EC PAPERS NOVEMBER 2017

3

Liberating Arts

Process :

From the beginning Liberating Arts was conceived as a hybrid event that shared characteristics with a summer music festival, an academic conference, a trade union conference and an arts festival. The event was to include performances played to a passive seated audience but also discursive sessions in which the audience were active participants. This is an emerging and now relatively common hybrid conference/festival model developed from the literary festival ( Hay Festival ) and is shared by events such as The Battle Of Ideas , Marxism Today , Rebellious Media and The World Transformed . 1

The date was already set as 3-5 November and a venue in Yarnfield near Stoke–on-Trent had been already booked.

The Producer’s brief included an aspiration that Liberating Arts ‘broke even’, i.e. that it did not cost the GFTU anything.

Yarnfield, is a residential, corporate training centre and the accommodation rate is £160 per person for 2 nights including all meals. We had rooms booked for 150 and although the rate of £160 is not unreasonable if we added the full costs of running the festival onto that we arrived at a minimum ticket prices of £300 per person for the weekend. Even with the excellent line up we eventually assembled a ticket price of £300 would be extremely hard to sell into a market place of low paid creative and trade union activists. Thus it was recognised that ticket prices alone could not cover the costs of the festival and it was agreed that ticket prices would aim to cover 50% of the costs, with sponsorship and grants covering the other 50%.

Indeed one of the marketing taglines we later adopted was “Liberating Arts is to the trade 1 union movement what The World Transformed is to the Labour Party.”

3 Producer’s Report 06/11/2017