MINUTES OF
INDEPENDENT ARTISTS’ SURVIVAL SUMMIT
BRISTOL OLD VIC
18.10.25
An Artist Forum event at Bristol Old Vic for independent artists was held a day after the announcement of the closure of MAYK.
Hosted by Caroline Williams (Associate Artist, Bristol Old Vic) and Gemma Paintin (Co-director, Action Hero).
The event was held due to the increasing difficulty of getting contemporary performance made and/or presented in Bristol.
ACT I
ARE WE IN AN EXTINCTION EVENT?
‘ Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.’ – Carl Sagan.
GP: Perhaps the plane has already crashed. We have survived and we are picking through the wreckage. What do we do now?
Time Travel:
It’s 2010 – you want to make a new piece of contemporary work in Bristol. Tell me what you do?
GP: I have conversations with the two festivals presenting contemporary work in the city: In Between Time and Mayfest. I approach Arnolfini, Ferment and the Wickham, who all have regular programmes showcasing experimental work. I get free support from Theatre Bristol, who input on the ambition of the project. I have a strong relationship with my relationship manager from the Arts Council and have an almost 100% success rate with Project Grants so I feel I can rely on that support.
It’s 2025 – what do you do now?
GP: Mayfest and In Between Time have gone. Theatre Bristol is closed. The Bristol Old Vic’s emphasis on new writing excludes most people making devised experimental work. Ferment is gone, as is Arnolfini’s programme. Project grants has become unsustainably competitive and our success rate is increasingly low. We have to look outside of Bristol if we have any hope of getting work made.
CW: I wasn’t in Bristol in 2010. I was in London learning my trade through Young Vic Director’s Programme (now closed). I had a 100% success rate with the Arts Council. I felt like ACE were my employer – I was reliant on them to make my work happen. Everything Gemma has described in Bristol in 2010 is why I moved here. It was a place I felt I could make work and have it presented. I was lucky that proved to be the case and I loved the community of experimental artists I fell into. Many who are in this room now: Tom Marshman, Sleepdogs, Jo Bannon and Raquel Messengeur. I was produced by MAYK. In 2025, so much of what gave us a home has now gone. There is very little opportunity to make experimental work, let alone scale up in the city. And similarly I have had an unprecedented number of unsuccessful Arts Council grants over the last three years.
GROUP EXERCISE:
People got into groups and asked each other the same question – time travel between 2010 and 2025 – what do you feel has changed?
TRUTH IS POWER
“A man should look at what is and not what should be.” Albert Enstein
Caroline and Gemma shared their fact-finding mission.
GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT
CW: I’m going to start by reading you an article written a few months ago by Jack Gamble, Director of the Campaign for the Arts.
A few words too to put into the space before I read it:
Brexit, austerity, global unrest, a cost of living crisis.
In July 2024, Labour won the general election, inheriting a crisis in the UK’s culture sector and promising ‘arts for the people and by the people’.
One year on, Jack Gamble, Director of the Campaign for the Arts, asks: has the government delivered?
‘Labour’s first year has been hit and miss for the arts, with rather more misses than might have been expected from their pre-election pledge to put the arts ‘at the centre of a new, hopeful, modern story of Britain’.
Let’s start with the positives. Labour’s 10-year industrial strategy, published last month, homes in on the creative industries as one of eight priority sectors for the UK government. It reaffirms a commitment to give every child in England a high-quality creative education. More strongly than was the case in the last government’s strategy, it explicitly acknowledges the importance of the interconnected ‘creative ecosystem’ and the public investment underpinning it.
But what of that public investment? There were some worrying signs at Labour’s first Budget last October (2024), when the Chancellor said there would be real-terms cuts to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and that she was ‘minded to cancel’ £100m of cultural infrastructure investment (as it turned out, two-thirds of this is going ahead).
There was better news at the ‘Jennie Lee Lecture’ at the RSC in February, when the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy announced a £270m Arts Everywhere Fund for 2025-26 (of which about £110m was brand new, mostly capital investment). ‘Everyone deserves the chance to be touched by art’, she said, quoting the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. ‘Everyone deserves access to moments that light up their lives.’
But concerning numbers of artists and cultural organisations are struggling to keep the lights on. Employers’ National Insurance has gone up, while business rates relief has gone down. Some extra support for running costs has been earmarked for national and civic museums – but not for the nearly 1000 cultural organisations funded by Arts Council England, over half of which are now in a ‘precarious financial position’ according to a recent Artquest survey. Last month’s Spending Review signalled yet more real-terms cuts to the DCMS over the coming years, despite an increase in overall public spending.
