We’re close now to Camden New Wave 13; a ten-day long festival developed collaboratively between Camden Council, a wider network of arts and performance organisations in Camden, and C4CC. As a group, we had 50 days to generate a programme, organise venues, and make it happen.

For me, the story starts earlier in the year as we began to talk more closely with Camden about how we could support initiatives in the borough – especially in the Digital and Creative sectors. I was also involved in wider conversations and consultations on “Technology, destination, and creative collaboration” where we discussed the opportunities and challenges facing Camden – especially given what the Council described as “significant changes happening across the UK public sector and to inform future conversations around economic growth.”

It’s this linkage of arts and cultural activity with economic growth that is particularly interesting to me. The sector is very important to Camden and its future. Research from Camden underpins this:

• Residents of Camden engage in cultural activities more frequently than almost anywhere else in the UK – nearly 70% of Camden’s population engage with cultural opportunities.
• Camden’s visitor economy is the third largest in London generating over £1,175 million in annual tourist spend and more than 16,000 jobs.
• Businesses and organisations in the creative and cultural industries in Camden have an estimated gross turnover of over £1,200 million annually.

Camden is seeing massive change and development – especially around the King’s Cross/St Pancras hub with big new developments, new public spaces and activities, and major new business and research activity moving into the area north of King’s Cross.

From Camden High Street to the British Museum, the London Borough of Camden is famous for the creativity, innovation, and talent that make it a thriving cultural destination and an inspiring place to visit, live, and do business. Camden’s creative and cultural sector is a significant driver of innovation, training, employment, and tourism in the borough, as well as contributing to the quality of life of those who live, work, and study here.

50 Days to ‘Put on a Show’

Move forward to July and an opportunity arrives – in the shape of a very short, immovable deadline, some budget, and Camden’s desire to act – to celebrate and draw attention to the wide range of arts and cultural activity in Camden and the role of people and organisations in Camden in innovating and ‘doing new things’. You can see the programme and read more on the rest of this site – I’m giving my recollections and some thoughts on the process we invented for making this happen.

The only way to generate activity on such a short timetable is to lean heavily on existing local organisations, their capabilities and relationships with local communities and, above all, their willingness to take risk and collaborate. So we got people into C4CC and brainstormed, had conversations, came up with new ways of looking at existing work and thought about what “New” meant in the context of this process. We had lots of inputs and thoughts over a very short time,  and the idea of five or so ‘flagship’ projects over the ten day period with a ‘fleet’ of smaller events/interventions emerged as a way to make New Wave 13 happen.

Clearly, it’s not really feasible to create completely new work on these timescales, but presenting ‘works in progress’, what we called ‘repurposing’ (not ‘replaying’!) existing work or doing experiments are all in scope.  Plus, ‘New’ can also mean collaborating with new partners (as the Place and the Pirate Castle are doing), previewing a new work (as Scottee will do) or a new way of presenting or showing work in a novel context (as Bridge Links will be).

New Wave 13 will highlight Camden as a place where:

• Innovation, creativity, and collaboration are able to flourish.
• Local communities and visitors have access to diverse opportunities to participate in arts and culture.
• A resilient creative and cultural sector is seen as a vital part of Camden’s future growth and wellbeing.

It’s been a very exciting and high pressure project so far – and it all kicks off later this week!

– Brian Condon
21 October 2013

–

Disclosure:
I’m one of the New Wave team at C4CC (led by my colleague Nigel McCune) and working closely with Camden Council. The views expressed in this blog post are my own and not those of the Centre for Creative Collaboration of the University of London, Camden Council or any of the organisations or people I work with.