An Arts Resource for Scotland

We asked JOHN DURNIN, the new artistic director at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, for his manifesto for the theatre.

PITLOCHRY FESTIVAL THEATRE is a unique organisation: its rural location, its repertoire system, its ensemble company (the largest in Scotland), its distinctive programming tradition and its incredibly high production standards ensure that. Collectively, these strengths have helped to build a substantial and loyal audience base that is drawn from all across Scotland and beyond.
 
Central to our current thinking at the theatre, however, is the ambition to use these strengths and traditions to develop PFT into an accessible and genuine arts resource for Scotland and the UK, while retaining this historical core function as a high quality producer and presenter. The labelling of arts organisations as local, regional or national resources can often be misleading or simply inaccurate. At PFT, we mean it – and we’re rolling out one of the most ambitious and distinctive development programmes ever pursued by a UK producing arts venue to prove it.

What kind of resource will PFT become? One that places a range of art forms at the heart of an informative, educative, practical experience; one that offers both a passive and an active experience of live arts; one that offers development to practising industry professionals, learning to the broader public and training for younger people with an appetite for the arts; and one that offers a variety of different spaces and environments to foster such experiences, from the Festival Theatre mainhouse to the Scottish Plant Hunters Garden to our new Yurt, the summertime home for our Community and Education programme.

The key to this process of reinvention – and to our parallel programmes of audience development and repertoire development – has been the identification of participatory activity as the central plank of an overarching development strategy. During the last year, we’ve trialled a range of cross-artform initiatives designed to encourage collaborative and participatory activity at every level.

An Active Arts programme now runs 12 months a year, focusing on visual arts, creative writing, performance practice, contemporary crafts and music. We’ve just launched the HiPer project, an outreach youth dance and drama programme for Highland Perthshire led by our new Community and Education Director, Colette McLaughlin.

Explorers, the Scottish Plant Hunters Garden, which has just opened to the public on the hillside above the theatre, will not just function as a botanical collection, but as a living history facility, supported by a programme of site-specific theatre, visual art exhibitions, workshops and Master classes.

And within the next two years, a series of new training and professional development programmes for Scotland’s theatre sector will be unveiled, which will complete PFT’s transformation into a learning resource and a skills development facility, while continuing its tradition as a producer of diverse, internationalist, large-scale theatre of the highest quality.

So to be PFT’s Artistic Director at this point in its history is quite a thrill, as well as a challenge. My background is pretty diverse – mainstream producing theatre, community arts, film programming, site-specific production, performance training, multi-arts practice – and I never thought that just one organisation would be able to call on all those very different skills and experiences at the same time. But PFT is doing just that: so much for the (false) impression that some still have of PFT as a rather quaint relic from the 1950s. And on top of all this, I still get to play with this wonderful, huge ensemble of actors, programme big, rich, entertaining plays and work with some of the best creative teams in the UK. Can’t be bad, can it?

© John Durnin, 2004