Roads to Ramps
Hello!
I usually start these with a “Happy New Year”, but considering it is literally HALFWAY through the year, I’ll spare us all the pain. Apologies for the delay in getting this one written, the start of 2023 has been a bit of a manic one. Between finishing off our Writers’ Room in Flintshire throughout January, to picking up Pocketfull again in February and juggling the funding deadlines, meetings, and report writing that fell in between, and the fact that I’m still getting to grips with the idea that we’re actually in 2023 (am I the only one who thinks it sounds like a made-up year?), the first 6 months just flew by. But they’ve calmed down a little now (I say, furiously touching all nearby wood available), and so I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit down and properly reflect on the last 12 (18?) months of work.
For those who’ve joined Haywire in the last year and therefore have absolutely 0 idea what is going on, this tradition of looking back on the previous year has been something we’ve done since Haywire began. We assess the goals we set ourselves in January of the year before, discuss what has happened to the company in this year, and set goals going forward. It’s an excellent opportunity to continually hold ourselves accountable, to explain why the company’s priorities changed and where we’d like to go next. In the case of unachieved goals, we explain ‘why not’, or perhaps ‘why not yet’. We think it’s vital that our practice is as transparent and open as possible, so that it may remain a conversation between us and the people we serve and in case it helps to break down any stigmas or barriers other early-stage companies may be facing. Starting a theatre-company, and growing it from nothing, is hard as hell. We don’t want to shy away from being honest about that.
2022 was, in one word, insane. Thankfully the good kind, most of the time. When I sat down to prepare for writing this post and actually looked back on our calendar, I was genuinely surprised at the amount that had happened in the past 12 months. Not because I wasn’t aware of the projects happening but because, to me, they feel like they happened a million years ago. We’ve moved from location to location, event to event, with such speed this year that it’s hard to comprehend everything together. It’s a testament to how hard the team has worked and how much we’ve pulled together. Perhaps it was the aftereffect of the first 2 years of the company being overshadowed by the lingering threat of the coronavirus pandemic, we were making up for lost time by cramming as much as we could into last year. Perhaps it was just that once we got going we couldn’t stop. Who knows. But either way, 2023 was Haywire’s busiest year yet, and our horizons expanded far further than we ever would’ve imagined. Our work in Flintshire has seen the company connecting with more communities, on a larger scale, than we had ever anticipated. The show that all that work will culminate in will be our biggest yet, far greater than we thought we’d ever achieve when we created the company 3 years ago. Approaching Pocketfull via the medium of an open callout as opposed to writing invitations blew it up. We received more applications than we expected and it was, at times, a little overwhelming. But again, in the best way possible. Tack onto that a highly successful, almost sell-out show at Edinburgh Fringe, and two new members of the Haywire team, and I’d say we’ve well and truly packed in the year. I can feel we’re right on the precipice, ready to scale up even further and make these larger developments more permanent, we’ve just got to work out how. But I’m incredibly excited for what this next year holds, and very proud of everything the team has achieved this year just gone. Onwards and upwards I say.
I’ll round this post off by setting us a few goals for the next year, but first let’s look back on everything we wanted to achieve in 2022, shall we?
1. Tour the summer fringe festivals with a piece of new work.
A strong A- for this one. While when we wrote this resolution last year we were definitely envisioning a tour that hit Buxton, Manchester, London and Edinburgh, which we almost definitely did NOT achieve. But 2 out of 4 isn’t bad! Quality over quantity also feels important here, as while we didn’t hit all the locations we were envisioning we more than made up for it with an incredible new piece of experimental theatre [Liv, can we link out to either the Nyctophilia page or one of the blog posts] and a close to sell-out Edinburgh run. Not bad for our first trip to Scotland, right?
2. Extend our community work to include a wider network of people and a greater level of participation, to grow our understanding and bridge the gap between artistic performance and community work.
Done and DONE. This year was an absolute knockout for our community work. Over 600 people worked with in total over 5 months of work, with a focus on engagement that was high quality, enriching, genuine and long-lasting. We’re over halfway through our journey to a completely community co-produced performance with the people of Flintshire, with a script and supporting research ready to take to the stage in the next year. While we’ll be battling the great demon that is major-scale funding to make it there, I’m confident in saying that Haywire is on it’s way to making a name for ourselves as a company bridging the divide between community and professional performance. Not too shabby, eh?
3. Get back to York.
Also a win on this one!
I was rather cryptic in last year’s post about what exactly I meant by this, so it’s hard to check the details, but we definitely did make it back to our North-East roots through our involved in the Creative Collision Festival. York is where Haywire technically began, through conversations between Olivia and myself in workshop rooms at 3 in the morning, so it was wonderful to touch base there again and to do so in way that helped us connect with young creatives currently about to make the jump from training to professional work. It’s important for us here at Haywire to help break down that tricky transition, so we consider it an honour to have the chance to head back and help out where we can.
4. Work towards cultivating a more resilient working practice, with prioritisation of artistic growth and healthy company policy.
