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

ACE’s Grants for the arts scheme is closing to new applicants between January 18 and February 26. Philip Deverell, the scheme’s director, explains why

Since it was set up in 2003, Grants for the arts has been a National Lottery success story providing over 25,000 grants from £1,000 to £200,000 to an astonishing range of artists and arts organisations all over the country.

It replaced a plethora of small funding programmes, and has enabled individual artists and arts organisations to make transformational journeys and create some of the most exceptional work of the last decade.

Recipients have created work of national and international acclaim, ranging from Cornwall based company Wildworks’ unique landscape theatre that ties communities and place together, to Roger Hiorns’ Untitled, which he recreated for this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.

We are constantly looking to improve how the programme works to ensure it offers the simplest and most cost effective way for artists to apply for funding. That’s why Grants for the arts will be undergoing a number of changes over the coming months, both improving how the scheme works for applicants and saving almost £1.5m a year in administrative costs, which will be reinvested directly into the arts. The changes are firmly focused on improving the service for applicants, providing a consistent and transparent service across the country. The eligibility criteria and our assessment criteria will remain the same.

The biggest transformation is that a new national Grants for the arts network, based in our assessment centre in Manchester, will assess and monitor all applications. The new teams will be focused around individual artforms and will maintain close links to each region. Grants for the arts has been very successful in balancing the twin challenges of regional and artform difference. Grouping the teams in this way means applications will always be assessed by an artform specialist and with an overview of arts activity across the whole country. This allows the Arts Council to make funding decisions using a national framework and ensures consistent advice and assessment is given to applicants wherever they are based.

We’re also continuing to make it easier to apply for Grants for the arts. Following the simplification of the application form in May 2008, from the 1 March artists and arts organisations will now be able to submit their applications online. We are also simplifying the information we need for applications of £10,000 or less. This will speed up the assessment process and allow us to make decisions within 6 weeks (previously only applications of up to £5,000 we’re assessed in this timeframe).

These changes will deliver nearly a quarter of the £6.5 million we are saving in administrative costs as part of our organisational review, ensuring the Arts Council runs as efficiently as possible and maximising the amount of funding going directly to the arts.

We want to implement the changeover to the new team and online process as swiftly as possible, and in order to achieve this we will be suspending new applications to the fund for a period of six weeks, between Monday 18 January and Friday 26 February.

This means that applications need to be submitted by 5pm on Friday 15 January to ensure we can make a decision before the end of March. So anyone looking to apply for a grant should plan ahead and think about the best time to submit their application, not forgetting that from 1 March they can apply online and applications up to £10,000 will be assessed within 6 weeks.

Grants for the arts plays a unique role in the country’s arts ecology, providing an important addition to central government funding for one-off projects and ideas. I believe that the changes we are implementing will make Grants for the arts faster and more effective at helping artists take risks and create truly exceptional art.

AI Profile Tony Hall, chief executive, Royal Opera House; chairman, Cultural Olympiad Board

A year ago, in his last interview before stepping down as chairman of the Arts Council, Sir Christopher Frayling showed that he had become increasingly frustrated at the lack of action on the Cultural Olympiad. “There are too many front doors” he told AI. “The way through it is to get a ringmaster, someone with a vision.”

Tony Hall is not the ringmaster. Although he stands at a new single portal to a proper national cultural representation in the 2012 Olympics, and despite the press having hailed him as the visionary required, he expects to announce the actual master of ceremonies in the next few days.

The delay in appointing the director of the Cultural Olympiad is partly his fault, he concedes. “They weren’t offering enough and this is a serious job, a huge opportunity. We want somebody who is going to shift things”. He won’t say what was on offer, but it was around £90,000 a year and now will be nearer £120,000.

“There are so many strands to pull together” he says, adding that he hopes the director will bring on other people “to help do the heavy lifting”.

“We have chance in a million to do justice to 2012 –and it is 2012 in my opinion, not 2010 or 2011 – and to demonstrate to ourselves and the world how immensely powerful the arts, culture and creative industries are in this country” he says. “I think 2012 is a showcase of arts and culture in this country, and I hope that at the end of 2012 people remember it as a year in which they were wowed by concerts and opportunities they never dreamed of.”

Tony Hall himself couldn’t have dreamed, during his long career which took him to the top in BBC News, that he would be hailed as the saviour not only of the Cultural Olympics but of the Royal Opera House.

It’s almost nine years since he arrived at Covent Garden to take charge of a dysfunctional and ailing subsidised giant. The opera house had reopened a year earlier after a protracted, costly and controversial refurbishment, thanks to the determination of his predecessor, Michael Kaiser. But it was in serious of danger of closing again.

“Michael Kaiser did a remarkable job in opening the place, but there was not a shadow of doubt that it needed to go from opening into how do you keep this thing running” Hall says.

“I felt there were two things we needed to do: One, to ensure financial stability, we needed to get funding for the seasons, simple as that; but, two, to make the debate about the opera house about the art and what we do on the stage, not about the management and the board and the building which had been dominating headlines for so many years.”

