6 months on and we're ready for our next adventures

“August, already? Feels illegal!” exclaimed Annis McGee (Nonsuch’s Production Coordinator) at the end of last month in an email thread organising a meeting with our colleagues at the wonderful New Perspectives. Well now it is mid-August, but no, this is not a blog post about the inevitability of the Gregorian calendar.

It is however about how we’ve got to here, and why for us at Nonsuch, it’s been a year of change, 6 months on from leaving our former Studios and closing Nottingham’s only Fringe Theatre.

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This time last year, we were a very different organisation. With a team of nearly 25 staff across our creative, community, cafe and venue operations; we were hosting roughly 20 events per month and had a seven day operation as a building based company.

We opened our Studios at the bottom of Hockley in late 2019, after 4 years in a much smaller space over on Clarendon Street (the now, wonderful - CommuniTree). It was a different time, even a different world. Having studios that were 6 times bigger were going to be game-changing and enable us to produce more shows, work with more artists and provide an essential fringe theatre for Nottingham - something that cities half our size have had for years.  

What happened next was not what the business plan had laid out, nor even the Social Investment Stress Test tried to prepare us for. Just as we were getting into the swing of things, completed our first season of programmed shows (at the time, one of the most diverse offerings in the city) the world changed, and we all now know what that entailed.

But weirdly COVID wasn’t the death nail we thought it would be, after the first 12 weeks of somewhat existential firestorms, emergency relief funds arrived and as an organisation that had never received core funding before, the books had never looked better and we were able to plan further ahead than we had before thanks to the Cultural Recovery Fund.

I think it’s quite clear now that for many organisations whilst COVID exhausted us, we rose to the challenge because there was support in place to make activity possible. I lost count of the different things we became to reach audiences or bring in some commercial income: online activity maker, at home booklet producer, streaming service, pizza kit factory, outdoor festival producer and wedding caterer to name a few. We worked hard and we were supported in our endeavours.

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Where the clinch comes is in the aftermath of covid and the days, weeks and months after the dates emergency funds had to be spent by. All of a sudden funding rejections rose, and spending behaviours changed dramatically. We weren’t able to support audiences in the same ways we had during COVID or think differently anymore because everything returned to being conditional to whatever budget we had in place at that time.

We pinned our hopes on getting core funding again. That didn’t come to fruition and so we worked harder and harder, doing more with less until we realised it was no longer sustainable. Or at least it could be, but the price we would have had to pay was less time away from work, more stress and putting amazing staff teams in increasingly difficult, stressful and less-resourced working environments, charging people more and offering worse deals to visiting artists.

In the run up to making the decision to leave we looked back at the funds we had raised in order to keep venue operations going. It was close to £250,000. Even with that eye watering sum, the outlook was tough. Each month we needed to conjure between £40,000-£50,000 to keep the doors open, a figure which often surprises people, but was the living reality of wages, supplies, utilities, artist fees, project costs and social investment/covid loan repayments. 

So, we made the decision to hand back the keys. I say we, but in all honesty I was lost in the determination of “making it work” which I was thankfully freed from by our incredible Executive Director at the time, Aoife Daniels. What Aoife brilliantly did was point out the chasm that had grown between what we wanted a venue to do and enable for Nonsuch and what it was actually allowing us to do. The shows we wanted to make, the artists we wanted to support and the communities we wanted to work with, were all having to play second fiddle to the everyday realities of plumbing, leaks, break-ins and keeping-on keeping-on.

It’s not commonplace for anyone to feel or share sympathy for those running venues and the budgetary magic they do on the daily, but as council cuts fall across the nation and inflation continues to squeeze budgets more and more, I do not envy the work other CEOs and Executive Directors are having to do.

After announcing our decision, we knew things would get tougher before they got better. Everyone worked their socks off, even in the process of redundancies, as we added ‘closing a building’ to our workload alongside committing to make our first full-length production in five years (and our first in the venue - says it all really). Both as a statement of intent for our return to producing work again and a determination to close the building on a high, our Robin Hood drag cabaret spectacular OUTLAWED was the perfect way to end our time at 92 Lower Parliament Street.

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Making a show again didn’t cover up the stressful and, at times, down right miserable tasks we were all having to do, but it enabled us to bring audiences, artists and teams together one last time to revel in our amazingly talented casts hilarious creation and also acknowledge and celebrate the incredible feat we’d achieved over the past 5 years.

As a guide for future venue-closers, closing a venue is not fun. Through all we did between September and January and to get where we are now, there was massive pain. We said goodbye to friends and colleagues, had to deliver 6 months of work in three, redesign programmes designed for a venue without said venue and begin to work out how on earth we return to our producing and touring work, after a 5-year absence. There was even some physical pain thrown into the mix for good measure, including my own 3 hour adventure to the walk-in-centre after cutting my head open whilst doing a health and safety check of our moving van - oh the irony!

Since February, along with moving offices, closing buildings and reworking almost everything we do, we’ve led a youth-led festival in an abandoned Debenhams in Mansfield as part of TAKEOVER, worked with students at Lincoln Arts Centre to co-create DON’T PANIC - a new outdoor installation about the permacrisis and led the bid for Ashfield Creates - a £1million Arts Council England place partnership fund.

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The incredible powerhouse team of Annis McGee, Caroline Rowland, Jake Orr & Syania Shaharuddin who now fill our glorious, great-glass office at the iconic Broadway Cinema are doing marvels as we plan what the future holds and what we’re going to do next. And whilst things are still busy, as it always seems in the arts, we can definitely say that the dust is settling.

With time freed from unblocking drains and all the other ‘not on the job description’ venue glamour tasks, we’re also beginning to reconnect with the world, following up to emails from 2018 and beginning to plan what we want to make, the stories we want to tell and the people we want to empower under our core belief that Creativity is Power, with us as a team being able to practise what we preach once again.

So, a new chapter is beginning, it feels like Nonsuch is getting its ‘like no other’ Nonsuch-ness back and over the next few weeks, we’re going to start sharing some of what the future holds for our audiences and communities again. From new shows to amazing projects, events, opportunities for artists and more, we can’t wait to start sharing what we’ve got planned with you again!

Ooo, and also we’ve changed our font! How chic!

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