Wadley’s in
Veronica Wadley has been appointed chair of Arts Council London by the Mayor, Boris Johnson. Pause for the shock of this news to subside.
To rehearse the story, Wadley was the editor of the Evening Standard (which reported her success on Thursday’s front page with ‘Top arts job for “crony” Wadley’) at the time of Boris Johnson’s election in 2008 and was his implacable champion to the point of some threatening to take the paper to the Press Complaints Commission. Last summer she applied to be the new London arts chair and, though a shortlisting committee discarded her, Johnson, in whose gift the appointment is subject to government approval, put her name forward. The then culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, wouldn’t sanction it, saying it broke the Nolan Rules on political interference in public appointments; Johnson fumed and darkly muttered that he would leave the post unfilled until after the general election, and so it has happened. In the meantime a huge row erupted, greatly to the embarrassment of the national ACE chair Liz Forgan, and it was agreed that a new selection procedure would be devised, excluding Johnson, and Wadley would have to reapply. She did, and despite an open letter on Tuesday from The Guardian’s Dave Hill calling on David Cameron and Nick Clegg to intervene in the interests of non-croneyism, Jeremy Hunt has confirmed her appointment. Also in the meantime, Wadley has been busy visiting London arts organisations and creating a favourable impression, as well as declaring in the Spectator that arts organisations need to ‘monetise assets’ and warning ‘subsidy junkies take note’. There have been carefully worded welcome messages from Liz Forgan (‘our London and national councils are finally at full strength, which is excellent news’), Julia Peyton-Jones (‘a fresh eye to the work of Arts Council London’), Nick Hytner (‘She is enthusiastic, perspicacious and informed’) and Colin Tweedy (‘…good for our cultural partners and good for our commercial partners’).
But how much power does the chair of Arts Council London actually have? Her council is effectively an advisory body for the executive director, the highly regarded Moira Sinclair, whose immediate boss is not Wadley but ACE chief executive Alan Davey. Wadley, along with all the other regional chairs, also gets a seat on the national Arts Council. It pays her £6,400 a year for up to 30 days’ work, but it also gives her automatic entrée into the cultural salons and arts powerhouses of the capital, places where her opinions will be heard, noted and given currency with decision-makers. The story of Veronica Wadley, cultural mover and shaker, starts here,
The 1985 show
Hunt’s decision to impose a 4% cut on the Arts Council instead of the 3% everyone else in the DCMOS family is a warning shot across the bows that the arts are in for it. Talk of 5% cuts a year for the next three years are leaving national companies gloomy, never mind the smaller fry. One ceo of a national institution and as diplomatic an arts mandarin as they come, tells me bleakly ‘It would take us back to 1985’.
Bradshaw’s guide
And while the ‘Beware forest fire’ signs have been going up, where was HM Opposition? I called the former culture secretary and current Labour shadow for a comment only to get an answering machine message. Two days later, with deadlines long past and the stories already soaking up chip fat, an email arrives: ‘I am very concerned about the potential impact of these in-year cuts on our arts and cultural life. But I fear much worse to come. The Liberal Democrats seem to have meekly caved in during the coalition negotiations and abandoned their pre election commitment to protect spending on arts and culture’. I offer it now because you won’t have seen it anywhere
In the next few days we will hear which one of four short-listed bidder will be the chosen UK City of Culture for 2013. There is to be one every four years, but as the first this one will set the early standard. The idea was the brainchild of the TV producer Phil Redmond who was the creative director of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, and the aim was to build on the 2008 “which had significant social and economic benefits for the area”, the culture department said in launching the scheme last year. “In deciding on the four cities recommended - Derry/Londonderry, Birmingham, Norwich, and Sheffield – the panel was influenced by the expected step change each city was asked to envisage, if they gained the title and subsequent media spotlight”. Here is what each has too offer.
NORWICH
Norwich’s bid is a bold one, which they are calling the “whole city experiment”. Sitting as it does at the far corner of East Anglia, it has always suffered from being perceived as slightly apart from the rest of the country, but it has a sound cultural base.
