The old row between metro-centric national press and regional arts rears its over the New Art Gallery, Walsall. As we all know, it was a bold and risky project for a local authority in this kind of community to go for, but theydid, ACE bac ked them, Peter Jenkinson got it made and opened, Jenkinson left for neew adventures, and rocky times followed. Then, five years ago, Stephen Snoddy came in and turned the place around. Out went the top floor restaurant nobody used, in came a Costa café on the ground floor, along with evening events, in exhibitions, partnerships with other galleries, artists’ studios. But the last five years seemed to pass by at least one national journalist. Last week NAG celebrated its 10th birthday with 1100 guests at a party and a celebratory exhibition with work by Renoir to Gilbrt & George. But that morning Rosie Millard had chosen the anniversary to have a piece in the Indy about failed lottery funded arts projects. Out came the Pop Museum in Sheffield and the Doncaster Earth Centre, both undoubted mistakes. But she included NAG in her catalogue of failure: ‘…where were the temporary shows, the must-see exhibitions, the retrospectives, the touring presentations of interesting work? Last year, it had such difficulty attracting a crowd that it only managed to reverse its unstoppable downward visitor spiral by introducing a raft of free events… it is not a seriously rated contemporary arts venue. “Frankly, the collection was much better when it was hung in the local library,” a contemporary-art curator murmured to me’. Not nice, but what puzzled Snoddy that the erstwhile BBC arts correspondent had never been near the place, in his time at least, ‘and got it so badly wrong’. The truth is that since 2006 visitor numbers have gone up by leaps and bounds and last year broke 200,000 for the first time. Emails, texts, letters and phone calls have been fired off from Walsall, needless to say, expressing ‘disappointment’ at the ‘lazy journalism’, but it goes deeper than that. The coming three or four years are going to be extremely tough for regional galleries like this one when subsidy is going to be cut, even when they are on the up as NAG is, and they are going to rely even more heavily on visitors spend, sponsorship. ‘A story in a national paper saying we are failing, however untrue, could have very serious consequences for us’ Snoddy tells me. So he’s invited Rosie up for a personal tour, but she should beware if the conversation turns testy: Snoddy is a Level 6 rugby referee.

Here’s a shocker which could lead to calls for the heads of Roy Clare and Sir Andrew Motion as heads of the MLA. The council’s Renaissance budget which feeds our troubled regional museums is underspent by almost £5m for 2009-10, and the money has already gone back to the DCMS. The Museums Journal quotes Clare as saying ‘It’s not an under-spend, it’s a right-spend. There would be no point in shovelling money out of the door just to spend it before the year-end’, but we can each of us think of a dozen museums at least that would have benefited for a smidgen of that pot – which is 10% of the budget. Apparently the underspend is due to the MLA’s new way of allocating money to the regional hubs – a simple system of not giving it to them?

The longlist for the £100,000 Art Fund Museum Prize is out and among the eclectic selection of 11 is a surprise omission. The Ashmolean is there, Hampton Court Palace, the Great North Museum in Newcastle, the National Army Museum, as well as the more exquisite candidates such as the Leach Pottery in St Ives and the Towner in Eastbourne. But why isn’t the V&A’s £32m medieval and renaissance galleries which opened in November? Simple. They didn’t apply.

80m handed out in penultimate recession awards
The Leicester Theatre Trust, which runs The Curve, opened 18 months ago at a cost of £61m, has got the largest award in the penultimate Arts Council Sustain awards, with £1.03m over the next two years to help the deal with cash flow probl,ms and maikntain quality dstandards after losses in box office and ghrants fropm tirsts and foundastions.

The Roundhouse in London, which re-opened in 2006 after a £30m refurbishment and redevelopment, is awarded £800.000.

Sustain was set up last year by ACE with lottery money to provide a quick and strategic response for arts organisations effected by the economic downturn, and ensure that artistic excellence does not decline. It was closed for new applications in October.

The seventh awards are worth around £8 million, with 27 arts organisations getting grants ranging down to £77,000. It brings the total handed out so far to £41m, and there are 13 more applications to be considered, asking for a total of £6m.