Plenty of Labour’s ministers seem to genuinely love the arts and care about public access to them. But those same ministers are planning to spend well over a third less per citizen on Culture, Media and Sport by 2029 compared with 2010, and that will have consequences.
ARTS COUNCIL
GP: On June 11th, the Chancellor delivered the government’s Spending Review, in which she set out departmental budgets through to March 2029.
Spending on culture, media and sport will be reduced by 1.4% (£118m) between now and 2029.
As we already said, these planned cuts mean that by 2029, the government is projected to be spending well over a third less per citizen on Culture, Media & Sport in real terms, compared with 2010.
So how does this affect the Arts Council?
On Project Grants and DYCP Chief Executive of the Arts Council said:
At the moment, our planned budget for this year is the same as last year. But things can change as we go, so we will continue to review our budgets in-year depending on National Lottery trading in the coming months. Levels of National Lottery income are always variable as they depend entirely on the number of tickets and scratchcards sold on a daily basis. In the past, we’ve been able to smooth out the spending line across years by drawing on our reserves, but at present, we are more reliant on in-year National Lottery income. This is because we are continuing to rebuild our reserves, after drawing heavily on them during the pandemic.
Developing Your Creative Practice funding also saw a significant boost over the Covid period, when we moved money from our reserves into the fund to support individual artists – and today, the size of the fund remains far above pre-Covid levels. Our intention is to retain Developing Your Creative Practice funding at the current, higher baseline.
CW: So not terrible news – yet – so this can’t account for why it all feels so hard right now. So what else is going on?
Eddie De Souza, Director Investment Operations and Resources said this in an interview about DYCP and Project Grants in June 2025.
These funds are incredibly popular, which we’re glad about! But since the pandemic, where our Emergency Response Fund and government’s Culture Recovery Fund brought more applicants to us than ever before, these funds have become even more popular.
While we invest as much as we can each year, we now have more applications than ever before, and as the costs of producing work have gone up and other funding is harder to come by, the average amount of funding people are requesting has also increased, particularly for Project Grants.
This has had an impact on success rates –1 in 3 for Project Grants and 1 in 5 for DYCP.
When we were talking to artists, one of the main take-aways is how the cost of living has increased the money you need to ask for and even if you do get the golden ticket, hotels, travel etc. cost more than ever and there’s a general feeling of not being able to look after the people you’ve hired well enough because there’s just not enough money to do that. Or if you do put the correct numbers in your bid, the actual cost of looking after everyone is so huge it feels unrealistic and only very established companies who are going to reach a lot of audiences would ever be awarded those kinds of numbers. So people feel stuck.
NPOs
GP: Some headlines on National Portfolio Organisations from a survey in May 2025 by Artquest.
- Standstill funding since 2010 means NPO grants have lost 58% of their value. Even those organisations who joined the portfolio in 2023 will have lost 17% of their grant by value to inflation by the end of this funding round in 2028.
- 93% of all NPOs have tried to increase their income since 2023, but
- As a result, 62% of NPO leaders feel more stressed than 12 months ago, while 51% are taking less leave and 69% are working longer unpaid hours. They’re having to ask their artists to put in ACE funding to make ambitious or any projects happen. And some, sadly, are being forced into closure entirely…
BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL
CW: Last year Bristol City Council (BCC) announced significant cuts to its culture budget, with 15 organisations losing funding completely.
Both Watershed and Bristol Old Vic lost their funding. From Clare Reddington, CEO of Watershed :
“We’d already cut ourselves to shreds, it wasn’t like there was loads of fat in the system. If you try to build ambitious new things and then the funding runs out, the community, skills and experience you’ve brought together start to drift away. For us, the challenge is: we would rather be making art, supporting artists, engaging with communities. But what we’re doing is thinking about profit and fundraising.”
Bristol Old Vic lost it too. Charlotte Geeves, former exec producer here, said the organisation is “doing more with less”, expanding its outreach work with schools and doing longer runs of fewer individual shows.
“If we continue being in a loss-making position, that will impact the shows we can do, but also the activity we can do across the whole city.”
