AI ProfileGAVIN HENDERSON, artistic director, Dartington International Summer School
Gavin Henderson is the kind of fatalist to whom things happen, and he allows his life to go accordingly: trumpet player, sculptor, performer, impresario, director, administrator, academic, he has been led into unexpected places to become ubiquitous in the arts in this country. What makes that un-orientated career all the more remarkable is that he has just begun his 25th summer school in the Capability Brown landscape in the Devonshire countryside outside Totnes.
Dartington is a summer playground for serious and not so serious musicians to mingle, learn, experiment, in the grounds of Dartington Hall. New work by both famous and merely enthusiastic composers issues from this five week idyll.
It was begun in the after-ease of the Second World War when the pianist Artur Schnabel, impressed by the fledgling Edinburgh Festival, said, “But where is the teaching?” His pupil William Glock became artistic dirtector, and it was at first set up at Bryanston School in Dorset.
There was mood for rural summer schools. Tanglewood in the United States had been long established, but they started appearing here too, for drama, poetry, painting and eventually music.
Five years later it moved to Dartington, where Leonard Elmhirst and his wife had founded a school and college of arts, and John Amis, as manager, recruited music students to build stages, shift instruments and create posters. They became known as Trogs because they seemed to appear through holes in the ground, and Amis’s old school chum Donald Swann was recruited to organise them. He and his performance partner Michael Flanders were able to try things out there, and their show At the Drop of a Hat was born.
Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia as written for Dartington’s Barn Theatre, but the Elmhirsts were persuaded to allow it to reopen Glyndebourne instead.
Glock continued as artistic director for over 30 years running it alongside being director of the Proms, and it was from his successor, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, that Henderson took over the summer school, an independent company governed by the Dartington Trust.
The appointment, he says, came as a complete shock. “I thought it was a practical joke” he recalls. “I’d never been to Dartington, though I was in awe of its reputation. I drove down the following weekend and just fell in love. He gave up Bracknell but kept Brighton.
“Over my 25 years it has become more and more part of Dartington, so that now where Dartington will say it is the jewel in the crown, the great thing that trust promotes” Henderson says. The summer school kept growing, and developed to embrace dance, including tango and salsa classes, elements of pop music, a jazz class with Keith Tippett and Herbie Flowers’s RockShop. “But fundamentally it’s about composition” Henderson says, “and it’s about a lot of people talking part - in chamber music, to sing in the choir…”
Seven years and £300m on, scheme needs to be revamped for the new National Museums Strategy MLA is planning
Renaissance in the Regions, the programme launched by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to revitalise regional museums and galleries, has been heavily criticised in a report commissioned by the MLA.
Its chief fault, says the report’s author Professor Sara Selwood, is that the Renaissance vision is unclear. “MLA has never restated its aims, nor has it published an overarching statement as to its ambitions in taking Renaissance forward, or set out a strategy for achieving those goals” it says, and calls for a dismantling of the present hubs to be replaced by more flexible partnerships.
There are ambiguities as to whether Renaissance was intended to transform all or part of the sector, what the target was or how it could be achieved. “It is arguable whether Renaissance has changed course, or merely lost sight of its purpose” says the report.
MLA is accused of being myopic and failing to see the bigger picture, so that “Renaissance does not yet amount to more than the sum of its parts”.
And the review sees a tension between serving the public and supporting the museums sector, with reporting tending to be about numbers of people rather than the community empowerment the government had called for.
However, the programme has also had its successes. The report acknowledges that Renaissance has contributed to halting the decline of many regional museums and their financial and political neglect. It has enhanced museums’ appeal, and their confidence.
The report calls for continued government funding for Renaissance to allow regional museums to compete with European equivalents, and to make the proposed National Museums Strategy a reality.