Other institutions and venues which have benefited this time include the Brighton Dome (£611,700); Nottingham Contemporary (£594,000); • Whitechapel Gallery, (£480,000); Royal Court Theatre (£454,000); West Yorkshire Playhouse (£424,710); Hall for Cornwall (£416,500); City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (£388,000), which has been hit by a lack of development and touring income; the Norfolk and Norwich Festival (£330,00); Derby Quad (£260,000); FACT, Liverpool (£233,500); Warwick Arts Centre (£215,000); Customs House Trust, South Shields (£179,600); Seven Stories, Newcastle upon Tyne (£175,000); Future Everything CIC, Manchester (£150,000); the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra (£150,000); the Lake District Summer Music (£140,000); the Britten Sinfonia (£126,000); the Academy of Ancient Music (£120,000); Milap Festival Trust, Liverpool (£120,000); and the National Centre for Early Music (£120,000); Forma, London (109,800); First Movement, Rowsley (£99,761); TIPP, Manchester (£81,450); Travelling Light Theatre Company, Bristol (£79,439); Natural Theatre Company, Bath (£77,000).

‘Sustain has been crucial in helping over 130 arts organisations weather the effects of the recession,’ said ACE chief executive Alan Davey. ‘It’s been a vital interim support, but now is the time to look to the next challenges and ensure that the right conditions are created to maintain artistic excellence in the long-term.

‘We’re determined to build on the successes of recent years to make sure arts organisations can continue to produce groundbreaking work and play a major role in our collective economic future.’

Just over £41 million has now been invested through Sustain, and there are a remaining 13 applications requesting a further £6 million still under consideration. The Arts Council announced in November that they would be committing additional Lottery funds for the Sustain programme so that all remaining applications are assessed fairly against criteria.

THE OTHER POINT OF VIEWWe shouldn’t be, argues Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums

So, when is a museum not a museum? It may be apparent to all who work in them, but it’s not to anyone else. Try explaining to a member of the public why the Tate is a museum, not a gallery. Or the National Portrait Gallery is, well, a museum. Your first attempt at explanation might be to say that a museum has to have a permanent collection. Then you can try and explain why the Royal Academy of Arts isn’t, technically, a museum, despite its collection of Reynolds and Gainsborough upstairs. And why Eureka in Halifax, with no collection at all, is a museum after all. Then there are places with names like the Wallace Collection and Somerset House. What are they? And there’s the National Trust. They have over 200 museums, most disguised as historic homes.

That’s why Kids in Museums decided from the start that if visitors think it’s a museum, it’s a museum. That’s the only way to define it. It’s all to do with the choices a visitor makes. I don’t think someone thinks, “I wonder if I’ll take my family to the Victoria and Albert or Alton Towers today”. I do think they might make a choice between the National Gallery and Kensington Palace. So, as Kids in Museums sees museums from a visitor’s perspective, they’re all part of the big museum family as far as we’re concerned.

But some people are choosing to opt out of the museum fold, feeling, I presume, it’s a word so besmirched that it’s impossible to save. The first thing Vaughan Allen, a former style journalist, did when he took over Urbis in Manchester was change the name. “We banned the word museum. The word museum does mean things in cabinets, and we didn’t have any”he said. He isn’t the only person to shun the M word. A couple of years ago, the Museum of Television and Radio in New York announced it was becoming the Paley Center for Media. In a New York Times article, Pat Mitchell, the president and CEO, said, “Museum was not a word that tests really well with the under-30- and -40-year-olds, especially in the context of radio and television”.

He did not, however, list any positive associations for the title “Center”. Most Centers or Centres I go to are to have bits of me examined by a doctor, and it’s never pleasant. But many places prefer such words to being branded a museum. When I was writing a list of Britain’s best museums recently, I imagined most would want to be on it. But I was warned not to include the Eden Project in Cornwall, as they don’t like being called a museum because of the image it conveys, to some at least. (Eden – do write in and say that’s not the case and I’ll list you immediately!)

I have very mixed feeling on the M word. Museums have transformed dramatically in the last decade, and are often not the glass-cabinet stuffed, unloved, deadly silent places they were not so very long ago. But the word itself undoubtedly still has strong negative connotations, in particular for young people. Mention the M word to my teenager, and she has a tantrum. She’s not going to One of Those. Call it something else – a gallery, even – and she just might consider stepping over its threshold.

