What if… Artists had a basic income?
“It’s time to turn our attention outwards” and “we need to allow ourselves to be open to new possibilities” were two of many profound comments made at the end of a 10 part series held with the prairie-based performing arts community.
Creative Futures is grateful to be working with a collaborative research team from the University of Calgary and the University of Regina to understand the critical uncertainties and possible futures affecting the theatre community in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. It started with a number of strategic foresight training sessions and has translated into the development of four possible scenarios for prairie-based theatre in 2040.
As a collaborative research team, we challenged ourselves to think about many different possibilities, including optimistic and uncomfortable futures.
What if … theatre is completely digital?
What if …. theatre land was returned to Indigenous communities?
What if … performing arts is supported by the state?
And what if all three happened together? What would that mean for prairie-based theatre?
After collecting hundreds of signals of change over a number of months, we imagined four alternative possible future scenarios of prairie-based theatre in 2040. And then at the end of March 2022, we explored and tested these scenarios with members of the community. We asked them to react to the scenarios and tell us what their preferred future may look like. From there, participants identified immediate and near term changes that could advance this future.
After exploring the four scenarios, it is clear that the theatre community has a desire to drive change well beyond the boundaries of performance. The performing artists we talked to see an opportunity for societal leadership and to start thinking about new ways of doing things moving forward. Artists and Directors alike want to find ways to positively impact the climate crisis, Indigenous reconciliation, diversity, equity and inclusion, and to create spaces for healing.
One of the opportunities that resonated with the community is a Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot in Ireland that aims to support the arts and creative practice by giving a payment of €325 a week to artists and creative arts workers. The pilot will run for 3 years, from 2022 and 2025 and seeks to address the financial instability faced by people working in the arts. The prairie-based theatre community felt that an artist basic income would acknowledge the essential nature of performing arts in a healthy society.
Without exploring the four (sometimes uncomfortable and provocative) possible future scenarios, I’m not sure if the responses from the prairie-based theatre community would have been so clear or systemic. By providing some different examples of what society and artists’ lives might look like in 2040, it allowed the community to react and respond to the parts that are desirable and undesirable. It created space to explain and elaborate on the details rather than sharing high-level, and possibly ambiguous, thoughts about hopes for the future.
Our work on this project isn’t done. We are continuing to contribute to the research project by designing a workshop series for Fall 2022 where we will dig further into the four scenarios to identify a radically optimistic vision for the future of prairie-based theatre, and an action plan to get there. We are looking forward to continuing our work with this talented community, who have inspired us during every interaction.
