You can’t stop the beat: artists need to keep creating despite lockdowns

Michael Ball brought me an epiphany this week. If you’re reading this, Michael, thank you – firstly, for the gloriousness of your strut on BBC One’s Musicals: The Greatest Show and, secondly, for helping me process the internal debate that’s been chewing away at me this week.

As lockdown three sinks its teeth in, freelance talent sinks into ever greater risk. Certainty, gainful employment and creative fulfilment feel like an alternative reality. The hopes of a return to ‘normal’ slope further into the distance while, in inverse proportion, the appeal of and need for that delivery job, or the re-qualification scheme in lab sciences, seem to loom closer.

Simultaneously, though, there are people and organisations making bold, thrilling, boundary-pushing work. This week alone my inbox has seen a generous handful of invitations to showings or broadcasts of digital art that has been made in and for lockdown – and not streams or films of plays that were made a while ago.

I acknowledge the appetite for streamed back catalogues. It’s so important for audiences to be able to connect with the world of theatre somehow while we are all at home. But, and it’s a huge but, these streamed shows do not translate into tangible work for creatives. There are small royalties to be gained but these are truly small and crucially don’t give creatives the chance to do what we need to do: create and make new work.

The epidemiologists now tell us that this virus and all its future variants are here for the long run. Vaccination is going on apace but vaccination won’t stop the spread.

Social distancing is going to be here for a while – which means we need to think about how we make work, how we budget for work and how we present and share it with social distancing.

How to square the circle? Theatres need audiences, their ticket revenue and their interval spending to keep afloat. I can only imagine the existential challenge for the big organisations and buildings, but, even if we keep our buildings afloat, if all the creatives become phlebotomists, teachers or cyber workers there will be no shows to go to.

Can we just stay on hold, in this stasis of non-creation as we approach a year in lockdown? This is where Michael comes in. He dedicated his song to the people of theatre and when I listened properly I understood why. “You can’t stop the beat” he sang.

We need to keep moving and keep making. There are ways to support the work of the freelance creatives who are the lifeblood of the creative industries – I echo all the appeals that this last Culture Recovery Fund round should go to freelancers and it needs to support them in making work, now. Not to be put on ice until we all emerge from lockdown potentially in another year’s time – it has to be work that can live and breathe right now. So that we can live and breathe.