The annual Norfolk and Norwich Festival has become a national event and will play a key part in 2013. There also five theatres, including the Theatre Royal the Playhouse and an open air theatre. At the University of East Anglia it has the Sainsbury Centre, the internationally recognised contemporary art gallery. The Castle Museum, which used to suffer badly from lack of repair and resources, has been restored and relaunched as a major museum and gallery with which the Tate has an association for travelling exhibitions. Although there is no major concert hall of international standard, St Andrew’s Hall has served well with a wonderful acoustic that attracts orchestras such as he London Symphony regularly. And it has the Writers’ Centre, a literary initiative that is spear-heading Norwich’s bid to become a Unesco City of Literature.
But Norwich’s is a “tale of two cities”, according to the bid. The centre looks prosperous and refined, but outlying are poor areas with a high level of deprivation. A third of Norwich’s children are living in households dependent on state benefit of one sort or another.
So the bid, which is supported by Labour leadership contender Ed Balls, is to “use culture to change the whole city, for all of its citizens”.
BIRMINGHAM
The city has long boasted of its “second city” status, and with its world class orchestra and concert hall, museums and galleries, ballet and dance companies and theatres such was a close call to be the European Capital of Culture two years ago.
But at the centre of celebrations in 2013 will be the opening of the new Library of Birmingham, pictured, the largest public sector cultural project in Britain which is rising on Centenary Square next to the Birmingham Rep theatre. In addition, there will be a brand new autumn festival and a special exhibition of the extraordinary Anglo Saxon Hoard at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery along with A City in the Making, a new history gallery that will tell the story of Birmingham and its people.
It is the youngest city in Europe, in terms of the average age of its inhabitants, and there will be a whole programme of activity designed, led and curated by Birmingham’s young people. There is already a group of children, young people and their families from across the city developing the programme.
Also, a large part of the bid has been MAC, the Midlands Arts Centre, which opened on May 1 after a £15m expansion and refurbishment. It had been one of the first in a wave of arts centres in the 1960s and has now, says its director Dorothy Wilson, been transformed for a new generation with the biggest display of contemporary art in the West Midlands.
DERRY~LONDONDERRY
The long-awaited publication of the Saville Report into Bloody Sunday, the day in 1972 when 13 young civil rights protestors were shot dead by soldiers, was a watershed for the Derry~Londonderry because it absolved the protestors and victims of any criminal blame and allowed the city to move on at last. Northern Ireland as a whole had agreed that Derry should be the bid city rather than, for instance, Belfast, and the whole province is behind it.
A key element of the bid, the presentation team for which included Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister, is the transformation of Ebrington Barracks, once the headquarters for British soldiers in the region, into an arts centre. The former parade ground is to become a large performance space for pubic events, larger than Trafalgar Square, and a contemporary art gallery is to be created out of the former headquarters building, the Clocktower. The square will also be surrounded by museums, artists’ studios, galleries, cafes and restaurants to create an artistic quarter. A giant new piece of public sculpture has been commissioned by the city Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier for the site at a cost of £800,0000.
The area in which Ebrington stands, Waterside, has been historically cut off from the walled city by the river Foyle, but is being linked by a new pedestrian bridge being built with European money, the Peace Bridge.
The bid presentation included a film, Voices , in which ordinary Derry people speak about what the arts in their city mean to them. “The great strength of the Derry-Londonderry bid” said temporary director of development Oonagh McGillion “has been the people of the city, and it’s the fact that it is the people of the city who deliver the message in the film that makes it so moving”.
SHEFFIELD
Sheffield is representing the north with its bid, and has the support of, among others, Manchester City Council, the Peak District National Park, Leeds City Council, neighbouring South Yorkshire boroughs and the region’s tourism agency.
The bid is about the people, communities, businesses and organisations in the city creating, making and participating in the 2013 programme. “We know our programme can cut it with the best internationally and we will invite the rest of the world to experience it here with us in Sheffield” the bid declares.
Sheffield already has an admired track record for delivering major events and boasts the largest theatres complex outside of London. The Made in Sheffield brand is globally recognised and its central role in the bid has been the platform for the city and the region to accelerate the selling of the city’s contemporary image and wider tourism offer.
