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AI Profile
Alan Bishop, chief executive, Southbank Centre
He is a modest man, Alan Bishop, and his Who’s Who entry is a masterpiece of understatement. It tells us he was born on August 2nd 1953, who his parents were, that he got a BA Hons at Queen’s College, Oxford, and that his career was “With various advertising agencies”, listing two before the fact that he was chief executive of the Central Office of Information between 2003 and 2009. It tells us that he likes bridge and cricket, and that he’s a member of Soho House. And that’s it, a total of 58 words.
Softly spoken and, at the start of our conversation, nursing a mild stammer which gradually disappears, it is hard to see this man flying into tirades with his board, as his predecessor Michael Lynch is reported to have been inclined to do, or flinging public accusations at the private sector. Insiders say his senior management meetings tend to be lengthy, and usually end with his gently insistent points being carried.
Bishop’s appointment was a surprise: with no professional background in the arts, his entire career had been in advertising and latterly running the COI, the government’s cross-departmental information agency.
In trawling for Lynch’s successor he thinks Rick Haythornthwaite’s Southbank board was looking for somebody used to working in a creative environment while also managing a business properly (advertising), and somebody who knew about being in the public eye and spending public money (government information). “Art is not commercially driven here” he says, “but working with people who are passionate about the creative process and for whom you need to create a financial environment that works and allows as much freedom as possible - without allowing anarchy to ensue - is very similar indeed”.
He arrived at the start of 2009 with a three month handover, and although the major task of refurbishment of the concert hall had been accomplished, it as a time of fearful uncertainty.
“That’s when the credit crunch absolutely exploded, and I suppose I found it particularly nerve-racking being so highly aware of the anxiety that there was in government at that time” he recalls. “We simply didn’t know what the effects would be, and every day you found that another bank had to be rescued. Anything could happen, and I was extremely tense. There was a lot of talk about possible mass unemployment, great uncertainty, and maybe people hunkering down and not going out, and watching DVDs was the best they could hope for.”
If the Southbank Centre was bracing itself for the worst, it didn’t come and the programming of the new RFH did not falter. “This is an intrinsically optimistic place, and I think that the basic attitude is a very good one – if we get it right the people will come” Bishop says. “We needed to position ourselves to say ‘You need something to distract you, interest you, entertain you in these tough times’, and we needed to make the whole arts programme as exciting as possible, so rather than cut back on programming to make sure that we were providing those opportunities for people. In detail that’s not what turned out, but in general it did. People haven’t stopped coming.”
Not only has there not been the slump in visitors to the Southbank Centre, Bishop has seen a 10% increase in footfall on the site – 3m ticket buyers a year, 20m passing by.
For Lynch had not only left a renewed concert hall, but the shops and restaurants under and beside the Royal Festival Hall which had drawn a lot of criticism when the plans were originally announced with the Rick Mather masterplan for the site. Those extra amenities have proved phenomenally successful, in fact, contributing £6m a year, three times what was budgeted for and Bishop’s best earner after box office and the Arts Council £25m grant.
A renewed concert hall with significant add-ons was not all Bishop’s predecessor left behind, however. He had to deal with what he saw as Lynch’s alienation of the private sector through his “bankers are bastards” interview for AI, castigating corporates for not contributing enough to the £111m bill for putting the Royal Festival Hall to rights.
“I took Michael task over that” he says. “I told him clearly they’re not bastards, you’ve insulted a wide range of people”. It was seen as an attack on the City, “and pretty insulting to those who had contributed”.
If it was a problem, he soon solved it. HSBC have just signed up as the major sponsor of this summer’s Brazil Festival, and Shell have renewed for their Classics season for another three years.
And if he was peeved with Lynch for that potentially dangerous remark, the legacy was many times more significant. “He was totally focused and passionate about the refurbishment of the hall.
“But he also understood that once done, you have to make the whole site more attractive, you need to have the kind of programming which will make sure people take up old habits again and return to site” he says, and it worked.
The challenge of recession has not, of course, gone away. “We need to make sure we’re sensible without making any rash commitments, at the same time continuing to build and expand the breadth of the programme so that we go on attracting audiences and new people to the site. It’s not a balancing act because that suggests you come out somewhere average, it was showing and building commitment to an ever expanding programme but presenting that in a way which you could justify making business sense as well as artistic sense. Getting that right is the challenge.”
So there are more events around the halls as well as the same quality within it, and all of it depends on a high degree of harmony with the management of the retail outlets as well as the residents and associates – there are six classical ensembles, the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, London Sinfonietta, The Sixteen and the Takács Quartet.
Bishop wants them not only to programme sympathetically, in close association with his music director Marshall Marcus, but to work together as much as possible, and he sees more symbiosis possible with the arrival of the BFI who are to build their new headquarters on the Southbank site – live musical accompaniment to film shows are becoming increasingly popular.
