The Arcola Theatre in London is making bold strides toward being the world’s first carbon neutral theater, through innovations such as energy efficient LED lighting systems – and the world’s first fuel cell powered performance. In addition, Arcola Energy is a pioneering new venture that will bring cutting-edge sustainability practices to other arts organizations. Ben Todd, Executive Director of Arcola Theatre, shares insights that could help any type of organization or business get started in being more sustainable.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

• The most important first step an organization should take for a successful sustainability project
• Why “artists and scientists are quite often very much the same” when working with them on sustainability projects
• Whether “going green” helps to sell more theater tickets

LISTEN NOW (press below)

TRANSCRIPT

Patrick Dominguez, Green Business Innovators:

Hello, this is Patrick Dominguez here with Ben Todd, the executive director of Arcola Theatre. Welcome, Ben.

Ben Todd, Arcola Theatre: Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Dominguez: Ben, tell us a little bit about the Arcola Theatre and the type of theater that you do here.

Ben Todd: Arcola Theatre, it is an off West End theater in East London. It started about 8 years ago in the classic tradition of the London fringe. No money, a lot of artistic vision. It was founded by artists, and its strength essentially was that of Mehmet Ergen, artistic director and Leyla Nazli who is now the executive producer, who essentially founded the theater on personal loans, on credit cards and incredible vision and an ability to really inspire people and bring people together to deliver the art that they wanted to deliver. Since then, over the past 8 years it has gone from strength to strength artistically. And increasingly as an organization is this maturity you have to develop in terms of stability, fund-raising and management systems. So particularly, I suppose over the last 3 or 4 years, I have done a lot of work on that with a view to creating an organization initially on which I could almost perch on the back of and do sustainability projects, which is my background. And I know over the last 2 years I realized that it is actually far better to actually directly integrate them – except that I never will finish trying to set up the theater and actually developing the two of them in parallel is far more sensible.

Patrick Dominguez: One thing that I will add to what Ben is saying is that this theater has gotten rave reviews. They consistently get fantastic reviews with the theater productions that they do here.

Ben Todd: Definitely true and actually crucial. If I was to go off and do sustainability projects in a theater that was not considered an artistic leader, it would be seen as almost fringe in the kind of disparaging sense.

Patrick Dominguez: Like a distraction.

Ben Todd: Yeah, or just people who cannot really function in the mainstream, going and playing on the fringe. There is this snobbery. There is this great passion for brilliant things coming from the fringe, but there is always that sense of, it is the people that cannot make it in the mainstream. So, the idea of running a place that has a fringe feel and anything is possible and anybody can do anything, but definitive international caliber work is pretty crucial.

Patrick Dominguez: Could you explain step-by-step the sustainability work that you have done for the theater, and try to frame it in a way that if other theater people were listening right now, what sort of model or formula would they be able to follow?

Ben Todd: The key, I think particularly across all sectors, but particularly in the arts sector is to lead with vision.

What I get frustrated with within sustainability is the sense that if you try to do something green, you must therefore be holier than thou. If you want to recycle paper, you have to think about everything. As soon as you try to do anything green, people will persecute you because of the one thing you do that is not green. So, that does not work in wider society and certainly not in the arts. So, start with a vision. Have a vision. In our sense the headline was we are going to become carbon neutral. You do not have to actually realize that ultimate vision. That is just the thing that inspires you to move. So, start from that, set your vision. Do you want to be carbon neutral. You want to deliver sustainable work. You want to make some kind of difference. From that, do something. Pick one project that you can deliver and deliver it. And then what follows I think then from there is the rigor. Then you start to learn, you start to bring in the expertise you might need. And you start to build a team that can deliver. The key then is to then once you have done that – almost go full circle and go back to vision. And say, so I started the great idea, I have implemented some rigor, I may have done some kind of audit of my organization, but I didn’t just put it in a drawer and forget about it and tick the box. I took it, I said okay, I’ve done that, what can we do now? How can I make this exciting? How can I make this inspiring?

Patrick Dominguez: So, what was your first project?

Ben Todd: The first project for us was actually the vision, it was to launch the vision. Because, when we started about 18 months, a year ago, there was almost nothing. I now know that there were people doing things, but completely hidden. It was technical managers here and there surreptitiously changing light bulbs and not telling anyone. So I think that the concept that the arts should engage with sustainability, it really was not very widespread. So, that if you like, was our first project, which now looking back seems almost trivial. The mayor of London now has got an entire initiative around sustainability in theaters, but a year ago that was not there. That was the first. Here’s my vision, this is what we want to do. After that it was partnerships. Who can we bring along? How can we build credibility? How can we build skills? How can we build the networks we need?

