No Boundaries – Jake Orr

In October last year I wrote a blog piece entitled What is the Future of Theatre Criticism?. It addressed my concerns that theatre criticism in its current form will face its demise in the next ten years. It is a subject that has been addressed countless times, but I'll be talking about it again at No Boundaries, because it's important.

I feel passionately that we, as the arts industry, as a community and, on a broader spectrum, as a society, have to acknowledge these issues and aid the future development of theatre criticism and journalism. There is so much at stake and yet as arts organisations, practitioners, makers and executives, we continue to turn a blind eye.

A Younger Theatre is the starting point for writers, a training ground that builds their skills before they move on to other publishers. I am immensely proud of the work we have achieved and I am continually in awe of these talented young people we work with. However, I'm not wearing rose-tinted glasses: the model A Younger Theatre has followed replicates that of the traditional media outlets. We rely on advertising revenue to cover our costs and, regrettably, this doesn’t (yet) stretch to us paying our contributors. The same is true across the digital sphere. Bloggers, magazines, websites, they’re all unfunded, with few advertisers, and increasingly producing free content by free writers. This is an unsustainable model, and yet we are continually hailed as the most valued of critical outlets.

"There is so much at stake and yet as arts organisations, practitioners, makers and executives, we continue to turn a blind eye"

We need to acknowledge the facts:
Print media is in decline
Arts coverage in the broadsheets is shrinking
Critics are being replaced by bullet-point digestible coverage
Online criticism thrives but with unpaid writers

The critic of the future will be the person who undertakes it during their free time, unpaid, as a hobby. The critic-hobbyist will find themselves increasingly under pressure to cover more, to see more, to write more. They’ll squeeze their writing into lunch breaks, they’ll deliver misguided words because they don’t have the time for true reflection, and ultimately they’ll do a disservice to the arts. Not because they want to this, but because they just don’t have the time nor money, to sustain the critical reflection we are currently used to.

"The critic of the future will be the person who undertakes it during their free time, unpaid, as a hobby"

I don't want this to happen, and I want to think about ways we can change criticism and arts journalism for the better. These are the questions and problems I'll be talking about at No Boundaries. I don't have the answers, but I do want to have the conversation. Join me.

Jake Orr is the Artistic Director of A Younger Theatre, a resource and publication for young people interested in or involved with theatre.  No Boundaries is a two-day conference supported by the British Council and Arts Council England, taking place simultaneously in Bristol and York on 25 and 26 February. The conference is being produced by Watershed in Bristol and a consortium of partners. For details of the conference, tickets and provocations, visit the No Boundaries website, and follow @UKTheatreDance and #nb2014 or @nbd2014 on Twitter.