A month in the life of an ACE worker

TOMMY BEAVITT reports on the stresses, strains and ultimate satisfactions in helping mount the Wester Ross Festival – even if it did turn much of the month into one big blur of activity.

WORKING AS the Arts in the Community Enabler (ACE worker) for Ross-shire for the Highland Festival has been an incredibly rewarding and learning experience for me, ever since I started the position in April 2003. The ACE Worker position is funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation which, as well as paying for my wages, also provides me with a commissioning budget to be spent on developing local art and artists.

Although the stresses of the part time position are equal to or greater than many full-time jobs I have done before, it has been eye-opening (to say the least) to see what the production work that takes place behind the scenes of arts events entails. I think that every artist should do a compulsory spell of production work before they are allowed into the marketplace!

Early September …

September has been a big month for me. Although I had the benefit of being part of the Highland Festival team during the 2003 Festival in June, I was mainly playing a supporting role to the full-time Highland Festival staff. The bulk of my time since has been spent preparing for the 2nd Wester Ross Festival, consisting of events in communities from Applecross to Ullapool on the weekend of 12-14 September.

The month began off the back of the Assynt Crofters Trust 10th Anniversary Celebration, Fling in the Fank. Jan Robinson, my assistant coordinator at Wester Ross Events, and I had been asked to step in at fairly short notice to project manage the Fling.

Despite certain misgivings about the amount of time it would take out of the Wester Ross Festival we decided to go ahead. Two main reasons behind this decision were to (a) get used to the event management roles and (b) to gain invaluable ancillary income for the Wester Ross Events.

The first Wester Ross Festival had ended up with a deficit, which was temporarily resolved by a long-term, interest-free loan by a private individual. In order to pay this money back it was agreed by the Wester Ross Events committee to hire our project management skills to other projects. The Assynt event seemed like the golden opportunity to put this principle into practice.

As it turned out, the Fling was a resounding success. The music event we were primarily involved with was associated with a land reform conference. Both events took place in an enormous tent on Stoer Green, the conference during the day and the music in the evenings. There was a ceilidh on Thursday and Saturday nights and a concert/dance on the Friday headlined by the Peatbog Faeries.

The event management brief consisted of liaising with suppliers and artists, resolving licensing issues, working with volunteer groups to prepare the site and man the event, and being present throughout the event in a site management capacity.

The great thing about the Fling was the degree of community involvement it gained. This made a huge difference to the smooth running of the event itself. The nature of one-off or annual events is such that no matter how well planned they are, contingencies tend to arise and having local people available to help resolve them is invaluable. The local commitment to hosting the event helped with the marketing effort too. There is a lot of media interest in the Assynt Crofters for obvious reasons, but the local marketing was of greater significance in determining the overall success of the event.

No sooner was I back in Ross-shire than the Wester Ross Festival preparations resumed in earnest. Normally I try to document all my professional activities as I perform them, but a glance at my electronic calendar for this period reveals an embarrassing paucity of information! There simply wasn’t time to write it all down.

Although consisting of fairly small discrete community events, the Wester Ross Festival project is big and complex. We needed to ensure that the event received the marketing coverage it deserved, and despite printing and distributing nearly 10,000 colour posters and leaflets, building a comprehensive website, obtaining editorial coverage in the main local newspapers with four separate press releases, email and local marketing, the effort still seemed to fall short of what was required.

One of our chief criticisms has been our apparent failure to publicise the event. The key element to marketing a community arts event is to generate a “buzz” on the ground and where this was achieved it was almost entirely the result of efforts by local Wester Ross Events committee members for their own communities.

Dealing with performing artists may seem a glamorous activity but the reality of it is that artists are generally too caught up in their own creative processes to have much of an appreciation of what is going on around them. I should know – I am one!

In order for them to show up they must be contracted and the specification of that contract can vary enormously. Some prefer to send their own contracts to the promoter; others expect the promoting organization to send them out. As a general rule, except for the really major events, contracts are signed late, and so a lot depends on trust levels between promoter and artist/agent. These are extremely susceptible to pre-event jitters!

