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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.
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.”
Arts Council England wants a strategy for the next ten years that can vault over government change. ACE chief executive Alan Davey explains
The arts in England are in a good place right now. In the last 15 years they have flourished and there is now a genuine acceptance that they are a part of the fabric of our nation. We want to build on that strength and ensure that in ten years’ time the arts will continue to thrive and everybody will have access the very best of them.
That’s why earlier this month at the State of the arts conference, Arts Council England announced a consultation on a ten year framework for the arts – Achieving great art for everyone. This framework will set our priorities for the arts in England over the next decade – for our own work and for the cultural and social context in which it will take place. The framework will set out some clear directions, but it will also be flexible, allowing for necessary changes in the face of the unexpected.
This document – and the ten year framework which results from it – brings together for the first time all art forms and development areas into one set of long term priorities. We know that in order to deliver the conditions in which great art can flourish we must look beyond the publicly funded sector; that’s why it will also look at the views of everyone from the commercial, amateur and voluntary arts sector as well as audiences.
We want to arrive at a strong but flexible long term plan that sets a direction and vision for the arts that the whole sector shares, and which can forge ahead through any changes in political or financial climate.
In Achieving great art for everyone, we set out a vision that sees this country as a place for world-leading artistic excellence and innovation, and a great place for artists to live and work.
We see a country where everybody feels they can enjoy the best of the arts, engaging and participating in new ways, where the arts play a dynamic role at the heart of society, locally, nationally and internationally, where they drive the creative economy and have adapted to a low carbon future.
We envisage arts organisations as resilient, naturally collaborative and adaptable, recognising the benefits of thriving within a mixed economy of support.
However, the speed and scale of change today bring exceptional challenges and opportunities for artists and arts organisations, and for the Arts Council in enabling the arts to flourish. That’s why we need a map for the future. We know that collaboration is going to be critical to our sector in adapting to the changes ahead.
We want to see the arts sector working more intelligently together, and that is why the contribution of artists, arts organisations and partners to this consultation is not just welcome, but essential.
In Achieving great art for everyone we propose five long term goals that can drive our development work, inform our funding priorities and strengthen our relationships with artists, organisations and audiences. We believe our proposals on how we will achieve the goals - including our thinking on new, more flexible, funding programmes - will enable us to be more effective, and encourage a greater sense of shared purpose. However, the proposals are just that: a work in progress, into which your contribution is essential. We want to create a framework that everyone in the arts can get behind, and develop a set of goals that we all want to strive for.
Later in the year, drawing deeply from what we learn, we will publish our priorities for our next investment plan and a ten year strategic framework. We will set out our long term goals, our ambitions for each artform and new ways of working with our partners and the people we fund. It will make a real difference to how we work and how we make our investment decisions.
Our framework for the arts will be an important document not only for us, but for anyone interested in, or working in, the arts in England. It will give clear indicators of how we intend to achieve our mission but at its heart it will be about pushing artistic boundaries and giving artists and arts organisations the space to experiment and to create – to take their art forms forward with the sort of work that audiences new and old will want to experience.
Whether you look at it as a prescription for excellence, or an antidote for stagnation, our ten year framework is something that anyone involved in the arts in England should want to help shape.
The consultation document is on our website at www.artscouncil.org.uk/consultation
The Crafts Council’s new programme Collective offers contemporary craft makers the chance to direct and develop their own professional development. Rosy Greenlees, the council’s executive director, introduces it.
Craft is a lively, entrepreneurial and independent-minded contributor to the economic, social and cultural life of the nation. Our role is to enable those at the heart of the sector to develop and grow and supporting makers has been central to the Crafts Council’s work over the last 35 years. The Crafts Council Development Award alone has helped over 1,200 new makers, including Caroline Broadhead, Tom Dixon, Thomas Heatherwick and Shelly Goldsmith, at the starting point of their careers.
