Shaping the Arts is a documentary which investigates, through the lens of a freelance creative, the performing arts sector and its role in the UK’s creative industries.

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Including interviews with industry leaders, changemakers, grassroots organisations and freelancers, the film shares both a UK and international perspective. Exploring issues surrounding routes into the industry, funding models, skills for the future andthe policy changes required to sustain the creative eco-system.

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A House of Lords report published in January 2024 estimates that music, visual and performing arts contributed £11.2bn GVA to the economy in 2022 and supported more than 28,000 jobs, comparable to the number supported by the Film and TV sector (Contribution of the arts to society and the economy - House of Lords Library (parliament.uk). 

 

Yet in 2024 alone, the UK arts sector witnessed more funding cuts, closures and protests than in any other year in history. Nowhere are these cuts more acutely felt than in theatre and opera: two areas in which the UK is indisputably world-class. And nowhere are precarity and brilliance of the sector more starkly captured than in the freelancers who power it.

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Shaping the Arts is a documentary which investigates the challenges facing the theatre & opera sector and the role it plays as part of the UK’s creative industries growth strategy. It explores the following themes: Routes into the Industry; Inequality, Roles & Diversity; Policy, Changes & Actions; Funding Structures; Skills for the Future.

 

Using economic statistics and research data, Shaping the Arts offers recommendations to an industry primed for both UK and international growth. The documentary takes a historical perspective charting the progress of the performing arts from 1945, to an industry today on the precipice of change.

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What are we adding to the debate that is new?

 

94%of the created by the nations stages is entirely reliant on the Freelance workforce. Freelancers do not have a voice in the decision making for the industry, this is led by only 6% in full time employment. For the first time, Shaping The Arts offers a unique perspective from practicing freelancers, whoare the innovators, drivers, imagineers, with the expertise and specialised skills that make the sector work, in order to create change and find solutions to resolving issues faced across the creative industries. The documentary looks at a new model that can sit within an existing infrastructure. We ask the questions: If working models and funding structures were different, what could change? Could outcomes and economic growth be enhanced?

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