The Mather Masterplan did not end with the Festival Hall, and Bishop is slowly developing the rest of the site with Mather’s consultation. There will be no major shifting around of buildings as had once been envisaged, and the enduring qualities of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, for instance, will not be compromised. The Hayward Gallery is due for a major remake, but in the mean time it has been closed for essential work since January, reopening in June with a major retrospective of the work of abstract minimalist Brazilian Ernesto Neto as a herald to the Brazil Festival.
One thing is still missing from the Royal Festival Hall, Bishop says, and his aim is to have it accomplished by the time his first five years contract ends in 2013.
“It’s funny how, when a newcomer arrives, certain things stand out, and this was on fro me” he says. “It was a shame that time and money ran out before it could be done, but I am I determined that by 2013 we will have a magnificent fully working organ, my one particular passion. It’ going to cost over £2m over £2m, but it has to happen.”
Create10, running from June 19 to August 1, will hit the streets, parks, office blocks, warehouses and even theatres and concert halls of London’s East End purveying some of the wackiest festival programming so far devised as the core of what the East End will offer London 2012.
It is, says its executive producer Hadrian Garrett, a “festival of doing, because doing is what East End people is all about. It’s new ways of them interacting with their creative neighbours”.
Create10 is the Cultural Olympiad project of the five East End boroughs – Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Newham and Waltham Forest – and is the core of what will become the main Festival 2012.
There was a Create9, there will be a Create 11 and Create12 – and a Create13.
The idea came out of a sentence in the original bid, which announced baldly that there would be a “big East London festival”. Early in 2008 representatives of the five boroughs got round a table – “probably out of fear as much as anything, knowing what had to be done” – with Garrard, and Culture9 the following summer ad the result.
Hadrian Garrard was a session musician before becoming involved with the project of reopening the Hackney Empire theatre, and then the cultural life of Hackney, then Hackney’s contribution to the Olympic programme. Since 2007 he has been one of the 12 creative programmers appointed by the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games across the UK to create an inspiring Cultural Olympiad.
For Culture10, it is by East Enders, for East Enders – and the rest of the world as it passes through, as more and more tourists are in the run up to 2012.
“It is designed to evolve up to 2012 when it will be an unforgettable experience, and then 2013, because there has to be a legacy that will bring the Olympic Park to life long after the games themselves are over” he says.
Last year 822,000 turned up, for the six week vent, 220,00 of them participated in some way, and £13.15 million (more than half of it from non-East Enders) was injected into the local economy for an outlay of just over half a million. The funding comes from the Arts Council, the London Development Agency, the five boroughs, the Bank of America, and artistic partners Station House Opera and the Central School of Speech and Drama.
One aim of the Create series was to get major companies to take the East End seriously, looking that direct for artists and collaborators, and it’s working.
Punchdrunk, the theatre company whose USP is involvement with audiences, is producing its first every opera in collaboration with ENO, and they will do a version The Duchess of Malfi in a disused warehouse in the Royal Albert Docks.
And what Garrard is even more excited about is a thing called You Me Bum Bum Train, winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, created by the Town Hamlets based Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who have been taking the show to different venues since 2004 and changing its nature for each environment. “It is an amazing thing, a cast of 200 for an audience of one, in which you the audience are the focal point of the production so you have to participate” Garrard says. Each single person is taken through a series of vignettes which h they feel have each been created especially for them.
It will be performed in an empty electricity board office block in Bethnal Green, and the real triumph is that it is a co-production with the Barbican for which it fits into the Bite 10 programme as an off-site presentation.
“The important thing is” says Garrard “that we’re not trying to fly something in here from outside, we’re growing something in an organic process that will build up to 2012 and then leave a legacy. It’s a logical thing to do in the East End.”
The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, was inspired by the revival of the classic event at the Shropshire village of Much Wenlock in 1850 by a local GP, “to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the Town and neighbourhood of Wenlock”.
“Coubertin’s main influence from Much Wenlock was the force of life, not sporting excellence” said Jonathan Edwards, the Olympic gold medallist. “It’s not about who can be the fastest, it’s about whole of life and at the heart of it is a belief in human potential”.
Which is why the cultural element, not part of the annual Much Wenlock event but at the core of Coubertin’s thinking, is so important, he said, as he inaugurated Creative Campus Projects, part of the Cultural Olympiad.
This is the initiative of 13 university campuses around he South East of England, led by Seymour Roworth-Stokes, pro-vice chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham.
“The Olympics can be an expression of artistic creativity, and that’s what we’ve come together to do in this corner of the country” he said. “It will open up the cultural resources and assets of our campuses, providing greater access to world-leading, practice-based research in the creative and performing arts.”
There are over 100 events running through the four summer months, and more than half a million are expected to see something of them.
A number of them will involve disabled artists, including the ensemble Sign Dance Collective, who performed at the Creative Campus launch at the Southbank Centre. The two dancers were Isolte Avila, Cuban-born who has been crippled with arthritis since childhood, and David Bowers, the deaf creator of the group and also a singer who came to fame as the brother of the Hugh Grant character at whose wedding he sings in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
“We are making a new piece for Creative Campus, New Gold” said Avila. “Singing is part of the performance, part of the choreography, and the arts for me is to dance so that I make use of my disability rather than a problem.”