Wester Ross is a large and diverse area involving some long distance travel. I seemed to spend half my time in my van driving between different communities and the Highland Festival Office in Inverness. My hand-free telephone set became my most valuable friend, and I developed a fine understanding of the locations where an Orange mobile signal can be found!

My laptop computer sat permanently on the passenger seat and I would often pull to the side of the road to enter or retrieve some piece of information from my database. We had additional organizations assisting us in our various activities but, with the best will in the world, things get forgotten, and sometimes it felt like swimming through treacle as I attempted to catch up with things that had not gone according to plan.

These failures were almost all due to breakdowns in communication or an insufficient realization of the under-resourcing problem that is such a constant feature in managing any project in the West Highlands.

As the event itself approached things actually seemed to calm down a little bit. As the timings tighten one finds oneself working to the limits of one’s capacity and so there is no time left for stress!

Friday 12 September

On a wet and windy night I found myself driving between Kinlochewe and Applecross four times ferrying artists and equipment between the respective locations. We managed to get the lights and sound equipment set up in the Applecross Village Hall about ten minutes before the doors opened!

Later that evening I drove to Kinlochewe Village Hall, where they had had a great night with the Fergie Macdonald Ceilidh Band and Rumba Caliente. There were musicians to drive to Gairloch and door takings to be accounted for. We finally collapsed in a Gairloch hotel apartment at about 3:30am.

Saturday 13 September

The next morning, I awoke to a full gale together with a fine drizzle beating on the window. For some reason it always seems to be like that on Saturday mornings in Gairloch! I got together some breakfast for the band whose accommodation I was sharing and then got on the road. I needed to get to Poolewe in time for the Eliza Carthy afternoon concert and then on to Ullapool for a street carnival parade and a concert with Mr McFall’s Chamber in the Village Hall. To boost our funds, Wester Ross Events had applied for an occasional alcohol licence, and I needed to buy the booze from the local Safeway.

I managed to catch the beginning of the parade. With a sultry evening sky and puffs of extremely warm wind buffeting the children, teenagers and adults as they made their way along Shore Street, it really was a stunning audio-visual spectacle. Then it was off to the Village Hall where we needed to set up lighting, stock the bar and set out the seating in time for the beginning of the concert.

The concert by Mr McFall’s Chamber featuring Valentina Martinez and Gallo Ceron was really fantastic. Several audience members were moved to tears and the programme of tango and nueva cantion had attracted several members of the local Latin American community.

Sunday 14 September

The next day was the last day of the festival and began with me running around after some very relaxed artists to ensure that their needs were being taken care of. It is no exaggeration to state that at times being an Arts Enabler feels like being the personal manservant of as many artists as are involved in one’s project. As one wag put it, ‘there’s no business like showbusiness’, and I think that this might have been what he or she was referring to. There is no other business in which at times it seems one is obliged to pay more attention to the needs of the product than to those of the customer!

The last night of the Festival took place on Scoraig peninsula and as it was my own community I had a particular interest in it going well. Considering that it was the first licensed public event that had ever taken place in Scoraig, the gig at Nigel’s Shed went remarkably smoothly. There WERE plenty of last minute details to be taken care of but by some miracle these fitted well into the available time frame so that the event started more or less on schedule. By the time the second act had come on I had relaxed to the extent that I could actually enjoy the performances! I slept that night on a hay bale under a tarpaulin in case there were any incidents after everyone had gone home. Fortunately there were none.

The Aftermath …

The rest of the month has consisted largely of resolving various residual financial and artist-ego problems stemming from the Wester Ross Festival. The support of the Highland Festival team has been invaluable here. There is also the matter of several reports that require to be written…

And the future …

In a couple of weeks I will be moving on, having been offered a place on HiWide’s broadband team. I will miss working in the Arts and will no doubt find myself back in this sphere again at some point. I wish my successor every success. If there is one lesson I have learned in the 5 months as ACE worker it is that community arts events cannot be forced onto reluctant communities but should probably only ever be attempted in communities where committed individuals with good communications skills are prepared to put their own local reputations on the line to run with those arts ideas that can have such a profound socially transformative effect.

© Tommy Beavitt, 2003