Our approach to financing touring

10 Dec Our approach to financing touring

We recently put together this touring case study, along with several other colleagues in the artist-led sector, to share with Arts Council England. You can read all of the different case studies on Tangled Feet’s website here. Tangled Feet have also pulled out some common themes.

We’re sharing how we’re finding the touring circuit at the moment in a spirit of openness, in the hope of making the case for a better supported touring system. Of course we know how lucky we are to get any funding at all and be able to do what we do. But it’s no secret that times have become harder for a lot of different people in the UK recently, and so if we want to be able to continue to offer good quality free events that reach wide diverse audiences in the places where they live, then it’s worth looking at whether the UK’s touring circuits are working as well or as efficiently as they could.

If you’re interested in contributing to Arts Council England’s thinking on touring at the moment, the Audience Agency are running some research.

How Mimbre tour

What we do

Mimbre are a female-led producing company, creating delicate, breathtaking and highly-skilled acrobatic theatre for outdoor and unusual settings, touring nationally and internationally, with a strong digital presence. We collaborate across the Creative Industries, as consultants and creators. We run a vibrant local youth programme and an Artist Development Programme for physical performers.

Where we tour

We typically tour to free outdoor festivals during the summer. In 2023, with two productions, we toured to: Rotherham Flux, Offbeat Festival in Oxford, Broadfield Arts Festival in Crawley, STAMP Internationales Festival der Straßenkünste in Germany, Basingstoke Festival, Dance Days in Swansea, Family Dance Day by The Place in London, Latitude Festival in Suffolk, Journeys Festival International in Leicester, Hullabaloo in the Park in Darlington, Milton Keynes International Festival, SpinOut Festival in Worthing, Kensington & Chelsea Festival, Arts in the Park at Trinity Green in Gosport, Redbridge Outdoor Arts, Spoffin Festival in the Netherlands, Full Shebang in Mansfield, Our City Moves in Hereford, Lancashire Encounter Festival in Preston, Derby Feste, Full House in Luton as well as many schools and libraries.

Who our audiences are

Our audiences vary from the 10s to the 100s, but in a typical year we will reach 15,000 people. In 2018 the Audience Agency found that “Outdoor Arts audiences are distinctive. Unlike audiences for many other artforms and cultural activities, they tend to be representative of the demographics of the public in their area”.
Because of the wide variety of places we perform, and the wide audiences we get there, we believe we are, among other things, contributing strongly to Arts Council England’s Let’s Create strategy outcome ‘Improving access to a full range of cultural opportunities wherever people live’.

However, because these events are free, unticketed and in open spaces, it’s almost impossible to survey our audiences without either being incredibly intrusive, changing the nature of the events, or somehow corralling an army of volunteers so we can incept a high enough proportion of the audience as they leave. This can make it difficult to collect exactly the kind of data that Arts Council England’s data partners (Audience Agency, Impact & Insight, Illuminate) would prefer.

How it’s paid for

A few years ago, Mimbre’s NPO (National Portfolio Organisation – or regularly funded organisation) grant was enough to make a three-hander touring outdoor show every three years as well as support our core team so we could take on other projects (commissions, our youth programme and so on). The show would then tour for three years, usually returning a surplus to the organisation that could be spent on other things.

Make up of funding

As we have been on essentially standstill funding for more than 10 years, our NPO grant now isn’t enough for the creation of even the smallest of shows, so we’re relying on getting a bit more money from Trusts & Foundations and often the Without Walls consortium of festivals – itself funded by ACE.

Additionally a lot of our bookings are now coming through consortia/networks of various kinds – in 2023 this included Without Walls, house (the South East touring network) and a tour organised by The Place but again funded through a consortium – and no doubt all of it being subsidised by ACE in some way.

The overall effect of this seems to be that instead of the Arts Council giving us money to create a show, and local authorities / Arts Council funded festivals / others then paying us to perform it, instead we’re getting a little bit from ACE, then a consortium of festivals are each getting a bit from ACE, maybe the consortium itself is getting some funding from ACE, and then finally this will come to us and will add up to enough to create the show and tour it – although we recognise many of the benefits of partnership working, in this way it seems to be making the sector less efficient rather than more.

International income

Ten years ago, half of Mimbre’s touring dates were in Europe and those bookings gave a lot of surplus back to the company. Now following Brexit, the pandemic and an increase in good quality shows on the continent, we get far fewer international bookings and they are not as well paid. It’s really important that we continue to resource our work well to make sure it is good enough to still be considered by European festivals.

Cost of living increases

As with many touring companies, we are now making a lot less from venues/festivals – we’re not subsidising our tours quite yet, but as our fees to performers, travel and accommodation costs and so on have all increased, while fees from festivals have not increased at all, our surplus is being cut more and more. We’re managing just for now, but the current trajectory cannot go on much longer.

The future

Having said all this, we still love touring, especially outdoors. The connection you can make with your audience, the feedback that we get, the varied places that we get to visit make it all incredibly worthwhile and we are of course determined to continue. We’ll see you on the road with Weight(less) in 2025!

Feature image: Mimbre, The Bridge at Counter Currents Dorset’s Inside Out Festival. Credit: Roy Riley. Alt text: A large outdoor audience looking onto a raised stage with three acrobats performing on it with a baby crib on the stage with them. In the background is the English Channel on a sunny day.