In 2022, Talking Birds celebrated its 30th anniversary of making work in Coventry. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that 2021-2022 was quite a year for us – bringing our 30th anniversary, Coventry’s stint as UK City of Culture, a global pandemic and the opening of The Nest which is – after 30 peripatetic years – a home base for the company from which to explore Regenerative Creative Practice. Established and stewarded as a resource for all those independent artists and small organisations in the city without a building base of their own, The Nest is also a place for us to build a climate conscious creative community.
We have found that being based in a building over which we have a degree of agency – especially one we have created as the shared resource we have always wished existed in the city – has brought change to both the way we conceive of ourselves as artists and, practically, to the work we make. Our programme for 2023-26 reflects this. As has always been the case, our three year programme is indicative – this is where we want to get to, and we have some markers along the way, showing the direction of travel but – as a small organisation – we make these plans before we know what resources we will be able to secure to achieve them. We also build in flex because we know how important it is to be able to respond to opportunities, or needs, that arise in the time between laying out the routemarkers and actually drawing the map.
Experience tells us that we will get to the place we want to get to, but that there is value in allowing time to explore the fruitfully meandering route (and maybe the odd dead end), rather than taking a more direct path.
There are 5 strands to our programme:
1. The Nest
We believe that effective leadership is kind, generous, creative, values-driven and distributed. Our mission at The Nest is explicitly to foster authentic behaviour change – specifically around climate, access and inclusion – through our creative leadership and sector support programme; making opportunities tailored to those with less ready access to mainstream opportunities; drawing on extensive contacts and place-based partnerships developed over 30 years; & building an extended creative community.
The Nest has already become established as the centre of the city’s green producing ecology: leading on and promoting Regenerative Creative Practice (as ‘sustainable’ is not enough) via our extensive programme which includes Nest Residencies, F13 network, Creative Co-working, Open Cast, and the Nestival of Ideas talks and discussions which we will continue to evolve and develop over the next three years.
2. Access/Difference Engine
Talking Birds is an acknowledged sector lead in centring access in the creative process, helped by national hires of our low-cost captioning tool The Difference Engine. Hires will continue, but the system is now in need of extensive tech development, which will require significant additional funding. The Difference Engine is only one strand of our wider work on access, which we will continue to build on over the next three years alongside audience and tech development.
We continue to prioritise d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent practitioners with our artist support opportunities and to offer an open, welcoming, safe and supported environment to many who face barriers to accessing other suppport and development opportunities, or might even hesitate to refer to themselves as artists.
Talking Birds is a partner on the Artists Manifesto for Access, created by Coventry artists in collaboration with Dan Thompson as part of Access Coventry, an initiative aimed at equipping artists in the city to more meaningfully implement access into their practice. Access Coventry, was managed by Shoot Festival with support from Talking Birds on behalf of F13 and has subsequently grown into the Coventry Access Consortium, which we plan to develop collectively in the next three years, building on the manifesto.
3. Art for the People
The nine recommendations that came out of Art for the People, our Citizens’ Assembly on Arts, Culture and Creativity were more far-reaching than we could have envisaged – and Talking Birds has adopted this programme of change as a major part of our programme for the next (at least) five years.
The long-term growth and progression of this work is about developing democracy, policy, agency, creativity – and making real people-powered change through arts, cultural and creative projects. We will continue to work to advance the nine Recommendations on multiple fronts in collaboration with the Assembly participants and their communities – sometimes leading and sometimes supporting, carefully sharing, and then handing over, ownership as we proceed.
Initially we will focus on:
–Neighbourhood Creative Hubs and the Make Something Happen Fund – projects which bring communities together through arts, culture and creative activities in a truly inclusive way – building cohesion, joy and collective resilience;
–Green Ways and Lighter & Brighter – projects which centre around environmental improvements; which are iterative, building on pilot projects; supporting communities in bidding for money and project managing; taking ownership of, and responsibility for, their environment.
–Encounters with Arts & Culture – projects that encourage accidental and purposeful engagement with arts and culture for enjoyment, education, problem-solving or career paths.
4. Outdoor Arts
Talking Birds makes work outdoors because it is the ultimate encounter with arts and culture. By ‘getting in people’s way’ work outdoors continues to be a great ‘stumble across’ intro to the company, and is especially well suited to areas and communities where arts engagement is otherwise low. We have a number of well-respected pieces in ‘rep’ which we will continue to tour to festivals, town centres and so on. These range from the Whale to a series of actor-guided walking tours (both live and digital), plus participatory sports favourites The Cricketers and Come Bowl With Me. The outdoor work is very much about fun, care, and bringing audiences together in a shared experience. These are also the projects that best allow us to engage large numbers of freelance performers, and our Open Cast initiative in particular is a route to expanding the pool of freelance performers with whom we work.
5. War & Peace
This will be a new body of exploratory creative work we will build over this three year period, interrogating the contradictions inherent in Coventry’s status as a centre of peace and reconciliation but yet also a long time manufacturer of arms. Through:
-building partnerships and creative collaborations with Coventry residents with lived experience of warfare and/or war zones, particularly those also on the front line of climate breakdown;
-pulling together our existing knowledge gathered over a long period of time in a city which is seemingly forever defined by a war of almost 80 years ago – for example by returning to re-examine specific stories such as the death of Coventry violinist Montague Johnson at the Battle of the Somme, or Coventry women’s unintentional invention of town twinning via an embroidered tablecloth, as well as the stories incoming from more recent conflicts, in the context of how the war in Ukraine and the rescinding of Coventry’s twinning with Volgograd plays out.
-how this destructive human activity, its contradictions and the power imbalances it magnifies, relates to – and affects – the climate crisis.
-hope and despair, the rehabilitation of ruined landscapes and polarised people, and how humanity can find ways to come back together.
The baseline of Talking Birds’ operation in all these activities is supported by our inclusion in Arts Council England’s National Portfolio, but significant additional fundraising is always required in order to achieve the levels, and depth, of activity in the proposed programme. Our work is funded through commissions, touring and hire fees, grants and donations from trusts, foundations and other supporters. If you would like to make a contribution to supporting our work, you can purchase Nest Bonds here, or make a donation here. Thank you.
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