Sign dance Collective is being presented by Buckinghamshire New University whose head of research, Paul Springer, is being the commission. “The Olympics and Paralympics is a celebration of self-expression and a lot of research is being done by universities, so what will be presented will be very surprising and fascinating” he said.
Artists are collaborating with students, academics and communities to create new work which has been inspired by the Olympic spirit.
Other offerings are the University of Kent’s Spectators, a film project involving a cinematographer, an artist and an equestrian. Degrees of Difficulty from Thames Valley University is a musical celebration of Olympic diving.
Creative Campus has been given the Olympic Inspire mark, said Jonathan Edwards. “These performers are inspired by the Olympic ideal, and we will be inspired by their performances” he said. “That’s why sport and education sit alongside eachother, both about human potential, both about making the most out of life. This will make a difference to lots of younger people, and older people who haven’lt been able to realise their potential” he said.
The participating institutions in six parts of the region are Buckinghamshire New University and Oxford Brookes University; the University of Portsmouth, the University of Southampton and Southampton Solent University; the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham and the University of Winchester; the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex; Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Kent; Royal Holloway University of London and Thames Valley University.
Simon Tait gets a preview of some of the features of Brighton’s citywide
For four weekends through May Brighton, the city that seems destined to be the one seaside venue along the south east coast without a contemporary art gallery, will have its most comprehensive contemporary art festival.
The triumphant contradiction, part of the Brighton Festival this year, is the work of two members of Brighton’s huge artistic community, partners Judy Stevens, an illustrator and print-maker, and graphic designer Chris Lord.
Artists Open Houses began 29 years ago, and have become a template for similar schemes around the country, in which artists open their homes to show their own work and sometimes other artists’. There were 16 when they started, 240 this time welcoming over 1,000 artists, and something like a quarter of a million visitors are expected, and sales of art worth £1m.
But this year they have added House Gallery, piloted last year and now a fascinating range of backdrops for contemporary work. There is support for the double-ender from the Arts Council, Brighton Council, Visit Brighton and host of local business sponsors.
“It is effectively the visual arts element of the Brighton Festival, because there is no gallery” says Stevens, who began planning three years ago. “This is a long-standing community of thousands of artists, and with nowhere for the to show – though we have tried establish a gallery – this is a showcase for them. We’ve had a lot of help and advice from Nicola Coleby at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, and from Simon Martin at Pallant House in Chichester, and it’s been a great association.”
House is a fascinating innovation in which artists’ current work is seen in unexpected and even incongruous venues. Here are some of them.
The Regency Town House is a magnificent gentleman’s house of 1829 in one of Brighton’s most beautiful squares, and for a quarter for a century it has been the obsession of Nick Tyson to restore it as closely as possible to the way it looked in its mid-19th century heyday. It is in entering the final stages, but as the process continues, in the ground floor reception room is the work of 21 artists – picked from 80 submitted - who have taken the theme of regeneration. There is a particular complication for hanger Woodrow Kernohan – “because of the delicacy of the restoration, we aren’t able to hang on the walls, so we are having to invent new ways of exhibiting that show the art and don’t conceal the rooms wonderful detail, quite a challenge” he says.
Unravelling the Manor House is an exploration of the fascinating Preston Manor, home of the Thomas-Stanford family for 130 years, furnished to the family’s Edwardian taste, and said to be the most haunted house in Britain. Twelve artists and designer-makers have been commissioned to research the family and their home, and make interventions reflecting what they have discovered and also contemporary 21st century life. Mrs Ellen Thomas-Stanford, who came to live here in 1905, was an intriguing personality who met her second husband at the funeral of her first, and between then and her marriage had a child by her butler. She collected white Chinese porcelain figures, and in a show cabinet where they are displayed row-on-row ceramicist Matt Smith has interposed bright red china British bulldogs - made in the United States. Louise Batchelor has taken Charles Thomas-Stanford’s pipe case and made two glass pipes for it. Caitlin Heffernan has created a cloak for Ellen made entirely from peacock feathers. Laura Splan has made her a pair of gloves from gel that appear to be of human skin, complete with buttons.
House-Garden. Last year, the pilot year, Stevens and Lord created a seven-seat cinema in their front room. “We were told there were far too many seats” Stevens says “so this time the home cinema is in a garden shed, setting four at a squeeze”. At the bottom of the garden at 46 Buller Road four films are being shown over the month, and perhaps the most intriguing is Alice in Wonderland, made by Percy Stow in 1903 and the first ever film version of Carroll’s story. The actors are unknown, there were no film stars then, and it would have been seen in music halls and horse-drawn travelling cinemas. Twelve minutes long, it is complete and has been restored by the BFI, with the original colour tints recreated.