However, over this period craft practice has changed and makers now have diversity of career paths and opportunities. It is crucial, therefore, that makers are supported throughout their careers extending and challenging their practice if they recognise the need to do so. With this in mind the Crafts Council has launched a comprehensive programme of support for makers. This programme, Crafts Council Collective, comprises five strands: Hothouse, designed for new and emerging makers, Injection and Artistic Licence for more established makers and Craft Rally and Portfolio for all makers. Collective will provide tailored business development, time for makers to explore their practice and take creative risks, support from peers and experts, opportunities to develop aspirational models of practice and opportunities to share knowledge, resources and advice.
Crafts Council Collective has been developed following extensive evaluation of former schemes, recommendations from the Craft Blueprint, developed in partnership with Creative & Cultural Skills and from Turning Point, Arts Council England’s ten year strategy for the visual arts. It will enable the Crafts Council to have an programme of initiatives that collectively strive to meet the needs of all 33,000 makers across the UK at all stages in their career.
The success of Collective will rely on strong partnerships with other organisations across the UK. We want to connect with exemplar regional or locally focussed schemes that already provide development and networking opportunities and extend these to a national level. Craft Rally, Portfolio and Hothouse will be delivered with a range of partners whilst Injection and Artistic License will be delivered directly by the Crafts Council. Whilst we continue to develop these programmes we will launch the first initiative, Craft Rally, in February 2010.
Craft Rally is a democratic, inclusive programme of CPD opportunity for all makers, regardless of location, discipline, point in career, or any other set boundary. Digitisation and virtual communication have revolutionised the way makers communicate and practice. Craft Rally will help connect thousands of makers many of whom work in isolation and often feel they lack peer support or networks. Craft Rally is a physical and virtual knowledge transfer network where makers can demonstrate and share innovative and aspirational models of practice. There will be four rallies per year across the country. The first Craft Rally will take place on 25 March at 45 Millbank in London and will be delivered in conjunction with ArtQuest and Yorkshire Art Space. The content of this rally and indeed all future rallies will be generated and steered by makers through a virtual network ensuring its direct relevance to the needs of the craft sector. Craft Rally is for makers, by makers.
The broader craft industry contributes £3 billion GVA (Gross Value Added) to the UK economy, greater than the visual arts, cultural heritage or literature sectors. Collective will ensure that individuals can take control of their own professional and personal development and together create sustainable models of practice for the whole sector that will define contemporary craft practice in the 21st century.
More information on all aspects of Collective in the Professional Development section at www.craftscouncil.org.uk/professional-development
AI Profile – Farooq Chaudhry, chairman, Dance UK
Danny Boyle should make a movie about the new chair of Dance UK. It would be more dramatic than Slum Dog Millionaire, with the added thrill of being true.
Farooq Chaudhry, the dancer turned business brain behind the phenomenal success of the Akram Khan Company, was born in Lahore in 1960 and was three when his parents brought him to live in West Kensington. “We came into a very white culture in London that was intensely racist, and we experienced huge amounts of discrimination” he recalls. “It had a terrible effect my family, it damaged my parents’ relationship and they split up. At 14 I ended up in care”.
And there, as in countless millions of cases, the story would have ended, an unremarkable tragedy, had it not been for an enlightened social worker who perceived a spark in the misfit adolescent. While his elder sister Mighat went back to Pakistan, he was sent to Peper Harow, a psycho-therapeutic community in Surrey for troubled young people.
“There was no formal education – I didn’t take that up till I was 19 – and I was basically self-taught” he says. At 21 he went to Sussex University to read English, but joined the dance society and after his first session went to the dean and announced he was leaving. He was going to be a dancer. “The dean was very kind. He gave me a year and said if I still wanted to leave then I could”.
Where the urge to dance came from is a mystery. His family home had been a culture-free environment, yet his sister became a renowned classical kathak dancer in Pakistan and is now influential there in cultural politics.
Chaudhry’s teacher back at Peper Harow suggested a visit to the London Contemporary Dance Theatre performing at Sadler’s Wells. “I saw amazing male dancers looking like gods, and it was love at first sight. I was mesmerised by it, I had to do it - but where could I find a contemporary dance teacher in Godalming?”
