Collaborations and partnerships in Birmingham

Is Birmingham a city where it is easy to collaborate with others?

I arrived in Birmingham in the summer of 2006, tasked with preparing Town Hall for its anticipated re-opening, due to happen 18 months later at the end of 2007. Although I had lived in the Midlands during my school years, I didn’t really know Birmingham, and so had no idea how it would feel to live and work in the City, despite the reassurances from a few friendly faces I knew prior to my arrival.

Since then, I have worked closely with my colleague Paul Keene (Director of Programming for THSH) to build new relationships with artists, producers, promoters, other arts organisations, and civic and community groups.  The most refreshing aspect of working in Birmingham has been experiencing just how easy it is to meet people and “do business”.  Despite the huge amount of creative work taking place here, I quickly found that everyone knows everyone, and really there’s no excuse not to be working together and sharing ideas.

Our approach has always been to get out of Town Hall and to try and see as many other things as possible, both to support the work of others, but also to get a real understanding of how THSH fits into the creative network of the City.  When your day job is overseeing a hall which presents 300 different events a year, it’s important to remember to get off the daily hamster wheel and make the time to meet with colleagues from other arts organisations, as that tends to be how the interesting new ideas and projects begin to take shape.

This week, Town Hall have hosted Fierce and Flatpack in two exciting events (The Irrepressibles, and Digging For Gold), and we are very proud to be involved as partners in both festivals. The Irrepressibles show came about because Laura from Fierce and I were both at a previous Irrepressibles show in St Martin’s Church as part of last year’s SHOUT Queer Festival, and we were both blown away by what we heard. A couple of quick discussions later, and a chat with Jamie from the Irrepressibles, and we had agreed to jointly work together to bring the group back to Birmingham for Fierce. With Flatpack, we have always kept in touch with Ian and Pip, and following their big Curzonora project two years ago, we were keen to work with them to bring another Flatpack project to Town Hall. By taking our successful existing silent film with organ accompaniment format, and adapting it to include improvised piano and some shorter films, we have been able to add to Flatpack’s focus this year on archivist Iris Barry.

We are also preparing for our major Rite of Spring 3D project, taking place on April 21st, and performed by the CBSO with dancer Julia Mach and artistic director Klaus Obermaier. We have made the financial commitment to ensure that this extraordinary project is presented in Birmingham, but as always, we want to work with our partners to ensure that all the potential audiences get to hear about it, and we don’t serve Birmingham audiences best by just doing that by ourselves.

That approach to the marketing strategy for the Rite of Spring project runs through all of our work at THSH – we will always work with partners wherever we can, whether it is us guaranteeing the fees and costs for a project, or through more straightforward marketing and cross-promotional relationships.  For example, if we are promoting The Dhol Foundation in concert at Town Hall, we will work with The Drum, sampad, Punch, Birmingham Music Service and independent promoters to ensure that we utilise as many avenues as possible to spread the word on the show, and to help develop an audience for the artists. We are also talking to the Birmingham Jazz team on a weekly basis, sharing ideas for future projects, and working together to promote performances such as the recent Uri Caine/Mahler concert, as part of the Birmingham Mahler Cycle.

On a national basis, we’re working with promoters and festivals including Serious, who collaborate with us to ensure that artists including Mariza, Staff Benda Bilili and Salif Keita are performing in Birmingham as part of their limited UK tour plans. Serious and other promoters who represent touring artists are keen to include Birmingham, but this will only happen if an organisation like THSH is prepared to invest and commit to the artists, as these concerts rarely stand up on a purely commercial arrangement.

So, back to my original question – is Birmingham a city where it is easy to collaborate with others?  Five years on, we can look back over a very broad range of collaborations, some of which were for one-off occasions, and some which have since evolved into an ongoing relationship. I believe that collaboration is definitely one of the things that Birmingham does best, and we should be proud of what we can achieve by working together.

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By Simon Wales, Town Hall Birmingham