Imagination and heart – your local arts fest should be leading everyone in unlocking the two things you most need to flip a world *forever* in crisis.

If you ever consider it, you might like to think of art as edgy and a little out there – but fun fashion stunts alone don’t make a living world. Playful interruptive experiences in public can help a lot of people at once feel like they’re not alone where they live, as guests, artists and festival makers alike try to create meaning out of the deepest personal realities. Especially now.

“It’s amazing. It’s wonderful. They should leave it here for a long time. Wow.”

David and Pam and Mrs Peach and I found ourselves naturally falling into conversation, as we’d all arrived on the seafront and stood staring up at the gleaming ten-meter structure rising from the shoreline in front of us and a gathering morning crowd.

“It makes you feel something” David said quietly, just taking it in.

A BEWorks report out this week suggests that there is a huge correlation between creative mindsets and optimism about facing the climate crisis. In fact, their study with 2,300 people in the US, UK, UAE and Japan found it to be a crucial component we’ll all need to tackle the slightly massive, world-threatening problem you might have heard about.

“When it comes to climate, the science is everything. But when science is married with story – well, that’s when facts can take flight, and impact the collective imagination” as Solitaire Townsend puts it, quoted in the report.

Interesting to pause lightly here to consider how little creative and cultural education most of us have grown up with, huh. ..But keeping it moving, that evidence doesn’t just swivel all spotlights suddenly at practicing artists. It also makes me think of the place where such mindsets can get triggered in anyone passing by.

A public arts festival.

I have been appreciative of the arts festival in my home town since its vaguely miraculous appearance in Bournemouth thirteen years ago. But this year I turned up to it as one of its new board members.

Arts By The Sea has grown to do a particular job rather naturally, I think – hold creative space for anyone to enjoy. An outdoor arts event spilling around a familiar town centre, changing the way we see ordinary things a little and trying to remove barriers to unusual storytelling experiences… I think such work can be a demonstration of radically hopeful leadership. 

No, really. Fight me.

Galleries with weird things in aren’t radical.

Fight me some more.

Now, when it comes to art, I ruddy love a white cube gallery, you know that. Going in with a curious mind always changes the way I see the world outside again afterwards. The long, winding queue of people waiting for the brilliant Giant to open its doors for the very first time to a whole post-industrial looking floor of Bobby’s, two summers ago, was so polite and patient you could smell the cultural adrenalin like dry gunpowder. 

It’s hard work keeping such a space alive. It’s a kind of community service to our imaginations; lord, but was I happy when it opened. But white cube galleries as a format have been a standard appropriation of art for way longer than I’ve been alive. And I’ve stood in cultural queues for a long time.

Outdoor arts festivals, on the other hand, have to do a bunch of differently daring things at once. Interruptive, logistical and political things far from the decadent luxury of guerrilla protest. And in managing this every time they occur, their organisers are showing all other leaders how to make things happen. To say nothing of how to make somewhere feel like a place.

The world premier of Lucid Create’s Portal, made David and Pam want to keep coming back to the town. 

“It’s an accident that we’re here while this is on,” they said to us. “Next year we’ll come especially.”

“Oh, I managed to get into the launch!” said someone to me with a sudden light in their eye, after we’d been introduced at an event in town two months later. “That’s why I recognise you! It’s my favourite arts festival. I can’t wait for next year. If I hadn’t moved to Bournemouth, I’d visit especially.”

If only arts festivals were just a bit of fun.

Climbing mountains.

As I shared in my previous Unsee The Future article, all the images at the sober Bournemouth Town Centre Summit recently were from this festival. But the context in which makers are always making such experiences is psychological mountain climbing. Battling many cultural elements at once. 

It’s not simply the massive practical basics of facing off with the actual weather, and ninja-ing uncertainty for dozens of productions and sites at once in spaces not designed for theatre. It demands a mental wellspring of resourcefulness, diplomacy, artful scheduling, accounting for everything and, for many events, a long ride aboard the soul drain – having to explain to other leaders what the value of culture even is. Even while they’re having a great time being photographed at it.

All that is before you arrive at the real creative start line – the interrupted public. How do you grab their attention with delight all of a sudden on their way to the CoOp? Street theatre professionals the world over should be carried aloft by CEOs as their warrior class.

Art always challenges the establishment, even when it seems silly. A noisy junk orchestra of found objects; grief hiding in a suitcase. The structures of our global economic world make many expressions of nature, like black skin or gender or sexuality, political. Provocations to power just by existing in this context. And that toxic status quo running underneath all our lives and hiding in so many of our unthinking habits has also removed art from being a natural part of who we are. 

It seems like a frilly luxury to many of us. An elite indulgence. Not a life support system.

There are still many town centres you would not want to dress in a glittery one-piece and ride into, on your Big Gay Disco Bike.

I may have developed a whole thesis about art’s vital missing place in facing crisis and change, but in joining the board of this festival, I found myself suddenly taken to school about what leadership really feels like.

Because trying to hold joyful space for others can feel excruciating. 

Your own shortcomings and blindspots can suddenly seem lit up like a ten meter sculpture. As an artist, I thought I’d trained for tougher skin.