The advantage he had was that he was coming from outside the arts, and could be a wide-eyed ingénue with no background to get in his way. He brought a pragmatism, got rid of Ross Stretton after a year in post as director of the Royal Ballet and replaced him with the respected Monica Mason, and added an artistic development arm under the former ballerina Deborah Bull. He says the credit for Covent Garden’s revival should go elsewhere, however.

“It was the passion and commitment and creativity of the place and people in all sorts of different ways” he says. “It wasn’t what you saw reflected outside, where it was the fact that there had been five of me in four years that people were aware of”. He defers to the work of Tony Pappano as music director, Mason and Elaine Padmore as head of opera for keeping the artistic quality high, and later Bull in the studio theatres doing new work and giving opportunities to younger artists – “this season Thomas Arne’s Artaxerxes has been a wonderful achievement, for instance”.

“Now it’s a really good and happy combination of talents” says Hall, “and I hope that’s what people see.”

If a museum wants to gain the heart and soul of a family, it’s often easier if they’ve won over their stomach first. Dea Birkett explains
more…
I’ve just returned from a delicious conference in Brussels on museum
and food, organized by Eetiket. Eetiket is a vibrant young
organization, dedicated to making the eating experience for families
more fun and more educational, especially in museums.
(www.eetiket.be).

Among their wonderfully simple ideas is to have
special VIP reservation cards on museum café tables, targeted
entirely at children and families. It’s just one low cost way in
which families can be made to feel welcome the minute they walk in.

I’ve always thought museums don’t make nearly enough of eating.
Everyone enjoys a good meal. And there’s rarely a collection that
doesn’t contain reference to or images of food, whether it’s Warhol’s
pop art soup cans or Cezanne’s bowls of ripening fruit. But the few
who do have food trails often begin them in one gallery and end them
in another, or even in the entrance hall. But if the aperitif to a
food trail is the café, and, after winding through several courses of
galleries, it ends up at a table there too, then you obviously
enormously increase your retail opportunities.

It’s difficult to wander into a place where people are supping and dining without wanting to do so yourself.

But museums are rather sniffy about food, as if it might leave a bad
aftertaste on their precious collection. It’s something that has to
be not only kept out of the galleries, but divorced from them. I have
yet to find – although I’m sure you’ll correct me – a museum or
gallery which has objects displayed between its café’s tables.

Of course, it used to be like this with learning centres. They’d be
tucked away in the museum basement, so the noise and dirt children
were presumed to produce wouldn’t get in the way of the serious work of the museum upstairs.

That is changing, and young people are now allowed to bring their paints, pencils and sticky fingers into more and more galleries. But last summer, wandering around one national museum with my kids, I took out a little bottle of water so they could have a cooling sip on a very hot day. The room warden swooped on us immediately; we were told quite clearly that water was not allowed in the gallery. In fact, it’s often difficult to get hold of it anywhere in a museum.

One of the 20 points on the Kids in Museums Manifesto is about providing unlimited, free tap water in a museum café, a continual plea from visitors with small children.

There are many missed opportunities for museums to make their
catering so much more than a meal. Some, such as Museums Sheffield or the British Museum have themed menus, renaming familiar food. At Sheffield’s Bugs exhibition, meatballs became ‘Dung Beetle Balls’.
For the Moctezuma exhibition, in the Court Restaurant in the British
Museum, cheddar nachos become ‘Selection of Aztec Bites’.

But is re-titling and redesigning your menu enough? How does that
really make the eating experience relate to and be part of the whole
visit? In the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington
DC, the Mitsitam Native Foods café cooks traditional Native American
food over timber fires. General Manager Larry Ponzi says, “The menu
is designed to be consistent with the mission of the museum, which is
to educate visitors about Native-American life and culture.” I wonder
how many British museum cafés are included in the museum’s mission?

Augmenting the Mitsitam’s educational mission are little ‘food facts’
left on the tables each day, such as ‘Did You Know … Chocolate
originated with the Mayas?’

It’s a simple idea to make visitors talk about what’s happening
throughout the venue. Meals, like museums, are great places to
stimulate intergenerational conversations. During the Big Lunch
initiative last summer, the Eden Project suspended giant
‘conversation starters’ from the café ceiling, prompting families to
reminisce and discuss food and where it came from.
These rare venues realize, as few in Britain do, that families are
often led by their stomachs.

As one family with young children
commented in making their nomination for this year’s Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award, “The café has to be welcoming. It’s probably the only place in the museum we’ll go to twice during one visit. Everything else we just see once.”

What a difference a café can make to a family visit became clear
during the judging process for last year’s Family Friendly Award,
when families were sent out to road test anonymously the shortlisted
museums. One large judging family went into the shortlisted Dulwich
Picture Gallery’s café, and began to move a couple of tables closer
together so they could all sit as one group. They were immediately
told they weren’t allowed to do that. The adults had to sit
separately, on different tables, each looking after some of the kids.
Dulwich Picture Gallery did not win.

The first point on the Kids in Museums Manifesto is “Be welcoming –
from the café to the curator.” If a museum wants to gain the heart
and soul of a family, it’s often easier if they’ve won over their
stomach first.

