It's Only Words (And Words Are All I Have)

IT’S ONLY WORDS (AND WORDS ARE ALL I HAVE)

Author(s): Rachel Grunwald

Date first Published: April 2016

Type: Provocation Paper for the Clore Leadership Programme Fellowship 2014-15

Note: The paper presents the views of the author, and these do not necessarily reflect the

views of the Clore Leadership Programme or its constituent partners. As a ‘provocation

paper’, this piece is a deliberately personal, opinionated article, aimed at stirring up debate

and/or discussion.

Published Under: Creative Commons

It’s only word (and words are all I have) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Your use of the Clore Leadership Programme archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use of this particular License, available under Creative Commons.

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Rachel Grunwald is a theatre director. She is Associate Director at SPID Theatre Company,

has extensive experience as a freelancer for companies including the RSC, Southbank Centre,

Hightide, Company of Angels and the Tricycle Theatre, and she was founder and Artistic

Director of the artist-activist group 'Act for Darfur'.  She is currently working with Visible

theatre on a new piece about women, fashion and ageing. She tweets as @rachel_grunwald.

For more details please see www.rachelgrunwald.com 

This paper was written as a part of the author’s Fellowship with the Clore Leadership

Programme in 2015.

The Clore Leadership Programme is a not-for-profit initiative, aimed at developing and

strengthening leadership potential across the cultural and creative sectors, particularly in the

UK. The Programme awards its flagship Clore Fellowships on an annual basis to exceptional

individuals drawn from across the UK and beyond, and runs a choice of programmes tailored

to the leadership needs of arts and culture professionals at different stages of their career.

This provocation paper has been produced under the aegis of the Clore Leadership

Programme.

For more information, visit www.cloreleadership.org or follow us on Twitter

@CloreLeadership

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ver the past year I’ve become aware of how language can advance or hold back

our thinking about the philosophy and politics of the cultural sector. I challenged

myself to find new ways of thinking through new ways of saying, and what

follows is an account of three thought experiments. The first is an exercise in substituting a

single word for another, the second traces how figures of speech have helped me break new

ground, and the third invites readers to help re-imagine some terms that have run their course.

OI start with that monster term, ‘diversity’.

'Diversity' defines against the powerful. It has come to refer to that large group of people

who are different from those in positions of authority. In that sense it is actually a collective

term for people who are perceived to be weak, a perception uniting people who have

otherwise no place being yoked together - whether that is people of colour, older people,

people with disabilities or sometimes simply people who happen to be women.

Diversity is a nebulous word. A vague, expansive and shady word. When two people have a

conversation about diversity they can be talking about completely different things. It means

everything and it means nothing. Using it suggests a care for everything, but allows you to do

nothing.

This matters. If our language doesn’t seek detail, milestones or a sense of what progress

looks like, it is hard to move forwards. And despite a passionate belief in the transcendent

nature of art shared by most cultural professionals, it’s clear that inequality and homogeneity

are bedding down in our sector.

So, how to move forwards?

I made a breakthrough when I substituted the term ‘diverse’ for the phrase ‘representative (or

‘reflective’) of the make-up of the UK’, and the idea of a ‘journey towards diversity’ for ‘a

move towards a sector which is properly representative of the groups and identities that make

up the country’.

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Of course, this poses questions. Do you aim to reflect your local community, your city, the

country as a whole? Should every cultural activity seek to represent/cater for all groups? But

it means that we can set targets around what an ideal workforce looks like, what

programming could look like (this is key), and who audiences might be. Instead of “We aim

to be a diverse company”, you could say: “We aim to represent the population of the UK as a

whole – specifically this means an equal split of men and women, 20% of artists who self-

identify as living with disability, 12% of people born abroad etc”.

This simple substitution in terminology gives us a benchmark to work from and to hold

ourselves accountable to, and frees us to analyse the situation, and trends, more clearly.

Next, I began to think more deeply about reflection. It is often repeated that the arts hold a

mirror up to life. Now I worry not that it’s a bad mirror but that it does accurately reflect the

world around us. The arts, and by extension our cultural sector, don’t reflect exact

proportions of different population groups, but they do provide a pretty true reflection of how

these groups are distributed across power structures. The world around us does not have

many black people or women in positions of power. It does not have Eastern European voices

sharing their rich cultural heritage as equals. It does not have well integrated disabled and

non-disabled schools. It is city-focused, London-centric, and it has wealthier, privately

educated people of all races in positions of power well out of whack with that group’s share

of population. The arts are a true reflection of our wider world. That’s the really tough

revelation behind the well-publicised, ‘shocking’ fact that they’re not representative of

demographics.

So, adding a distinction between ‘reflect’ and ‘represent’, what we need to do is represent the

whole population, but reflect back a picture of how we want the wider world’s power

structures to look, rather than a mirror image of the status quo. Surely that’s the role of

culture – to assess how we live now and pose questions and alternatives.

Now, how to respond? Once again, words have the answer.

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I noted above that programming is key when thinking about representation, and there are two

metaphors that have helped me in this area. The first is from Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of

Southbank Centre:

Southbank Centre re-calibrates what platforms are available for people to tell their

stories – people who didn’t even know they had a story to tell because they’d never

had a platform. And what to do with the people who’d always thought all the

platforms were theirs?

For me, the assumptions encapsulated in these statements speak volumes. Everybody has a

story. Some stories have historically been repeated more often and more publicly than others.