The Handmade House was a run down shambles of a farm building, built in 1939 in the delightful village of Ditchling when designer Ralph Levy saw it eight years ago, and moved in. The garden was a jungle, the house itself was a health trap with no facilities. “The only thing to do was to strip everything out to the basics and start again” he says. The original fittings and fixtures remaking as far as he could rescue them, everything else he has made himself, from the stove in the tiny lounge, to the kitchen fittings and even crockery. The garden is now reclaimed and neatly planted with vegetables by Levy and his neighbour Lucy Greenaway – an artist who is also director of Phoenix, the artists’ studio co-operative in Brighton – and where he has built a pizza oven (“I had a commission to design one, and the only way to do it is to build one”). He also has 60 acres beyond the house, and through part of this he has made a sculpture trail, because for House he is showing and selling the work of artist friends in the house.
AI Profile
Ruth Mackenzie, director, Cultural Olympiad
Here’s a thought. Why not give Olympic medals to artists? Part of the “Olympic Truce”, say?
Ruth Mackenzie, the new director of the Cultural Olympiad, likes to go back to the ancients for inspiration, and then adapting what she finds to the 2012 job she has to do.
“At the first Olympics the Greeks laid down their arms and watched athletes and artists – and artists! – performing ‘beyond their personal best’. Who could quarrel with that? Olympian values are great” she says, and the thought continues.
It’s not well known, but until the last London Olympics in 1948 medals were handed out to artists, why not now? They got them for architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture, and that year the British engraver John Copley won a silver at the age of 73. But it was incredibly complicated and, and in 1952 there has a single music medal awarded, one Josef Suk, and it was only silver.
The Cultural Olympiad itself has been under way since the end of the Beijing Games, though you may not have noticed, and Mackenzie and her team have taken on the role of “editing” what occurs up to Midsummer’s Day, June 2012, when Festival 2012 gets under way and continues over the summer covering both the Olympics and the Paralympics. It will, she says, be three months of the best British artists can offer, programmed by her with commissions coming from her £75.5m budget (not enough, she says, and she hopes there will more contributions).
Her appointment came more than a year after the outgoing Arts Council chairman, Christopher Frayling, had called for a “ringmaster” to get the arts element of the Olympics under control, after the cultural promises are thought to have been a major reason why London beat Paris for the 2012 Games.
There have been lots of myths to be dealt with – such as that Boris Johnson tried to veto her appointment when, she says, the London mayor’s cultural adviser, Munira Mirza, had actually been on the panel that appointed her – and hurt feelings needed to be salved. The person who had held the title, motiroti co-founder Keith Khan, lost it in 2008, and though her job is quite different from his, Mackenzie says, she has “had a nice dinner” with him and he will be making a new piece for the Festival. He is, after all, and old mate, and Mackenzie has an impressive network of old mates that seems to lattice the world.
Some of them she has gathered around her as her paid advisers: “Martin (Duncan) I’ve worked with for ever, Brian (McMaster) I have worked with for at least ten years maybe 100, Alex (Poots, with whom she founded Manchester International Festival) I’ve worked with for at least 100 years. Craig (Hassall, a veteran of the Sydney Olympics and now running English National Ballet) is the only one I didn’t know well, but already it feels like we’ve been together for a century”.
Apart from a musical career as a schoolgirl French horn player, briefly revived as a saxophonist for a play she was putting on once (“I lent it to an actress friend who took it to Southampton and I haven’t seen it since – but I forgive her”), Mackenzie has never been a performer. Her life has been making the arts happen.
Her nine year tenure at Nottingham Playhouse – the last five of them with Duncan as artistic director – put the regional theatre on an international plane with bold programming, which they continued when they ran Chichester Festival Theatre together.
The audience loyalty she earned in Nottingham is wonderfully illustrated by the gamble she took in 1997 when she brought the French director Luc Bondy and the film star Emmanuelle Béart with an obscure Strindberg play, Playing with Fire. “They were here for seven days, ours was the only booking in the UK, and we suddenly realised that opening night was election night – even Emmanuelle said ‘nobody will come’. But it was an incredibly loyal and passionate audience, Nottingham. We were asking them to pay to see a play they’d never heard of by an obscure company, and on election night. And it was a sell-out.”
The friendship with Bondy, incidentally, continues: she is consultant dramaturg for the Vienna Festival of which Bondy is artistic director, and she has leave to complete her contract with this year’s events in May and June.
She will have the last word on programming, the buck stopping with the new Cultural Olympiad committee under the chairmanship of Tony Hall that appointed her. Lessons, she says, were learned by politicians and bureaucrats from the Millennium Dome when there were too many cooks stirring an increasingly thin yet obscenely expensive pot. The Cultural Olympiad has not had that problem, more “no cooks at all, with all the ingredients rolling around” Mackenzie says. “But 200 events in two years and 4m people is not nothing, in fact it’s rather good for a banquet with no cooks”.