But Prof Selwood adds a long list of recommendations, including:
The vision to be restated and a long-term plan published, focussing on museums’ unique contribution rather government agenda, with more effective use mad of collections;
The programme’s management and delivery are kept strictly to its stated aims, and that the distributed funding should be kept separate from MLA’s other funding;
High level funding partnerships should be forged – there has been a lack of consistency – and there should be integrated partnerships between national and regional museums;
Replace the hub structure with more flexible network partnerships, winding up the present Regional Renaissance ~Boards to be replaced by a National Renaissance Board;
Core museums should have a duty of care to other museums;
The creation of a challenge fund to be bid to by partnerships;
The installation of national programmes for organisational change, with museum development officers co-ordinated in s national framework;
The Management of Renaissance should be from a high level and driven by the pursuit of outcomes, and it should be peer reviewed;
There should be better communications in the management of Renaissance
Funding should be regarded as an investment rather than a subsidy;
That, in the “absence of a coherent and logical framework of performance measures”, Renaissance should be performance measured by DCMS and DCLG.
£100m budget shortfall may hit major developments
Major arts capital projects are at risk because of a reported £100m funding black hole in DCMS budgets.
“Our capital budget is currently overcommitted” a DCMS spokeswoman said. “Ministers are examining the reasons for this and looking for solutions. It is possible that difficult decisions will be needed, but none has been taken yet.”
Projects at risk could include the £215m extension to Tate Modern, to which the government had promised £50m representing half the £70m already pledged; the £135m British Museum new exhibitions centre (£22.5m), work on which is due to start this year; and the £165m BFI Southbank development which is hoping for £45m from the Culture Department.
When the DCMS grants for the Tate and BM were announced in 2007 the schemes were hailed by ministers as powerful stimulants for the economy, creating jobs, multiplier earning and new visitor attractions. Now ministers have written to institutions to say that the pledged cash is no longer guaranteed. “It’s a great idea and we would love to support it, but it’s very difficult at the moment” said culture minister Barbara Follett. “There are too many schemes bidding for too little money”.
There could be a serious knock-on with private support for the projects, warned A&B’s chief executive, Colin Tweedy. ‘When government funding pulls out of a project the private sector immediately thinks there’s something wrong with it, which is not the case here – I believe it’s not due to government incompetence, it’s to do with the banks, and unfortunately these situations are going to be coming thick and fast”.
Nor is sponsorship likely to offer immediate comfort, he said. “The private sector is not in the business of rescuing things, it wants to be in partnership. It will be tough but the private sector will recover before the public sector”.
The sudden appearance of the shortfall for 2010-11 and 2011-12 has caused consternation, and the worry is that the process of making up the missing budgeting will mean cuts in other areas. Following the April Budget the Arts Council was relieved not to have the anticipated £14m cut and was able to absorb the eventual £4 reduction for 2010-11, but that might now have to be revisited.
However, the likelihood, the DCMS sources said, was that the promises would be deferred. That would delay the developments into a period of a new government, which may decide to cancel such pledges.
But while criticism was falling on DCMS for rickety budget management, senior arts figures believe blame may eventually land on the Treasury which has also announced a £100m cut in education spending. ‘It seems an extraordinary coincidence and smacks of the Treasury clawing back rather than ministers getting their sums wrong,’ said one.
Prospects for co-operation between the British Museum and the new Acropolis museum are ‘impossible’ unless the Parthenon Marbles are returned to Greece, says eminent classics professor Anthony Snodgrass.
Professor Snodgrass, emeritus professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University said that a call by British Museum director Neil MacGregor for the Greek and British governments can work together so that the Parthenon sculptures can be seen in China and Africa “is quite impossible to settle without reuniting the sculptures where they belong.”
Professor Snodgrass, who is chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles added,” Only then can the possibilities for the transmission of the sculptures to other countries, whether physical or virtual, be seriously discussed,”
The committee added that a recent poll showed that 94% of respondents wished to see the Marbles returned to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.
The Welsh Assembly Government has unveiled its first strategy for museums in Wales.
Ministers have agreed that through CyMAL, the Welsh equivalent of the MLA, they will work on four priorities for the development of Wales X museums from 2010 to 2013.
These are: Developing the Visitor Experience, Developing access Developing the collections and Developing sustainable organisations. CyMAL will produce a detailed action plan to cover these areas and align any grant funding available to meet these priorities.
