The Arts Council has made folk music and dance a client, just as its lead society is responding to a folk revival. Simon Tait reports.

Most folkies won’t care. They’ll still stamp and strum and scrape and jingle and bellow, and even stick their fingers in the ears if they’re of that generation, but it is official: folk music and dance are art.

Confirmation comes with the English Folk Dance and Song Society – Efders for short, according to its CEO Katy Spicer, but look for a name change soon - being admitted to the pantheon of regularly funded organisations. It’s got £400,000 over the next 18 months to get folk on a national footing, properly taught, promoted and integrated.

The news brings folk into a focus it hasn’t ever had before, even in the days of Cecil Sharp, the composer and musicologist who a century ago began to collect and archive the songs and dances of working people.

The EFDSS has been struggling to make itself heard as the national development agency, confined as it is to a Grade II listed fortress in Camden, built six years after Sharp’s death in 1924 as his monument. Cecil Sharp had been the centre of teaching, mostly of dancing, housed an unmatchable library and archive and was hired by enthusiastic clubs for ceilids and concerts. But there was little impact beyond Cecil Sharp House.

Meanwhile, the truth is that despite the natural habitat of the folk club, the pub, closing at the rate of 27 a week, folk is on a high with more young people learning instruments and performing than ever, more high level performances at main venues and continually growing audiences.

A measure of how folk is featuring more and more largely is in the fact that one of the National Theatre’s biggest hits for some time is Warhorse, now in the West End, in which the music and performance of Tim Eyken, the rising star of English folk, is integral.

Cecil Sharp had become a folk convert after an incident that’s as famous for folk music historians as St Paul’s experience eon the road to Damascus. On Boxing Day 1899 at Headikngt5on Quarry near Oxford he met William Kimber, musician to the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers, and from then on he devoted himself to researching the roots and expanse of the genre.

The English Folk and Dance and Song Society was created in 1932 with the merger of the Folk-Song Society (founded 1898) and the English Folk Dance Society that Sharp formed in 1911. Hence the tortuous name.

A century ago folk music was a fascination for composers led by Sharp but including Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Henry Hammond and there was fevered collecting of songs, music and dances in what is still seen as a golden age. Vaughan Williams’s great library came to the society in 1958.

It was he EFDSS that nurtured the birth and growth of the folk festivals which began to proliferate, a conscious effort to take folk back to the folk, and events at Sidmouth, Whitby, Holmfirth, Chippenham and Cambridge are meccas for thousands of followers.

Twenty years ago the EFDSS almost moved out of London. The board had decided to rationalise by selling the House at the top of the North London property market and using the proceeds to buy or even somewhere in the country, develop its teaching, expand its library space and generally move with the times, but he plan collapsed. “It simply didn’t happen because the members wouldn’t hear of it” says Katy Spicer. “The emotional attachment to this place was just too strong”.

So folk was stuck with it. There were suggestions and half-hearted attempts to sell off assets that also foundered, and the EFDSS soldiered on as best it could.

Then, two years ago, the board knew things could not go on as they were. “It was a realisation of the board that although the organisation had been around for 75 years, it had lost its way” Spicer says. “It’s supposed to be a national organisation - or an England-wide organisation - and they used to have regional offices which died the death as funding changed. But it had become an organisation that as very centred around the activities in this building”. They decided a major remodelling was required if the society was to meet the evident growing demand and serve it properly.

Katy Spicer has no background in folk, having been in dance administration for all of her career, latterly at Arc Dance in London and with spell as an Arts Council advisor and assessor.

“The building, which was bustling, had become essentially a hires venue. The society was Static, very dance orientated, and it wasn’t fulfilling any sort of role of developing, either the organisation or the folk world” she says.

Her job was to appoint heads of the new marketing, education and operations departments, and together to re-establish the EFDSS as national body and looking outside the folk world. First, though, she redecorated the building, clearing the walls of the random posters and objects that had been hung there over the years (“a hotchpotch of things, like a museum room someone had forgotten about”).

The society has just finished Take Six, an HLF funded archive, outreach and education programme which involved putting the archives of six collectors on a website and linking with half a dozen primary schools in Hampshire and Lancashire – at Andover the scheme discovered a child who was the direct descendent of a farmer who had contributed to a collection a century ago.

Spicer met the artist David Owen who had been creating ironic images around the notion of the society, and he mounted an exhibition on the CSH’s newly pristine walls a year ago. It was a popular success, and led to the appointment of a visual artist in residence Matt Cowan, who is now working on his third visual art exhibition there. “We want to engage with contemporary artists who don’t usually engage with folk audiences” Spicer says.

The task is much wider, however, and the ACE money will help to fulfil it. A third of the money will go on artists’ development - mentoring, showcases for emerging artists, and performing artists in residence; a quarter go on education, including teacher training modules because few teachers are qualified to teach folk music and dance; they need to expand the communications and information service, and are developing a large new website; and they will run an annual conference, an important networking opportunity where venue managers and producers can mingle with the artists.

But there have already been valuable links forged. There was a recent collaboration with Sadler’s Wells when dancers were joined by folk musicians for a week – classically trained ballerinas dancing the Cotswold Jig had to be breaking at least one mould – and there are connections now with the Southbank Centre and Youth Music.

They formed a link with the National Gallery with Hidden Voice that matched folk artists with paintings in the collection for performances, and with the Royal Opera House for shows in the Linbury Studio.

And one of the most heartening rapprochements was over Mary Neill, a great teacher of dance who was one of the first to connect art and social reform by teaching poor girls he joy of dance. She had been a close collaborator with Sharp but they fell out over teaching methods, and the schism was never healed. Until earlier this year, that’s, when Mary’s great niece Lucy- co-founder of the London International Festival of Theatre, inherited her archive and decided to endow Cecil Sharp House with it, in a day of music and dance which Lucy Neill herself programmed.

“What we can say now is that the Arts Council has trust in our ability to deliver high quality art, and that we are open for business in all meanings of the phrase” says Katy Spicer.