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ARDENT HARE WEAVES ITS WEB
17.02.2012 / Funding / 0 Comments
Dada-South, now relaunched as Ardent Hare, has a new website, a milestone for how far the charity for deaf and disabled performers has come since closure loomed 11 months ago. Its chair, Graham Wiffen, explains how you can use it to help
With the launch of our new website, Ardent Hare became a reality on 1 February 2012. So you have a new website and a new name, but what has actually changed since the end of January? In its eight years of existence, Dada-South served as a development agency for deaf and disabled artists and practitioners in the South East: Disability Arts Development Agency. We did what it said on the tin. But we did a great deal more, and although we take huge pride in the success of these projects we also know that we greatly over-extended ourselves and our resources to the detriment of our long term sustainability.
Major projects such as last year's Accentuate-sup- ported Up-Stream showcase at the Brighton Festival demonstrated our ability to develop and manage big events. We are now in discussion with some of our regional partners to explore how we can develop on these initiatives more sustainably in the longer term.
This year sees the culmination of another Accentuate project with the Go Public art commissions going live during this Olympic and Paralympic year. Artists Sarah Scott, Lorna Giezot and Zoe Partington were commissioned by Ardent Hare (Dada-South as it was) and they have planned and created innovative and eclectic projects ahead of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. A day-long seminar in November brought the artists together with others who would dare to take on the challenge of art in the public realm. Anyone who has ever taken on a public art project will be aware of the range of issues and the extraordinary com- plexities that face the artist when he or she faces the blank canvas of our built environment. Those issues and complexities are greatly magnified when the artist concerned is disabled.
What came across to me so forcefully on that day was the strong sense of empowerment and community that Dada- South has engendered in the participants. Ardent Hare's website is the place where that disparate and diverse community can together. There is even a space on the new site called "Community" and this space is both a dedicated resource for our artists and performers and a forum for them to express their own views.
In these austere times, the web- site is the place where Ardent Hare will be focussing its energies for the immediate future on its core offer to artists and practitioners. When our resources are necessarily tight, online resources will enable us to serve a wide community.
As director Stevie Rice expresses it on the website: "We know that engaging with Ardent Hare has a big impact on people. We know because they tell us. This year we will be developing our tool to track the development of artists as they jour- ney through our programmes so that
we can follow their progress and really understand what works and what doesn't work for them."And as one artist did tell us: "Personally I've got a lot of time for Ardent Hare because I think they've invested in me and taken a chance on me and on my development, so I want to actu- ally give them more than the 99.9% I give any other organisation."
Of course our online presence is a vital tool but if Ardent Hare is to grow and develop and, in the longer term, start to influence government and public agendas then we will need to develop larger scale projects. At a time when deaf and disabled people face increasing threats to their welfare through public expenditure cuts Ardent Hare's voice will need to be loud and clear if they are not to be marginalised even further. That voice speaks passionately on the home page. Arts Industry readers can support our Ardent Artists by visiting our website and becoming one of our new Ardent Patrons. Ardent Patrons are invited to invest in the future by supporting the professional devel- opment of three talented artists. We believe that our community will be much more vibrant and its voice stronger if its support comes from a wide range of sources. Like us, we also believe that, as the strapline says, you too are "passionate about potential".
Visit www.ardenthare.org.uk to join our community. Follow us on Twitter @ArdentHare and find us on Facebook.
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