There was a debate on Hall’s board about the title, Cultural Olympiad, “which doesn’t say anything immediately to anyone”, but culture is more significant in these Games than in any in the modern era. “Festival” on the other hand “is about having a great time and seeing marvellous things. What we have to do is make sure everybody thinks this adventure is worth buying tickets for”.
“My strength” she says “is in artistic programming and leadership”, and finding new funding partners inspired enough to take on the convoluted sponsorship rules set by the International Olympic Committee. “People fund exciting projects so you’ve got to have some”. An outline for the festival will be announced this autumn and the programme in October 2011. The opening and closing ceremonies, happily, will be none of her business.
Her biggest funder is the Legacy Trust which has had criticism for apparently doing its own regional Cultural Olympics programming, but Mackenzie will have none of it – “what were they supposed to do with two years to go?” Apart from contributing £33m to her own budget, the trust has been working assiduously “below the radar” on community projects. “It’s about community empowerment” she says, “not the sort of stuff journalists are very good at noticing and appreciating, but it’s the kind of stuff that changes lives”.
As for her message to artists taking part in the Cultural Olympiad, Mackenzie returns to the Olympic Truce theme. “It’s a very powerful idea to say to artists coming to this festival, ‘Imagine the Olympic Truce when the eyes and ears of the world are upon you. What would you like to be saying?’”
And what about those medals. It couldn’t be the old system, the one abandoned for very good reasons 60 years ago. But there are awards given by outside organisations – media sponsors, for instance – to acts, individuals, events and productions in festivals such as Edinburgh’s Fringe and Glasgow’s Mayfest. Couldn’t some outside sponsor come up with a scheme that gave awards to, say the best concert, painting, play, stand-up, circus performance, you name it? “That’s a very interesting idea, very interesting. But no-one has come forward with it yet, and it’s not my idea – don’t you dare say that it is!”
Artists will be an important driver for the post-election economy. New Deal of the Mind, a coalition of artists, entrepreneurs and opinion formers who believe in the value of creative talent, have just launched a report for the Arts Council to show how artists should be brought into the centre of the economy. Founder and chief executive Martin Bright outlines the proposals
May 6 is the date of this year’s election but it is also the 75th anniversary of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, which created 8.5m jobs in the midst of America’s Great Depression.
The vast majority of people employed under the WPA worked in construction, manufacturing and civil engineering. However, one aspect of the genius of Harry Hopkins, the man who ran the WPA for Roosevelt, was that he recognised it was crazy employing artists, writers and musicians to dig roads and build dams. Instead he decided that creative individuals should be engaged in creative work. As a result of this insight, he helped launch the careers of painters Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and writers Saul Bellow and John Cheever among others.
Half a century later on this side of the Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher brought in the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which helped a host of artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs set up on their own. Among them Julian Dunkerton of the Superdry fashion label and Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records.
New Deal of the Mind - possibly the only organisation to be inspired by Roosevelt and Thatcher - is campaigning for the reintroduction of such a scheme, and that’s reinforced by a report we’ve just published for the Arts Council.
Creative Survival in Hard Times is a snapshot of the obstacles and barriers that young artists face and the things they believe would make life easier. Quite simply, they don’t want hand-outs, they want a helping hand in the form of space to work and rehearse in, access to business and financial advice, mentoring from established artists and entrepreneurs and recognition that being self employed or freelance is a valid choice.
The £50 billion value of the UK’s creative sector is well documented and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) believes it will be “the key driver for the UK’s recovery from recession”. It is likely that it will employ more people than the financial sector within four years. The CBI has recently added its voice to others across the political spectrum who recognise the importance of the creative sector to economic recovery. Yet we treat those who are striving to work in the creative industries abominably with long unpaid internships, low pay when they get a job and little help with professional training.
The young artists and creative entrepreneurs interviewed for the report wanted work space, access to information, mentoring and business skills. Small interventions that could make a big difference were far higher on their list of priorities than money.
Some argued against public financial support because as one put it, “hard working midwives and teachers” should not have to pay for them to follow their dreams. Neither did they want Jobseekers Allowance but a more flexible approach to freelancing where any financial help should encourage productive self-employment. As one said: “If someone becomes a lawyer or a doctor they fill an existing job. An artist who starts their own business creates a new job”.
The level of personal commitment and sacrifice made by young people who would rather struggle financially than abandon their creativity is awe inspiring. Many criticised the bureaucratic, inflexible attitude of Jobcentre staff who fail to recognise self employment and freelancing as a valid choice. The report argues “Self employment is not just a quick fix solution. It is Britain’s best chance of capturing the talent of a generation of creative entrepreneurs”.
Aspiring artists spoke of the difficulties entering a job market where vacancies are rarely advertised and exploitation of interns is rife, reinforcing it as the preserve of the well off or well connected.
