From health and transport, to woodlands and gardens, from arts to energy, land to housing they represent civil society, that part of life and society that abuts and overlaps the public sector and the markets. In seemed to me that my organisation, TRACS, should stand with them as they explore an approach to ordering the key components of our lives, an approach that seeks to find alternatives to the fiat of public institutions, elected or otherwise, or the vagaries of capitalism.

‘We should be in there,’ I said to my colleague. Here’s why.

Human life in these days often feels fragmented, rootless, atomised. alienation and loss of meaning bar the way to clear ideas about tackling what is arguably the central question of our lives: ‘What is the right or best course of action for all of us in the years ahead?’ A turn to community, what Alastair McIntosh calls the rekindling of community, is seen by many of us as part of the answer to that question.

Community is one of those tricky words, though, like ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’ that we are inclined to put on the positive side of the ledger, but which require some parsing in order that we are not inured to their more negative aspects.

‘Communities of interest’, people connected through the nodes of shared pursuits, are not our focus here, but communities located in the geographical and topographical realities of particular localities. That combination of community and locality is held to be a vital component of what have come to be known as the ‘traditional arts’, our particular concern. Indeed, my colleague and counterpart in Wales, Danny Kilbride of Trac Cymru, once went so far as to write that

The traditional arts are significantly different to other kinds of art.  The difference is in the nature of the source.  The French have a word to describe wine-making. Terroire. It doesn’t translate easily into any other language although the Welsh word ‘cymry’ with its nuances of both community and a shared landscape comes close.  It means the history of the community that makes the wine as well as the geography that sustains the vine.

That notion of a shared condition is at the heart of the idea of community. Indeed the word is derived from the Latin for city walls and denotes all those to be found within that boundary. There can be communities within communities, however, dislocated or relocated groups who find themselves within others’ city walls with varying degrees of welcome, and who cleave to their own identities and the cultural expression of those identities in order to anchor themselves, steadying themselves against hostile currents. I have always been moved by the resilient testimony of the Irish singer from Arranmore, Róise Rua nic Gríanna when, speaking over a hundred years ago of the dances she loved, said, ‘These dances helped to give heart and lift depression from us who were in the midst of strangers.’

Community, then, has both tangible and intangible dimensions, and in the latter has connotations of togetherness that can mask power structures and their resultant tensions. as Valdimar Hafstein and Martin Skrydstrup have noted:

Part of the political attraction of communities lies in their apparent naturalness. Nevertheless, like nations before them, communities need to be made up. Boundaries and distinctions have to be put into place. communities have to be visualised, surveyed and mobilised.

So, when we personify ‘the community’, giving it qualities of identity, imagination, a point of view, we need to be clear about just who we are talking about, who speaks on behalf of the community, whether such people represent a consensus, and from where they derive their authority.

One person who was assigned authority to speak on behalf of others in traditional communities was the shaman. the shaman had the power ‘to go into non-ordinary realms of experience and then come back and integrate them with everyday reality…a good shaman knows everything that is happening in the tribe, has great interpersonal skills, and is often a creative artist.

Writer, Tony McManus goes further, contending that the shaman’s ‘practice goes away beyond the role of “the artist” in modern society, using the skills they have acquired to draw on their perceptions in order to make them available to the community at large. Someone who had a shaman-like quality to their work and who has inspired a lot of my own thinking on community arts was John Fox, founder of Welfare State International who over three years in the early eighties, as he put it,

transformed dull village halls into unrecognisable dream palaces with specifically designed lanterns, illuminated paintings on canvas and strings of bunting. The evening usually lasted four hours or more. In between dances we slipped in themed theatrical episodes using songs, story-telling and street-performance techniques.

 Fox and his team recognised that this form of dancing was a means of turning a disparate group of people into a kind of community in a very short space of time, and may even have a kind of ritual quality, a space where existing relationships might be confirmed or latent tensions might be confronted. What welfare state did was intersperse the dancing with surreal theatrical interludes which brought an additional dimension of experience to the dancing, deliberately challenging but also supporting that community-forming process.