And with Arts Council funding that isn’t rising with inflation so increased costs aren’t being covered – the £1.25m ACE allocation for this building has been frozen since 2012 – if it had kept pace with inflation, it would be £1.742m. On top of local authority funding cuts from central government, buildings start to run at a significant loss.
Last month Bristol City Council announced even more cuts over the next two years and some worrying language about how they’ll ‘honour’ the money they owe.
All this tightening of the belts of course affects independent artists.
Established companies who are partnered with two or three organisations, NPOs, are for the first time having to put Project Arts bids in to make tours or ambitious productions happen because venues can’t cover costs.
Imagine sitting in front of somebody working in a building here pitching your idea and they’re carrying all of the above. Or applying to the Arts Council who’d love to fund your excellent project but are oversubscribed and have to choose between your development or sharing of a new experimental work versus a project involving two large NPOs that’s confirmed to reach thousands of people – how do you compete? As with so much within a capitalist system, commercial ventures win, art for art’s sake loses. Risk loses.
So to sum up:
The government is stretched after a pandemic/15 years of austerity/Brexit and isn’t prioritising investment in the arts, which means DCMS has less to give, which means Arts Council England can’t grow to meet demand. Local authorities also shrink and cut arts funding during a cost of living crises. For artists the cost of living / cost of making work continues to rise. Add to that a bloated over-subscribed post-pandemic Project Grants and DYCP fund. Add to that venues and organisations who’ve lost local authority funding and haven’t had ACE funding that aligned with rates of inflation since 2012. They have rising costs in energy bills along and can’t fund artists like they used to do. So the big dogs are hitting up the Project Grants pot and suddenly you’re in nothing short of a resource scarcity.
We are all trying to get to the watering hole but there’s not a lot of water and so you may end up… maybe… in an extinction event. Not all of us, who would have survived when the hole was full, can now survive.
ACT II
IT’S NOT PERSONAL, UNTIL IT IS
CW& GP read out words from other companies who answered these three questions:
- Do you agree that it’s a particularly hard time in the Arts to get work made, and if so, in what ways?
- What changes or strategies has your company put in place to survive?
- What would you say to someone struggling today to make work?
——
Tom Marshman:
Yes, it’s a very difficult time to get work made. Government funding has been reduced, and there are far too many bureaucratic systems in place that take up artists’ time. Instead of being creative, many of us end up becoming administrators, constantly negotiating systems that don’t really work especially if you’re neurodiverse. There are fewer artists who can simply be their authentic selves, because we’re all expected to present ourselves through a certain professionalised language or code that often feels inauthentic.
I’ve started focusing on writing non-fiction and applying for more opportunities outside of my normal art form – it’s become a numbers game. I’m also reducing accommodation costs and focusing more on myself as a whole creative practitioner. I’m developing my work across several roles: dramaturg, director, writer, and agent provocateur within different organisations.
I’d say: if there’s something else you really want to do, then do that instead. But if you’re committed to the arts, make sure you have a side job, something I never managed myself. Be generous to other artists, both those coming up and those who’ve been doing it for a while; that generosity tends to come back around in different ways. Take advantage of the small supports that exist: free rehearsal space, free tickets, free wine, get what you can, because honestly, the system can be shit.
——
Anonymous director of children’s theatre:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Recently I’ve been working with two well funded NPOs for a co-production tour and I still have to put in an ACE grant to make it happen. I find it bewildering that we are all in the same pot. Everyone is going for the same money and there’s just not enough of it.
Five years ago I retrained as a primary school teacher – it was necessary with a mortgage and two kids. And only because of my wife’s career progression can I now consider putting my toe back in.
If you’re not from a big city – go home to wherever you are from and make work there. Do not go to London, Bristol or Manchester (unless you are from those places) because if there is one thing that funders want to fund it’s stuff happening where someone has a genuine connection to outside of the big cities. That’s where the money is going.
——
LUNG Associates at The National Theatre:
People say all the time, “it’s never been tougher”, but it’s never been tougher. Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not.
More and more I find myself thinking about logistics and money more than the work itself
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Make make make.
——
Bertrand Lesca of Bert and Nassi:`
`
With places like MAYK closing down its going to be harder and harder to support artists making contemporary work regionally and we are all a bit shocked because it already seemed quite hard already to sustain this work in Bristol. We came to the decision a few years ago that we can’t come to the UK to make work because the UK venues aren’t offering enough commissioning money – or any. The pot is too small. As our scale of work has increased and therefore the cost, it’s not viable to come to the UK except in a touring capacity with finished work made elsewhere.
