In today’s economic climate you often can’t escape hearing about money in some form or another, particularly when you consider the amount of cuts that the performing arts industry has faced.

“Of the £700bn the government spends, the Department for Media, Culture & Sport’s budget is a minuscule £2.2bn, and [is] already suffering a 43% cut. The Arts Council has lost a third of its funds, [and have been] obliged to cut deep. Until now it has swallowed hard, and axed some projects altogether while investing selectively in the best” (Toynbee, 2013).

In the face of this it has never been more fundamental for a company’s financial planning to be well thought out, in order to adequately navigate the turbulent times the arts industry now finds itself in.

It is said that “the first step to effectively managing your finances is to see what kind of financial shape you’re currently in. And the first step to determining that is to get organized” (Schrage, 2013), which will allow for the creation of a suitable budget that our company will be able to follow throughout the creation of our debut performance. Our company has been given a donation of £166 from the University of Lincoln which we will have to carefully monitor in order to create our performance, Take Me by the Tongue. When creating a budget it is suggested that you collect every financial statement, record all monthly income, review your monthly expenditure and then make a list of fixed and variable expenses (fixed expenses remain the same throughout the months and variable expenses are likely to change from month to month)(Vohwinkle, 2014). However, this is more easily applied when you are creating a budget for personal finance as opposed to creating a budget for a drama production. Also, in the case of our company, we have no previous experience with which to draw upon in order to form our budget as this is our debut performance.

At the beginning of our project, Take Me by the Tongue, the company met to discuss what we wanted our debut performance to be, and decided that we wanted create a devised piece of theatre which brought further challenges when it came to creating a suitable budget for the show. For example, I couldn’t have a list of props that we would need for the performance, research how much they would cost and assign a specific amount of money for that area, because we weren’t completely aware of what we need. Therefore based on the conversations that we had as a company, I tried to split our funds in a sensible manner.

(Kayleigh Brewster, 2014)

This graph shows the divisions that I made to the overall budget, and exactly what percentages I’ve assigned to each section.  In our initial discussion regarding our performance it seemed that most of our ideas for prop, costume and set design would be quite simplistic, in order to give a contemporary feel which is why I felt that I was able to divide the money up in this manner. A lot of the props, costume ect, that have been mentioned up until this point will be easily accessible to us from the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, or can be cheaply sourced.

As we went through the process of creating our show there were some hiccups that we had to cover financially, for example the first logo that we paid for we received feedback that suggested we make some changes, which obviously cost money. In order to try and prepare for unseen costs, I had set aside a small percentage of our budget so that we could prepared, and only allowed that portion of the budget to be spent when we needed something on show day. Also, as a result of our acoustic night, we received £19.95 in donations which, though it doesn’t seem like a lot, turned out to be the exact amount of extra money that we needed to purchase a few of our smaller props.

The money that was donated on the acoustic night was helpful though the purpose of the acoustic night was for promotional purposes as opposed to fundraising, although donations were welcome. This was because we felt that the focus of the night would better serve our company as a promotional technique because we knew at the time if we needed any extra money to cushion out our budget we wouldn’t need a lot. That being said, had we reached a point where we felt the show needed a substantial amount of extra funds then we were prepared to hold fundraising events in order to raise that money.

It has been said that budgeting and financial planning is much like the recipe for baking a cake;

“If you are going to bake a cake from scratch, you’ll probably want to use a recipe to ensure it bakes properly and tastes delicious… Your personal finances aren’t much different. Your income is the sum of ingredients, and your expenses are the quantities to use, while the budget tells you how to put it all together. With a cake recipe, if you’re short an egg or put in too much flower, the cake will not taste right or even bake properly at all. The same goes for your finances” (Vohwinkle, 2014).

I think in our case planning has been an essential part to our recipe; we were able to spend wisely and remain on budget and I’ve also been able to learn a lot about how I would handle the budget for future performances. We would carefully allocate any money that we would receive from funders like the arts council (see “Forward Thinking” by producer Lizzy Hayes) and would have fundraising plans in place in case we needed to raise any money. Planning is key, and hopefully by remaining wise in our spending we will be able to successfully manage our funds for future performances, enabling us to create more of the work that we have enjoyed, and that our audiences will enjoy like, Take Me by the Tongue.

