Outside the Box: Redistributing Artistic Power

Towards the end of the ACE application form there’s a table on the make-up of your leadership. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has a single row for the Artistic Director, which assumes there will be, as there usually has been, one person with one set of answers. But at Candoco we now have a very different model: Artistic Assemblies. So yes, artistic direction very much exists. But no, I can’t easily pick from a drop-down, because the ‘occupation of the highest income earner in the household at age 14’ really does depend on who is there.

So as we slip into yellow-leaved Autumn with that conundrum… and with two Assemblies under our belt and the selection for our flagship commissioning programme ‘Choreo Accelerator’ coming up, it feels like the right moment to reflect on what we’ve learnt so far.

Why we did it

So what propelled the shift? The decision came less than a year ago, during a process of questioning why Candoco exists, and what, and most importantly who, we exist to benefit. Once we decided to move from an ensemble company to a producing one, a big question followed. The Choreo Accelerator puts the resources in place to bring to life the vision of a D/deaf, disabled or neurodivergent artist, working with the people they want to work with. In that context could artistic direction be a function to be distributed, rather than a role? That shift in thinking gave us the freedom to create a new way: a way that simply wouldn’t be appropriate for many companies. So we took it.

At the heart of the Assembly is multiplicity. There is no one disability and no one type of disabled person, so it stands to reason that no one artistic vision is right for Candoco any longer. We now open decision-making up to the community we work with and for, and we protect space for many voices to be heard. That is how we create the conditions for brilliance.

It has also moved us on from ‘disabled-led’ to disability-led. ‘Disabled-led’ by definition puts individuals’ protected and private characteristics out into the world in ways that aren’t always comfortable. Disability-led means decisions are always taken with, by and for D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent creatives regardless of who is holding a PAYE role at any one time. It recognises that we all have intersections and are unique, and it lets us build a model where unique can show up and be seen and heard.

A gathering, not a group

The most common misconception when I share the model is that the Assembly is a fixed group. It isn’t, and I argued hard against making it one, for three reasons. Firstly, artistic decisions don’t arrive quarterly like board meetings, so convening one fixed Artistic Assembly with busy working freelancers as part of its make up would be an administrative nightmare. No thank you. Secondly we want a range of voices at different career stages, and the right voices will be different at each juncture. And lastly, quite frankly, appointing a fixed group doesn’t distribute power. It just puts it somewhere else.

Instead, we convene a new Assembly each time a decision needs making. It may be no coincidence that I was on jury service while the board and team first mooted this idea, and I came back with that experience feeling very fresh. Like a jury, Assemblies gather around a decision and then disperse. Using that idea meant we could bring new voices into the organisation throughout the year, matched to the skills and experience each decision needs.

But juries work because they have structure and clear instructions from a judge. So we wrote ours…. Our Curatorial Statement sets out what excellence should look and, most importantly, feel like, for audiences, artists and ourselves. We drew it from our original vision and purpose, and shaped its vocabulary with artists and creative leaders, including our founders. Alongside it sits an Ethical Framework, which sets out how we enact our vision, mission and values. And with those documents in hand, we worked outwards.

Starting with clarity

With the support of creative consultant Nadine Patel, we then wrote Terms of Reference, so everyone would know what the Assembly does and how it does it. They set out two tiers of decision-making:

• Level 1: decisions are fully delegated. The Assembly’s decision is final, provided it fits our curatorial approach and budget.
• Level 2: the Assembly works alongside our executive team on larger, longer-term or higher-risk commitments, where financial, operational and artistic responsibility has to be shared.

We also set some non-negotiables:

• At least 75% of members must have lived experience of disability.
• Board members are excluded, to keep governance separate from artistic practice.
• Members are paid, and Candoco covers their access costs.

But in practice…?

Our first dilemma was how to make sure this wasn’t just a panel by another name. We are not asking Assembly members for advice and opinion as a sounding board. We talked about that tension openly as a team and concluded that much of it would come down to how we, as the Candoco team, show up.

That starts with acknowledging that while we are trying to shift power, in our PAYE roles we still hold it. So an Artistic Assembly isn’t just about the power we offer out; it’s also about how we use the power we hold ourselves differently. My belief is that our responsibility is to hold it lightly, and to use it to ensure care, honour the space and make sure every voice is heard. Any team member calling an Assembly has to take that responsibility on board and commit to checking in with members about the experience they are having throughout the process. We log their answers and recommendations in a Decision Log, which we carry into the next Assembly so that the learning is always iterative.

All of this has sparked team-wide conversations about pay, about time, and about what it really means to step back. Those conversations won’t be finished any time soon, but everyone is committed to keeping them live and honest.

It has also reminded us that for power to be truly shared, the whole process has to be considered, including how we say ‘sorry, not this time’. Given our resources, our Assemblies will have to say no more often than yes. So we’ve looked again at our entire recruitment process. We now treat it as a way for people to introduce themselves to us, and us to them, rather than only as a single opportunity going in one direction. It’s two hellos. Not one goodbye.

What about quality?

The question I’m asked most about this model is how we will ensure quality. The more I reflect on it, the more I think it says less about our model than about the norms we’ve all become accustomed to.

Bringing together a group of exceptional and diverse creatives who know their craft, the landscape and the barriers, and who haven’t been preconditioned by our organisational conventions will ensure quality not undermine it. Why would their selection of the best Motion Shorts films be any less ‘excellent’ than one made by someone with Artistic Director on their business card? So my answer is simple. If we trust the process, enact our Curatorial Statement and act within our Ethical Framework, the excellence you see will be excellence assessed by the community from within, and be all the more excellent for it.

Practice makes perfect

Working this way is like making a new piece of choreography. It needs to have a shape and a structure because improvising it from scratch, each time, would be exhausting. But it also has to adapt to the individuals present and be able to flex.

So our brilliant team: Governance Secretary, Toni, Co-Leads: Performance, Commissions and Advocacy, Emma and Nick and Lead: Skills and Leadership Lucie have together mapped out a process and workflow so the model becomes learned behaviour and muscle memory. And at every stage, it draws in the experience of the people making decisions alongside us.

Two Assemblies in, we already know we need to:

• Recruit members earlier.
• Give them more preparation time.
• Involve them in shaping any questions to applicants.
• Address conflicts of interest earlier.
• Be clearer about the facilitator’s role, or offer a member the chance to chair.

What’s next

This Autumn we have three more Assemblies planned: one to select our Motion Shorts cohort of films, and two for the Choreo Accelerator.

Both are big and important decisions for us, and we’re preparing for them by bringing together exceptional Assemblies with a real range of perspectives and knowledge, and a clear brief. I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Meanwhile, like many others, we’ll be navigating the Arts Council England NPO form and finding the best words to describe the impact that our new model offers. It won’t be the last time we have to translate this model into traditional ways of collecting ‘governance’ information, so it’s not a wasted exercise. I’ll be working with the team and board to answer those questions in a way that does the model justice. That means not squeezing it into a shape it has outgrown, but explaining it on its own terms and celebrating the breadth of ideas and perspectives we bring in when we choose a new way of governing.

The model doesn’t fit neatly into a box. But that was always the point.

A huge thank you to the people who have made up our Assemblies to date: Annie Hanauer, Tom Ryalls, Nadine Patel, Curtis Darrouux, Janice Parker, Ebony Dark and Xan Dye.