Making our young people creative is crucial to the nation’s future, according to a reborn Creative Partnerships, but too many key players in the arts, politics and education are not yet convinced, reports Simon Tait

Cultural heavyweights – the likes of Nick Serota, Ekow Eshun, Vikki Heywood and Carole Souter - were out in force in the lecture theatre of the RSA a month ago for the launch of a paper entitled Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning, produced by something called the Culture and Learning Consortium, a new name on the scene. In the front row, looking not a little proprietorial, was the chief executive of another new name, Creativity Culture & Education.

He is Paul Collard, who until the start of April was director of Creative Partnerships, the sometime controversial creativity programme for schools set up nearly seven years ago under the Arts Council with, in that time, an accumulated £110m of revenue funding. Since then it’s worked with almost a million young people and 5,000 schools across England, liaising with artists, arts organisations and local authorities to bring programmes to young people.

CP has now enlarged itself into CCE and the advents of the new organisation, the new consortium and the paper are all connected with the fact that, for all its cash, its 200-odd staff and its successful initiatives, the CP message still hasn’t been getting all the way home.

Some government departments, schools and even the arts and cultural institutions themselves, says Collard, have not entirely bought into the fact that creativity is, in effect, the fourth R. Unless we all get it we are doomed, he says, it’s as fundamental as that.

Vanessa Swann was appointed chief executive, Cockpit Arts in 2002, and since then she has transformed the organisation from a managed workspace to a creative business incubator. In June she launches a new campaign to support designer-makers.

How did Cockpit Arts come about, what does it do and what is the origin of the name?
Our Holborn incubator is located in Cockpit Yard, WC1, which is the site of a former 18th century cock fighting pit frequented by nobility and at one time owned by a cabinetmaker. Cockpit has grown from its small beginnings in the late 80s as a volunteer-run initiative, involving just a few designer-makers, to become the UK’s only creative business incubator for designer-makers. There has always been an informal cross-fertilisation of skills, contacts and ideas in the (mostly) shared studios, but today we offer a package of services to help designer-makers grow successful businesses. Presently there are 165 businesses across the two sites, including a healthy mix of start up businesses, second career designers and established businesses seeking to move to the next stage of growth. We provide them with affordable studio space, intensive in-house business development support, a rolling programme of workshops and seminars, and access to finance schemes and selling and promotional opportunities, as well as office and IT facilities.

What is “Maker Difference”?
Our new campaign to raise awareness of, and encourage support for, UK designer-makers. We want to spread the word that buying beautifully crafted work is a sustainable alternative to throwaway shopping culture and can even have investment potential. Most importantly, it is also hugely satisfying and can be great fun. To get people involved, starting from June 12 we will be running lively open studios events. Visitors can see behind the scenes and meet designer-makers and there will be special attractions such as tours, screenings, activities for children and adults and pop-up cafes. There are more events to come later in the year as well as lots of great online content at www.cockpitarts.com.

Transitions Dance Company, founded by the late Bonnie Bird, is celebrating its 25th year. David Waring, its artistic director for the past four years but previously company director and a dancer in the company in the 1987 cohort, recalls the founder and assesses what has happened to TDC in its first quarter century.

Since it’s first tour in 1983/84 over 230 dancers have performed with the company, working with 80 choreographers and travelling to more than 130 venues around the world. Alumni include choreographers Matthew Bourne, Luca Silvestrini, Tom Dale, Stine Nelson (director of CandoCo), Paul Johnson (director of Dance Ireland), Ashley Page (director of Scottish Ballet) and Nicky Molloy (head of dance & performance, Southbank Centre).

Our founder, Bonnie Bird, continued as artistic director until her death in 1995 and had been one of the original members of the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York in the 1930s, but she is best known as a passionate and ground-breaking dance educator. She was the first official teacher of Martha Graham’s technique - pupils including Merce Cunningham and Remy Charlip - and collaborated with composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison. She began a long association with Laban (then the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance) in 1974 and it was here that she founded TDC in 1983. She was the force behind the company - there to keep things on track.