Mindful of the historical significance of the May 6th anniversary, New Deal of the Mind calls on the next government, whoever it may be, to harness and nurture the creative talent upon which we may all depend to rebuild and reshape the UK economy
Among the recommendations in Creative Survival in Hard Times are:
An Enterprise Allowance Scheme for the 21st century
Simplification of self employment regulations, help setting up as freelancers and small businesses
Space to work, rehearse, network and access business advice
Strict control of unpaid internships
Hannah Kozich on how a local council’s funding cut has hit a thriving arts centre in Cumbria
I reached for my calculator when I heard that Allerdale Borough Council intended, from April 1 this year, to end its grant to the Kirkgate Arts Centre in the Cumbrian market town of Cockermouth.
The council does not regularly fund the Kirkgate: every year we have to go cap in hand, never quite knowing whether the centre will have enough cash to continue the work that is valued so much in the community.
Now we know that for 2010-11 we will receive nothing. Last year Allerdale gave us £3,600, which works out at less than one penny per week per head of population in the town. We know that Allerdale, like many councils, faces major budget pressures. But in return for a tiny local authority investment, the Kirkgate has developed into an arts centre that estate agents boast about as they sell their houses to incomers; it is, say those agents, one of the things that makes Cockermouth “a great place to live, work or visit”, which just happens to be Allerdale Council’s motto.
Allerdale’s penny-pinching comes at a particularly cruel time for Cockermouth, which is still recovering from the appalling floods that swept through the town last November. The Kirkgate was not affected, although its neighbouring beck rose dangerously high.
We knew then that we had to help the people of the town. We offered space to groups whose regular meeting places had been flooded. We also soon realised that flood victims, scattered in emergency housing across the region, desperately wanted to stay in contact with the friends and neighbours from whom they had been separated.
So we launched a series of drop-in social nights at which people could meet. Nothing exotic; just food, drink, music and talk. But their value has been huge and people have pleaded with us to keep running them. We will if we can. But we are not sure we can find the time. If we were not so preoccupied with Allerdale’s cut to our funding, we might be better able to continue to support local people.
Those socials proved Kirkgate’s worth in the community. The centre was established 15 years ago in a sturdy former school by a team of enthusiasts and now welcomes more than 6,000 visitors a year whose ticket money and room rents help us survive. The centre has a minimal staff and a part-time development manager was appointed only three years ago. Without a team of 100 dedicated volunteers who run the box office, act as front of house staff and help with publicity and marketing, we could not function.
We run a regular programme of independent films, live music, contemporary dance, children’s theatre and professional touring theatre shows in our intimate auditorium. Amateur groups stage their shows here. We provide opportunities for our volunteers to train and develop their skills and we are now developing a programme of arts activities for young people, including weekly Krazy Arts workshops for those aged 11-16.
So why has Allerdale abolished our grant? How do we persuade other bodies to fund the Kirkgate when our own council won’t?
But the problem does not stop there. The Kirkgate also delivers Arts Out West, the rural touring programme that takes high-quality arts events into 25 village halls and community centres in West Cumbria, from Millom to the Solway. Till now, Allerdale has regularly funded AOW and last year gave a grant of £5,000. AOW also receives grants from Copeland borough council and Cumbria county council, and is regularly funded by Arts Council England.
We fear that Allerdale’s abandonment of its responsibilities to AOW will have an impact on those other funders. The end of the grant means not just a reduction of 40 per cent in the number of professional shows that can be offered to village halls in the borough but endangers the survival of the Rural Touring Scheme as a whole.
To remove funding at this time from both the Kirkgate and Arts Out West shows a real lack of understanding of the benefits of the arts, both to those who attend performances and to those who give up their time to arrange, promote and host them. If Allerdale’s councillors believe that bringing pleasure to thousands of people is not a good enough reason to fund the Kirkgate and Arts Out West, perhaps they should consider the economic impact of the two organisations and their role in the recovery of a town and region battered by a natural disaster.
Meanwhile we have a simple message for the council: Give us our penny back. Please.
Hannah Kozich chairs the boards of Kirkgate Arts, Kirkgate Centre and Arts Out West
Simon Tait almost misses London’s newest theatre venue
You could walk past this new theatre, mistaking it for another glass investment bank or another glass gym in this sort of urban Grand Canyon created by British Land.
Peer through the tint at 15-16 Triton Street NW1, though, and instead of a uniformed receptionist there is the legend, in capital letters, New Diorama Theatre.
A giant Julian Opie walking woman on the office building opposite helpfully seems to be heading towards it.
It owes nothing but its name to the ground-breaking Diorama of the 1820s, built a few yards away on the edge of Regents Park as a forerunner to cinema. But the chutzpah and belief in audiences’ willingness to be beguiled by honest fantasy is the same, and the New Diorama’s own legend, “epic stories intimately told”, could easily have applied to the original.
The New Diorama has just opened its “construction season” with a two-hander by Robert Gillespie, Love, Question Mark, about sex at the other end of the age range. Even the 80 seats are a long way from being sold out, but it’s early days. There’s no shortage of optimism.