So, if we don’t have museums, what do we have? Quentin Blake is currently raising funds for a House of Illustration, to hold much of his work. Note – the word “museum” does not appear in the new building’s title. We could have more Houses of …, which does sound a great deal friendlier. House of Mummies, House of Dinosaurs, House of 19th Century French Porcelain. When the International Spy Museum in Washington DC was being built, the planners commissioned a study to choose a name. They came up with The House on F Street, which they felt conveyed an appropriate sense of intrigue. But when the public were surveyed, they overwhelmingly preferred the straightforward International Spy Museum, which seemed to them to represent what it actually was.

But perhaps we could find a single word to conjure up the spirit of the place, like Urbis, Eden or Fact in Liverpool. Under this poetic scheme, what could we call the British Museum? Conquer? And the National Gallery? Paint? Or, I quite like Frame.

But before any museum rebrands, listen to this cautionary tale. Urbis, no longer called a museum, is closing down, having lost support. It’s being replaced by a wonderful set of objects on popular culture. It will reopen as the Football Museum.

www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk

AI ProfileBrigid Larmour, artistic director, Watford Palace Theatre
There’s a fine line in the alchemy of running a provincial theatre between it being wonderfully exhilarating to utterly heartbreaking, and modern demands for high quality facilities, product and diverse audiences make the extremes even greater.

Watford Palace Theatre is a quintessential case in point. Serving a local community of around 800,000, it’s an Edwardian building which opened in 1908 as the Watford Palace of Varieties. An extension was added in 1983 and in 2004 it reopened after a two year closure for a £9m refurbishment.

That was when the alchemy started to curdle. The audience had to be wooed back, but the adventurous and even risky programming of Laurence Till – he opened with a modern Tanika Gupta reworking of Wycherley’s A Country Wife - failed to bring them back. The Watford Palace found itself deep in an unexpected crisis. Two years later, the “refurbishment of the audience” as Till put it still not properly under way, a TV career beckoned and Brigid Larmour was brought in to replace him.

What had happened was that with the reopening the staff had expanded from a seasonal operation to a year round one, the audience did not respond as it was hoped they would, and the business model went out of kilter with the subsidy spent paying off overheads rather than the product.

“So I came in to bring a different energy into the organisation, and to try and build the work and build the audiences” Larmour says. But first she had to go through the painful process of redundancy, not many, but in a small team like this the axing of even three or four leaves a scar.

Brigid Larmour, who celebrated the launch of her 2010 season at the end of last month with her 50th birthday, came to the WPT from a career that had had a steadily upward trajectory. After a peripatetic childhood and Cambridge, she went to the RSC, to Contact in Manchester, to Granada TV, to the National Theatre’s education department, to the BBC and then to Act Productions, the West End group for which she was artistic director.

One of her roles with Act was to find and nurture new writing, something that she did with conspicuous success and which is part of the WPT’s ethos now. Producing Lee Hall’s first hit, Spoonface Steinberg, brought from Newcastle to the West End, and workedwith the likes of Kathryn Hunter, Annie Castledine, Peter Gill and Anne Reid. She also set up Act Partnerships with regional theatres, notably with the Gate in Dublin.

She arrived at Watford three years ago with a pedigree, and a plan. “I came with the idea that participation is as important as producing” she says. “Increasingly, people (meaning potential audiences) want to have a stake in the work - it doesn’t mean they want to be an actor. When I arrived there was a successful established programme of curriculum work in schools, but we didn’t do anything for adults. Community shows were not fully integrated into the organisation”. One of the standout triumphs was the Opera Group production of Weill’s opera Street Scene in which members of the community provided the crowds.

It was part of her “Four Ps” strategy – producing, participating, presenting and partnership – which could become a paradigm for other theatres of the WPT’s size and constitution. Producing is enabling other companies to develop work initially for the WPT stage; participating is involving the community to grow audiences; presenting is a holistic attitude to what happens on stage, so that Larmour talks about “events” and “entertainments” now because they are as likely to be dance theatre, opera and even stand-up as drama on her stage; partnership is links with other houses and producers to make work which can have a life beyond the stage of the initial producer.

