Unpacking Great Regional Engagement

A photo of Michal mid-conversation, seated at the ActNow front desk. She is a white woman with dark hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail and is wearing a fitted denim top and matching jeans with heart-shaped sunglasses pushed back over her head.

Photograph by Alex Kwong.

Great regional engagement starts with community at its centre, as any engagement practices should, so why are so few arts organisations committing to listening to the communities they claim to serve?

Written by Michal Hughes

In January of 2023, I spent two weeks onsite attempting to solve, play with, examine, experiment with how ActNow can engage in more meaningful ways with regional communities. I have felt a little like I have been trying to answer an impossible question. 

I didn’t always live in a regional town; I was born in a city in central New Zealand and spent my formative childhood years enjoying the privilege of access to metropolitan spaces. Then, at eight years old, we packed up our home and relocated to the coldest, tiniest, wettest corner of Tasmania, where weekend entertainment was pub rock at the local RSL. My family committed to driving me an hour each way to rehearsals for my school musicals. At the time, I didn’t hate the disconnect from live arts and entertainment — I was young and marvelled at the small-town magic of roaming the streets at all hours and building cubbies in the bush. Those who have never lived in a small town will never truly understand the unparalleled sense of community you can feel in a space where every face is familiar. The regional experience has always been central to my work, forever chasing that feeling of freedom and adventure so present in my youth.

Fast forward a few years, and we relocated again, as is typical for industry families, to South Australia, settling on Barngarla land (Whyalla) 380 kilometres northwest of Adelaide. What Whyalla lacked in small-town quaintness, it made up for in sunshine. Finally, I lived in a town big enough to host a live theatre, a cinema, and D’faces — one of only two fully funded youth arts organisations in the state. I like to say that I have wanted to work in the arts for as long as I remember, having grown up watching my mother on stage, obsessively writing stories, and even as a young child, producing Christmas productions with my cousin for our whole family (only $0.50 a ticket, AND you get a free program!). Still, I don’t think it was until Whyalla that I truly understood a career in the arts was something I could achieve. D’faces presented a home for other outcasts and weird art kids like myself, where creative development and artistic growth was nurtured and flourished.

It is worth noting that my displeasure is not with the companies who tour their work to the regions, spending months spreading their art from town to town. My argument is with the culture that has decided that we regional patrons of the arts should be thankful for the packages they deliver, never stopping to ask us what we want to see. Though a regional tour is valuable for a theatregoer, simply visiting the regions to perform city-centric work does not have the same impact as work tailored for regional audiences.

The engagement, or lack thereof, of metropolitan arts organisations in my city, is often on my mind. I am lucky to live in close proximity to one of only five regionally based Country Arts SA Art centres; however, regional engagement is often looked at by metro organisations within the framework of gifting communities with one-off workshops and one-night performances. Though a regional tour is valuable for a theatregoer, simply visiting the regions to deliver a production of city-centric work does not have the same impact as work tailored for regional audiences. For example, within five years, Don Giovanni toured Whyalla twice, and due to the drop in popularity of classical opera, not only regionally, but across the nation, both times tickets failed to sell, and both times, our theatre was only filled thanks to the hard work of our local arts champions who care passionately about the continuation of arts opportunities for their community.

Of my country-based colleagues I have spoken to over this last week, based in different communities across South Australia, there were a few common threads in our conversations. One thing we consistently agreed on was the recognition that the regional experience is very different to the metro experience, and each regional community itself differs vastly from another. Therefore, regional engagement must centre the regional experience and cater specifically to a community’s needs.

As a theatremaker, I work primarily with regional young people between the ages of 12 and 18 who are filled with fire, thought, and desire for social change, and who perform to small audiences in half-filled community halls just because they feel the need to tell their stories. For them, I ask, what legacy do touring shows want to leave the communities they visit? Because we know what we want as regional practitioners; we want meaningful, long term engagement that understands who we are as communities, that enriches our experiences, that tell stories to which we can relate, and that shows us things we might never have seen before. We want committed organisational funding for our existing regional arts organisations and better support for the crucial work they are already doing. When a workshop is delivered in conjunction with a live performance, do these programmers genuinely care for the development of these participants, or are regional makers and shakers just a box ticked on a grant application?

One of the greatest things D’faces does as an organisation is centre the lived experience of project collaborators in its work. There is a strong commitment to creating original work and consulting with its internal communities along the way. Supporting regional artists is the only way to keep art being made in regional communities, and D’faces commitment to nourishing local practitioners is a perfect example of community engagement done right, but as an organisation that is vital to our creative community, D’faces runs annually off minimal organisational funding and only 1.4 FTE staff. When organisations say “We want to engage better regionally”, what they often fail to grasp is that we don’t need more shows, or more administrative tasks that are marketed as being “great for our community”, we need support and resources, and, like every other arts organisation in Australia, more money.