Event overview
Flagships & Rowing Boats: The (Un)Resistible Rise of Tara Arts & Talawa 1980-1987
This paper seeks to investigate processes on the journey, both stated and hidden, by which a theatre company who originally set out with others to address a particular constituency/ community, achieve the de facto transition of not only representing but dominating that group. Two such flagship companies for Black and Asian theatre are, and remain, Tara Arts and Talawa. Yet their rise to prominence in the 1980s, while laudable, is also puzzling when one considers their many well-established contemporaries at the time of their formation.
Tara Arts, who formed in 1977 were until their 1982 production The Lion’s Raj still essentially an amateur company; yet by the financial year of 1987/1988 the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Drama Director Brian Rix had made the unprecedented recommendation to the Drama Panel that major companies such as the National Theatre and RSC receive standstill funding in order to secure Tara Arts' long term future. Similarly, Talawa’s ambitious inaugural show The Black Jacobins managed to secure over £80,000 alone from the Greater London Council, a sum that for this one production exceeded at the time by over half, the annual subsidy of other major Arts Council theatre clients such as Foco Novo and Joint Stock.
Drawing extensively from the archives of the Arts Council of Great Britain this paper will seek to outline the policy decisions taken, both written and more significantly unwritten, by which Tara Arts and Talawa were selected to become representative/token flagship companies over and above contemporaries such as The Black Theatre Co-operative, Temba and Madhav Sharma’s Actor’s Unlimited, who by contrast struggled or disbanded by the end of the 1980s.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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20 Nov 2013 | 4:30pm - 6:00pm |
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