Patrick Dominguez: Did you have a particular sustainability project in mind as your first one?

Ben Todd: No. What emerged – my background is in fuel cells. That was an obvious I suppose first project if you like. That’s become our flagship if you like, installing a full cell here. So we now have a 5-kilowatt fuel cell which powers the bar lighting and selected shows. The other key I think was to link it to productions. So, we said, rather than making this long-term organizational project, it was to say that this show will be delivered sustainably, and therefore by the opening night of this show we will have changed all of the bar stock, all of the cleaning products. We will have changed the bar lighting system. We will have installed the fuel cell and we will have established techniques and partnerships to light the show sustainably. So, it all kind of came together into this fairly epic project. Because again, there is something about, you have to deliver a project that is big enough that people care. If you talk to people, particularly artists, I think, about recycling bottles, it’s not interesting. Eyes glaze over.

Patrick Dominguez: So what you did was you said “we’re going to make this production sustainable.”

Ben Todd: Absolutely, and then work back from that. So, that if you like was the vision and then you work back. How do you actually rigorously do that.

Patrick Dominguez: And in terms of rigor, did you think about well what are the most environmentally unfriendly practices in your production and start with items with the highest impact? Is that how you went about it?

Ben Todd: Not too much. The biggest impact is audience travel. Which if you think about it for a while you quickly realize, or of course you can spend a lot of time measuring it. I did not know again because it was vision before rigor. The first thing was just to do it, to inspire people. There is a lot that I have seen with a background in sustainability. I have a fairly good feel for what is and isn’t a priority. So I can kind of, I suppose inform you and instinctively prioritize. I was very cautious of getting involved in auditing and trying to work out what is the best possible thing to do. Because I think in a year or 2 years that it takes you to do that you could have actually done half the things that you are going to do anyway. If you like, that is a big bugbear of mine is that organizations spend a lot of time thinking about what to do when they could just do it.

Patrick Dominguez: So instead of auditing and thinking for a year or two of how you are going to do it, how did you actually go about making this production sustainable?

Ben Todd: The first thing I suppose was to find a young company who were interested in doing that. So I didn’t have to force anybody to do anything. A young producer, a young theater company who wanted to do this. I said to them, okay, you deal with your side, the looking at the rehearsal space, at water usage during rehearsals, the prints, printed material for the flyers, the costumes of the set. I look at the, I suppose, the bigger infrastructural elements. So I look at where we get the energy from to drive the lighting and the sound. I look at what type of alternative lighting systems we can use. I do a lot of the, I suppose in some sense the high-level brokering, the relationship building. So yes, effectively you split the tasks. The management system I suppose I have developed here is very much based on the way arts management seems to work to me which is that director’s role. The director identifies the skills that he needs and then the director goes and finds people with those skills and gets them to do it. And again, so that you do not get too holy and precious about everything. You do not have to micromanage everything. You just set people on the road and the “it will be alright on the night” principle. It is quite powerful. It will be opening on this night. You will do the best that you possibly can by that night. Again, that takes away a lot of the preciousness and a lot of the hesitation and that kind of rigor mortis, I call it, where you just literally never get anywhere. Details, information people may want will follow. It is just starting to come through on our blog now. And again, motivated by the fact that we’ve done something brilliant. All of the write-up follows later. Do that later.

Patrick Dominguez: All of this work that you have done of course helps the environment. Has it also benefitted the theater in some way? Has it attracted more theatergoers or helped to sell more tickets?

Ben Todd: I’d say that it has had massive, massive benefits to the theater, some of which, every theater and every organization could gain. Some of which obviously we gained from essentially being the first and certainly the most prominent. The key I suppose is partnerships, as a relatively small theater organization we are not strategically significant to most major funding bodies, industry and lighting industry. Yet as the leading sustainable theater we have certainly become quite strategically significant. You can sit at a higher table, if you like. So, you become party to much more useful, long-term strategic visions. You have access to brilliant people.

Patrick Dominguez: Can you give a couple of examples?

Ben Todd: I suppose the obvious very practical would be somebody like White Light which is a theater lighting supply company. So now, I can, I suppose ring the managing director and say that I have got this idea or I need this equipment. Can you support us? It’s very small, relatively small amounts of money, but it makes a big difference to a theater company. So, when I want to persuade a lighting designer to use a low energy lighting rig, I can say, well if you do this your objective is to get me Critic’s Choice and a brilliant show, but if you make it sustainable I’ll give Brian a call and see if I can get him to lend you what you want. So that would be one, the other I suppose then is working at high-level within the arts council, within local government, within the mayor of London’s office, increasingly within our local London borough council. As a theater again, creative industries does not feature that highly on many borough councils’ list. But a leading sustainable theater actually does. So you get to the point again where you can move up and build much better relationships with those sort of strategic stakeholders.