He devised an elaborate plan, creating his own dance society at Sussex for which members paid a fee, and with this he hired teachers from places like Pineapple and The Place. Whereas the club he had joined had 20 members at its fullest, in two months he had 400 members. “In six months the Observer Magazine credited as being the moist successful dance union in the country, and the wealthiest” he says. “It all came out of desire – I was dancing and at same time creating a scheme. I discovered I’m very entrepreneurial”.
In 1983 he got into The Place and joined a small group there called Images. “But there was no-one to manage it, so I volunteered, made it up as I went along, and started to raise money. I got it out of IBM, Digital, Reebok and I was inundated with offers to be administrator. But I wanted to be a dancer”.
He applied to join Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s renowned Rosas in Belgium and at the third try got in, aged 34. “I learned not only about being a dancer in a company but also to work out what was happening, the dynamic of relationships in organisatons”. He was Keersmaeker’s assistant for a year “and I began to understand the challenges, the issues and problems”.
But injuries were starting to set in, and in 1998 – by now married to Su-Man Hsu, a Taiwanese dancer – he enrolled for an arts management MA course at City, commuting from Brussels by Eurostar. “I didn’t enjoy it very much – it seemed very heretical because you disengage from practice, and there’s a tendency to idealise and romanticise the arts as some kind of social saviour, but it’s an industry”.
He joined IndepenDance, a new Arts Council sponsored agency for ex-dancers who wanted to be managers. “It was very protectionist, and it was weird working with people who has been professional for 20 or 30 years and were highly respected, but had become very cautious. But I’m an ambitious person, I like to dream, and I was frustrated, I wanted to go bigger”.
He saw a performance by the dancer Akram Khan. “I thought, wow! I liked this new language that was being spoken by bodies, a beautiful spiritual quality that comes with Asiatic aesthetics.
“Most classical/contemporary dance is monocultural, and when you get an artists able to speak more than one language in his work it’s really interesting” he says of Khan. “We spoke and there was an immediate chemistry between us - he found me as much as I found him. We both had a desire to go somewhere, I’d been offered work by various companies but wanted to grow with an artist”. He became Khan’s producer.
But Akram Khan was already £14,000 in debt, and somehow Chaudhry cleared it. He sent Khan to Keersmaeker for six months training in international techniques, and he returned brimming with ideas for a new piece. But he wanted three dancers, commissioned lighting, commissioned choreography, and Chaudhry sold his flat to pay for it.
That was Rush, which announced Akram Khan as the first cross-cultural, cross-art form choreographer, and soon he was working with Anish Kapoor, Nitin Sawhney, and even Kylie Minogue. Last year he collaborated with the National Ballet of China and the French actor Juliette Binoche on In-I. “My wife is a masseuse now and Juliette is a client of hers. She happened to mention that she’d always wanted to dance, and Su-Man said she should talk to Akram…”
Akram Khan’s rise has coincided with a revolution in dance in this country, partly led by Chaudhry’s predecessor as chair of Dance UK for five years, Alistair Spalding, chief executive of Sadler’s Wells. “People like Alistair are programming much more adventurously, productions are much better made, the quality of collaborators people are pulling in is much higher, and that means we’ve got a greater richness to the work and we’re drawing on a wider spectrum for audiences” says Chaudhry. “Dance UK has come in on that and created a wonderful momentum”.
But in taking over from Spalding he has walked into a series of challenges, the principal one being the dancers’ health pilot programme which he believes is essential for the future well-being of performers, but which was turned down for a £40,000 lottery grant by the Arts Council just before Christmas. “I will have failed if I don’t find the money to make this project a reality” he says.
Next will be to continue to engage politicians and ameliorate the effects of cuts promised by all parties after the election – “We have created this momentum with spectacular statistics - audiences up and dance all over the television - and it would be tragic if the head of this momentum is cut off because people are worried about the country’s debt”.
He is working towards a dance summit for 2012, not so much to thrash issues out as to establish a forum where creators can meet and talk. Dance UK could also start training programmes to help dancers into new careers after their performance life is over. “In how many professions could you start all over again at 40? I did, and it’s been fantastic.”