To order a free copy of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to
www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk.
Follow the progress of the Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award on
twitter – www.twitter.com/kidsinmuseums

ACE is about to create a new system that will revolutionise the way it funds its RFOs. Simon Tait reports
Peer review - the notion of assessment of subsidised arts organisations by those working in the same creative orbit – has been talked for some years, and was seen merely as an evaluation by someone who was not a bureaucrat, viz. Genista McIntosh’s review of the Arts Council in 2007.

But when Brian McMaster mentioned it in his report on excellence in the arts for the Culture Secretary, his definition was more refined: effectively, judgement by those working at the same coalface.

That was the meaning that Alan Davey, the man whose role in the subsidised arts some believe equates to that of Hercules in the Augean Stables, chose to adopt when he announced a year ago: “All of us in the arts will need courage, boldness and ambition. To do that we’ll need knowledge – and not just from the Arts Council. We’ll need the help of practitioners and audiences’.

The peer review system the new ACE chief executive started then was to be a process whereby the Arts Council would no longer be seen as the remote judge of artistic performance of regularly funded arts organisations (RFOs) on which an annual grant would depend – a process which had got it into repeated trouble over the years, to the point of being sued at least once, and latterly in the now notorious triennial investment review of two years ago. This was to start a new age of self assessment.

Davey announced the consultation process, the pilots and the selection that would lead to peer review, which would be part of the self assessment ethic.

The consultation is now over, the pilots (in the north west and south east) have been deployed and analysed, the jobs advertised, interviewing has happened, and the applicants are just how being told whether or not they have made it. In January 150 of them will be announced, in March/April they will start work, and after some bedding in their assessments will come full into force in informing funding decisions for the 2013/14 financial year.

They will be the final phase of a revolution which began not with that Davey lecture at the RSA in November 2008, but with McMaster’s report on excellence 11 months earlier. It’s a concept being firmly grasped by both the national office’s directors of strategy and regional arts councils that will take the lead.

“It’s an important new dimension” says Susanna Eastburn, the Arts Council’s director of music strategy who is in the process of appointing 21 assessors. “It will get us closer to the companies and performers to have someone else informing the process.”

AI ProfileRoy McEwan, MD, Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Discreet whispers in the Whitehall corridors of power about “direct funding” make arts administrators write to The Times and politicians hit the denial button. Arts funding in England will remain at arm’s length, it’s safe in Labour/Conservative hands, the flagships will not be treated as special cases.

Not in Scotland, though. There, five arts organisations are now directly funded by the Scottish government, and Roy McEwan runs one of them. He is a veteran as far as running a single arts organisation is concerned, more than 16 years as managing director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

A new era starts for the SCO on December 11 when their new young principal conductor, Robin Ticciati, makes his debut at Glasgow City Halls with a programme of Mahler, Brahms ands from the later 20th century Henze.

But the 26-year-old Londoner’s arrival is just the latest of many changes McEwan has seen in his time.

He took over from Ian Ritchie with the SCO on a high, an international reputation and a pioneering education programme, and he has developed it to even greater heights as far as quality of work and audience building is concerned. “You recognise some of the changes when they’re happening” he says, “but a lot of it you don’t realise until you look back.”

Born in Dumfries his career began in London after a degree at the London School of Economics, as the house manager of a small London theatre, and them manager of the Whitechapel Gallery before becoming administrator of the MacRobert Arts Centre at Stirling, then as its director. In 1993 joined the SCO.

“The biggest change was a couple of years ago when we moved to direct funding from the Scottish government. It gave us a greater feeling of stability, but a sense of place as well, as flagships and as cultural ambassadors.”

A couple in North London have committed their future to helping you find the music you love, on the web.
In the back bedroom of a detached house in Muswell Hill, in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, a small international miracle has been taking place.

It is being wrought by a married couple, David and Alison Karlin, and is already changing the way classical music lovers get their fixes, and it could change the way we book all our entertainment.

Bachtrack is what they have created, a listing website but so much more than that.

Bachtrack will find a concert by your favourite composer, ballet or opera of your choice anywhere in the UK, and the United States, and moving into Europe.

The site will also find you CDs and help you buy them as well as book tickets for venues in the UK.

But dig deeper and you find reviews by young people, snippets of music as tasters of concerts and recordings before you decide, and archive information on subjects of interest, such as biographies of composers. It is unique, and probably could not be copied, so intricate is its bespoke design.

It all started a little more than two years ago when, weary of corporate life, David Karlin left Sage where had had been head of research and development “to take a break and think for what I could do next” - 25 years ago he had built the first home business computer for Clive Sinclair.

He and Alison, a City stockbroker before she married and had children, discussed projects they could do together, and they came up with something that could make commercial sense as well.

David had been surrounded by music in his childhood home, drifted to jazz in his teen years and to folk at university, where he became a competent guitarist. His chief musical love now is opera. As a mum, Alison found that there was little live music for kids who were not good enough or inclined to be in the school orchestra, and among other things started a “kitchen band” for their two children’s primary school pals. Together, the Karlins had experienced the frustration of trying to book music on line, and realised that here was their joint venture.