There’s a production workshop which means the WPT can provide sets for commercial clients, and for its associated companies at less cost than on the open market. “So we’re making the subsidy work harder”.

Contemporary dance devotees are in for a sensational treat – from a 50-year-old company from one of gth world’s poorest nations which has never toured here before
Last year British audiences at the Royal Festival Hall marvelled at the accomplishment and passion of the young musicians of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and wondered why it couldn’t happen here.

This month audiences keen to admire high quality youthful performance have on offer a dance version, this time from Cuba, thanks to the determination and awareness of what is happening overseas of the Dance Consortium.

The members of Danza Contemporánea de Cuba are not in the early teenage years of Gustavo Dudamel’s Venezuelan musicians, dance demands more physical development. These artists are in their twenties, but have been dancing since they were tots as part of their elementary education. “It’s their chance to advance out of poverty” says Alistair Spalding, artistic director of Sadler’s Wells. “It’s like football here, an opportunity everyone can pick up on”.

Danza has been invited by the Dance Consortium, the co-operative of dance venues here that work together to showcase the best in new choreography and performance. Planning for his tour has been spearheaded by Spalding and by Assis Carreiro, the director of Dance East who last year opened a new international-standard dancer centre in Ipswich.

Danza has been described by The Guardian as “one of the world’s most exciting dance groups”, with its Cuban blend of modern American theatre, Afro-Caribbean dance and classical European ballet. “It’s about the whole dancer on the stage, the way they live the dance, their enthusiasm, their energy, the quality of movement” says Spalding. “It’s in their genes.”

Danza began more than 50 years ago when Ramiro Guerra, once a dancer with Martha Graham’s legendary company in New York, founded the Conjunto Nacional de Danza Moderna (National Modern Dance Group) and although the name was changed along the way, it remains essentially the same.

There are 60 dancers, all drawn from Cuba’s national art school – 21 of them are on the tour - and now under the direction of Miguel Iglesias, Danza imposes a gruelling training regime, and places a high premium on individual spontaneity and inventiveness. “The grammar of dance, the words of dance, is movement,” Iglesias explains, “but a choreography must have a central idea, an intention. We must provide a dancer with the intellectual means to turn all this sophisticated technique into the language of dance.

“Our approach always stays fresh. Each new member brings new experiences, feelings, intentions… They are young faces and bodies, some very young, but they are always extremely talented. Not all of them get to be stars, but we try to make sure everyone is playing the right role” Iglesias says.

Yet although Danza has toured the world, this is the first major tour the company has had to the UK, and the reason is simple, Spalding explains: “Really, it’s the rep”.

And although Danza has over 70 works in its repertoire, none are modern commissions so the dances tend to be traditional and static, in spite of the ingenuity of the dancers themselves. Cuba is a poor country, with a tiny annual budget al of which has to go on running the company. There is nothing left for commissions, an almost surreal situation for a contemporary dance group, particularly one with national status and an international reputation.

So the Dance Consortium has commissioned the Cuban George Cespedes, Danza’s principal choreographer, to create a new piece, and although it is based on the Cuban experience and on the traditional dance, the mamba, the music he has chosen comes from the progressive Cuban group Nacional Electronica, and it is called Mambo 3XXI. There are also new dances especially commissioned from international choreographers Mats Ek (Swedish), the UK-based Spanish Rafael Bonachela, and Jan Linkens (Dutch).

From February 23 Danza will tour to Newcastle Theatre Royal, the Brighton Dome and Sadler’s Wells in London.

OK, now it’s serious. There will be a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ and Tony Hall will make sure of it. They’ve made him a member of the House of Lords today to give him the platform to bully it through. It comes in the week that his nominee as director of it, Ruth Mackenzie, starts work.

And all this after almost five years of faffing around after it was our cultural acuity that was credited with winning (if that’s the word) the 2012 Olympics in the first place.

But it won’t be called the Cultural Olympiad. Mackenzie’s first job is to come up with a name that everyone can reasonably be expected to understand, one word that bears no relation to that other bureaucratic confection which doesn’t mean anything. The next thing is to make it so that it doesn’t get trapped in the IOC’s spider’s web around logos, accreditation and badges.

