PhD Research Project

This blog is written by Josie Lena Davies, who is beginning an AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award: a PhD research project embedded in China Plate’s practice.

Many artists, and people who fund the arts, are increasingly aware of how important communities are to our creative processes. It seems clear to me that not only can communities benefit from engaging in artistic activities, but also that involving communities in the making of art benefits the art itself. However, the realities of ensuring we do this effectively and ethically are challenging.

Rewind a couple of years, and I’m in an arts job I care deeply about in my local regional theatre. It’s a small Community and Creative Learning department with big ambitions. Almost every day I get a glimpse of the positive difference theatre-making can have on people’s lives, whether or not they consider themselves to be “theatre makers”. I work regularly with theatre professionals, community groups, schools, retired adults, youth theatre and people with profound multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and get to co-create and direct joyful political theatre with people of all ages and backgrounds.

It’s rewarding but it’s also challenging: I distinctly remember the work I’m doing on the day the news breaks about the Taliban seizing power in Afghanistan. In the morning, I happen to be running a playwriting workshop with veterans, many of whom served in Afghanistan and some of which seem triggered by the headlines. The men talk about their disappointment in the UK’s response and feeling as though their service is now wasted. After lunch, I drop into an English lesson for refugees and asylum seekers with a painting activity and free theatre tickets. The group share stories, which inevitably involves fears they have for their family members who are now living under Taliban rule. Technically I’m here to engage people with theatre, but the arts activities I’ve prepared seem entirely irrelevant today. In both settings I feel uncertain of what I can offer beyond listening. And that doesn’t feel like enough.

I feel profoundly unqualified. I’m learning on the job, and frequently find myself looking for resources that don’t exist yet. There just isn’t a handbook* on How to rebuild the cultural sector after a pandemic as a theatre director with an interest in making work with community groups that largely consist of vulnerable people who actually need food and basic services more than they want to watch a play. (Granted, it’s not a catchy title.) *N.B. If that book does exist somewhere, please tell me where I can find it.

The resources I do find, I rarely have time to read. I develop my practice through trial and error (although my imposter syndrome/perfectionist tendencies drive me to unsustainable over-working in an attempt to minimise the unavoidable error). In the two and a half years I work in this job, I learn more than I could have imagined. And yet, I am still unclear on how to implement those learnings when structures don’t allow for them.

The more people I speak to, the more this seems symptomatic of the industry as a whole. The daily demands of any job too often means that we don’t have the opportunity to meaningfully reflect on what we’ve learnt, let alone document and share that learning. (And although you don’t start a career in theatre for the money, the fact that the skills and the salaries don’t match up means we are losing so much of the talent we could learn from.)

Fast-forward to about a year ago. Having flippantly (and somewhat naively) told people that if a book doesn’t exist, you have to write it yourself, I get multiple emails from different colleagues with variations on: “Here’s an opportunity that you should check out – it sounds right up your street”.

It’s an advert for a fully funded PhD, working with leading theatre producers China Plate to investigate how new modes of “co-created” practice enable communities to work together to make positive change. China Plate (a company whose work I have long admired) are offering an unprecedented level of access to their work: the researcher will get to observe artists’ work, interview stakeholders, witness the day-to-day running of the company, benefit from China Plate’s training programmes, and take part in and develop public engagement activities.

In other words, it’s exactly what I’ve been missing: time to reflect on community practice, experts to learn from, and resources to write that non-existent book that I’ve been desperate to read. Having not done a masters due to finances, a PhD feels wildly unattainable. But at this point I’m an underemployed freelancer with nothing to lose in applying…

Many applications, interviews and meetings later, and I’m now officially embarking on the research. As a theatre maker, and more recently as an academic researcher, I am starting with far more questions than answers. Some of the big ones that keep me up at night are:

• Who is community arts practice for? Is it for the artist, the funders, the communities, the PR, the good of humanity?
• What if, with the best intentions in the world, we just don’t have the knowledge or resources to get it right?
• What is the impact of artists parachuting into communities? Or perhaps more importantly, what happens when funding stops or the project wraps up – and artists parachute out? What do we leave behind?
• How do we create and measure long-term change? Should “change” even be the goal? Who decides what the change should be?
• What are our social responsibilities as artists, or indeed as humans?
• Which policies need changing to ensure we aren’t exploiting people in the pursuit of “good art”?
• How do we embed care into our work within the constraints of capitalism?
• How do we know whether we’re achieving what we set out to do?
• Do we have any right to impose art on people or is it a patronising hero complex?
• How do we centralise the knowledge? Is it possible to create toolkits or blueprints for community work?
• Where do I even start in answering any of this?
• How, as an industry, do we ensure best practice when working with communities?