Sheffield will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of stainless steel in 2013 but also sits at the heart of the most digitally connected region in the UK. The £90 million Digital Region initiative will bring the first major deployment of super fast broadband in the UK to our city, providing endless possibilities for our 2013 programme and the city’s digital future.
And, like the orthers, it has recruited celebrity support, in this case Michael Palin. “Someone once noted that all the Monty Python team were provincials” he said “and I think that coming from Sheffield gave me a fresh and unconventional outlook on life which has helped me in my creative work and been with me ever since”.
AI Profile – Nica Burns, theatre producer and owner, director and producer, Edinburgh Comedy Awards
The West End is shark-infested waters stained crimson by the gore of plays, musicals, actors, directors and producers that have fallen victim to its predatory critics. Yet some, a handful perhaps, have found the way to navigate this hostile sea.
Many of them are women, the likes of Thelma Holt and Carole Winter, who trust to their eye and their instinct to create successful shows. One, Nica Burns, has found another quotient to add to those qualities: she owns five of the Square Mile’s most beautiful playhouses, as half of the Nimax Theatres and the partnership’s chief executive.
Nica Burns does not confine her enthusiasm to London, though. It is 30 years since she, barely out of her teens, made a deal with Perrier to bring the best of the Edinburgh Fringe comedy to a London showcase – the first winners of the “Perrier Pick of the Fringe” were the Cambridge Footlights with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson.
Perrier went the way of all sponsors, banks crashed, but Burns kept the Comedy Awards going, and in May announced a new and besotted partner who will ensure the awards continue for as long as men drink lager…
Nica Burns was not born to the theatre, but she discovered it in her DNA while she was doing a law degree at University College, London – where, incidentally, she met her lawyer husband, Marc Hutchinson – and on graduation she trained as an actress at the Webber Douglas. She adapted and starred in H E Bates’s Dulcima on the Fringe, and back in London ran a comedy club at the Finborough Arms in Earls Court, compering the show herself.
But serious theatre beckoned and in 1983 she became artistic director of the Donmar, and under her aegis it won 21 awards, presenting drama all week and late night comedy on Fridays and Saturdays. She left when the theatre closed for redevelopment in 1989.
Meanwhile, she was also associate director of the Assembly Rooms, one of the three nodes then of the Fringe, and programming for the Festival of Sydney. In 1993 she was drawn back into the West End by Janet Holmes à Court, owner of the Stoll Moss Theatres, as production director, and continued in the role when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful bought the group. It was Burns who lured Christian Slater, the Hollywood roustabout celeb, to London to star in the stage version of one Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
She also continued to produce independently, eventually leaving Really Useful in 2005 when Nimax was set up. She has made a trademark of marrying TV and movie gloss with serious drama, and you’ll know some of the shows she brought into London, if you don’t automatically associate her with them: My Brilliant Divorce with Dawn French; Deborah Warner’s production of Medea with Fiona Shaw (which won the Evening Standard Awards for best actress and best director in 2001); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Kathleen Turner; Some Girls with David Schwimmer; A Moon for the Mesbegotten with Kevin Spacey (which transferred to Broadway); and more recently James McAvoy in Three Days of Rain.
But in 2005 Lord Lloyd-Webber, as he had become, decided to sell five of his West End theatres, and Burns went into partnership with a 65-year-old oil heir, Max Weitzenhoffer, who had fallen in love with theatre and been one of the original bidders for Stoll Moss when Lloyd Webber bought the group in 2001. He is also an Anglophile, having forsaken Oklahoma for Winchelsea.
They now have a fill the Apollo and the Lyric in Shaftesbury Avenue, the Duchess in St Martin’s Lane, the Garrick in Charing Cross Road and the Vaudeville in The Strand. With the extraordinary timing of fate, the deal was sealed in the week London won the Olympics and the bombers struck on the Underground.
The partnership came as a surprise to West End watchers, who were aware of Weitzenhoffer’s interest but not Burns’s. “It just sort of came up” Burns said. “There was a conversation some time when Max said ‘We could do this’ and then we both went quiet for a hell of a long time, then we both said ‘OK’ and hung up”. And they are equal partners, “Just me, Nic and the bank” Weitzenhoffer said. “And my husband” she added. “I’m deeply fond of Marc, he’s deeply fond of our house, and we intend to stay living in it.”
