Review of Book entitled Urban Backstages

There is an interesting book in the library on performance spaces called Urban Backstages, ed Cecily Chua, Labeja Kodua Okullu, Marta  Michalowska, Publ Theatrum Mundi, 2021.  A beautifully presented hard backed book with an orange cover with green text and green logo on.  Plain green pages inside covers. Green and orange text on white. 

As we have to design an outside performance space for the North Place site, I thought that it was interesting to just glance through this. Backstages in Urban Backstages appears to be used as a loose term as the spaces discussed are not just performance spaces but more widely creative spaces where communities produce and sell goods or art forms.  Provide work for locals or support to the homeless.  Develop local creative initiatives or develop local people.  On the back cover, it gives a definition of the understanding in the book expressed as The Urban Backstage. "The behind the scenes counterpart of The Urban Stage, the public facing cultural sites, largely aimed at national and international tourists and visitors, such as monuments, museums, galleries and theatres, where culture is consumed and displayed as the 'urban stage.' 'Urban backstage'. . "includes both the hidden spaces where cultural production, experimentation and rehearsals take place and the underlying conditions that underpin these activities. The urban backstage is made up of invisible networks, relationships and labour that exist out of public view in our cities, producing 'everyday' cultures which are vital in fostering and cultivating a shared cultural identity and sense of belonging in our urban spaces." This book aims to amplify the voices, stories and experiences of artists, performers, makers, designers, craftspeople, fabricators, cafe owners and those running small businesses that support cultural production locally." Through this "the image of the city emerges from the activity and cultural expressions of its inhabitants rather than being imposed by national, regional, citywide or local policies and plans developed by public and private bodies and authorities." It reminds me of the saying, "People Make Places."

The introductory essay is on The zero-sum game of cultural infrastructure by Richard Sennett.

Richard Sennett introduces the topic by stating that "there is a kind of zero-sum game at work in culture, just as in investment banking: what the elite gains, the mass loses." It gives an example of what happened in the city of Hamburg. "It spent a decade and over 700 million Euros on building the Elbphilharmonie concert hall, a vast project jutting out into the port of the city.  The structure has successfully attracted tourists from around the world and global-brand musicians, but there's no money left in the city's coffers for support of youth orchestras, or for studios in which young artists can work, or for the semi-professional choirs which once fanned out over the Hanseatic North."

It can be determined that Cheltenham has several successful festivals during the year and that there are lot of established venues and gardens in use for these festivals.  There is no need it would appear to invest in a massive new structure.  The Centaur at the Racecourse is probably the newest large venue to come to Cheltenham.  Currently, a good system of using businesses such as pubs and sometimes restaurants within the town plus official venues such as the Town Hall is in operation.  This also benefits local businesses.

Cheltenham is probably in a unique and confident position to open and sustain a new medium sized performance space but still a study would be made to look into the need for this bearing in mind current facilities and demand.

The book Urban Spaces, outlines that the way to get out of a zero sum game is to invest "more in producers and less in distributors.  Moreover, we need  to think about how to encourage communities of practitioners, not focus only on individual artists.  The writer William Empson once declared 'the arts result from overcrowding,' meaning that a community of people who do different things, speak in different voices, will interact, competing and conspiring, and so energise one another. This was the case in the early days of the tech revolution in places like Silicon Valley outside San Francisco or Nehru Place in Delhi.  Such community building is the model we should use in funding the arts." I wondered if the Bloomsbury Group, the Dymock Poets, and the Romantic Movement on a small scale were examples of dynamic communities where people came together and sparked one another and competed.  Or the Punk Movement which like the Romantic Movement was international.

Richard Sennett states that in addition to encouraging communities of practitioners, when he chaired the urban studies committee at UNESCO he wondered "how investment in our world Heritage sites could help them become tourist beacons while serving local communities." "Our solution was partial: in places  which required restoration local artists got the work, and the sites became places for educational programmes on history and heritage but that does not grapple with the issue of building new or being big. Instead of the Elbphilharmonie model, how could a concert hall be designed for programmes small as well as big? How could it be integrated into the everyday working lives of artists in the city?"

