Guest Blog: Suba Das On How HighTide's Lighthouse Programme Is Supporting Writers

It's certainly surprising to find yourself still working at least ten hours a day during "lockdown". As I check in with so many of my freelance friends and colleagues who are the beating heart of our industry, I know how lucky I am to be busy. Their experience of this crisis has been characterised by a sense of shock and paralysis, of certainties falling away.

Our response at HighTide has been to roll up our sleeves, launching our Lighthouse Programme four days after the theatres began to close. Our intention was straightforward: while it feels increasingly likely that life will never be quite the same again after this moment (nor should it be), we believe there will be a moment when artists and audiences will meet again.

Our responsibility at HighTide is the same as it's ever been: to ensure there is an ongoing flow of incredible new and diverse talent into our industry. And so, our programmes right now are based on ways of generating community, keeping writers sharp and engaged, and doing what we can to ensure that our most vulnerable talents especially, those from low-income backgrounds, do not fall away at this time.

We're as fortunate as anyone can be at this time in that we were gearing up to announce a range of new initiatives and ways of working to mark my first year as new Artistic Director (having taken up the reins officially last October after the conclusion of our 2019 Festival). Consequently, the projects we've announced so far simply required us to pull forward plans we had already made, and there was something quite clarifying in not holding fire on things simply for the "right" or most "business-savvy" moments, but rather responding practically to need.

As a company, we've asked ourselves frequently in the past few weeks "What are we here for, who are we seeking to serve, how is what we do of unique significance?", but again these are conversations that any organisation undergoing leadership change asks of itself. It feels uncannily as if we were somehow preparing ourselves for this moment anyway.

The programmes we've launched encompass script-reading, writer training and a more detailed mentorship relationship with up to ten of the UK's most exciting emerging voices. All of these opportunities are offered for free, and we have made artists in the East of England (our home region and a part of the UK characterised by quite limited levels of investment from Arts Council England, with a fairly small number of National Portfolio Organisations) and artists from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds the focus of these first efforts.

We've also sought to innovate where we can by making public the details of our script-readers (our first set of Associate Artists, the incredible Aisha Zia, Chris Sonnex, Chinoyerem Odimba and The Queer House) so that writers get to have some choice in who reads their work. It's a way of handing back power to the writer, who so often is simply sharing work into a void, and also acknowledging that work from diverse voices and perspectives needs to be encountered and held by dramaturgs, producers and directors who will understand where that work comes from, and not seek to homogenise it through a development process.

Alongside this offer, we are also launching a Digital Youth Theatre in partnership with 4YP, the health service for the most vulnerable young people in our home region of Suffolk, where we have traditionally held our annual new writing festival.

We're creating this using the incredible Coronavirus Time Capsule resources created by the phenomenal Company Three, and that means that actually in a time of lockdown and isolation, young people in Suffolk will in fact have an opportunity to get to know their peers all over the world. It feels like a true defiance of a threat that seeks to shut us down and make us small.

Importantly for us at HighTide - as we consider our home in the East, a part of England characterised by overwhelming social exclusion and rural isolation - the digital tools we are developing to respond to this crisis, the networks we are building to promote and distribute, the very way we work, all of this feels like organisational development that we should and must hold on to for our future.

The response to these initiatives tells us we are on the right track. Around 300 artists have participated already. More incredibly, having set an initial fundraising target of £10,000 to try to support the costs of this work and ensure it is sustainable, we find ourselves having already raised almost double that. This has enabled us to launch our "Cancellation Catalogue", with a hope that we can find some way to help rescue the British new writing premieres that have been lost already and include them in our plans, whatever they way be, as we begin to emerge from this. Shutdown mustn't mean silence.

Find out more about HighTide's work here

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