Creative Australia has announced the next wave of Creative Futures Fund investments, including a significant grant for the Second Cities Producing Consortium, a landmark new partnership between four regional arts venues.
The consortium will see these four venues co-invest in seeding, developing and staging new large-scale Australian theatre productions. Together, they will create a new national pathway for ambitious Australian theatre works to be developed with audiences in mind from the outset, connecting artists, producing partners and major regional venues across multiple states and territories.
The Creative Futures Fund investment will allow the Second Cities Producing Consortium to deliver the first two years of a proposed four-year pilot, with a $280,000 investment in the first year.
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‘Second cities’ refers to large regional centres within a couple of hours’ drive of Australia’s capital cities. Think Wollongong in relation to Sydney, Geelong to Melbourne, Gold Coast to Brisbane, and Canberra as a centre for the ACT and Southern NSW region.
The performing arts venues in these areas already play a key role in the national performing arts ecology. With a combined catchment of 2.6 million people and more than 1.2 million annual attendances, they boast sizeable audiences, infrastructure and artistic ambition.
The Second Cities Producing Consortium members, each the cultural heart of their region, have a collective audience of 1.2 million annually. This includes Geelong Arts Centre in Victoria, Australia’s largest dedicated regional performing arts complex; Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia’s largest and most prolific regional theatre company; HOTA Home of the Arts, the landmark cultural precinct on the Gold Coast in Queensland; and Canberra Theatre Centre, the performing arts centre of the national capital.
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Working with a range of producing partners and other key venues across the country, the Second Cities Producing Consortium will shape the major works made for Australia from development through to presentation.
Responding to a sector under pressure
The Second Cities Producing Consortium was developed in response to the rising production costs and fragmented touring models that have contributed to Australia’s live performance crisis. Audiences will sit at the centre of the model, which seeks to bring new work to communities right across the nation.
Canberra Theatre Centre Executive Director Georgia Hendy said: ‘The Second Cities Producing Consortium creates an ambitious new pathway for Australian stories to be developed, produced and shared beyond the traditional capital-city circuit, recognising the importance of Australia’s vibrant regional cities and the audiences they serve.
‘Together, we can strengthen cultural and economic connections between our cities and help ensure more people can experience world-class Australian theatre closer to home.’
Merrigong Theatre Company Artistic Director and CEO Simon Hinton added: ‘The Second Cities Producing Consortium pilot comes after years of discussion in the sector about developing new and better models for creating Australian theatre works that connect with and build audiences across the nation, and most especially in the burgeoning regional population centres we now refer to as Australia’s ‘second cities’.’
Collaboration over competition
The consortium will deliver a new model of formalised collaboration across state borders, bringing regional arts organisations together to respond to shared challenges, pool insights and resources, and build the resilience of the sector.
By working collectively, the partners will create greater opportunities for artists and touring production companies, expand audience access to ambitious Australian work, and build stronger national advocacy and influence for Australia’s second cities.
For each of the theatre companies involved in the pilot program, their business and audience development models depend on a regular supply of large-scale productions that are artistically compelling and capable of attracting significant audiences.
In many international markets, such as the UK, pathways between capital city markets and second-tier markets are well established and built into the planning and business models for major works from the
beginning. In Australia, however, this pathway has often been an afterthought, with costly remounts, redesigns and transfer costs making the supply of large-scale work unreliable and poorly supported by existing producing, touring and funding structures.
After many years of informally collaborating around programming and touring of works of scale, these four venues are now forming this consortium in order to better guarantee the supply of such works, and ensure the continued growth of audiences in their respective markets.
The hope is that the pilot will support wider sector sustainability, grow regional and remote audiences (beyond each venue’s immediate audience catchments) and generally improve industry practices around the making and touring of larger scale work around Australia.
The Second Cities Producing Consortium Pilot Project is funded through strategic investment from Creative Australia. Individually, its members are backed by funding from the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, NSW Government through Create NSW, City of Wollongong, City of Gold Coast, QLD Government through Arts Queensland and the ACT Government.
Second Cities Producing Consortium pilot initiatives will be announced in the coming year.