Our strategy is to stay in Europe because in Germany and France they offer commissioning money and pay the artists properly.
Decide on your side hustle. Can it leave you enough time to make work? Learn other languages. Work abroad. Get your hands on a European passport.
——
Anonymous independent artist in London:
I mean, objectively ACE success rates are significantly lower, and there are significantly fewer small venues to programme the work of younger artists, or indeed anyone who wants to make small-scale work. But I think it’s worth considering the amount of self-exploitation that used to help sustain the ecology that allowed that small scale work to happen. ACE told me success rates have gone down because artists on average are asking for more money, which might in part be because the standards around pay are stricter for applications now. There are fewer small venues and fewer scratch nights but those opportunities were always so poorly paid if they paid at all. Those venues that are still around are scrutinised more in terms of their rates of pay, even if it means they are supporting fewer artists. So perhaps it is harder to get work made, but the work that is getting made is on average better supported. The question is whether that is a good trade off?
I don’t know if we’ve explicitly put anything in place to survive, but we have certainly attempted to diversify our work so that we aren’t always so burnt out by touring. I think a big realisation for us was that theatre/performance on its own requires an unsustainable amount of touring to make it viable, whereas if we combine performance work with things like films, books, exhibitions, etc. we can make a more manageable balance for ourselves because more of that work can be done from home.
It’s hard to know what I’d say to someone in general because I think any advice has to be really specific to that person or people and the kind of work they make (and honestly how good their work is). It’s not enough to just say ‘keep going’ or ‘make your own opportunities’ or whatever. I think really the only generalised advice I could give would be to build relationships with your peers. Find people who share your artistic concerns and values – people who are in a similar situation. Whatever the solution to your very specific problems, you’re more likely to find it with friends.
——
Dan Canham, choreographer & film-maker:
Yes it feels like the hardest time I’ve known in 21 years of working in the arts. It’s harder than ever to get funding from the arts council, buildings are more risk averse, they have less money, audiences and the culture at large feels like it’s been gutted. So if you’re not working with a commercial end in mind it’s harder than ever and even then it’s tough.
I stopped my company three years ago because I felt like the wind was changing. And so as a freelancer in the last few years I have managed to make it work by spending half of my time as a freelance filmmaker within the arts – videographer, gun for hire – and that has effectively subsidised the live theatre work I’ve done and am doing. And that work has been predominantly with large scale institutions like the National Theatre or Bradford City of Culture that have still got money to make work.
I would ask – how much do you want to work in the arts? How much is it serving you and feeding you? You don’t have to. If it’s something you still want, I think now more than ever, adaptability matters. Not thinking of yourself as one particular identity or job. Being able to turn your hand to lots of different contexts. That might include working outside of the arts. Knowing that there is money in other fields. But if it’s working exclusively in the arts you want to do then finding your champions, working your tail off, being flexible – I’d suggest all those kinds of things.
——
Chris Brett Bailey, writer and performance maker:
I guess the answer is yes. The problem is at the beginning of the conveyor belt at the end of the conveyer belt. It’s hard to get work made as an artist because we are so connected and distracted and everyone I know personally doesn’t seem to have the same capacity for imagination that they had ten years ago because the world has become worse in some ways and we know a lot more about it than we used to and there is this telecommunication device in your pocket which is mesmerising and more addictive than heroin and is there to constantly drain your focus and your emotions. And creativity comes out of boredom and moments of restlessness and want and craving – and those are becoming increasingly rare states. It’s harder, therefore, than ever before to come up with ideas and put them down on the canvas. I see it with the students I work with – they struggle with being distracted and its not so much writers block so much as a sense that everything has been said before and there’s nothing new that can be said. And they suffer with they ‘ why would anyone care’ worry because they look around and the world is run by maniacs. And then on the other end of the conveyor belt there are less venues. Arts cuts/covid etc/shrinking audiences. They take less risks and they’re more inclined to put on stuff thats an adaptation or that they can hook onto an existing audience in some way and that comes down hardest on people who work in experimental ways and who are at the beginning of their career.
My producer used to get 30% of her annual salary from me. I no longer can give her that. She’s had to work on participation projects that involve kids – that’s a field increasingly where the money. I’ve taken on teaching and workshop leading and writing for hire on other people’s projects. I’ve started writing screen plays / fiction / the books for Broadway musicals. But without my teaching I’d be screwed. All that subsidises the other work I do. I was never good or passionate about seeking out every possible opportunity and predicting what next year would be like. No five year plan. What that means now is that I’m mostly writing for hire knowing that most of it won’t see the light of day as most projects are on spec and won’t get made.