Dance still has a long way to go, and get help the rest of the arts sector with its challenges. “One of the problems for dance is people with lack of commitment, discipline and business acumen. How do you make it work in artistic framework? I believe that we need to be more perceptive, we need to be sharp, we need to know who we are. We need to know what people want when they don’t know they want it yet” he says.
“Dancers can be the best the best entrepreneurs and business people, but they’ve always got to be some way ahead of what’s happening.”
Polska! is introducing us to another side of the nation many of us know only as diligent migrant workers
It might be the start of our calendar year, but the UK is in the middle of a year of culture that has seen Polish visual art, music and drama in corners of the country that rarely get the attention of arts touring planners as well as the national venues.
The year will be rather more than 12 months, too, having started back in March 2009 and scheduled to run until May.
The reason, says Aneta Prasal-Wisniewska, is simple. “2009 was the 70th anniversary of the second world war when we remembered Poland standing with Britain, it was the 20th anniversary of fall of communism for us, this year is the bicentary of the birth of Chopin, our greatest composer.
“But these are all excuses. The real reason was that with a million Polish immigrants in this country, Britain needs to know more about Poland and Polish culture so that we can communicate who we are.”
Polska!, or PL! as the press material has tended to shorten it to, is a saturation exercise that began in Canterbury Cathedral with Penderecki’s St Luke’s Passion – conducted by the composer. The Barbican had the Gospels of Childhood, a mixture of traditional story-telling and contemporary theatre direction. The Sainsbury Centre at Norwich had a show devoted to Tadeusz Kantor, the legendary Dada-ist artist-performer who died ten years ago, coupled with the work of 16 of Poland’s New Wave artists.
Poland’s designers and architects were a big part of the Design Festival in the autumn, and Polish film has figured large at the Southbank and the Barbican. For the next six weeks or so, Chopin is the centre of attention at the Southbank Centre.
Visual art has been the biggest domain among more than 200 events on offer, with the first serious solo exhibition here for Robert Kusmirowski, Bunker, for which the Barbican’s Curve gallery was transformed into a second world war bunker filled with found objects from the time. The Tate has just acquired its first piece of work by Artur Zmijewski, perhaps Poland’s; most provocative artist, and he has just had a major retrospective at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. And at Dulwich Picture Gallery, whose collection was based on the national collection being put together by the last King of Poland when he was forced to abdicate, London-based Antoni Malinowski created an installation to link the 18th century with the 21st.
Modern Art Oxford is currently hosting Pawel Althamer’s extraordinary piece, Common Task, in which the 33-year-old intertwines sculpture and performance. Althamer’s has taken to travelling al over the world with groups of friends and neighbours, mostly unassociated with art in their normal lives, who become parts of his creations.
Poetry and prose performance is a growing theatre form which Lit Up both examines and promotes. Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow explain.
“Spoken word in a way is a very new artform but… communicating to your community with your voice is also as old as time”. Baba Israel, artistic director of Contact Manchester, offered a historical context in his keynote speech at the Lit Up showcase and conference last September at the Albany, Deptford. The event was the second in a series of three, the final one taking place in a few weeks at Bristol Old Vic on February 16.
The Lit Up events explore the exciting potential of the artform, aiming to bring spoken word into established theatres and arts centres. “Spoken word” and “live literature” may be hard-to-define, somewhat slippery terms, but they represent a fast-growing body of work in the UK.
Live literature includes performances of poetry or prose-based work, often (but not always) performed by the writer. Live literature blurs the lines between theatre and other artforms but, as Antonia Byatt, the Arts Council’s director of literature strategy, said at the last Lit Up, “let’s not worry about defining it too much, it combines writing and performance, but trying to put it in a box is probably a mistake”.
Why then is it exciting as an artform and why should it be of interest to theatres and arts centres? For performer Stacy Makishi, “it is about your own personal breath, sharing stories that are very close to you.” At its best, it is very direct, even visceral, often political, and certainly very personal. It provides artists with a whole range of possibilities, and venues with opportunities to attract new audiences. In particular, it often has a strong appeal to young people as both audiences and performers. In some ways it is the essence of the communal live experience, creating a very intimate relationship between the performer and audience.
