Rural touring is where professional performances take place in rural venues. These rural venues usually take the form of a Village Hall or Community Centre, but can also be pubs, libraries and outdoors. They are rarely fully equipped arts venues. Rural touring is generally set in villages where many audiences walk to the venue. And if they don’t walk, they live usually within a 10-mile radius, so journeys are short.
The performances available are programmed by Creative Arts East, the expert rural touring charity, who curate a varied season of events they believe will appeal to local audiences. The specially curated programme is then presented to local promoters to host the events in their own communities. All genres of work are represented in rural touring – from comedy to drama and from theatre to dance. The very best creative practitioners and performing companies are selected and all deliver professional quality work. If live performance doesn’t appeal, then the project also supports community cinema, meaning anything from the latest blockbusters and timeless classics, to live-recorded theatre performances, foreign language films and contemporary independent titles are available.
Since August 2021, the rural touring project in Cambridgeshire has helped 20 communities put on performances in their village halls, with 22 live performances and 53 films being shown. These performances have been popular with over 2,250 audience members attending.
Volunteering sits at the heart of rural touring; most promoters are volunteers. Even venues employing professional staff utilise the help of a network of dedicated helpers. Promoters maintain an engaged audience for shows, know what they like and are aware of the level of risk they are comfortable in taking in their programme. The funding provided by Arts Council England allows us to provide financial subsidies and guarantees against loss for promoters, meaning they can trial new experiences with minimal risk themselves.
Cambridgeshire ACRE is now looking for more volunteer promoters to come forward to give opportunities for further rural residents to come together in their village hall and experience high-quality arts. Promoters are typically management committees of village halls and other community buildings. We work with them to identify which performance or artist is the most relevant for their audience and them support them to carry out other tasks such as running their box-office, promotion and hosting artists.
Rural touring has many advantages including reducing isolation and developing community cohesion, while also strengthening the capacity of local people to organise and to develop themselves. The act of programming touring arts into rural areas generates a range of individual and community benefits, including personal development, improved well-being and supporting community buildings and infrastructures such as halls and pubs. The strengthening of existing community organisations through networking and volunteering and bringing people together positively fosters community cohesion by reducing loneliness and breaking down age barriers.
Please do get in touch if your community would like to be involved.