That is a fundamental role of the arts and
one that we have employed since the dawn of our civilisations and even
before that. The arts have an intrinsic power to enable all of us to share a moment
in a wholly deeper way, to at once recognise that there are layers to all our
lives and our experiences that connect with each of us in a myriad of different
yet complementary ways.
It had been 36 years since I had attended
Corrymeela before. Then, as a schoolboy, I had made tentative steps at
supporting cross community processes in a Northern Ireland still utterly riven
by sectarianism and violence. On returning last week, I found Corrymeela to be an oasis
of centredness, having core values that support a way of engaging, but being
accessible to new, disparate and diverse voices. The eclecticism of the
Aperture Festival alone, paid tribute to the breadth of culture's role in
celebrating the applied nature of Corrymeela’s continuing vision.
This nature of the arts with its ability to embrace the
amazingly varied breadth of all of us and our communities is
further reason to see the arts flourish . Then, applying artistic practice to
another layer of situations, with potential actions, processes and outcomes, and all the socially-engaged potential that represents – should not be threatened with cuts and
reduction.
I’ve said it so often, in this blog and on platforms representing
CAP and #ArtsmatterNI, that the arts' infrastructure is barely sustainable at
current levels of support. For further cuts to ensue might well have deeply
felt and long-lasting impacts that this society cannot afford. Bearing in mind
where we have come from as a people and a place, surely we need to seize every
opportunity to celebrate the positive and nourish a more thoughtful, positive
future for our wee corner of the globe and purposefully renew our vision of
ourselves and our collective future. In discovering the dreams held by our
collective imaginations and learning how to be fundamentally creative, we can
immediately understand again, just how powerful the joy of “making” is. To
create something from nothing, that creative alchemy that all community arts
programmes and all arts exhibitions, performances and events demonstrate, is to
return to more deeply connected places in all of us. They herald the Olympic Games,
not by having runners run, or jumpers jump, but by having film-makers and creative
producers celebrate the narrative of our lives and the dreams we hold in powerfully dramatic and evocative displays. We can demonstrate our values, our fears and
the deeply meaningful, long-held beliefs attached to our cultural positions,
whatever they may be.
To under-fund the arts is to shackle our
ability to express – it is a gag on our cultural voice, to express not only who
we are now, but who we may have been and who we wish to be in the future.
For Northern Ireland, not quite one
generation into living in Peace, to see such opportunity through the arts
squandered, undermined and reduced is to not value the tremendous opportunity
that peace affords us and instead to lose sight of the dream. If anything, the
public representatives should be finding ways to pour more investment into the
celebration of our vision of ourselves and our place in the future. Investing
in our tremendous centres of artistic excellence and in our opportunity to
support everyone to explore their creative power. Quibbling about 0.01% of the block grant going
to the arts doesn’t make sense. It is so little has but holds the power to be
so much. As a society, we should be insisting that the arts flourish and give
us the platform to celebrate the very best of ourselves, just like Corrymeela
did the other weekend.
#ArtsMatterNI
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