Special Guest Northern Highlight - Matt Fenton

 SPECIAL GUEST NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT

Matt Fenton, Artistic Director & Chief Executive, CONTACT

Can you tell us about Contact?

Contact is where young people change their lives through the arts. Based in Manchester, we are the leading national theatre and arts venue to place young people at the decision-making heart of everything. At Contact, young people aged 13-30 work alongside staff in deciding the artistic programme, making staff appointments and act as full Board members. We develop and present new theatre shows, and deliver a wide range of free creative-training programmes for young people in theatre, music, creative media and spoken word.

Old Tools > New Masters > New Futures produced by Contact and Young Identity. Photo credit Oscar Lister

Tell us about your amazing new building and the advantages of being based in Manchester.

Contact is a brilliant, sustainably-designed arts building. We’ve just finished a major expansion and refurbishment that has created a new recording and media studio, a new rehearsal space for young people, a dedicated arts and health studio, a small cabaret/live music/spoken word stage, as well as a new social hub with a café, bar and outdoor seating area.

 Manchester is a fantastic city with creativity, music and a love of language in its DNA. It contains a some brilliant cultural organisations and festivals, and the concentration of talent and opportunities of Media City, but it also has a vibrant independent scene.

Photo credit Adrian Lambert

How are you currently supporting and mentoring young people?

When it was clear we were heading into lockdown last March, we made a concerted effort to get laptops and pads to the young people on our projects and move our young creative and leadership programmes online, mainly via Zoom. Our brilliant creative development team provided 1:1 pastoral support, mentoring and signposting for young people or the challenges they were (and still are) facing as a result of Covid-19. Many of the young people we engage with are from low-income families and from diverse local communities, who have been hardest hit by the pandemic and have families most likely to have lost work, or working on the front line.

What children’s events, workshops, performances do you have planned for 2021?

For Spring/Summer ’21 we are presenting a hybrid programme of online/digital events and outdoor shows. It includes Queer Contact, our annual festival celebrating LGBTQ+ arts and culture in Greater Manchester, and outdoor events such as a new sound-walk exploring grief during lockdown, and a new show from Contact Young Company, our ensemble of young performers.

What for you is the 'spirit of the North’?

I’m an Essex boy up North, but I have lived and worked all over the country, and in my experience the North is more friendly and has a better quality of chat. People talk in the queue at the shops, at the bus stop, and there’s a genuine love of language. The northern music and spoken word scenes are where it’s at.

Why is it so important that we continue to support the arts industries in Manchester?

Culture and the arts, and the wider events industry, have been one of the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic. Our sector is made up of 70% freelancers, many of whom have fallen through the cracks of government support, and have seen more than a year’s work wiped out by Covid-19 so far. At the same time, the arts have provided a fundamental mental health benefit and a positive distraction for people through these challenging times, and creativity will be vital to how we rebuild.

The impact of Covid will be felt for a generation, and combines with the lasting impact of austerity on our communities, and the loss of arts subjects at school. That means it’s going to be harder than ever for low-income kids to enter the sector. This is heart-breaking, and makes our role at Contact more vital than ever.

Tell us about the fabulous event you ran with the children’s writers Nathan Bryon, Hannah Lee and Pete Kalu last year.

The main focus of our public programme last Summer and Autumn was Black Lives Matter. We partnered with Black Gold Arts Festival, delivered a conference on decolonisig theatre, and with the brilliant poetry organisation Young Identity, commissioned young poets for BBC Blue Peter, marking Black History Month. During that time, Maia, the 9-year-old daughter of a colleague, wrote a letter to her headteacher asking for more black authors to be read at her primary school, and more characters that looked like her as a child from a diverse background. This inspired our whole team to create 'I Read Me: More Black Authors in Schools', a live digital event hosted and curated by Maia herself, alongside some brilliant children’s authors.

What would you like to see from the creative industries in Manchester?  

One positive outcome of the pandemic has been working together across the sector to support artists and freelancers, including through the Greater Manchester Artists' Hub. I really hope that continues, alongside greater cross-sectoral working with the health, education and youth sectors. We’re going to have to work together to rebuild and create better life-chances for young people as we recover from the pandemic.

You can read more about Contact at Home - Contact (contactmcr.com) and follow Matt on Twitter