It’s possible to spend careers and lifetimes grappling with these questions, so I’m relieved to have 8 years dedicated to researching them. Thankfully, I believe that China Plate – and the many communities they make work with – hold some of the answers.

You can read my research proposal below:

In 2020, Arts Council England (ACE) published their Let’s Create strategy outlining their vision for the country over the following decade. [1] It reflected and necessitated the increased focus on creatively engaging communities in the making of culture, a process that resists categorisation [2] but is widely dubbed as “co-creation”. With ACE’s investment principles effectively setting the agenda for many subsidised arts organisations, there has been an influx of co-created theatre. However, it is too often assumed that participation is inherently positive, without sufficient interrogation of ethics, community impacts, or best practice. Despite good intentions, artists are at risk of inadvertently perpetuating the very inequalities they seek to dismantle. [3]

While networks such as Co-Creating Change [4] have been established to share knowledge, China Plate’s innovative contributions to this field remain undocumented. To The Streets [5] provides a unique case study to examine the evolution of a regional community-focussed process into a commercial tour. This offers opportunities to evaluate whether capital compromises any ethics of community-led projects, and to what extent broader audience reach increases positive social impact. While the publicly funded cultural sector is an incubator for the commercial creative industries [6], co-created art is notably absent from current commercial theatre. To The Streets could demonstrate the scalability of co-creation, fundamentally shifting the relationship between subsidised and commercial sectors to better represent communities historically excluded from theatre.

My primary research question will be: ‘How do China Plate’s new modes of practice form and transform communities?’. Building on the work of Sadeghi-Yekta and Prendergast [7], I will examine the notion of service: both artistic methods of serving individual communities, and more broadly, the subsidised arts sector’s responsibilities as a public service. I will also interrogate whether theatre can move beyond “rehearsing for the revolution” [8] and enact social justice. This line of enquiry will investigate social impact, exposing questions of aesthetics, ethics and activism.[9] Observing China Plate’s processes will also enable me to analyse the extent to which participants are subjects or agents in co-created work; the benefits and tensions resulting from participatory arts; and the ways in which community engagement may enrich artistic output.

I will utilise a practice-led approach, embedding myself into China Plate’s processes through regular fieldwork. Participant-observer methods will be integral to evaluating community impacts and primary evidence will be collected through (auto)ethnographic placements. I will engage with participants, audiences, collaborators and stakeholders through semi-structured interviews, enabling me to tailor interactions while maintaining consistency for cross-analysis. The ACE Insights and Impacts Toolkit will provide a robust evaluation framework to measure quantitative data from surveys and questionnaires.

In terms of impact, this research will contribute new theoretical understandings to arts ecologies and applied theatre scholarship, aid China Plate to evaluate activities against KPIs, influence arts practice and policy, and enable practitioners to maximise positive social change in the West Midlands and beyond.

I am looking to connect with arts and community workers, activists, academics and anyone with insights on my research questions. If you’re interested in chatting, feel free to drop an email to [email protected]

You can also follow this blog, where I will be posting updates on my work.

[1] Arts Council England, Let’s Create: Strategy 2020-2030,  (Manchester 2020).
[2] Chrissie Tiller, Considering Co-Creation, Heart of Glass and Battersea Arts Centre (Arts Council England, 29 July 2021 2021).
[3] Marit Dewhurst, “An Inevitable Question: Exploring the Defining Features of Social Justice Art Education,” Art Education 63, no. 5 (2010/09/01 2010), https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2010.11519082; Caroline Wake, “To Witness Mimesis: The Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Testimonial Theatre in Through the Wire,” Modern drama 56, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.3138/md.2012-0465.
[4] “Co-Creating Change,” Battersea Arts Centre, http://www.cocreatingchange.org.uk.
[5] China Plate are developing To The Streets! with a view to producing a full stage version of the musical in 2026.
[6] England, Short Let’s Create: Strategy 2020-2030, 42.
[7] Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta and Monica Prendergast, Applied Theatre: Ethics, ed. Michael Balfour, Applied Theatre, (Great Britain: Methuen Drama, 2022).
[8] Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Pluto Press, 2019), 106, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bham/reader.action?docID=5731445&ppg=1.
[9] Helen Nicholson, “On ethics,” Research in drama education 10, no. 2 (2005), https://doi.org/10.1080/13569780500103414. Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics, ed. Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato, Theatre&, (London: Methuen Drama, 2009); Ridout, Theatre & Ethics.