Then she has to invent a festival, because that is what it will amount to – a ‘festival of festivals’, probably a vast street event that has to do the impossible thing of having a national impact and also giving the impoverished five East End boroughs that surround the Olympic site some kind of, dread word as Beachcomber would say, legacy. This why she has got Brian McMaster (ex-Edinburgh Festival), Alex Poots (Manchester Festival) and Martin Duncan (Chichester Festival Theatre) as paid advisers. The fourth is English National Ballet’s Craig Hassall, who was in c charge of branding for the Sydney Olympics.

Lord H started with no budget when his board was created last July but he’s managed to shake down £80m in cash and kind for Mackenzie to work with, and has told her to come up with one announcement, and one only, in a couple of months, which means April.

‘We’ve got a chance to make culture a part of what the Olympics does’ he told we hacks at lunch last week. ‘We’ve got a chance to change the way this country looks at arts and culture by making a statement that this is as important as sport’. Now he can bang on about it in a forum where everyone will take notice. Won’t they?

Ruth Mackenzie, currently cultural policy adviser at DCMS, is to be the £130,000-a-year director of the Cultural Olympiad.

Reporting to the chair of the Cultural Olympiad committee, Tony Hall, she becomes the “ringmaster” for the cultural Olympics called for a year ago by outgoing ACE chair Sir Christopher Frayling.

Four artistic advisers have also been appointed: Sir Brian McMaster, former director of the Einburgh Festival and author of the DCMS report on excellence in the arts of 2008; Alex Poots, director of the Manchester International Festival (of which Mackenzie was general director); Martin Duncan, with whom she was co-director of the Chichester Festival Theatre; and Craig Hassall, managing director of English National Ballet who was responsible for branding for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

” Our first task will be to do an audit of the existing plans and make recommendations to the board on the vision and timetable for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad” she said. “We aim to announce our initial plans in a few months’ time”. In fact, the first announcements are expected as soon as March.

The delay in the appointment is thought to have been due to a combination of disagreement about the salary – Tony Hall told AI last month that the originally proposed pay was too low – and some opposition on the main London Olympic Committee for the Olympic Games.

Artsadmin is 30 years old and having nursed some of our most iconic artists into their careers is as innovative as ever. Simon Tait talks to its directors.

Artsadmin stands for everything in the arts zeitgeist right now, in January 2010: innovation, boundary crossing, excellence, hands-on support for artists. It was all in McMaster, it’s all in the Arts Council’s strategy for the next ten years.

Yet they are the disciplines that lie at the core of the organisation that has just celebrated its 30th birthday and has the same two-handed directorship that has guided it for 25 years, with one of them a founder.

In 1979 Judith Knight was the general manager of Oval House that was then, with the ICA, one of two London venues offering space to avant-garde performance, and Seonaid Stewart was theatre co-ordinator at the Oval. Both had an enthusiasm for inter-disciplinary performance.

“People kept asking us if we’d do individual projects” Knight says. “We didn’t want to do that, but we said ‘Why not try and put together an office?’ There was no business plan, but they discovered an instant need for what they were offering as producers, which was sharing and connection to give creative people the space and seclusion to make work. “But we were very careful who we worked with, the artistic policy was very important”.

It was a time when funding was scarce but ambition was high, when LIFT, Dance Umbrella and Serious were also starting, and Artsadmin have always worked with them. Their first clients were Hesitate and Demonstrate, which quickly developed a reputation in Europe, and Mike Figgis, both still associated with Artsadmin though Figgis now has a successful film career; and then The People Show, Pip Simmons Theatre Group and Forkbeard Fantasy, Bobby Baker and Graeme Miller among many.

After five years Stewart moved back to her native Scotland to work, and Gill Lloyd, moved over from The People Show to become co-director of Artsadmin. For her, too, this was not a business affair, it was an affair of the heart. “How awful it would be if, as a producer, you found yourself having to work with an artist or company you didn’t like but who could afford to pay more than someone you did?”

Artsadmin are producers, but much more. They facilitate the development and presentation of new work, but also offer artist development, mentoring and advisory service and bursary schemes.