“We want it to be the theatre that small theatre companies can call home” says David Byrne, the New Diorama’s programming manager. “There are plenty of theatres for new writing now, but we want to be the theatre for new companies because although everybody in Europe seems to be opening them, there’s nowhere comparable here”. The nearest, he says, is the Farnham Maltings, “and that’s a huge community resource, everything from farmers markets to films to jewellery makers’ studios, but it’s got the closest thing to our policy”.
That artistic policy is closely defined: to present “the work of theatre companies and artistic collectives within a variety of arts disciplines” and to support them; to link up with festivals and be a London hub for their work; to be a debating forum; to include established and emerging artists; to develop a network of producers.
The theatre is the result of the Regents Place development by British Land of the area on the north side of Euston Road from Warren Street tube station as Section 106 planning gain. The development meant the abolition of the old Diorama Arts Centre and so included a theatre. Diorama Arts were offered the new venue but, when the building of planned additional rehearsal studios had to be put back because of the credit crunch, they felt they were unable to take it on and British Land looked elsewhere.
In Hackney, the young people’s touring theatre company Quicksilver was about to lose its headquarters to development, and when the possibility of a playhouse of their own was offered they leaped at it. David Byrne is also Quicksilver’s marketing officer.
“Quicksilver is essentially a touring company and will continue to be, but we will be one of the residents at the New Diorama and present our shows here at either end of tours, as well as running the venue” he says. They have a 15-year lease and while Guy Holland and Carey English will continue to run Quicksilver, Byrne takes charge of the venue.
“We’ve no idea how much the new theatre cost to build, into the millions, but British Land have been more than great to us and we’re nominating them for an Arts & Business Award” Byrne adds.
It is a minimalist work of architecture, but the design is such that the stage has a flytower with height that allows almost any set – for the forthcoming Elevator an entire lift is being installed, and Byrne sees no reason why opera should not be produced here.
The dressing room is in the wings and doubles as a baby-changing room, the green room is full of spare seats and cardboard boxes, and the biggest space is probably the café/bar. A staff of six operates the theatre.
This summer is an “under construction” season of programming, and there will be a formal opening in September by which time, Byrne says, they will be much more sure about their direction. Meanwhile, he is scheduling in comedy and magic for Monday nights, and for Tuesdays to Saturdays bringing companies like Firehouse and Third Party with productions that will be seen in London for the first time.
And he is putting together a panel of residents and associates, small companies with two or three productions of proven quality under their belts that will become members of a family. “We want to be a bridge between small companies and places like the Hampstead Theatre, or the Royal Court, or touring, or whatever the next thing might be” Byrne says.
Many Fringe productions are now made for specifically for festivals like Edinburgh or Mayfest and as such they do not always transfer well: the New Diorama will offer the venue where they can develop their pieces. He hopes major companies, too, will see it as a discreet placed to try ideas out. The theatre has already had a sell out with a series in which sit-com writers try out their ideas on the audience, and his current quest is for a music theatre company.
Meanwhile, during the day the theatre is available for conferences, rehearsal, presentations and the schoolwork Quicksilver already has a reputation for and which the New Diorama is already embarked on. And the bar and café is open.
“Theatre needs small central London space that is not the West End or Dewynters, and we’re next to every London Underground line” Byrne says. “This feels right. It’s not a crumbling old Victorian place under a railway arch, and it doesn’t feel like it’s been built by Novotel. We can make it into a fantastic theatre.”
More of Simon Tait’s writing at www.staitarts.com
From Ms Esther Salamon
I wish to take issue on two points in the article written by Pauline Menard, “Where Waygood went wrong” (AI 252).
Firstly, although I resigned as chair of Waygood Gallery & Studios in late February 2010, I am still a non-executive director of the company.
Secondly, I have been involved with Waygood for eight years. During this period I have not been receiving £12,000 per year for my involvement with Waygood, as reported in Ms Menard¹s article. To clarify, all self-employed non-executive directors of the company are eligible to claim for the actual work they undertake on behalf of the company (non-executive directors
do not receive an annual wage, annual fee or retainers). Far from having earned £12,000 per year I have, in fact, earned an average of £2,229 per year, and no more than £3,500 in any one financial year.
Yours truly,
Esther Salamom.
AI Profile
Graham Sheffield, artistic director, Barbican Centre
Graham Sheffield has been credited with turning round the critical fortunes of the Barbican Centre, coming in as its first artistic director and developing its first proper programming.
He waved a petulant Royal Shakespeare Company off when they discarded their only London residency, and he introduced Bite, the theatre season which brings often avant garde drama from around the world, in its place.
He has also brought in associates like Cheek by Jowl, who have just opened a critically approved new production of Macbeth. He invited the BBC Symphony Orchestras to become an associate to work alongside the resident LSO, with Serious as associate music producers. Dance companies like the Michael Morris Company were brought in as favoured creatives, and he got a proper art gallery established. Each of the art forms was accorded its own director.
