I Know That We're Gonna Dance Again

I've written about all the negatives over the past few months, so it seems only fair that I write something about one of the positives that has FINALLY happened.

On Monday morning, 1385 organisations received the much needed news that they had been successful in receiving a grant as part of the Culture Recovery Fund. For those that don't know, this is from the Government's 1.57 billion 'rescue package', that arts organisations applied for back in August. 
One of the organisations who received a much needed grant was my place of work, and my home: The Theatre, Chipping Norton.

It's a really strange thing when your place of work is so much more than that, and it actually is your home. If you didn't know, I essentially grew up in that theatre, and it has literally been my home from home for the last 18 years (and my full time employer for 6 and a half years).

The pandemic has stopped the arts in their tracks, and threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands (with tens of thousands having already been made redundant or forced to take employment elsewhere.) This funding has secured our staffs employment through the winter and into early next year, when we plan to reopen fully in the Spring of 2021. I think in reality that's optimistic (largely due to the government's shambolic response to the situation)  but we're planning and adapting to our ever changing surroundings. It's what we artists do: we look at what is around us and react.

Inevitably, not everyone was as lucky as we were. Two thirds of applications were successful, but that means that around 700 applications weren't. Which is really rough. There are organisations that are going to really struggle in the coming months, and some of them won't survive. And that's really hard. 

There was a way of getting all our venues through this if the crisis had been acted on sooner, and the Government had invested in us the way that we really deserve, but hey, we are where we are. If you have any money that you could donate to one of these venues, who will be frantically working out how they are going to keep going, you'll never know how much they appreciate your generosity. 

Herbert Kretzmer (the lyricist of Les Miserables) died this week. It's a real loss to the theatre community, but he truly left us with some of the most hopeful words in the musical theatre canon. If you're looking for a lyric about hope, there isn't one better than this:

"Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise"