OAUK visited Out There Festival in Great Yarmouth last week and ran networking and professional events for our members and sector delegates. Friday morning kicked off with OAUK Director Sho Shibata chairing a roundtable discussion between 40+ attendees. Joe Mackintosh, Chief Executive of Out There Arts, delivered an opening speech about international collaboration as a prelude to Fresh Street coming to Great Yarmouth in May 2025. Fresh Street is a Pan-European Street Arts conference that takes place every four years. This is a write up of some key points raised at the event.
Out There Festival is in its 16th edition this year, and Joe’s speech outlined the importance of European Union funding in kick starting and growing the festival into what it is today. Between 2008 and 2020, Out There delivered 22 multimillion EU funded projects. It enabled them to work with over 75 organisations across Europe, facilitating almost 1,000 UK and European artists working across borders. In the early part of Out There, the level of investment it received was crucial in building the infrastructure to present high-quality Outdoor Arts and Circus in Great Yarmouth. The high point was 2014 when Out There was managing a budget of €500,000 for enabling artists to work internationally. That year, Out There brought in 67 companies to the festival, where 32 of them came from Europe and beyond.
Great Yarmouth has multiple areas of high deprivation due to historic underinvestment and difficult geographic access. Out There used the town’s historic status as a leisure destination with deep roots in Circus (the town is known for its Victorian Circus venue) and attracted EU funding to develop a festival that has successfully reinvigorated the town. The festival makes substantial impact on the local economy, too. The local paper The Mercury reported in 2022 that Out There contributed £3.1 million.
Despite it being cold and windy, the May 2024 edition brought in a large crowd and there was a palpable sense of joy and celebration. It was evident that the local community has developed a great appreciation of contemporary Circus and Street Arts too, thanks to consistent and ambitious audience development strategy. Out There regularly attracts 60,000+ audiences over a weekend annually. Cultural engagement from underserved communities is booming in Yarmouth at a time when the nearby Norwich Theatre released a report in the same week: One in four British people have never attended a theatrical performance. Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play also announced this week that they are having to do a pay-what-you-can lottery scheme in a bid to remove financial barriers to theatre.
Although the 2024 festival had a good number of international acts, Joe highlighted that UK losing access to EU Culture funding has made international collaboration much more difficult. The cooperative development grants like interreg were particularly high value and enabled much less restrictive exchanges of artists and festival personnel. Not having access to these funding pots have hugely dampened European appetite to work with UK festivals and artists.
Attendees of the discussion also shared their ongoing concern of UK artists touring in Europe, with cabotage and differing visa and export restrictions hampering the ease of movement for artists, crew, and equipment. There is increasing concern too that the reduction of the British Council’s capacity will further damage the UK Arts’ competitiveness in the international market. Organisations like Catalan Arts are fantastic at subsidising and promoting artists in Catalonia to export their work, and South Korea are increasingly getting better at this, which is highlighted by a recent report on soft power by the University of Arts London.
Soft power promotion is becoming very ad hoc and less impactful without a proper international cultural strategy and funding. Individual British Embassies piggybacking on prominent companies who happen to be touring in their countries for example, is not helpful in representing our country’s true potential. One of the attendees of the OAUK roundtable discussion highlighted that diversity is what makes contemporary British Arts distinctive and exciting, but without a cohesive strategy, less diverse organisations will dominate the international market because they have historically had better opportunities to resource their work. Great Britain is missing a trick if it’s only telling half of our story.
The need for these issues to be addressed is only growing, and the hope of the Outdoor Arts sector is that Fresh Street 2025 in Great Yarmouth will boost our collective voice to champion better working environment for international exchange. Internationalism is crucial for diversifying income, enhancing local impact, and to make sure that British Arts remains a beacon of diversity and inclusion on the global scene.
-Sho Shibata, OAUK Director