For their first 15 years they were peripatetic, a team of four sitting above a McDonalds in Clerkenwell at a time when rents there were low. “We both had small children then so we installed a crèche. And we both had pets (Ollie, a senior black Labrador, still follows Lloyd about) and when a German magazine came to write about us, the piece seemed to be all about kids and dogs” Knight recalls.

What they needed, though, was premises of their own where they could offer rehearsal and performance space, and perhaps office facilities.

They discovered Toynbee Studios. These had been built by Toynbee Hall, the social change charity in Whitechapel set up in the 1870s that had built extra space in the 1930s for education projects. Latterly it was used by the Inner London Education Authority, with a theatre on the ground floor (the old Curtain) and a football pitch, believe it or not, on the roof, but when the ILEA was abolished in the early eighties the studios fell empty. Artsadmin were eventually approved by the charity and moved into what was then a three-storey block next to Toynbee Hall itself in 1994.

“It changed everything for us” says Lloyd. “We’d always toured nationally doing new work and we’re really proud of what we did between ’79 and ‘94, but the advisory service, the education thing, the bursary scheme were possible because suddenly things opened out. We could offer space to people, and somehow when you’ve got bricks and mortar the world takes you a bit more seriously. It’s a real solid base, literally, an identity the building reflected very much. In the 60s would have been an arts lab.”

Ambition grew, and when the chance to buy the lease on Toynbee Studios they put in for lottery money – they had been Arts Council clients since the mid-80s. But the chance of ownership was a catalyst for more improvement, and in 2007 the studios were launched after a £6.5m refurbishment, £2.5m having come from the lottery.

“We were lucky” says Lloyd. “We fitted all the criteria of the time - shared space, multi-use, and we got through the door before it started to close on London projects”.

Most of the refurbishment was invisible structural improvement to make a 70-year-old building fit for 21st century use, but the open roof has become the fourth storey, a sprung floor studio habitually used by the likes of DV8 and the Michael Clark Dance Company. On the third floor are rehearsal spaces and studios, on the second offices - Artichoke, Arts Catalyst, Crying out Loud, Curious and DV8 among them. There are 18 offices in all, all arts related, and more studios in the basement with the performance artist Frank B has his lair.

There are few art forms that aren’t entertained at Toynbee. The Curtain was 480 seats, but when the stage was extended in the mid-90s for a piece Mike Lee was making for the Barbican the seating was reduced to 280, and so it remains as a valuable rehearsal resource for theatre, film and television as well as for schools’ use. The oak-panelled courtroom, the first juvenile court in London, remains as an ideal recording studio and music venue.

But on the ground floor is one of the first installations Knight and Lloyd made when they arrived, the café, which they run themselves. “The whole thing needs a hub, it’s where residents here get together, and now that it’s more visible from the street (a street wall has been replaced by railings) it’s a popular local meeting place” Knight says.

Artsadmin, now with a staff of 24 whose ACE annual grant as an RFO accounts for half the turnover, continues doing the work it always had, plus some. They have to raise funds for artists’ projects; there 12 to 13 permanent artists in any year, each doing one or two projects “which could be a tiny site specific thing round the back or a tour to China” Lloyd says.

Education has been increasingly important element, and Artsadmin now has an education co-ordinator, Sam Trotman, who runs an annual summer school – last year’s theme was environmental sustainability. She has also created a youth board of artists aged between 18 and 25 who independently advise on programming.

“What has happened in the last 30 years is that the barriers between art forms that the funding authorities could seen have mostly disappeared” says Knight, “thought some of the press and media still find it difficult not to put things into boxes.”

To mark the 30th anniversary, the Toynbee residents were asked to create an image in the building, and the likes of Bobby Baker, Lloyd Newson, Mike Figgis, Franko B and Curious have all complied to make a unique memorial.

Artsadmin will continue to examine issues through what they do at Toynbee and who they work with, and Lloyd and Knight hope to be able to establish an annual festival there to address themes. Climate change will continue to figure large, and Artsadmin has been working with the British Council to find ways of reducing the carbon footprint for touring companies.

“This is going to be a difficult year for the arts in many ways, but what we want to make sure of is that in the search for young talent we don’t forget older artists” says Judith Knight. “Because, say, Bobby Baker is in her 50s doesn’t mean she is any less creative or in need of support, and I hope the Arts Council take that fight on. We certainly have.”