Bonnie cared deeply about dance as an art form and the artists who lived and breathed it. Like her, I have always found it a privilege to work with the young performers in TDC who either have some experience in the dance profession or are about to enter it. I find their energy, curiosity and commitment to devising and performing new (and remade) work particularly exciting – these dancers really want to do it! Bonnie also wanted the art form to develop, which meant supporting and nurturing emerging choreographers – giving them a platform to show their work using a company dedicated to developing, and challenging, the talents of the dancers in it. By commissioning new work from outstanding choreographers and recruiting dancers emerging onto the international dance scene, TDC continues to contribute to the development of contemporary dance.

AI Profile – Nick Capaldi, chief executive, Arts Council of Wales

It was a big enough challenge, taking on Arts Council Wales, which only three years ago was fighting for its very existence against an ambitious fledgling Welsh Assembly. When he arrived, seven months ago, Nick Capaldi had no idea that an even bigger test was about to descend: recession was about to threaten its very purpose – ensuring the development of the arts in the principality.

“I’d no idea the bottom was going to fall out of the economy, but now it feels a little like a phoney war” he says. “We know that it’s going to be awful but it’s not awful yet, and we don’t know quite how awful it’s going to be and when it’s going to start. Everybody is braced.”

It’s a challenge the former professional pianist says he relishes, after 20 years with Arts Council South West, latterly as executive director.

“Wales is hugely different from the south west of England socially, culturally, politically, economically. Superficially there are similarities in that Wales is large country with huge rural areas and a dispersed population, but it also has significant centres and concentrations of population.” I

Arts Council Wales is the poor relation of Arts Council England, whose £430m a year compares with the £30m ACW gets from the Welsh Assembly. In January 2006 ACW was almost caught up in the political conflagration known as the “Bonfire of the Quangos”, and attempt by the Welsh Assembly to thin out the population of non-government organisations.

The then culture minister proposed to take over the funding of the six major clients of the Arts Council, Welsh National Opera, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, Diversions Dance Company and the literature promotion agency, Academi. The stout defence of the arm’s length principle that was to blatantly at stake led to the effective dismissal of the chairman, and the threat was not finally lifted until the election of 2007 brought a new regime. “They stepped back, and the current minister is pretty good at sticking to the arms length principle. In fact he talks about it himself.”

Glyndebourne’s 75th season opens on May 21. Simon Tait went down see if nothing really ever changes at the mother of country house opera.

Looked at from certain angles, the Glyndebourne of 1934 seems not to have changed. The same comfortable-looking Elizabethan country manor house across rolling lawns of turf almost as old, sheep beyond the ha-ha, and, on festival afternoons, dinner jackets and posh frocks surrounding champagne and salmon under the ancient mulberry. In the shadow of the house, its owner John Christie built an opera house for his new wife Audrey, developed by their son George.

But now in the third generation of the family’s tutelage, Glyndebourne hopes it is slotting itself well into the 21st century.

Look beyond and you see the Glyndebourne of the 60th anniversary George built, a paradigm of 90s music theatre architecture (by Michael Hopkins) and project management, entirely privately funded. Look further beyond, up the hill towards Glynde, and you can make out the fin that is testing the airflows for the wind turbine Gus Christie will erect later this year to provided all the over the village that Glyndebourne has become will require.

Locals objected at the planning hearing, but, in the nicest possible way, Glyndebourne is the industry around here and no one seriously tries to bite this hand.

Not that Gus Christie is the kind of lord of the manor to impose his will, but beneath a very gentle manner he has a will. In his father’s day it would be unthinkable to have a whole summer festival without Mozart in it somewhere: there has been no Mozart for the last two seasons, and nobody has much noticed.

