The arts are a powerful tool for social change but it takes more than good intentions for an arts project to really make a difference.
The opportunity to change your little piece of the world is appealing to most of us. But arts organisations cannot just drop into disadvantaged communities and expect to be effective – let alone appreciated.
There is now a huge body of evidence that the arts can assist in improving mental and physical health, empowering disadvantaged groups and increasing educational achievement. There are many opportunities for artists to make work, find employment and make a positive social difference in hospitals and disability services and schools, with Indigenous and refugee communities and with local government in struggling regions. Successful arts projects have been shown to reduce crime, improve literacy rates, and ease the anguish of the dying.
But get the stars out of your eyes. These are tough jobs with difficult customers, many of whom have seen a parade of short-term social workers and community projects come and go without really changing their situation. Sculptor Deborah Halpern, who is currently working on a public housing project, says working with the disparate community can be ‘like trying to herd cats’. Polyglot’s Sue Giles notes the barriers to participation that mean disadvantaged schools sometimes turn down free opportunities because they lack the timetable space or simply the imagination.
Successful social change arts projects need as much professional rigour as commercial ventures: clear goals, measurable outcomes and excellent follow-through. At a recent event hosted by Melbourne City Council’s Lord Mayor’s Fund, people who have driven successful arts projects for social change gave their advice and examples of what works.
Cede control
Sue Giles, Artistic Director, Polyglot Theatre has led a large number of social change projects both within Australia and internationally. Current projects include work in Indonesian villages and a project to support young pregnant women in Melbourne.
She says in social change projects it’s essential to ensure you have the community working with you. ‘Any project that displays proper process with community, time taken to engage authentically, form partnerships and work collaboratively towards the outcomes, whether public or not.’
Giles says there is particular power in a public outcome. ‘If the outcome is very strong then not only the people involved but the rest of the community, and perhaps those outside the community, can see and respond to the issues involved.’
The exchange between artists and the community is essential – not only the community but also the artists must be willing to change and grow. ‘We use a lot of child-led process where we hand leadership over to the children and artists are really challenged in that because sometimes their entire practice has to fly out the window. It also means they genuinely engage with the community because there’s a mutual need.’
A seminal example for Polyglot was High Rise, a puppetry and performance project, based in a housing estate at the time of the Tampa crisis. ‘The children really took it to heart and they really started making this project something they could talk to the rest of the world about. So in terms of esteem, confidence, creative confidence especially, it was a particularly powerful piece.’
Take a risk
Professor Sue Natrass had her most powerful experience of social change through the arts when she was running the (then) Victorian Arts Centre. A Sydney-based Indigenous theatre company came to her with Munjong, a script by Richard Walley, complaining no Sydney venue would have them.
‘I got into a towering rage internally and I said “Just bring them down here and we’ll look after them”. Then I read the play. I won’t use the language I used at the time. ‘I thought “This is dreadful” but then I realised I was looking at it through white eyes.’
She took a risk, largely because she did not want to go back on her word and provided the group with not only a free venue but also skills training and accommodation. ‘We did everything we could to ensure they would succeed’.
The result was the world premiere of ‘one of the best plays I have seen in my life’, says Natrass. ‘They turned the studio at the Arts Centre into an extraordinary landscape so evocative of central Australia.’
‘It was a very difficult story. It was about deaths in custody and they told the story with such humour and directness. It had a profound effect on audiences. It had a profound effect on me. It had a profound effect on my at time 11-year old nephew…it really set up his thinking about the relationship about groups in our community.
‘It also started to move Aboriginal theatre into the mainstream. The members of that original community derived a great deal of pride and they went on to be the leaders in Aboriginal theatrte: Rhoda Roberts, Kyle Belling, Lydia Miller.’
Give people something to feel proud of
Sculptor Deborah Halpern believes a high quality artistic result is a key part of an effective social project.
‘One thing that drives me crazy is community art that just looks like it’s been thrown together and people say “Well, the process is what’s important”.. It drives me insane. Process is fantastic but if there’s no result that people could be proud of you lose so much.’
Halpern is currently engaged in a project called Creating community: one sculpture at a time, which will deliver three Halpern sculptures to the Atherton Gardens in Melbourne. She is working with both children and adults from the local housing commission.
While she has had to let go of initial ideas and respond to the group she is working with she has hung on to her artistic standards.
‘I’m into precision. I want even the little five year olds who can hardly use their hands [to be precise]. I say, “You have to find a tile that will fit into that space”. They have to get mum or dad to cut it for them so there’s all that working together, all that thinking, all that maths or science, your relationship to the physical world. There’s so much on so many levels, all that creative stuff adds to life.’
Halpern says creating a physical work brings people together. ‘You go in with one idea and you come out with completely another idea. You can imagine, there are probably thousands of people who live in that high rise community and many different communities are there and they don’t particularly want to talk to each other so the whole project means trying to get a group of people who don’t even want to talk to each other to have some sort of relationship.
‘If you give people a result at the end of the project and they have had a part in that result and they have participated in one way or another – however that may look, generally not the way you thought it was going to look in the first place – there is ownership there.
‘People want to know about the work we are doing, how do you cut the tiles, what glue do you use. People can’t help themselves. They just want to be involved because they are human.’
Halpern also advises artists to step back and enable leaders to emerge from the community. ‘I can see that leaders actually start to come out. My intention is really to be invisible in the process and have those people show the way.’
Measure the outcomes
Education consultant Professor Brian Caldwell has gathered powerful evidence of the transformative power of the arts. His research on The Song Room is a useful lesson that outcomes can be and should be measured
Few arts organisations will have the opportunity to do the kind of controlled trial which The Song Room project in Western Sydney offered but many will be able to record positive impacts through their intervention.
Caldwell’s team was able to find two sets of schools exactly matching. One set of schools provided an hour a week of music education to upper primary students for either 12 or 18 months. The other schools acted as a control. At the end of the project the students who received The Song Room program were a whole year ahead of their peers in their scores in literacy.
‘There are hundreds and millions of dollars that have been spent trying to improve literacy with minimal effect, even sliding practice. But here’s a program that if generalised would give a whole year.’
But it wasn’t just academic outcomes. Students also improved on every-single measure of social and emotional well-being survey, which includes resilience, stress, engagement with adults and more.
Caldwell was familiar with’ incontestable evidence that participation in the arts may increase academic outcomes, increase IQ, improve literacy and numeracy, improve attendance, resilience, self-regulation, self-esteem, identity, self-efficacy and motivation, tolerance, empathy, co-operation, collaboration and communication’.
But he was flabbergasted at the strength of The Song Room findings, which were fed into the National Curriculum Review and had a key effect on Creative Australia’s recent announcement that every child would receive arts education under the Federal Government’s new National Cultural Policy.