 Cheltenham although part of the Cotswolds AONB is not a UNESCO site. Cheltenham does have a cultural importance in Gloucestershire and a good track record in the provision of the arts. Experience from UNESCO sites is worth a reflection. It seems helpful that the North Place performance space is a medium sized venture.  This does promote a feeling of intimacy in a space.

Sennett continues that big museums are instructed that their 'public' "should consist of makers as well as visitors: How can a museum service the needs of creators for the community? Creative work, like scientific research, entails a good deal of frustration and failure.  How should we support - that is, invest in - this necessary dark side of the creative process?"

Case Studies in the book are accompanied by diagrammatic depictions of the backstages. "In London we focused on how the railway arch in Elephant and Castle had been adapted and reused by three very different cultural producers. (Maldonado Walk is home to eight railway arches inhabited by a cluster of businesses run by the Latin American diaspora. . . Spare Street is a new workspace facility for artists and creative entrepreneurs . .and occupies five arches: rents from hotdesking space and private offices subsidise studio spaces for artists, designer-makers and creative start ups.  Robert Dashwood Way is a business park established in 1970.  It contains a stretch of fifteen arches accommodating light industrial trades.")  In Glasgow, the post-industrial Barras Market gave us a mix of buildings to explore: industrial warehouses and vacant retail units, all home to a diverse mix of initiatives, from grassroots community-run projects to established creative workspace providers. (Many studios offers forty-five workspaces to a community of over sixty people, from visual artists and designers to writers and engineers." "The Space is Scotland's first pay-what-you-decide community arts venue.  It offers creative workspace, rehearsal rooms, community-focused social activities, and support for the local homeless population."  "The Barras East End studios is a collective of former market traders," producing own goods on site)."  Marseille has culture led regeneration "which is not embodied in any single neighbourhood." (Coco Velten is a hybrid space that offers affordable workspace for artists and non-profit organisations alongside emergency housing for the homeless. Rue Leon Bourgeois is a narrow residential street with a cluster of small workshops in the garage spaces at the back. Some have been  renovated as office spaces for small businesses in the creative industries, while others retain light industrial uses. KLAP Maison pour la danse opened in 2011."  Formerly a dairy shed "it was adapted into three purpose-built studio spaces for choreographic production, largely through an artist residency model, as well as spaces for some community-oriented education activities".

In addition to these three cities, Paris is also included. The book has five essays and the fourth of these entitled, Invisible Cities, by Fani Kostourou gives a comparative discussion on architecture and urban design production and policies in the areas of the Elephant and Castle, London and La Goutte d'Or Paris.  It reveals the invisible networks and infrastructures supporting creative communities, workspaces, and local economies, uncovering lessons one city can learn  from another.

The other essays are entitled, The Sensorial as Infrastructure: Making Pandebono by Andrea Cetrulo, Elahe Kariminia , and John Bingham-Hall - borrows the recipe for pandebono, a traditional Colombian pastry, and uses it both as a portal to a faraway home and a tool  for dealing with uprootedness, homesickness and alienation. The pandebono becomes a recipe for survival, its changing ingredients telling a  story of migration, resourcefulness and adaptability.  I would hope that the provision of international food at the North Place development would bring communities together in a similar way. provide a job for whoever has to cook the food and sell it.  Even if only from a van. Even better if some provision for cooking and/or eating together could be provided at a subsidised cost.  The Philippino Community in Cheltenham is quite large and enjoy sharing food as do many of our communities.

The essay, The Medusa Effect by Cecily Chua draws  on Barras Market "stories from the market traders and makers who have lived and worked there for decades. resisting the decline and regeneration of their neighbourhood.  The essay argues for a new definition on what 'cultural heritage' can be.

The essay Flexibility in Cultural Production by Elahe Karminia interrogates different readings of what flexibility is and can be" . . . "It focuses on what flexibility means to cultural producers, particularly those whose practices exist at the margins, too noisy, messy or movement based to fit neatly into the sanitised co-working environments where creativity rarely ventures beyond the computer screen." She reveals "flexibility" as more than just a "buzzword linked to creative co-working spaces."

The final essay "What's the Worth of It All?":by John Bingham-Hall, -. ."explores the value of culture from different perspectives and applies different scales from central government to individual cultural producers - the protagonist of this essay- that make and maintain the urban backstage."