Some 60 years ago Joan Littlewood and her closest collaborators came up with the Fun Palace idea. It was to be a ‘university of the streets’ and a ‘laboratory of fun’: a movable, state of the art building for arts, science and the community and a place where everyone would be welcome to come in, pick up a skill, watch a band or a play or a film. Littlewood's concept was perhaps a paradigm of her participatory beleifs, an ever-changing venue against alienation and for integration of arts into their surroundings.

Littlewood never did manage to make Fun Palace happen, but her centenary is now being celebrated through a contemporary reimaganing of the original idea. With Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings at the wheel, Fun Palaces have grown into a network of 130+ events around the UK. They are all free, local, innovate, transformative, engaging; diverse and self-organised with some logistic support provided by the core Fun Palaces team. They are all also happening this weekend: check where your local one is, and see what Duffy and Rawlings have to say on the false division between arts and sciences, the long way to true arts accessibility and the democracy of Fun Palaces.

Run Riot: Fun Palaces revolve around a curious mix of arts and science, often tagged as separate and disparate fields. What brings them together in Fun Palaces?

Stella Duffy & Sarah-Jane Rawlings: Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop was among the first in the UK to embrace sound and design technology. They worked with technicians or learned, as non-technicians, how to make new work. They loved technology and what it could bring to the arts. Unfortunately, in our current education system, we are all encouraged to decide, incredibly early on in life, if we are ‘arts’ or ‘sciences’ – as if the two could be uncoupled, as if science isn’t required to make art, as if science can be relayed to the rest of the world without art. Joan had a phrase “Everyone an artist, or a scientist” – we’ve taken it a step further to say “Everyone an artist and a scientist”. We believe the two are inextricably linked, and the sooner our education system remembers this, the better. How they’re coming together in Fun Palaces is as varied as the venues and locations themselves – there’s a physicist getting in the pool at Brockwell Lido to explain the physics of water and swimming, kitchen experiments in Whitstable, the science of theatre in Oxford, Minecraft in loads of Fun Palaces, astronomers in Farnham, soundcloud pieces and podcasts ... anything that the people making them want to include.

Run Riot: In 1961 Littlewood imagined a building linked to other spaces in an undefined but technologically minded way. Now that we have the Internet to do exactly that, what role does the digital dimension of Fun Palaces play in the overall project?

Stella Duffy & Sarah-Jane Rawlings: We’re thrilled to have a presence on The Space’s platform – we think that being there may bring us visitors who wouldn’t consider community arts (or sciences) to be their thing, and we also very much hope that some of our makers and participants, who may not consider digital arts to be their thing, will be tempted to follow up on some of the amazing work The Space have on their site.

The original design for the (never-built) Fun Palace had live feeds from the football and the zoo, it had walls lifted by air and by hydraulic pups – we can’t offer the latter, but we can definitely offer the former! We also hope that by offering equality of online presence (ie the Southbank’s Fun Palace page is exactly the same size as that of the entirely community-run Luton Fun Palace), we’re offering an equality of sharing. All too often those who get noticed in the world are those who have the money to put towards getting noticed. The Southbank are able to do their own publicity, of course, and that’s way more than many of our smaller local Fun Palaces can do, but on our site they are of equal magnitude. And everyone likes that, both the big and the little Fun Palaces.

We also hope that people will come and visit the website, as an artwork in itself – an artwork created by the people, for the people. We’ve worked very hard with Katy Beale from Caper, and the great team at Mudlark, to create a website that is user-friendly and can grow as we do, we expect it to change as Fun Palaces changes, and we welcome that.

Run Riot: Arts have had a rough couple of years, with funding cuts everywhere and a growing impetus to move towards a completely commercial system. Are the principles of Fun Palaces a tide against the principles of current policy makers?

Stella Duffy & Sarah-Jane Rawlings: As part of this climate of diminishing funds, we feel lucky to be supported by an Arts Council Exceptional Award and a co-commission from the Space (to fund our website) to develop the foundations of the Fun Palaces campaign. Rather than a tide against, I think we are part of a policy that agrees that culture and creativity shouldn’t be resigned to buildings and timetables, but that it is time to hand it back, to give people permission to celebrate who they are and what they can do, to enable people to ‘play and not just pay’, to talk about ‘building communities’ rather than ‘building audiences’*. Fun Palaces is about fighting for an all engaged, wide ranging, energetic cultural scene involving a broad and inquisitive community who see it as part of their everyday lives. It is a fight that may take many years to reach fruition but by supporting us alongside the rest of their difficult decisions, the Arts Council have boldly agreed that it is a fight worth funding.

(*from Building Communities, Not Audiences, Doug Borwick)

Run Riot: Accessibility is a big word in the arts. How do you think the UK fairs when it comes to making the arts accessible to anyone, of any background, who might want to partake?

Stella Duffy & Sarah-Jane Rawlings: We think it’s got a long way to go – and we say that in spite of all the brilliant work that is happening across the country and in spite of being based at the Albany in Deptford which is continually buzzing with its local community watching, taking part, having a say, hanging out. So much of the work around access seems to be about breaking down barriers and building new audiences - a tiny sticky plaster of a solution and not one that is going to have any lasting remedy. It just doesn’t get down to the root of the problem which is, as we see it, that many of our communities don’t think these shiny cultural institutions are for them – they just don’t think they will be welcome. There are too many spaces in this country that people don’t want to enter because they don’t feel comfortable.  And when amazing cultural events do happen outside of the buildings, led by the local communities, too often there is a distinction made that bills the community / engagement work as somehow not really ‘art’. So Fun Palaces exists to change all this – to turn the talking about access in to a movement for authentic change, to rethink the nature of engagement between communities and cultural organizations, to champion a more inclusive arts and education sectors and to engage in a serious search for the democratisation of the arts.

Run Riot: Can you give us a little taster of Fun Palaces - what are some of the more idiosyncratic, exciting, or innovative events taking place?

Stella Duffy & Sarah-Jane Rawlings: With 134 (at last count) Fun Palaces across the country ranging from tiny community groups who came together on twitter, to woodlands, to schools, to major arts centres and even a butcher’s shop, Fun Palaces has clearly captured the public’s imagination and has grown exponentially on a tide of goodwill, community energy and individual enterprise. It is clearly the right time, every one of the 134 Fun Palaces are using this project to explore arts, sciences, their own locality, and are doing so as part of a simultaneous, nationwide shout that says 'culture' is by and for the people. The Fun Palace brief is broad and this has been very liberating  - everyone really can be an expert, everyone really can be an artist. The weekend of 4/5 October will therefore see: robots being built in Hull; mermaids in Brockwell lido; chocolate postcards in York; digital art with conductive ink in Leicester; talking tigers in Hastings; painting workshops in a shed on wheels in Blackpool; an opportunity to learn sign language at a silent party in Camden; graffiti workshops in Leicester, amongst many, many other things. But as the campaign has developed, we have also realized another very important thing, that communities coming together to create a Fun Palace is as important as the weekend itself.

Fun Palaces

4-5 October

Across the UK

Photo by Tom Parker Photography