Patrick Dominguez: So you become kind of a jewel in the community.

Ben Todd: Yeah, and there is something about this space where you bring sustainability and culture together. You often find really good, talented and motivated people. The ability to attract those people is clearly a benefit. Recruitment becomes much easier. The energy team that we have put together at the moment, so far with no money, are brilliant. I have incredible university graduates, post-graduates coming and working with us because they have been attracted to this vision of sustainability in a cultural setting.

Patrick Dominguez: So, you’ve mentioned that doing this work has helped to attract partners, local municipal partners, government partners, business partners. How about theatergoers?

Ben Todd: It is interesting. We haven’t done a lot of work on does it influence theatergoers. In London on any given night I think there are about 200 shows running. People are pretty much driven either by special interests – they may have an interest in Ibsen – or by reviews. They will simply look and say I am going to trek halfway across London to see a show it had better be good. So, they will go on artistic reputation of the company, of the venue or literally on how many stars the show got. We have seen a certain increase again from the partners that kind of word of mouth, the fact that there’s increased interest within the industry in Arcola brings you some audience. I would say that we quite deliberately actually not linked our green PR with our theater PR. I don’t want people to come and see a show because it was green. I want people to come and see a show because it is brilliant. So in some sense, I have not collected the kind of data that I could then wave at people to motivate them and say being green sells more tickets. With a kind of longer-term, strategic view I think maybe I should do that as a way of showing people that you can get that benefit. But I am very, very aware of that danger, that fundamentally producing a theater show is a non-sustainable activity. It has a carbon footprint therefore if you do it badly the most sustainable thing to do is just not do it. So, I am very, very careful I suppose with how I sell, if that’s in any way an answer.

Patrick Dominguez: You have been doing a lot of work here to reduce your impact. Are you doing work with other art organizations to spread the gospel of reducing environmental impact?

Ben Todd: Yes. I think we have had a fairly major impact. Primarily it is very simple, somebody has to start. Once one person, one organization starts everybody suddenly goes, ah, we should start. We have been thinking about it for how ever many years. We have got these little pockets of best practice within the organization. Maybe that person who has been busily nagging us about light bulbs should be brought to a slightly higher table and given maybe a larger budget and a bit more influence. I think I have seen quite a lot of that personally within organizations. And then across the world the kind of interest we have had. Again, it just, you tend to have individuals within organizations who are pushing this agenda and for them to be able to say, look they’ve done it. Look at all the publicity they have got. Look at all the benefits they’ve gained. It really helps. It allows them to move forward. Now, increasingly on a practical basis I do an awful lot of speaking at conferences and sitting on panels. We are just about to launch effectively a consultancy service which we will go out and do a bit of pro bono work helping theaters install the basics. And ultimately I would hope a revenue stream for Arcola as an organization to deliver literally, I suppose, environmental management services, with a cultural awareness. So, there is quite a lot of environmental management around, but to find organizations, or companies, contractors who understand the arts industry, who understand the third sector, charitable sector, who have staff, who have the rigor, but also understand the need for vision and understand the need for communication. So, I think that element will grow quickly.

Patrick Dominguez: You mentioned to me the Arcola Energy project. Could you talk a little bit about that project?

Ben Todd: The energy project if you would like it is the umbrella for everything. So, it is everything from the sustainable shows to changing our suppliers or harassing our suppliers, to implement some kind of sustainable or ethical procurement process. All the way up to the bit I haven’t mentioned so far, which is the Arcola Energy incubator which we are now sitting in, which is essentially the top floor of the building. Arcola is in a 4-story late-Victorian industrial building of which the theater occupies two floors. The middle floor is still a clothes factory, and now we have the top floor. In which I’d like to host a suite, if you like, of sustainability companies, with a technical focus. So it’s the energy incubator. Energy in some sense being a shorthand for all things sustainable. But I suppose, quite a nice one because the obvious iconic part of theater is the lighting which is directly into electrical energy. So the companies we are looking at, at the moment, are major lighting manufacturers and a fairly major fuel cell installer or sustainable energy systems installer who will quite literally be resident here with whom we can then develop cooperative projects between the companies. We have services that we can buy in if need be. We have companies that we can pass people on to. So in some sense become some kind of honest broker. There is an awful lot of rubbish spoken about sustainability. There are quite a lot of charlatans there. So to be able to introduce arts companies to companies that are tried and tested and very accountable, I had to create this wild space where you can come down for coffee and you might meet an artistic director, a theater director, an actor, an actress or an electronics expert, or a sustainability consultant. Or who knows, a fuel cell installer, a solar panel installer, electrician, a builder. The whole range, literally from the kind of cultural intelligence needed to change behavior very quickly to the technical skills needed to deliver projects on time and on budget.