As company member Baz Kershaw said

In other words a relatively conservative social ceremony – barn dancing – was transformed by radical theatre techniques into the experience of community formation.

The shaman has its more grounded counterpart in the bard.

One of the best accounts of the role and function of the bard in modern times is Tom McKean’s ‘Hebridean song-maker: Iain MacNeacail of the Isle of Skye’. as Mckean writes:

The bard baile was an important figure in Gaelic society for centuries and remained so until well after the Second World War.  These unpaid, unofficial poets were the de facto spokesmen and women for their communities; as such they wielded considerable power over their neighbours and public opinion.

Iain MacNeacail, known by his byname of An Sgiobair, the skipper, would spend up to six nights a week in the ceilidh houses, the designated gathering places. He was an integral part of the community, and it was through him that his fellows’ thoughts and feelings could be expressed in song and verse. He had considerable influence to the extent that his satirical barbs were much to be feared, but his authority was conditional. He told Tom McKean, ‘if it’s not to the [right] music…they [the ceilidh-goers] would soon check you on that’, which leads McKean to observe that the bard had to operate to a certain standard and within a certain aesthetic.

This relationship between bard and community has informed a critique of the relationship between the artist and society in the contemporary context. John Lane sees the contemporary artist, ‘glorying in his own genius’, as betraying the primary function of the artist as he sees it, which should be as a servant of the community. That idea of service also finds voice in Hamish Henderson who professed himself increasingly out of joint with

the 19th century concept of the romantic specialist super-creator… in this anxious, despondent, febrile period of late capitalism, artists have become more and more isolated, more and more shut in on themselves… gradually the poet and the community must be threaded together again – and we must start here, where we stand – we can do no other.

Henderson speaks of threading the two together again, of achieving a balance between the artist’s vision and a collective vision, something we have learned to be wary of, as throughout much of the twentieth century, what purported to be the collective will was a mask for highly concentrated power.

For TRACS the area of creative practice that unites collective identity, sense of place and cultural memory is what has come to be called the ‘traditional arts’, the collectively created and re-created expression of the people’s encounter with geographical, historical, psychological and social circumstance, including the processes of settlement, relocation and dislocation.

Artists with a social sensibility and a willingness to put their art at the service of communities are the vital force in this movement, but there is a clear sense of frustration among artists at the moment over the degree to which they feel their contribution to society is valued. Some artists feel that they are disproportionately supported compared to the funds that go to what might be called the arts’ distribution centres (galleries, theatres, venues etc). Moreover, the centres themselves are inequitably distributed both geographically and in terms of art forms.

Community cultural development, although complemented by the existence of distribution centres, is not dependent on them, and is indeed an answer in itself to the lack of equity in arts provision. The Scottish government, in the shape of its recently refreshed cultural strategy, lays down a template for what equitable arts provision might look like, stating that we need to be

exploring new models of community-led and participatory arts activity which will make a positive contribution to the lives of people and communities across Scotland.

 While that is indeed desirable, communities and artists throughout the country can in the meantime get on with the work of bringing local culture and local history into focus, using it to develop individuals’ skills, knowledge and creative powers in order to articulate a community’s sense of itself and its aspirations.

Community cultural development has a role in fostering genuine participation and opening up new ways of doing and knowing. The kind that we are interested in draws together local heritage, the learning required for its creative expression, and the sharing of that creative expression with others, empowering communities to flourish: to enjoy well-being and good health; social capital and social justice; respectful relationships with nature and each other. TRACS, as part of the Scottish Community Alliance, aims to contribute to that vision, and I hope will continue to do so.

Art is a powerful human tool for community transformation.  Since the 1960s, through the community arts movement, contemporary artists have been taking up something of the bardic function by agreeing to lay their skills and insight at the service of the community in which they find themselves. By negotiating the structures of power and influence, forming alliances and keeping negative forces at bay, by deploying diplomatic skills as well as artistic ones, artists can draw on collective memory and the creative resources to hand to help communities to own their own imaginative life, to articulate their sense of themselves to themselves and to the world around them. and by doing so helping to explore answers to that fundamental question I mentioned at the beginning, of how we create a good future.