Remembering What It’s All About

KATHY HUBBARD reports on some goings on in Shetland guaranteed to brighten up a hard-pressed administrator’s day.

YESTERDAY I was idly wondering which whinge-of-the-day I could pontificate upon for this article – funding reductions, organisational restructurings, political interference in the arts – the usual tired menu.

But I’ve just come out of a Youth Theatre dress rehearsal and I want to celebrate instead.  The politics and the dwindling resources may be ready to fall on my head like the sky on Chicken Licken, but every now and then I get to remember what makes working in the arts such a fantastic way to earn a living.

Youth theatre does that for me, amongst other things.  The opportunity to be involved in something truly creative, to watch young people develop from the shy twelve-year-olds who prefer to hang about at the back of the crowd scenes, to the confident teenagers whose performances can genuinely move you to tears or to laughter is a privilege not to be equaled. 

Shetland Youth Theatre is currently rehearsing ‘Lunch in Venice’ by Nick Dear for the NT/Shell International Connections programme, and it did my old heart good to watch them acting their socks off, tumbling, dancing, leaping about the stage. In fact, so entranced was this desk-bound administrator that she even forgot to worry about the risk assessment for the ‘ten-person human pyramid with fiddler playing violin at the top’.  I just allowed myself to feel inspired instead.

Back at the office, more to celebrate: a fifteen-year-old’s voice has knocked them sideways at Celtic Connections; a man in his eighties has cut his first CD; the pride you see in someone’s face when they catch sight of their poem or story in a published book or magazine for the first time; a fantastic textile artist just arrived to work in schools for the next four months; eleven young bands get to work with Rockschool and they’re so excited and enthused that we can’t get them to go home at the end of a long weekend’s training; a stunning exhibition of Inuit art at the Bonhoga Gallery; all this and so much more to smile about.

“I want to celebrate all artists of whatever age or interest, who put the joy into life”

Flailing about from day to day amongst the Cultural Strategies, the Community Plans, the Community Learning Strategies, the evaluation and monitoring forms, the grant reclaims and the VAT returns, you can be forgiven for failing to remember what it’s all about sometimes. 

All the meetings, budget discussions and grant applications (especially those lovely European Fund ones) that sap the morale and ingenuity of the most determined positivist can be wiped from your mental slate in an instant when you see a project come together and really work.

Some get their kicks from champagne, as the song says; I get mine from helping out in the special effects department (“Right, how will we do ‘getting your brains blown out’? Hmmm. How about tagliatelle and cochineal ….”) or from sitting with seven year olds making models for their own animation film, or from the barely suppressed anarchy that characterizes a poetry slam (or ‘poetry skelp’, as it’s known up here); or watching an audience spontaneously start to dance because the music just insists that they should.

So I want to celebrate all artists of whatever age or interest, who put the joy into life; and to celebrate the staff who regularly work way, way beyond their contracted hours to help deliver an arts service to the public; the volunteers who help make it all happen with not much more than a free bag of chips at the end of the night for their efforts; the funders who risk their money with us and trust us to deliver; and the audiences who could stay at home and watch the telly but who choose to come out in all weathers to give of their time and money. 

I hope that all of you had a very Happy Easter.

Kathy Hubbard is Projects Manager of Shetland Arts Trust

© Kathy Hubbard, 2005