(Kayleigh Brewster, 2014)

Works Cited:

Schrage, Andrew (2013). How to Create an Organizational System for Your Finances. http://financialplan.about.com/b/2013/06/06/create-organizational-system-finances.htm [last accessed 29th/06/2014]
Vohwinkle, Jeremy (2014) Budget Isn’t a Bad Word. http://financialplan.about.com/od/budgetingyourmoney/a/budgetbad.htm [last accessed 1/06/2014]
Vohwinkle, Jeremy (2014) How To Create a Budget. http://financialplan.about.com/od/budgetingyourmoney/ht/createbudget.htm [last accessed 1/06/2014]

As a company our aim is to take existing texts, or speeches, and re-contextualise them in our performances, however doing this means that we have to take into consideration exactly what the text is saying, and what meaning we want the words to take through performance. This means that our work has the potential to be extremely political which I think, as a company, we shied away from, especially for our first performance.

(Kat Banyard, 2010)

However, as we created our performance we came to notice a theme gradually emerging from the texts that we’d chosen and the way that we had then chosen to perform them. We gradually became aware that our performance concerned itself quite often with subjects that feminists, such as Kat Banyard and Natasha Walker, concern themselves with.

Throughout the creation of Take Me By The Tongue, we seemed to circle back quite often to the connection between a woman’s appearance and the pressure that women may feel from society to perfect their looks. Scenes like the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ scene and the ‘Generation Show’ scene in particular were created specifically to explore the pressures women feel to be physically perfect. In The Equality Illusion Kat Banyard states that “despite decades of feminist critique of the tyranny of beauty, monitoring and manipulating their appearance remains a daily feature of women’s lives. Today it is ‘normal’ for women to worry about their looks when they get up each morning, to religiously check their appearance in the mirror every day, to not want to leave the house without make-up on, or to feel fat or disgusted at the sight of their thighs” (2010.16.17).When you consider that the vast majority of the company, all but our production/stage manager Andy, are female it is unsurprising that we would relate to Kat Banyard’s statement and had unconsciously created scenes of a feminist nature.

The ‘Marilyn Monroe’ scene in particular we created because we could see the juxtaposition between what the words that she, Marilyn Monroe, was saying and how she presented herself, and also we could see this same contrast in our own lives. It was said that when considering her appearance;

(Phil Crow, 2014)

“She was uneasy when she first saw herself in the mirror. It wasn’t the ‘real’ me. Then she saw that it worked…The very artificiality of it, she realized, meant that it was a created thing and she would have to create a personality to go along with the new face and the new hair. A bleached blonde is not natural; therefore she cannot wear ordinary clothes or make-up, or be ordinary. She becomes, in a sense, an assembled product” (Zolotow, 1961, 45).

This description of Marilyn Monroe would seem to directly contrast what Marilyn herself says about sexuality and beauty being natural, and that you can’t achieve this beauty by being manufactured. Many of us in the company could understand the desire to feel beautiful naturally and to not feel the need for items such as make –up to make us feel physically acceptable, which linked nicely to the extract from Natasha Walker’s Living Dolls: A New Sexism that is performed in the show as the scene entitled ‘Generation Show’.

When we discovered how many of our extracts linked to feminist writings, and once we embraced the feminist message our show was expressing, we could then clearly see links to feminism throughout the show, even in scenes that were not originally intended to have any feminist connotations. For example, the scene in which Libby has taken the well-known poem Golden Ticket from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and created a song, a song that is a completely different style and tune to the adaptation that can be found in the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The purpose of this scene was to use a children’s poem to explore fame, and the sometimes fatal cost of something that is so often strived for. However, when you consider the feminist tone of the rest of the show these scenes that were intended to have a different message also have feminist undertones. Whilst ‘Golden Ticket’ is primarily about fame and drug abuse, when watching the video that accompanies the song you see these famous women and, personally, I can’t help but wonder at the connection between fame and feminine beauty.

As a performer, and a woman, I have always been aware of the Feminist movement, and have enjoyed the chance to explore this movement in more depth through the creation process of Take Me by the Tongue. I think that, as a company, what we have learned through the creation of our debut piece is that we will have to embrace the potential political nature of our upcoming works. The potential for exploring the written and spoken word is limitless in the sense that we are not constricted by an author, or a political movement, and we have to embrace this potential if we wish to continue to create engaging works for many different audiences. In the future we will probably continue to explore themes of feminism, I think as a full female cast these themes would be impossible to avoid, but we will also be able to explore other themes, other political movements. The written and spoken word is powerful and our exploration of these mediums has the potential to create powerful, thought provoking work. What we have learned through the creation of our debut piece is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the political nature our work could take, but to embrace it.

Works Cited:
Banyard, Kat (2010) The Equality Illusion. London: Faber & Faber Ltd.
Zolotow, Maurice (1961) Marilyn Monroe. New York; Bantam