Patrick Dominguez: Sounds like unlikely bedfellows. Maybe one day we’ll be able to buy LED light bulbs at the theater bar along with a theater ticket.

Ben Todd: It was always one of the jokes – “would you like a low-energy light bulb with your tickets?” I expect it to happen. Although, it may have reached the point where low-energy light bulbs are not really that interesting, and we will move on to the next exciting thing that you might want to pick up with your ticket. But the other point I suppose is they are not unlikely bedfellows actually. If you spend some time in science and research and spend some time in the arts you’ll realize that artists and scientists are quite often very much the same. They are both difficult, cranky, self-obsessed, visionary, dislike paperwork, dislike being forced to conform to fit their ideas into some other box that somebody else created. They both rely on some kind of producer and some kind of broker, some kind of CEO to take their ideas, to build a team and to realize them. Actually, there is more understanding than you might think.

Patrick Dominguez: That is one of the more surprising insights from this interview. Ben, I know that Arcola Theatre has done a lot of work to reduce its impact on the environment. Can you tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind that?

Ben Todd: Yeah. The inspiration I suppose has come from my background. I spent about 10 years in engineering sustainability. I did my Ph.D. on the modeling of solid oxide fuel cells. That’s high temperature, next generation power generation systems, working with Rolls Royce who are at the moment, aside from making airplane engines, also do a lot of power generation equipment based on gas turbines. So, I did all of this fairly heavy research into that, always looking for the final objective of what we were actually trying to get to, what we were going to deliver, the problems we were going to solve and eventually of course realized that actually research probably is not the right place to be if you are focused on delivering tangible projects. So, I came out of that and did some consulting, and got a bit frustrated with again not delivering something, and stumbled into Arcola and thought – this is it. This is where it all works. This is a place that I can effectively and in some sense highjack and use as a place in which to embed the projects and that I spent time developing, but never quite realizing. I suppose I started gradually lobbying Mehmet and Leyla and the various artists associated with the theater to bring this in, to mainstream it into the theater program. I guess ultimately we kind of succeeded. So now there is very much this shared vision of artistic excellence and sustainability throughout. And now, it just grows.

Patrick Dominguez: So, what I am trying to understand is in thinking with the hats of the creative director and the artistic director, how did they decide to bring you into the team as a sustainability expert? It does not seem like the obvious choice for a theater executive director.

Ben Todd: Yeah, I suppose that’s the key is that I was not brought in as a sustainability person. If fact, I was not really brought in. Arcola is really not that kind of place. I suppose increasingly now we do, but certainly when I joined nobody was really brought in. People came. People did things that were good and that needed to be done and stuck around for as long as it suited them. Obviously, it suits me quite well, so I stuck around for rather a long time. I went from I suppose essentially someone who helped fix a few computers to chief executive responsible for making sure that the company functions.

Patrick Dominguez: How long have you been with the Arcola Theatre?

Ben Todd: About 4 years now, and essentially the sustainability, it was part of my interest, and again that is something of the theater that if you put something into making the theater work and you have a vision or a dream that you want to realize, if it can be realized within the remit of the theater, then that’s what we do. You don’t recruit a sustainability person into theater. Or people didn’t. Maybe they now will, following our example.

Patrick Dominguez: Ben, are there any other thoughts or ideas that you want to share related to the theater work that you’re doing and the sustainability work?

Ben Todd: (laughter) I could talk for a very long time. I think the key is just start, lead with vision. Bring in the rigor you need but don’t drown yourself in rigor. Don’t bore people. If people start to glaze over, move on. And always go back to vision. It’s all about vision. And the key that integrating culture, culture activities and sustainability brings is the ability to change behavior quickly. Sustainability practitioners, we need to use cultural skills. We need the cultural sector because we can build the best machines but if no one likes them then they’re not going to use them.

Patrick Dominguez: Ben, thank you very much for this interview, it’s been very interesting.

Ben Todd: You’re more than welcome. Thank you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.