, but flourish, in the Anthropocene and beyond, we are going to need to find radical solutions to the huge challenges of climate change and the related conflict, food insecurity and population displacement that it is likely to trigger. We need to find solutions we haven’t even imagined, yet at present, we’re lacking the structures to harness the full human potential for brilliance and innovation that is at our disposal, because no truly democratic space exists to nurture creativity, innovation and radical thought.
Humanity is at a tipping point, and we need art (and culture and creativity) to help us survive. With our one precious life, where best can we use our talents? Where best can we use our resources for the good? And if it’s not in making art and culture for everyone, what does that mean about the future of the human race?
And knowing that, how can any of us really think of giving up?
On staying (maybe)
My job is a special one. Our community has endured centuries of engineered hardship tantamount to cultural genocide. We have a responsibility to nurture local art and artists to ensure that thousands of years of island culture can continue to flourish. Sometimes, it feels like the odds are stacked against us and the responsibility weighs heavy. Sometimes I want to give up. But on other days, I know that this job is one of the most worthwhile things I could choose to do with my life.
I’m not the only one who feels like this.
What would we need to stay? All of us tired, disenchanted, exploited and angry people who believe that art is as necessary as breathing. What do we need to keep on trying to find the solutions to humanity’s most desperate challenge? What do we need to remember to imagine a hopeful future?
What if… we directed our resources to restructuring our arts and culture ecology to imagining better ways of being? To facilitate the democratisation of space in daily life for radical creative thought and practice? To provide resourced structures to nourish and inspire everyone to think more deeply, more generously, more openly to imagine and implement a better life for us all? What might that look like and what impact might it have? It’s a massive, naïve and potentially radical proposition, but…
What if the UK Governments passed a Culture Act, enshrining the right to access meaningful artistic and cultural experiences in Statute, much as the 1870 Education Act first enshrined the right to education?
What if there was a dedicated Creativity and Innovation Minister, focused on creating the conditions for new ideas to flourish at all levels of society? (I’d also suggest that the department’s remit was specifically for the nurturing of innovation and creativity irrespective of productivity, profitability or potential for monetisation, but even I’m not that naïve an idealist!).
What if frequent, regular and playful creative space and time for humans of all ages was woven into the fabric of education and working life, so that every one of us could benefit from the improved wellbeing that being creative brings, and develop the emotional and intellectual resources to practice thinking newly shaped thoughts? A mix of facilitated and self-directed creative opportunities to encourage people to find their own creative path.
What if there were free at the point of need creative studio space, skills sharing and collaboration networks in every neighbourhood, to normalise creative thinking and practice as part of everyday life. Artistic drop-in centres where everyone is welcome to have a go, play and create?
What if there were civic innovation forums to hold meaningful space for new ideas to be shared and debated, to democratise the means of catalysing change and encourage civil discourse and shared cultural responsibility in every community?
What if every employment contract included ring-fenced ‘creative days’ – like minimum annual leave requirements or the two weeks minimum statutory maternity leave – that every employed person must take each year? To instil a sense of creativity and artistic engagement as a right, not a privilege, across all parts of society. (This is something I’ve implemented at the organisation I lead, resulting in a noticeable upswing in staff wellbeing – and no demonstrable decline in output).
What if we changed who holds the power to make decisions about what art gets made? What would it mean to genuinely democratise who got to make, commission and fund art? Not tokenistic box ticking or paternalistic and patronising community projects, but truly giving over power? And by power, of course, I mean money.
What if, instead of deciding centrally where culture funding was spent, we gave an arts allowance to each citizen (a bit like child benefit, but only spendable on art and culture)? We’d probably learn some sharp lessons about what is really important and resonant in our communities. To some extent, it’s a naïve argument – public subsidy is important to allow artists to innovate by creating works that people can’t yet imagine and don’t yet know they want. But the thought experiment might help us find a better, more truly democratic, way to fund and make art.
What if art and culture were funded as part of a structure of citizen government and cultural enfranchisement, dedicated to fostering civil discourse and collective responsibility?
What if we restructured our cultural ecology to be fundamentally interwoven with social and healthcare aims on the broadest possible premise, that experiencing arts and cultural events makes life better for everyone?
What if we start with the audience? Begginning every programming conversations by asking “How does this enrich the audience’s life?” How can we give them one of the best nights of their life? How can we surprise and delight them? How can we make them feel joy?
What if we stopped treating theatre, and concert halls and galleries and museums like churches? No one wants to be preached at.
What if we stopped assuming every audience shares our values.
What if we focused simply on telling brilliant stories with complex meaning that resonate widely on a deeply human level?
What if we prioritise stories that focus more on joy than trauma – or at least, joy that can sit alongside trauma, modelling ways we can all find meaning and happiness despite how difficult it can be to be human? It’s easy to make people sad or angry or scared, but that’s not how to reach the best in us.
What if we dance? Sing? Even if things unravel. What if we laugh until our sides hurt and help our audiences do the same?
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