Newcastle-based women’s theatre company Open Clasp has been awarded a special commendation at the first ever Digital Culture Awards which celebrate the very best digital and tech innovation in arts and culture.
Many organisation were in the running for the Content Creation and Distribution award which recognises the development of creative content and innovative uses of digital technology to distribute cultural content, including Complicité, National Theatre at Home and Opera North.
Alongside category winners The Old Vic, Open Clasp were awarded a special commendation.
“Open Clasp are a shining example of a smaller arts organisation that is making use of digital technologies and art to advocate for change on a national level,” said Fiona Morris, CEO and Creative Director of BBC’s The Space.
“For two decades, Open Clasp toured live shows to community venues in the North of England at a subsidised rate, bringing high quality, professional theatre to those communities,” Open Clasp’s Creative Producer, Carly McConnell said. “We told stories that came from the women themselves that explored issues like domestic abuse, homophobia, racism, sexual abuse.
“As the funding for local community venues and youth programmes was pulled and frontline services could no longer afford to work with us, we created and embedded a digital strategy. That strategy reaches our diverse audiences—community centres can host free screenings of our plays, frontline services, academics and the criminal justice system can purchase the filmed play at a lower fee for training purposes and audiences who may face barriers to stepping into a theatre can watch online from the comfort of their own home.
“By creating digital theatre and finding new ways to distribute that content, for example by working in partnership with charities and BBC Arts, we’re able to be more responsive to our audiences and what matters to people, using the arts to fight injustice and make tangible, positive change.”
Open Clasp’s Key Change was created in 2014 with women serving at HMP Low Newton in County Durham. It was streamed to mark the UN campaign to end violence against women and girls in 2017, and was also performed in the Houses of Parliament. In response to the first national lockdown, Key Change was relaunched, raising awareness of women in prison, and an accompanying education pack was created for teachers who suddenly had to deliver lessons online.
In 2015, following a change in the law making coercive control a criminal offence, Open Clasp worked with survivors to create Rattle Snake. It has since been used to train thousands of frontline police officers. The Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird QC, and Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, co-signed a letter to all 43 police forces in England and Wales to encourage their frontline officers and staff to watch Rattle Snake, showing the impact theatre can have on a policy level.
In 2017 Rattle Snake was toured as a play to 11 venues around the North East as well as to York and London. Then, when domestic abuse reports rose by 49% during the first national lockdown, it was streamed for free with BSL during Deaf Awareness Week to raise awareness that Deaf women are twice as likely as their hearing peers to suffer domestic abuse.
Sugar was made specifically for the screen and was watched on BBC iPlayer by thousands of households nationwide and screened in 45,000 prison cells across England Wales on Way Out TV. Filmed before the pandemic, the decision to create a piece of digital theatre rather than perform it live helped to remove some of the barriers to access experienced in traditional theatre spaces.
“Creating theatre for the screen offered us remarkable opportunities to tell these stories in new and different ways”, director Laura Lindow explained. “The viewpoint of the camera is powerfully intimate as the characters take us into their confidence.”