Rural Touring

Rural Touring is a key and vibrant part of the UK theatre sector. By nature it is often already working quite sustainably, with the small scale lending itself to low resource use and low carbon footprints, as well as more localised audiences requiring shorter distances of audience travel. Rural venues have often done fantastic work upgrading their buildings to be as energy efficient as possible. However, there are some things you can bear in mind when planning a rural tour, or acting as a receiving venue.

Training

Theatre company, Smoking Apples have been trialling sustainability training for the rural touring sector. For more information or to get in touch about booking training click here.

Green Riders

Good example of a rider for schemes or presenters:

• Live & Local Green Rider 
• Green Contract Rider for Co-Production
• Green Contract Rider for Companies and Venues

Producers and Companies

As theatre-makers can you consider the idea of concept touring? Concept touring is where the ideas and/or script travel but perhaps not the people or set, props and costume.

This doesn’t have to be ‘full’ concept touring but are there any elements of the production which don’t have the travel but can be generated locally? This could be anything from set and costume to the performers themselves.

For further information on concept touring, and a report on it from 2022, see LIFT Festival’s website.

Whilst rural touring has its specific opportunities and challenges you may find some of the general touring toolkits useful:

• Information Sharing between Companies and Venues
• Travel Planning Tips and Best Practice
• Guide for Rail Travel
• Guidance on Freight

Venues, Programmers, and Promoters

If you have control over your own building, see Theatre Green Book Operations and Buildings sections for some suggestions of how to make your venue more sustainable. The Operations Tracker and Building Survey Tool are easy-to-use tools to plan what changes you might be able to make even with limited funds, as well as guidance on larger capital projects.

Lots of venues have already done work to upgrade and adapt their buildings. Some brilliant case studies can be found on the Highlights website, including:

• Installing LED lighting
• Adding air source heat pumps
• Audience engagement about cycling or walking to the venue
• Fundraising for and installing solar panels

It can be challenging to think about how to talk to audiences about plays or seasons with sustainability themes. Can you consider the language: nature-aware, climate-conscious, conservation etc? Is there a local angle, and can theatre help communities to engage with intimidating or scary themes (eg, local coastal erosion)?

How can you use and play with the idea of ‘bringing the outside in’? How can you use your position to feedback and be in dialogue with playwrights and theatre-makers?

Can you also use your position in your community to engage with local politicians and councillors to stress culture’s role in both human and planet wellbeing? Can you make local eco-partnerships with other venues, companies, community groups, local interest groups etc. 

If you need or want to collect data on audience travel, can you do this as a one-off snapshot to avoid the time taken to do it for every show? You can use audience postcode data to make estimates.

Or could you find a fun way to gather survey data, with a coin drop vote or a map people locate themselves on. Give people a reason to engage with data collection: “Look after what you love”. 

Communicate your successes: climate-related work can be frustrating and troubling. How can you and your team share your successes with your partners and audience in a positive, proactive way?

Schemes and Promoters

 See Live & Local and Highlights Rural Touring Scheme for a good example of how rural touring schemes can help rural touring be more sustainable.

Their examples include:

• • • information on how they programme work with climate or environmental themes
    • the local sustainable businesses they use to print marketing materials
    • the Carbon Literacy training given to staff
    • How they use green riders with visiting companies
    • Voluntary work their staff undertake such as tree planting

Highlights have also chosen to use Investors in the Environment Accreditation (achieving silver level accreditation).