It is ten years since Gus took over when Sir George retired, and put together the team that is still together – David Pickard as general manager, Vladimir Jurowski as music director and Gillian Brierley as head of communications – and there has been a determined move towards the outer reaches of the opera repertoire.

“I feel that one of my lifelong jobs is to break down the stigma of opera that it is only for the elite, well-heeled few, so we’re doing all sorts of initiatives to try and broaden the reach” he says. “It’s one of those myths that it would be lovely to destroy about Glyndebourne, that people come here because all they want is to have a picnic and to see is pretty frocks. People come here because they’re absolutely passionate about operas, in many cases they want to be challenged and they want us to do new things.”

As the recession bites the need for cultural organisations to come together is becoming ever more vital but, as Peter Armstrong, director of development at the Royal Armouries shows, museums have been reluctant to take the step when partnerships at home and abroad could ensure their futures
Museums are curators of the past, custodians of the icons of our history. But that does not mean that they cannot be imaginative, or even entrepreneurial.

The fifth anniversary later this year of the opening of the Royal Armouries’ US offshoot demonstrates this point. When, in 2004, the Leeds-based museum took over an entire floor of the new Frazier International History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, it was the first British – or indeed European – national museum to open a permanent collection in a foreign country.

Five years later, it is still the only British museum to adopt such an entrepreneurial approach, although both the Guggenheim and the Louvre have plans to open satellite operations in Abu Dhabi. We believe that the benefits that flow from cultural partnerships of this kind should be adopted more widely by other UK institutions.

These partnerships can – and should – be mutually beneficial: The Frazier has gained a collection of European arms and armour that does not exist anywhere else in America (North or South), while the Royal Armouries has gained in return a shop window for its collection as well as the opportunity to display objects that might otherwise have remained in storage.

Transforming a one time political club into an exhibition centre is the start of creating a cultural quarter for a quiet county town.

Bedford needs to rediscover itself, Frank Branston decided, and The Mound, near a museum devoted to John Bunyan who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in Bedford Jail, is where the project started. Branston created the local paper, the Bedford Times, and formed the Better Bedford Party of which he is leader. He is also the first elected mayor of Bedford. “We needed a new centre that says something about who we are” he says.

The Mound had been a rather awkward overgrown green lump interfering with car parking arrangements just off the High Street, the remains of what had been an 11th century castle, and in 2004 it was excavated. Little detail was found but the shape and design of old Bedford Castle was established, and a local fascination with what it had meant to townsfolk’s forebears.

“That was the place to start with the cultural quarter” says the mayor, and cars have largely been banished to a few yards nearer the river, the Great Ouse, and The Mound has been planted and turned a garden and a kind of preface for what lies beyond.

Beyond is the museum and art gallery, well established and the beneficiaries of enlightened collecting, but more recently relegated in civic thinking and funding, “and rather tired and uninspiring” says its director.

But for Mayor Branston, together the Bedford Museum and Cecil Higgins Art Gallery are the core of his cultural quarter, while a few yards to the west the town centre itself is braced for a major remake. They are the subject of a £11.3m remodelling, the first phase of which has just been completed.

AI Profile – Paul Hobson, director, the Contemporary Art Society
There is a new prize in the spectrum of arts awards; a generous one in terms of its value, and one which its creators hope will change the contemporary art in this country once and for ever. Not how the arts is made of course, explains Paul Hobson, but how it is appreciated, exhibited and, at least as importantly, bought.

It is the slightly cumbersomely titled Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums, but it is worth £60,000 and is to support museums to commission new work to remain in their permanent collections. It is a waymark for a new phase for the CAS as it enters its second century, and signals the latest and perhaps most significant change to the CAS since Hobson became its director two years ago, in succession to the respected Gill Hedley.

Coming from a series of fund-raising and development roles in large and small art institutions, 38-year-old Hobson is moving forward the innovations his predecessor put in place, he says, and building on them, as the fund steps into its centenary year.