Whilst the hybrid nature of the form might bring problems of definition it also brings a real diversity and the almost limitless creative potential. Lit Up’s own commissions, which include new work from poet/musician Zena Edwards and a collaboration between novelist Jonathan Coe and musician Sean O’Hagan, illustrate how music from jazz and pop traditions, as well as folk and hip hop, are enriched by their meeting with spoken word.
Spoken word’s collision with theatre is also a rich area of possibility. Poet Inua Ellams’ first full-length show The 14th Tale was profiled at the Lit Up event in June, and after a successful autumn tour will find itself on the National Theatre’s stage for a short run this spring. Lit Up associate artist Polarbear will premiere his “spoken screenplay” Return at BAC in March, having previewed the work in development at each of the Lit Up events. Both are clearly spoken word performances, but can also be seen as boundary-pushing theatre productions.
The arts are sprouting them, but are they worth anything? Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums which has just produced its latest, wonders
We all love a good manifesto. The 11 point Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, the first arts manifesto of the 20th century, called for the demolition of museums and libraries, but its centenary was still celebrated this year as if it had paved the way for every arts initiative since. Manifestos are credited with having clout beyond that of any mere document or proposal. Just the name is enough to conjure up visions of revolutionary change.
I’ve noticed that, as the political parties clamber to construct their own manifestos, the arts world is also drawing them up by the dozen. The National Campaign for the Arts’ Arts Manifesto, the Manifesto for Children’s Arts, the Northern Ireland Manifesto for Children’s Arts, Manifesto for Participation in the Arts and Crafts … It seems there are so many of them, organisations are struggling to find a new name for each. To fit in with this trend, we’ve also been busy producing our own 2010 Kids in Museums Manifesto – 20 ways to make a museum family friendly – compiled from visitors’ comments. (See page 4)
There are some really good examples of arts manifestos, I hope ours included. The Music Manifesto, for example, with its key five aims, demonstrates how something simple can have real force. However, I’ve also noticed that many manifestos are so in little more than name. That doesn’t mean that they don’t meet the dictionary definition – a public written declaration of the intentions or motives of a party. It means they don’t work. And the reason they don’t is because they’re nothing more than yet another report on the arts, thinly disguised as something else.
I believe the heart of a useful manifesto is brevity. It can’t only be called it, it must be it, and that means it must be a call to action that can be easily summarized. We keep our Kids in Museums Manifesto to one side of one sheet of paper. I have yet to come across a shorter one, although I’m sure there is. But longer ones – I’ve found plenty, and the more you write, the less gets read. If you write one page, everyone reads it. If you write two pages, hardly anyone even reads the first page. I learnt this over years as a journalist. I’ve noticed, since I’ve strayed into the world of the arts, that arts organisations like to have big, fat publications, not single sheets of paper. How can people rally around essays?
In addition to brevity, there must be clarity and clear purpose. It’s no good having a manifesto with aims that boil down to nothing more than “enabling more people to have access to the arts” or “placing the arts at the core of improving people’s life opportunities”. Or, even worse, things like “expanding the cultural offer”. These may be rallying cries – but to do what exactly? It’s rather ironic that so many manifestos call for accessibility in totally inaccessible language. Phrases like that have no real meaning and no clear aim. It’s what I call a Motherhood and Apple Pie Manifesto - asking people to sign up to what everyone wants to happen anyway. A manifesto must have things in it that people object to, otherwise there is nothing to implement. It also must have an outcome that is measureable. There’s no real way of assessing when and if any of the above are achieved.
I think the reason so many manifestos are written is that the idea sounds simple. Just write a list of points. But being clear and precise is far more difficult than any amount of waffle. If the arts sector wants things to be done, and just not talked about, they need to get a little better at being brief and being clear. In these times, we need rallying cries. But we also need to understand what they are.
To order your copy of the new 2010 Kids in Museums Manifesto, just email manifesto@kidsinmuseums.org.uk.
To download a pdf of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
