Research Projects
We are committed to continuing to push our own practice through target research projects which benefit both the way we work and the wider sector.
Current Research: ensuring Access to Art
The Ensuring Access to Art praxis study is a multi-year project, which will explore Tortoise in a Nutshell’s approach to create publicly funded live culture that is accessible to everyone.
Over the course of two years we will deliver a blend of live performance and participatory arts experiences to communities in Dumfries and Galloway and Edinburgh North and South West. The aim of this programme will be to explore models and methods of cultural interaction that attempt to breakdown/circumvent existing barriers to cultural participation.
This project runs from 2025 - 2026, results expected early 2027.
Report: Current and Potential Impacts of Brexit and COVID-19 on the UK Theatre Sector and International Touring Landscape, April 2021
For the theatre sector, and indeed society as a whole, the past year has been an intense period of rapid change, instability and uncertainty. During this unprecedented year (2020-2021), nations across the globe have together battled a common ‘enemy’ – COVID-19. Even so, the experience between and within nations has been vastly different. We have lived through a truly historic period in time politically and socially. With national lockdowns and interrupted work schedules across every industry, we have been provided time for an exceptional collective awakening to inequality within our nations, amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we have witnessed the fruitful outcomes of working towards a unified call to action to end injustice and support our local and global communities through one of the most challenging periods in recent history.
For citizens of the United Kingdom, this immense period of change has been intensified by the UK’s transition and departure from the European Union, known as “Brexit”. With international travel bans introduced in many countries during the pandemic and negotiations regarding trade agreements and mobility protocols continuously taking place between the UK and EU, the full impact of Brexit is to be fully uncovered. This report looks to present information as it was available in April 2021.
As a small organisation with a history and love of working collaboratively across borders, the future relationship of the UK to our friends around the world will have a real impact on the ways in which Tortoise in a Nutshell creates work. This report was produced to inform Tortoise in a Nutshell’s future work within Europe and across the globe post-Brexit and COVID-19. It’s been a fascinating and extremely useful project and one that we are keen to share in the hopes that it can be beneficial for all those involved or interested in theatre.
We hope this report will benefit readers who, whether seasoned experts or first-time readers of Brexit and COVID-19 material, can learn alongside us and participate in conversations about how we move forward as an industry, and help us to rev-evaluate how we make work, who we make work for and why. It has helped us to reflect on how our own touring should adapt to better serve audiences from across Scotland, specifically those systematically excluded from or underserved by the arts.
Report: Serving Audiences in the age of recovery 2020-2021
The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures asked profound questions of Tortoise in a Nutshell’s work. As a touring company, we were stripped of our primary conventional pathway to accessing audiences and our proposed programme of work for the coming three years suddenly faced significant knock-on challenges. A proposed plan of national and international co-productions had to be re-evaluated, and more challengingly, the target audiences of our work were now living in greatly altered circumstances and facing uncertain futures. To continue to deliver on our organisational purpose as a performing arts charity, Tortoise in a Nutshell needed to carefully reshape future plans to ensure we continued serving our purpose and our audiences to the best of our abilities.
The Serving Audiences in an Age of Recovery project was driven by a commitment to approaching this crisis as an opportunity to use our specialist knowledge as a leading innovator of visual theatre to learn more about our audience and their needs. During an eight-month period of practical and community-based research we aimed to create the blueprint of a new three-year plan of activity. This resulted in a programme built around the needs of audiences during and post-Covid-19 and driven by a desire to make a demonstrable positive impact on inequality. The programme was led by two members of Tortoise in a Nutshell’s core artistic team, and guided by them, we explored live performance methodologies and presentational forms to assess how our work could meet the needs of audiences during a time of social isolation and acute economic hardship.