A very, very hard one to measure. There’s no metric for tracking how well you’re working as a company, so instead I’ll focus on what we’ve achieved last year, and whether it would’ve been possible without it. As already mentioned, our output has been far greater in the last 12 months than it has been in years previous, which I think is testament to our resilience and partnership as a team. We’ve programmed in those spaces for rest, following key areas of delivery like Edinburgh Fringe and Community Outreach. Workload, capacity and mental health are a permanent agenda point in all our Director’s Meetings. It’s difficult running a company at this point in its development, because we’re sitting in the tricky middle line where we have enough work to make Haywire a fulltime job, but not the money to pay people for that time. Until we do, there’s a limit to how much we can prioritise practice within our practice. But until then, we’re doing what we can. One thing I will say is that I think the last year taught us a great deal about how much we could achieve without pushing ourselves to the point of exhaustion, occasionally because there were a few moments when we found ourselves there. That was a really key learning, and one that we’ll be sure to try and avoid as much as possible in the future.
5. Connect with a permanent writer.
It feels wrong to end on a low when we started on such a high, but this one was definitely a goal that we missed (dare I say forgot about), or that we reformed over the course of the year. Initially, I think we set this goal to avoid repeating the incredibly vague goal of just ‘expanding the team’. We wanted our action to have purpose, and we already had members of the team who could lead on producing, directing, music and acting. Clearly, what we needed was a writer. But if the last year has shown me anything, it’s that what we actually needed was way more producers. A permanent writer would be incredible, for all the reasons that I stated in last year’s post, but they mostly help create the seed of more content. They don’t, necessarily, bring it to life. We’re not (and we weren’t) in the position to need that. We have expanded our team in the last year, adding two incredible new artists to the Haywire crew, but neither of them are writers first-and-foremost. And that’s a good thing. If they had been, and if they had joined the team and given us several new projects to work on, we’d have been inundated with work and no manpower to see them to fruition. So all in all, while we definitely failed at this one, I think it’s for the best. One day Haywire may have a permanent writer on the team, but we’re not there yet.
Okay, consider 2022 reviewed! Overall, it was an incredible year for working out exactly where Haywire stood, and the kind of company we want to be. As we look ahead, it’s now about how we turn those ideas into a reality. With that in mind, let’s set some goals for the next 12(ish) months, shall we?
1. Bring the Well-Fed project to fruition with a fully funded professional show.
Our work with Well-Fed, Flintshire County Council and Theatr Clwyd is by far the largest project that Haywire has worked on so far which makes it our biggest priority in the coming year. Its success also sets the tone of the rest of our community work and will allow us to build a framework for how the company creates, and how we can do it more in the future.
2. Reflect fully on The Pocketfull Project over the last year, and make plans to adapt the project for the better.
The Pocketfull Project has changed a great deal in the last year and half, and the number of artists involved has increased exponentially. We’re now working with people from across the globe, all the way from America to New Zealand, Japan, Italy, France and more. As a team, we’re all really proud of what we’ve achieved, but we’re also incredibly conscious that, as it stands right now, it takes up a great deal of our time, and could be having a much larger impact than it does. While we aren’t looking to park the project completely, this next year will be a chance for us to look critically at everything we’ve achieved so far, what we want to do with it next, and how we can make that happen. We’re big believers in evaluating everything we do, as we do it, to make sure we’re hitting our goals. Now, with the last (currently) confirmed Pocketfulls coming out in the next few months, is the perfect chance to do that.
3. Continue building on the community foundation we’ve established in Flintshire, and grow that work to new Welsh locations.
Our work with Well-Fed is some of our most important, and has been some of our most company-defining. It’s given us a brilliant new perspective on the work that we do, and we’d love to grow that more. To encompass new companies, new creatives, new stories and new ideas. We have some ideas in the works, some which I can talk about and some which I can’t, but rest assured you want to watch this space. Well-Fed is just the start of our community-theatre revolution.
(Dear god, that sounded pretentious.)
4. Continue building a more supportive framework of information and assistance for emerging creatives at the start of their careers.
A goal that Haywire has had since our first year of creation, but one I’d really like us to zero down on this coming year. We know how difficult that transition from training to creative practice can be and we want to make that easier for all artists, from all backgrounds. Over the next 12 months, we’ll be looking at what careful, measured steps we can take to do that, and how we can build that support into Haywire’s practice moving forward.
5. Continue setting the groundwork for strong company cohesion and fulfilling, healthy creative practice.
I sincerely hope this never leaves this list. We’ve made some good progress on building better practice this year, but we’ve still got a long way to go. A lot of this resolves around the concept of foresight, realising how much work projects are going to require before we take them on, and before they become too much for our team to work on sustainably. I’m also aware that this goal has details that will always change, as the theatre climate changes, the focus of the company changes, or the team does. But that healthy, fulfilling practice is vital part of what we do, and making sure what we do is sustainable.
You’ll spot that a lot of these revolve around continuing, or developing existing practice. That’s on purpose. Over the last 18 months, I’ve seen the team at Haywire (and by default the company) strengthen clear goals as to what we’d like our work to achieve and stand for. Much of this already exists, in one degree or another, in our current work. And we’re not in the position to take on loads of new ideas right now. So for the next year, our focus will be on strengthening the current work we do, or developing it so the delivery is stronger while the goal remains the same.
I’m not worried about a lack of new, ground-breaking ideas in those goals. I think it’s natural for a company to find their stride, and start to walk in it. Then run. Right now, I’d say we’re at a comfortable jog. The kind you could sustain in breezy, 15 degree weather. One day we’ll get to a full sprint, but we’re not there yet. And I’m okay with that.
Until next time.
Lucy