Are polish theatres autonomous? Artistic institutions in a bureaucratic system of culture funding

ABSTRACT

The culture funding systems based on the arm's length mechanism are generally believed to secure more autonomy of artistic institutions than ‘bureaucratic’ systems which directly involve politicians or public servants in the allocation of public funds. There is a wide range of academic literature that defend this approach. The aim of this paper is to readdress this view and show that it stems from typology-based preconceptions rather than real-life policy-making. To this end, the article analyses relations between public theatres and local funding bodies in Poland, where culture funding system is characterised by a bureaucratic decision-making. Mixed methods were applied using questionnaires and focus groups with public servants and theatre directors. The paper suggests that, although Polish local governments play a dominant role in the arts funding, their intervention in the area of culture has merely administrative nature and, in general, does not entail interference in the artistic activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomy
• arm’s length
• bureaucracy
• Polish cultural policy
• theatre

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Anna Galas and Paweł Płoski for their advice and support and Dorota Buchwald, director of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, for providing the opportunity to conduct this research. I also thank the editor and autonomous reviewers for valuable insights and suggestions.

Notes on contributors

Kamila Lewandowska is an Assistant Professor at Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, Poland. Her expertise centres on international cultural policies and management, economics in the arts sector, arts and business relations. She worked as a member of advisory and expert boards for Polish and international organizations, e.g. European Commission, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 By a ‘repertory theatre’ I mean, after Klaic (2012, 37), a theatre company ‘with a strong artistic leader shaping a recognisable aesthetic profile, working with a fixed ensemble of actors, as well as administrative and technical staff, in their own building with one or more stages, with their own workshops and production facilities, and counting on a regular, diverse audience – the idea [that] dominates the theatre landscape of German-speaking countries, and much of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe’.

2 A ‘shock therapy’ refers to a rapid transition from a communist to capitalist economy, usually including extensive privatisation of previously public-owned assets. In Poland it is a commonly used term both in popular and scientific discourse to describe economic reforms implemented by Leszek Balcerowicz, Polish Deputy Prime Minister (1989–1991), so-called the Balcerowicz Plan. Although Balcerowicz himself believed that culture, like other sectors, should rely more on the market than the state, cultural institutions were not eventually included in the Plan and remained public entities.

3 The Amendment to the Act, signed in 2011, introduced a distinction between cultural institutions (museums, cultural centres, galleries etc.) and artistic institutions (performing arts organisations).

4 The Amendment to the Act (2011) foreclosed the possibility of appointment of the director for an indefinite period. The director of an artistic institution is now appointed for the period of three to five artistic seasons.

5 The respondent refers to the investigation after the tragic Smolensk plane crash in 2010 that killed 96 Polish officials, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski. Two teams involved in the investigation provided two different explanations on the causes of the crash. While the government's expert team maintained that the reason was the pilot's error, the team of the opposite party (Law and Justice) suggested that the Smolensk crash could had been an assassination.

6 In recent years we could see several attempts by public authorities to put economic pressures on theatres in order to make them cancel performances that were considered obscene or religiously offensive. For example, the performance ‘Death and the Maiden’ (Polish Theatre in Wroclaw) was called to be cancelled by the minister of culture Piotr Gliński on the grounds that ‘public funding must not be used to support pornography’. Similarly, regional authorities announced they would cut public support to Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz which showed the performance of ‘Our Violence and Your Violence’ directed by a controversial artist Oliver Frljić.

7 The distinction between negative and positive autonomy was inspired by Erich Fromm’s (1941) two types of freedom: ‘freedom from’ (freedom from ties and restraints) and ‘freedom to’ (freedom to positive realisation of oneself).