Paul compiles resource packs for education and learning programmes. He is pleased to assist education and learning managers in repertory theatres, touring companies and receiving houses.
Please contact him for further information.
The King’s Theatre, Glasgow (Architect, Frank Matcham, 1904) – drawn by Miles King for a Laughing Audience education project.
Long has it been the business of the stage
To mend our manners, and reform the age.
This task the muse by nature was assign’d,
Ere Christian light shone in upon the mind;
Ev’n since these glorious truths to men appear’d,
Her moral precepts still have been rever’d,
And when the sacred monitors have fail’d,
Just satyre from the stage has oft prevailed.
Tho’ some sour criticks full of phlegm and spleen
Condemn her use as hellish and obscene;
And from their gloomy thoughts and want of sense,
Think what diverts the mind gives Heav’n offence.
- Prologue given at the opening of Carruber’s Close Theatre, Edinburgh, 1736
(a defence of the cultural, social and educational impact of the stage)
2007-2011: TEACHING IN THEATRE AND ARTS MANAGEMENT
Lectures given by Paul Iles at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts include:
- History of government intervention in the stage
- History and theory of entertainment trades unions
- The theatre manager as programmer and critic
- Contracts for theatre production companies
- Government arts and cultural policies
- Cultural policy in the Third Reich, 1933-1945
- National theatres in Europe
- European Capitals of Culture
- Design of theatres and concert halls
- Processes for capital projects in new and refurbished theatres
- Production management for managers
- Cultural quarters
- Producing and co-producing theatre productions
- Touring and working abroad
- Producing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
- Marketing campaigns for theatre productions
- Contemporary issues in performing arts management; see student conference website
- Theatre research methods, for MA students
- Theatre bibliography
- The acting company and the artistic director
- Audience theory
- David Garrick as Richard III: interpreting William Hogarth’s painting
- Conference paper for HEIF Creativity and Learning Conference at LIPA: Theatre architecture and the curriculum
- New course on Liverpool theatre: Download Liverpool Theatre Course Outline
NOTES ON TEACHING
What is the best aspect about working at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts?
Like most lecturers at LIPA, I am a practising professional in the working theatre. I ran drama companies and touring theatres before study at Glasgow University and lecturing in drama at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Theatre studies assumes many shapes, forms and structures, including history and organisation, but this job appealed because the Institute trains to a very high level of expertise in practical work, supported by critical study. In British theatre, there is a tendency for practitioners and academics to scorn each other’s approach, but at LIPA, the ‘doing’ and ‘knowing’ go hand-in-hand across each of nine degrees. It is important that lecturers maintain good contacts in the theatre and entertainment industries. Moreover, because the performing arts are multi-disciplinary, all LIPA students take electives in other subjects than their specialism - this is one of the best aspects of the job; it diminishes any conflict between the ‘professional’ and ‘academic’ and offers opportunities to educate management students in the whole art of performance, something that cannot easily occur in a standalone business studies degree.
How does your role assist managers of the future?
The performing arts need managers who enjoy cooperating with artists. My role – like my colleagues – is to encourage in students a knowledge and understanding for what the theatre, music and entertainment businesses have been and can be in the future, rather than for what they are at this moment only. The best thing that LIPA can do is to give students a feeling for the performing arts that do not yet exist. The idea that managers are rogues and vagabonds trained in the ‘school of hard knocks’ has changed to a perception of bureaucrats in grey suits who create the bureaucracies that undermine artists. I hope we are teaching managers towards a third way, to be creative producers, not simply in ‘management’ but as managers who support good art. I don’t only mean a manager who is also a creative person, but a manager who is aware of the fundamentals, the intangibles and the abstractions that underpin the practical sides of theatre, dance, design and music-making. This, it seems to me, is our greatest need in British arts management at the moment. Sometimes, we study the cock-ups in arts funding and the politics of subsidised theatre, although most students want careers in commercial theatre and music.
What would draw a new lecturer in arts management to LIPA?
LIPA students are highly motivated, with high retention rates and an international outlook stemming from many overseas’ entrants. I have taught students from Canada, the Faroe Islands, Switzerland, South Africa, France, Norway, Mexico and more; examples from world-wide cultural policies are often brought to class by students, and in their annual conference material which is debated in global contexts, especially for the music industry. A new management lecturer would join an impassioned team, augmenting our experience in the music business (Phil Saxe, Dave Pichilingi and John Reynolds), law and finance (Jeremy Grice) and the theatre (Maria Barrett) to work collegially whilst maintaining links with the business through outside personal practice that LIPA encourages. Not to mention the helpfulness of lecturers from other disciplines and the camaraderie of support staff. Plus the attraction of the well-stocked Learning Resource Centre; this is one of the best performing arts collections in any specialist academy and is multiplied by the even larger subject stocks available to us at the Liverpool John Moores and Liverpool University libraries. Working at LIPA is like being a member of a professional producing company – in Britain today, outside the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, there are no stable resident ensembles offering the benefits of consistency, yet here – with drama, music and dance – LIPA is a model of a real arts organisation. This is the lodestar for any applicant.
Pictured are two 2009 LIPA graduates: Jessikha Ellison from Merseyside and David Hutchinson from Stirling.
Jess was a management student. She researched a 12,000+ word paper on programming issues at the new Floral Pavilion Theatre, New Brighton. This was supervised by Paul. She now works as education officer at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool.
Paul taught David during the third-year of his acting degree, leading a module on running artist-led companies. David went on to develop his Sell a Door Theatre Company with colleagues. The group-led theatre staged seven productions at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has presented several productions at Greenwich Playhouse. Paul has been the Company’s mentor under a LIPA start-up fund, including guiding them in tour booking for Dracula, a twenty-fifth anniversary production in 2010 of Liz Lochhead’s version of the Bram Stoker classic.