If it’s an industry wide catastrophe then we are all in the same leaky boat in a storm. We are all in there. The other thing is good luck! And perhaps playing devils advocate my advice would be: Adapt or die. If there’s anything else you can do maybe do that so that you remain in control of the creative work you do do – allow it to remain unmolested by commercial pressures. People have made brilliant works of art under far more difficult conditions than any of us are living under now and that’s got to give you hope that something meaningful is possible. It’s possible to be urgent and ruthless and quick with making work and the result might actually be something even better. If it’s going badly you’re probably under-thinking it or overthinking it – most of us right now are overthinking it. But mostly I’d say – good luck!
GROUP EXERCISE:
The room got into small groups and discussed their own survival strategies. We created a wall of post- it notes and discussed our favourites.
– Being honest about struggles.
– Diversify – what else can you do?
– Be more of an artist for hire – what parts of you are for hire?
– Don’t take it personally when it’s hard.
– Cut personal costs – try and find cheap accommodation.
– Be willing to think commercially.
– Always approach venues knowing their financial situation and their audience.
– Be strategic with what you make.
– Retrain in a side hustle.
– Build a boat – ride the wave.
– Take this question very seriously: do you want to work in the arts?
– Diversify your arts practice – don’t be shy about following the money.
– The Robin Hood method. Learn how to do it.
– Know where you draw the line around what you can and can’t cope with.
– Skill up around other funding / grants / foundations.
– Widen your net of presenters / make relationships abroad.
– Get an EU passport.
– Learn another language.
– Bear to be scrappy – it may be your only option right now.
– Think about what else you love.
– Go big or go home.
– Patreon / substack.
– They just don’t know they want you… yet. Create a life / income in which you can afford to be patient.
– Slow making – making as an active change.
– Love!
– Community.
– Mutual aid.
– Accept this is what you do.
– Move city.
– Patchwork careers – make it work.
– Lobby for basic wage.
– Celebrate the new artists coming through.
– Encourage the industry to stop lying and share vulnerabilities.
– Say yes to things you don’t know how to do.
– Encourage organisations to speak to independent artists more honestly and vice versa.
– Practice radical generosity.
– If a company, apply for theatre tax relief.
– Buy a lottery ticket.
– Being older = being braver.
ACT III
DREAMING IN THE DARK
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.” – Ursula Le Guin
GROUP EXERCISE:
The room got into small groups and discussed the one wish they had for the future. Again we formed a wall of post-it notes.
– To go back in time and relish every moment of when the contemporary theatre scene was so alive in Bristol.
– To make ambitious work in Bristol – not always have to work away.
– To have a regular work in progress night.
– To have the equivalent of Theatre Bristol again – a formalised structure or space of care and support.
– To bring MAYK back from the dead or support the new generation of producers passionate about contemporary practice – find them.
– To have an artist owned producing house.
– To have basic income for artists.
– To have an accessible Bristol home for physical collaboration and play that isn’t focused on new writing.
– To have a resourced, collective way to hold organisations to account around issues that matter – rupture and repair.
– For all phones to explode.
– To have a new space that regularly presents contemporary work in Bristol.
– To convince Bristol Old Vic to pick up the gap left by MAYK and programme local artists making experimental work.
– To have more events like this – maybe a walk + talk.
– To have more cross fertilisation across other industries for artists.
– For Watershed, Tobacco Factory, Arnolfini and BOV to recognise the decimation of contemporary performance practice in the city and think about how they can help.
– To have more transparency and chats like this across all stages of careers – maybe in a sauna. (Also want an artist community sauna.)
– To be trained to think more like an entrepreneur/business.
– To have more invitations to be ambitious and take risks in Bristol – not having to leave Bristol to make work.
– To have a self-organised skills exchange amongst artists.
– For there to be more career progression in Bristol for mid-career performance artists.
– To have affordable spaces for experimentation.
– To have an annual contemporary performance festival – who/what can replace MAYK/In Between Time?
– To have a new government who funds the arts.
CONCLUSION
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” — Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
We ended the discussion by asking everyone to stand in front of the wall of wants and ask what social or cultural capital we each had as individuals to make any of them happen.