The strategy document which is out for consultation until October 23, identifies a number of goals over the three year period of the strategy including the launch of the online People’s Collection in 2010, encouraging all museums to develop learning strategies, improve accessibility, introduce a new scheme for sharing collections and improve the management and governance of museums, including a new emphasis on workforce development.
The strategy also suggests that museums need to study demographic profiles and understand their communities better and could help raise Wales international profile through loans, exhibitions and the sharing of skills and experience
Welsh Heritage Minister, Alun Ffred Jones, launching the strategy at the opening of an exhibition at Abergavenny Museum, said “It builds on a great deal of important research we have carried out with the museums sector and identifies a clear way forward to improve access to our wonderful museum collections”
The Conservatives have threatened to reverse the decision of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) to move operations to Birmingham.
Conservative culture spokesman Ed Vaizey said that a future Conservative government “will review the decision” if they won the next election.
The move follows fears in the art market that the relocation of the Export Licensing Unit, which grants permission for artworks to be exported, could affect London’s pre-eminent position in the European art market.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, who is president of the British Art Market Federation, led criticism of the move in the House of Lords. He said that the decision went against a pledge by the DCMS in 2005 that the Export Licensing Unit would co-locate with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council somewhere within the capital from 2006? He also questioned why the move to Birmingham was happening before the DCMS and the MLA have introduced an electronic licence application form.
Government spokesman Lord Davies said that pledge related only to 2006. He said the MLA was quite confident that it can meet the same levels of efficiency with the relocation to Birmingham. He added that MLA wanted the art market to pay part of the £750,000 cost of moving to an electronic licensing system. “The Government are not prepared—nor is the board prepared from its budget—to sustain the full costs of going electronic.”
Involving local people in decisions about arts funding should not been seen as a threat to the arts.
That’s the verdict of a report commissioned by Arts Council England into participatory budgeting, where citizens are given the power to decide how a public budget should be allocated is a growing phenomenon in the UK.
The report, by Involve and the Participatory Budgeting Unit said that arts projects fare well in the small-grant, community-focused form of participatory budgeting. The projects most likely to succeed are those that are seen to benefit the community directly, provide value for money, are easy to understand and appeal to voters’ emotional response.
The study adds that this form of budgeting can benefit local arts organisations by increasing funding opportunities, creating more public support and ownership of publicly funded arts and allowing for better informed decision making.
However it adds that the research was based on small scale participatory budgets on community arts projects such as youth drama groups, cross-generational dancing events and music therapy in sheltered accommodation. The report says it is difficult to predict how less community-focused artforms would fare in a public vote, or how the arts sector as a whole would be affected if mainstream local authority budgets were opened up to participatory budgeting, which is the direction government wants local authorities to take by 2012.
The report argues that the Arts Council should support the arts sector to
make the most of the participatory budgeting opportunities and by raising awareness among public officials, citizens and service providers of the social value of the arts.
Tony Hall, Royal Opera House chief executive, has been announced as the new Cultural Olympics tsar, with £16m from the Olympic Lottery Distributor to pay for six of the projects already announced.
Hall will chair a new Cultural Olympiad Board which will have arts sector luminaries such as Nicholas Serota of the Tate, Alan Davey of ACE and Munira Mirza, director of culture for the Mayor of London - the new board is a joint initiative of the Mayor and LOCOG. Jude Kelly, currently chair of culture,ceremonies and education for the Olympics, stands down but will serve on Hall’s board.
CULTURELABEL RADAR
It is with hope in our hearts and a spring in our step that we bring you this month’s issue of CultureLabel Radar. Last week, Sir Nicholas Serota and Neil MacGregor presented their view of the museum of the future – and from where they’re sitting, the future is pixelated.
According to them, museums of the future will be “multi-media centres” and the relationship to their audiences will be completely transformed. Serota said: “The challenge is, to what extent do we remain authors, and in what sense do we become publishers providing a platform for international conversations? I am certain that in the next ten to 15 years, there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more effectively working as commissioning editors working on material online.”
A week to the day later, with almost uncanny timing, we launched our book Intelligent Naivety: The entrepreneurial Museum, which looks at these issues and more: how will new digital technologies impact on our relationships with our consumers? How do we talk to consumers whose first experience of anything now is often online? What are the opportunities for institutions like ours with assets of heritage and meaning in a world looking to de-brand?