Challenging ourselves.

Before being interviewed for the board, I'd only contributed one piece of work to the festival myself before, commissioned in the lockdown year of 2020 to develop a podcast. Between us, it turned into the wonderful Talking Distance, which still ranks amongst my favourite work.

But talking to artists about their stories is a long way from stepping into the shoes of responsibility that helps get their work out there.

Outdoor arts events become un-gated intersections of people’s lives; everyone’s private experiences and view of the world at a point in time are all suddenly paused together and held a bit more open than usual. The human issues that art has to deal with will include our most serious, our deepest. 

Any troupe of festival makers bringing artistic works together are taking everyone’s lives in their hands. 

You don’t know what you might be provoking, unlocking, by holding space for creative testimony, for emotional expression. While I’m swooping up another free prosecco and seem to be enjoying myself at a private view, what might the work or the particular gathering of people be saying to you, there in the same moment? Does it even feel like a safe space? And what might it have taken for the event’s leaders and artists to make it into the official photos down the front, or the Insta moment right beside you?

Putting art out into the world is risky, because you don’t know what people will see in your work.

Putting on an event is a full rollercoaster of risk – but they make significant shared moments in our lives, even landmarks. Putting those landmarks on the beach or together in an exhibition might show up things no one expected. Sorta gotta hope so.

What art-thinking leaders can do with the seriously unexpected is emotional alchemy – make something out of what happens. Turn that accidental experience into something deliberate, to learn from next. Make it part of the story. And man, but emotional truth can be exposing.

What I’d expect from creative sector leaders is speaking the language; they should be more equipped to be self aware and willing to develop.

“Arts By The Sea Festival and the cultural team in BCP are leading the council’s reputation on all fronts.”

I found myself proclaiming this from the front, opening the launch party. I’d gone a bit mad inviting friends from across the creative scenes in town. It was a joy to see who was there this year. But I was a bit turned up to eleven, because of some serious things running in the background at this party.

We knew, as a brand new board, we had to be diplomatically on deck for director Andrea Francis and her tiny team. That black hole in the council’s finances was hanging over the future of the festival. Like facing sustainability or representation, BCP is at the “we get it” stage of cultural leadership, not quite the “we know what it feels like” stage.

“It may be the single most cost-effective brand tool our local authority has at its disposal,” I continued. “It shows how to get on and do in an age of talk – economic impact, environmental leadership, community engagement, talent retention and development, business partnership, diversity, inclusion and representation…”

It’s easy to say things to a home crowd. Proof of our creative values comes in the structures we change, as leaders.

The behind the scenes details of our context as a team don’t matter to my point here. I felt proud to introduce who I did that first night, and who I saw around us all together there. I saw a large creative community, full of heart and imagination, backdropped by Bournemouth’s pines. 

Andrea and creative director Tor Byrnes are people I’ll readily champion for their grown up leadership and consistent authenticity before I continue to name drop them as dear mates, like the big lush I am. The calibre of character that Andrea and Leigh Hayler and Sam Johnson found in their new board members makes me feel a bit sobered to sit next to. I’ve already watched what leadership looks like in some of them, including new board chair Emma Kerr , and I marvel a bit at it. Who we are is bound to evolve, but partly because of the attitude of the people stepping up now.

And as I said to council leader Vikki Slade and Chief Executive Graham Farrant , when I first met them back in the summer: "If you want to see the best community engagement, watch the video from last year's Arts By The Sea West Howe…"

“Moments make our lives – and artists help us make them.” I finished with, raising a toast.

Tackling global, structural, generational problems is not for the lone logistics planner. It’s not for the lone anybody. Even opening ourselves up to new creative experiences can knock us off balance. But if we are to change the stories of our times and places to ones with more compelling futures, we will have to encourage each other to get creative. And help each other to hold safer risky spaces to do so.

It was just another moment in time, Arts By The Sea this year, and for thousands of voices in Bournemouth a carefree joyful one. I heard that orchestra of found objects being banged and hooted and twanged all the live-long weekend.

What interests me, as we look forwards, is what we’ll keep making it into for more of us – and the leadership it could inspire everywhere else, just when we need it. 

The heart and imagination it could stoke in who we think we are, and what we think we can do.

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"As this report demonstrates, culture is an essential tool for cities in generating environmental engagement, whilst supporting other interconnected policy agendas such as urban planning, social inclusion, health, commerce and regeneration. The cultural life of cities connects citizens to one another, and to their values, offering a critical platform to influence, inspire and lead public engagement on climate and the environment.” 

World Cities Culture Forum: Culture and climate change

“One of the biggest drags on the economy is how many people are unwell in the UK. It’s not a question of prioritising healthy people OR a healthy economy, you get the second if you invest in the first.” 

From Quality Of Life Foundation symposium.

“Given the overall low confidence and optimism across the globe, who then has hope for humanity and Is motivated to work on the most difficult challenge we have faced?”

BeWorks: Propelling Climate Action, Illuminating the Climate Era Mindset

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Crisis and change: how to get more effectively excited.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ME AND MY CLIMATE & FUTURES CREATIVE WORK AT MOMOZO.CO >