LEARNING FROM Dudley Creates
Research by CoLab Dudley, CBC Dudley Creative Producers + Jo Orchard-Webb
By speaking to participants, artists and producers we know that Dudley Creates enabled:
Community and local artists to co-create and co-produce via a diverse range of mediums
Further development of local community cultural capabilities, creative skills and confidence
Local artist social practice development and peer learning
New relationships and creative collaborations (with ripples for future cultural production)
A wide range of mental health and well-being benefits - specifically in relation to overcoming isolation, accessibility and health anxiety barriers to cultural participation and co-production
Dudley Creates reminded us of the power of arts in reimagining spaces and places, and how communities value them. In this instance working deeply in place helped to:
Unlock new creative interactions with spaces such as nature reserves, community gardens and canals, allowing them to be viewed by local people and artists as important cultural assets
Enable participants to reclaim uncared-for public spaces that had previously felt unwelcoming and unsafe like subways, tunnels and caverns
Connect to non-arts spaces, like High Streets, libraries, and shopping centres, as important places of everyday cultural co-creation and cultural identity.
Why is this work important to people and communities in Dudley and across the Black Country?
Art and culture are integral to our lives. It can help us understand each other better, it can support our well-being, it can help tackle social injustice and it can contribute significantly to the economy. It can make the places and neighbourhoods we live in feel special and unique, giving them an identity of their own, and it can bring people together when they most need it.
The Dudley Creates programme enabled significant socio-cultural value in terms of new relationships developed during co-creation, which participants described as critical for their mental health following the isolation and loneliness experienced during the pandemic. The collective and collaborative element that ran through the design of the majority of the projects was important to participants who expressed joy in creating together. Whether that co-creation was walking together, weaving together, listening together, singing together, or stitching together - the relational quality of these experiences of co-creation enhanced their cultural capability by unlocking ‘power with’’ through collaboration.
The relational and collaborative focus helped to:
Introduce new local artistic partnerships and initiatives
Support new funding applications for scaling-up pilot experiments
Start new local community creative group meet-ups
Support further community requests for project follow-up sessions, iterations and extensions of these projects in new locations in the borough
Enhance practice development and creative confidence in artists and participants alike
Support the legacy of an ecological approach taken by Creative Black Country to weave together different projects, programmes and resources that continues to encourage collaboration and cultural potential across the Dudley cultural ecosystem
Artists were enabled to develop social practice capabilities in new spaces, with new art forms, alongside new communities, within the context of shifting government health policy and health risks, extreme weather events, and growing barriers to accessibility and participation owing to social and economic consequences of increased financial precarity.
Developing key ideas for a cultural strategy
When the Dudley Creates projects were programmed it was during the global pandemic, the early worsening of the cost of living crisis, and during a summer of climate emergency-related extreme weather events. To develop a strategy that is both meaningful and achievable amidst rapidly changing and uncertain contexts we are adopting an ecological approach to the cultural sector in Dudley borough. A nurturing and relational approach that supports many cultural opportunities and increases cultural democracy for all.
The learning shines an honest light on the challenges as well as the potential for local artists and creatives of developing a social practice rooted in place. More generally, Dudley Creates illustrates the evolving and adaptive role of cultural infrastructure like Arts Council England's Creative People and Places (of which CBC is part) in creating conditions for wider and deeper cultural engagement and co-creation by communities in the context of crises. The Dudley Creates programme offers valuable lessons in terms of some of the conditions needed for realising greater cultural democracy and a flourishing local cultural ecosystem in the Dudley borough. These lessons are important for local cultural ecosystem creatives, communities, guardians, collaborators and stewards in informing their different roles within the stewardship of a flourishing local ecosystem.
You can see the key ideas here.
A strategy rooted in place
Alongside our colleagues at CoLab Dudley, we thought about names for the strategy. Instead of ‘Dudley’s Cultural Strategy’ we concluded that ‘Dudley Creates’ continued to describe what we hope to achieve: a long-term vision of a programme rooted in place, designed by local cultural producers, working with mostly local artists, alongside local communities exploring together what it means to co-create in Dudley borough.
The programme highlighted many aspects of working in place including the specificity of experience in convening in local everyday spaces (High Street, shopping centres, parks); convening in unusual non-arts spaces (tunnels, caverns, canals, nature reserves); being inspired by the materiality of local places, and how that relates to local histories, memories, stories, local knowledge and identities; and it meant exploring sensory and embodied experiences of place (via walking, singing, sensing, and touching).
Dudley doesn’t have a wealth of art galleries, museums, cultural spaces and buildings like our neighbouring cities so it is important that we can illustrate the powerful agency of cultural activities in the production of space and reimagining narratives of place. These new spatial imaginaries are critical in terms of freedom to co-create culture, and so the possibility of realising cultural democracy. They reframe who creates and who gets to interact with ideas of permission, ownership and responsibility.
These ideas and democratising cultural practices by local artists and participants expand who occupies space, and the agency they feel in that space. In this way, they go some way to disrupt manifestations of oppression that are expressed in the absence of a sense of permission, or sense of welcome, or feelings of safety, belonging, or solidarity. This helps introduce a diverse range of people, creative activities and modes of cultural production that disrupt the usual ownership and power of cultural activity.
How will we know that the strategy is the right one for Dudley?
A flexible, experimentation approach, with a focus on building relationships and opportunities for creative collaboration, was key to how Dudley Creates held open spaces for a greater diversity of culture-making by local communities and local artists. We'll continue this approach as the strategy takes shape.
Using an ecological framework Dudley Creates learning helps us begin to articulate examples of local vital signs for a flourishing cultural ecosystem and greater cultural democracy in Dudley borough. The aligning and creating interconnection between the programme, the Dudley Council-funded Summer of Creativity, and the CoLab Dudley-supported Time Rebels projects show further evidence of an ecological approach to cultural programming.
Local ‘vital signs’ help us to see how to support and nurture artists, creatives, communities and organisations to support a thriving ecosystem.
Read the full report here - Dudley Creates - lessons in place based programming.
What next…
We’re thrilled that the year-long programme that initially started as Dudley Creates is now becoming a people-led, place-based, evolving strategy in action. Like the programme, the strategy will morph and change as creatives and communities come together to shape it. Currently, CoLab Dudley is taking the lead on supporting this; working with a cohort of Cultural Collaborators who look to the future of the borough to support projects, events, plans and ideas with local communities. Every quarter CoLab Dudley invites you to their space on Dudley High Street for the Cultural Collaborators Gatherings where you can see, listen, learn and take part in events that help you have a say in the culture you want to see.
This isn’t a strategy that starts and then stops in a few years - instead, it will continue to evolve, and be shaped by local communities and creatives - offering guiding tools and ideas for local people to shape their future cultural landscape.