We answer these questions and more in our book; better still you can download a free copy from our website www.intelligentnaivety.com from July 20th, but we thought we’d treat you to a few excerpts ahead of that:
Culture institutions know a thing or two about balance. Balancing curation and consumption, intellect and accessibility, heritage and modernity, today’s market and tomorrow’s study, preparation and performance, intrinsic and instrumental, public and private, commercial and creative, perfection and delivery.
Liverpool was so successful as last year’s European Capital of Culture that the government wants to have cities of culture around the country. But, as Andrew Tait reports, a small and ancient Wessex community is celebrating its own status
Carried along on a wave of enthusiasm from local artists, businesses and shopkeepers, the market town of Marlborough, Wiltshire (charter 1204), is rapidly turning itself into a regional centre for the arts.
Marlborough, with a cultural catchment area from Devizes to the west and Newbury, across the border in Berkshire, to the east, has a periphery of villages where scores of artists and craftsmen have established their studios and thriving businesses over recent years.
As music from the annual Marlborough jazz festival throbbed through the streets, parks and pubs last weekend, visitors and residents were invited to follow the Marlborough arts trail, a month long project which features the work of 59 local artists in 30 office and shop windows, with a free art trail handout with a map showing who can be seen where.
Also during every weekend in July some 40 artists – painters, ceramicists, photographers, printmakers and sculptors – are opening their studios in and around Marlborough to the public to discuss, demonstrate and sell their work. Some are offering courses and workshops.
Last Sunday, coinciding with Marlborough’s annual jazz weekend, an inaugural art market was held in a car park in The Parade (also August 16 and September 13, 10am-4pm), near the site of a projected cinema and arts centre on the banks of the River Kennet.
Chainsaw sculptures, hand-made artisan jewellery, paintings, photography and ceramics were on sale, to the accompaniment of performances by children from a community primary school, clowns and local musicians.
The first Marlborough arts month was held in 2008, organised by the We Love Marlborough initiative, which was born the year before over a gathering in a local pub. “Some of us who care about Marlborough as our special town and about the arts decided to tap into the wealth of local talent and the goodwill of local traders and businesses,” says Louisa Davison, a PR professional who, together with husband Peter, president of the Chamber of Commerce, regards the work for We Love Marlborough as a labour of love itself.
But she stresses that the July Marlborough arts trail and studio visits are far from the only activities she and her colleagues, many of them artists and including a stiltwalker, organise throughout the year, from concerts, street entertainment surrounding the switching on of the Christmas lights and exhibitions – all not-for-profit.
Also involved in many of the projects, and with a programme of its own, is the Kennet Valley Arts Trust (KVAT), driving force behind the proposed riverside complex.
This is the Riverbank arts centre, long the ambition of the KVAT to provide theatre, visual arts and cinemas facilities which the trust is in discussions over with the new Wiltshire unitary authority.
This weekend also saw the opening in the offices of local businessman Tony Apps of a display of work by Jack (The Singing Butler) Vettriano and local artists Davina Fisher, Chantal Bourgonje and Ray Ward.
Already established as permanent showcase for local creativity is the “redundant” church of St. Peter and St. Paul at the end of the High Street, where Cardinal Wolsey was ordained in 1498.
The church, now an arts and craft centre with craft shops and stalls and a café, is a welcome haven for Marlborough visitors, many of them en route to nearby Avebury and Stonehenge. For residents it regularly presents lectures, concerts and exhibitions and, yes, church services.
The town’s traders are fully behind We Love Marlborough, and this latest initiative. The art trail is sponsored by Equilibrium Wealth Management Ltd and Waitrose - who are both exhibiting art work – and, unsurprisingly, by the local Chamber of Commerce.
“In these tough economic times traders are open to new ideas that will attract people to the town, entice them to look in shop windows and spend money with our local traders,” says Peter Davison. “We think the art trail is a brilliant idea and are delighted to be co-sponsoring the event.”
Further information: www.welovemarlborough.co.uk