All this was in partnership with John Tusa, the managing director, who steered through a massive refurbishment programme built around better servicing the artistic offer of the place, and when Tusa retired in 2007 Sheffield was widely expected to get the job – in the gift of the City of London Corporation which owns and funds the centre. When, to his and Tusa’s dismay, he didn’t get it friends expected him to quit when the job went to Nicholas Kenyon, the former Proms director and Radio 3 CEO.
He didn’t, partly because Kenyon is an old friend from BBC days with whom he knew he could work, and a month ago they together launched an ambitious summer programme including jazz, open air concerts of east End music, an exhibition about architecture and surrealism, and a commission from the surreal multi-discipline artist John Bock.
It is a very primary colour schedule which has Sheffield’s signature on it, but he has also been leaving his fingerprints outside the Barbican’s precincts. Since 2006 he has been chairman of the venerable Royal Philharmonic Society, devoted to promoting musical composition and the word of younger artists, and last summer the British Council appointed him its first advisor for arts and a creative economy.
But, in a move that has surprised all but his closest confidants, he is leaving. After 15 year at the Barbican he is to go in August to become chief executive of the West Kowloon Cultural District.
It might seem a step down from programming the artistic life of an international multi-form venue to become what sounds like an old fashioned town clerk in a former Far Eastern colony. The truth is that there is no West Kowloon Cultural District yet, Sheffield has three years and £1.87 billion to make it.
It is, he says, the job of a lifetime. “In many ways the Barbican has been a dream job and there are not many I would consider giving it up for” he says, “but there are very few opportunities like West Kowloon and I couldn’t put it aside”.
His experiences running a multi-cultural arts centre might been a factor in his appointment, he thinks, “but this is creating something entirely new, in 16 buildings rather than one, and four times the size of the Barbican”.
His role at the British Council, taken up last year, will almost certainly have to be reassigned, but he won’t enlarge. “In six months we have had a measure of success with the arts and culture now at the centre of their thinking” is all he will say. “I’m sure I will be involved with the British Council, but in what capacity we have not yet discussed”. But the BC is very firmly entrenched in Hong Kong where it has a long history integrating education and the arts.
The West Kowloon Cultural District had been planned for a decade, since Hong Kong was handed back to Chinese control by Britain but with a large measure of autonomy, and was on the backburner when in 2006 the Hong Kong government’s consultative committee advised that the creation of the cultural quarter should go ahead immediately, with 15 performing arts venues and a museum/gallery/exhibitions centre. Legislation was put through two years ago.
Sheffield’s appointment will have a lot to do with how he set about creating an arts centre rather than what he is doing with it now. His success began with the RSC’s departure from the Barbican in 1997, early in his time there, and the end of outside control of one of his key venues, the Barbican Theatre. “We’re not going to sign another 17 volume residency agreement with someone like the RSC because we actually enjoy the freedom of being able to put on whatever we want” he told ai then.
When he arrived there was no artistic steerage at all, and the building was reviled and even hated, particularly by the resident RSC who had actually designed the theatre. He had begun with just the concert hall and cinema in his control: there was no education programme, the art gallery was run by a different department in the corporation, the RSC had the theatre, there was no sponsorship department at all, and marketing was run separately. He made a brand, created a team of artistic programmers, and consulted West End contacts like Thelma Holt about what to do with the theatre.
In 1998 he put on the huge Inventing America festival which put the Barbican on the map artistically. “Then we started the process of trying to build on events with a lot more thematic festivals, a bigger jazz programme, a bigger world music programme with festivals built around those”. Then they had to finish the improvements to the hall’s acoustic started by Larry Kirkegaard, so that now they can welcome orchestras like Berlin’s, Vienna’s and Amsterdam’s which had shunned the Barbican before. Resident “more as a lifelong friend than a lodger” is the LSO.
Sheffield’s first love is classical music. A product of Tonbridge School and Edinburgh University where he got a music degree, his ambition was to be an opera director. He became a stage manager but got “syphoned off” into the BBC where he was a Radio 3 producer, and then found himself head of music at the South Bank Centre. So his only opera production remains the one of Chabrier’s comic piece L’Etoile he did at university.
It was a big shift from music management to what was then called arts director of a place like the Barbican. “Each job I’ve done somebody has taken me on trust – before I went to the BBC I’d never been in studio before, I’d never worked in a concert hall until I went to the SBC, and here they took a risk on me and theatre” he said.
He changed his title from arts manager – “too bureaucratic sounding, I thought” – to artistic director, but the job has changed since then and he is no longer a programmer so much as a facilitator of programming, travelling widely to concerts, plays, exhibitions and performances.
A few mlonths after his arrival, John Tusa was installed as managing director and a double act was created. “We’ve done our damnedest to turn it into a silk purse” he says.
Now Sheffield has to repeat the process, to the power of four and a budget approximately three times everything he and Tusa spent on the Barbican transformation. He has to appoint executive directors for each of the disciplines, and the architectural leadership that will create the new buildings in what he intends will be the cultural crossroads between the Far East and the West. As he says, “Why wouldn’t I want to do that?”