A shift towards new stories may be difficult for those accustomed to telling theirs. The

structure of an arts centre is essentially a set of platforms which are made available – by

choice – to one group over another. Those choices can be consciously changed to ensure

greater representation of the range of stories in the wider world. Jude’s language recognises

the power in making choices, demonstrates that no choices are neutral, and that no

organisation structures itself by accident.

The next metaphor comes from a producer friend Jeanette Bain-Burnett, and again addresses

the idea of things that seem to happen by accident, or ‘instinctively’:

The canon is dangerous. It feels like a lovely place to be but it’s actually an echo

chamber.

People who grew up on the canon may feel that they are flexing their muscles when they opt

for something in its farther reaches. They may feel they are being daring or brave by

following their ‘instinct’ instead of ‘overthinking’ things. But the noise that comes back to

you in an echo chamber is only the sound of your own voice, and instinct relates to what we

were born with or tastes we developed as young children – it cannot take us outside

ourselves.

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If the canon has an inside wall that bounces noise back, it follows that it has an outside too.

How much of life is outside compared to inside? What and who is on the outside? Whoever

they are, they are rarely heard inside the canon. It’s too noisy with the ricocheting voices of

the people already in there. Historically the people inside have chosen which stories to put on

the platforms; the people they invite onto the platforms will not change without the conscious

re-calibration described above. You don’t get out of the echo chamber by accident. To see

who’s outside, the people inside the chamber will have to make a conscious, hard effort to

break through the soundproofed walls. Unconscious choices in programming can only re-

create the past.

Each individual will find different metaphors that speak to them; these two figures of speech

helped me understand the necessity of conscious recalibration, and the magnitude of the

effort required to break through historically soundproofed barriers.

Conversely, words can hold us back. I recently read The 2015 Report by the Warwick

Commission on the Future of Cultural Value1. It was brilliant in many ways, but I continually

butted up against terms such as: superconductor; galvanise; synergies; interlocking sectors

and creative-cultural continuum. It seemed to me that the authors were speaking the language

of STEM2 with a fake accent, betraying an embedded sense of inadequacy. In a report about

cultural value, they undervalued what we have to offer by making our case on somebody

else’s terms. This was doubly frustrating because a genius for passionate, inventive and

emotional communication is very much at the heart of our sector.

Further problematic phrases I’ve encountered include ‘cultural offer’, ‘production of culture’

and ‘consumer of culture’. Do we really produce, offer and consume culture? Let’s think

what those words really mean.

Production. To produce implies an act of deliberate creation. There’s a specificity and

limitation to it: you produce something. And in many instances this is what we do, but in

1 Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/research/warwickcommission/futureculture/finalreport/2 An acronym referring to the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics

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others culture is a process: open-ended, assembling itself, tidal. Offer. I offer new foods to a

child. If my toddler were fussy, the books tell me, I should just keep on offering the same

dish until eventually (maybe the thirtieth time), the child will accept it. I might make an offer

on a property. I might receive an offer of a job. I offer a gift. There’s no parity between the

two parties in those examples, and little suggestion of an equal feedback loop. Consumption.

When I consume something I use it up; when we encounter the word ‘consumer’ it usually

means somebody who eats food and turns it into waste, or buys goods produced to enrich

distant others.

These phrases do not capture what I, and colleagues in the sector, hope to achieve. Isn’t

culture the web of reflections, objects, stories, recipes, sounds, histories, artworks, hopes and

relationships that transcend cycles of production, offer and consumption? Even if we can’t

articulate this clearly or concisely, surely using the terms above anchors our discourse in an

unhelpful, in fact perverse, context?

Some words are plain old inadequate. Take ‘digital’. It seems strange that we have only one

word to describe a fast-growing and multi-faceted field. Here, a paucity of vocabulary is

holding us back, acting as a bottleneck to keep out many people who don’t realise that this

one little word serves as front door to an expansive world.

Other words, once very helpful, have been overused to the point of uselessness. I’m thinking

specifically of ‘creativity’. The Creative Society. Creative Skillset. Creative and Cultural

Skills. Creative and Cultural Industries. The Cultural Learning Alliance. Creative People and

Places. Creative Scotland. Get Creative! I’m creative! We’re all creative! When you next

hear the word, ask what the person using it (even if that’s you!) really means. Do we need to

say it?

If we wish others to believe in the power of what we can do, we need first to demonstrate that

we believe it. This means speaking a language that is uniquely ours – one that allows a

passionate, personal voice to shine through, that eschews jargon from other fields, that has a

democratic commitment to clarity, and that knows where and how to use poetic or richly

descriptive techniques to transport readers and audiences to a new world.

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At this point, especially with reference to ‘cultural offer’, I must admit I’m stuck in my

thinking. I’m frustrated. I flinch each time I use or hear these words, but I haven’t yet thought

of better ones. In that sense this paper is a call to arms. The process of re-imagining our

language may be imperfect, it may be open-ended, but that doesn’t excuse us from trying.

You might find my own language inadequate for this task; I certainly do. You may not follow

me down the avenues my words have opened. But if you too flinch next time you use or hear

one of these words, spend a little time asking what might be better. Perhaps together we can

deepen our understanding of what our words roughly equate to and hence what we can do to

achieve our shared goals.

I don’t believe that words ever completely capture what people are trying to say to each other.

Verbal language is inadequate as a form of communication; that’s never more apparent than

at a time of loss, when well-meaning people endlessly say the ‘wrong’ thing. But trying to

communicate through words is the human project. It’s our life’s work and it’s what much of

art has dealt with throughout recorded history. If we want to break new ground in thinking

we have to acknowledge when our words are inadequate, say ‘thank you very much for

getting us this far’ and seek out other words we can use to make the next, flawed step.

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