The partnership (with Weitzenhoffer) has prospered and consolidated. A couple of months after Nimax was set up she was named 40th most important in the arts in the United Kingdom by The Times, and in January 2006 The Stage identified her as “the fifth most important person in British theatre”, and Burns is the current president of the Society of West End Theatre.
But Fringe comedy is her abiding passion, and Burns has fought to keep the comedy awards going. In 2006 Perrier gave up their support, and Burns found a new sponsor in a banking concern called Intelligent Finance – so the Perrier became the IF awards.
The recession struck, and IF, a subsidiary of HBOS, was a casualty which struggled to the end of its three years deal and the comedy awards cold have ended there, in the ash and rubble of the recession. Instead, Burns decided to sponsor the awards herself, pro tem. “When IF went I said that the right sponsor was a rare and precious thing – I didn’t expect that right sponsor to be me!”
She was, and is, undeterred - “I will never let it go!” she texted - and set about finding a new sponsor for 2010, without toning down her conditions on who might be considered potential sponsors: “A sense of humour, a long term commitment to comedy, owned by a company with an ethical track record, a history of long term sponsorships, a stable company, unlikely to be taken over and with a great product that continues to grow and grow in popularity. Not a lot to ask for, is it?”
Surprisingly, perhaps, she didn’t have to look far, because Heineken UK is now based in Edinburgh since acquiring Scottish and Newcastle Breweries. And one of Heineken’s leading brands is Foster’s, which has a track record in comedy while other beer brands go for sport.
“It seems so right” said Heineken’s PR manager, Dave Jones. “Comedy has been in Foster’s bloodstream since we did the famous ads with Barry Humphries, and then Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame.
“We thought, ‘What do lager drinkers like most alongside football?’, and the answer was comedy”. The deal is for three years with an assumption, said the Heineken brands director Mark Given, of developing the awards thereafter. “We know comedy plays an important role in the lives of our target market:” he said. “It’s our major marketing platform for Foster’s for 2010 – ‘Foster’s is serious about comedy’.”
And Nica Burns? “I’m a theatre person, that’s just who I am, but it’s comedy that makes me more than that. It makes me smile.”
Response
Alison McGovern is the new MP for her home town constituency of Wirral South. A former borough councillor, the arts have always been part of both her public and private life. Here she looks at how the new government appears to have failed to learn the lessons of arts and economics.
In the first annual report of the Arts Council in 1945, the chair, John Maynard Keynes, said: “The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied… by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation”. As an economist, Keynes’s work has been dismissed and rediscovered many times. His argument: that when markets fail, the role of government is to act against the economic cycle to reignite confidence, is once again under the spotlight.
In the election in May, I spent more time talking about the economy than any other subject. And we now know the immediate impact that the result of the election will have on the cultural sector: difficult cuts in this year, with more to come.
But politician of all parties say they value culture. They would be mad not to. From the striking figures of Gormley to the beautiful Brits waltzing up the red carpet to receive their Ivors and their Oscars, the evidence of success is all around us.
So is the relationship between culture and politics good? Sadly not, I fear. The Conservative-Lib Dem alliance in government has been quick to set an emergency budget requiring government departments to cut spending with speed. The contribution that the public purse makes to arts and culture is going to decline; the question is how fast, and what will get left behind, but I don’t think we should give up and accept that there is no way to justify public support for arts and culture now.
To argue in favour of public funding for culture, three things are required: first, for the money to be spent in the most efficient way possible; secondly, for the quality of the work to be nothing less than the best, and finally to explain the true “value for money” of culture.
On efficiency, I believe most organisations understand this. It might mean making tough choices in the short term, but more importantly I would support more co-operative working between organisations where services or staff can be shared and better prices negotiated.
On quality, the public will not understand if, while they are facing cuts in public services all around them, they perceive public money to be spent on culture that is repetitive or uninspiring. Of course, this is a matter of taste, but it’s a challenge to the arts in Britain to show us yet again the force of their contribution to our country, and I know it’s a challenge that the arts will relish. We are the country that gave the world Shakespeare and The Beatles, Simon Armitage and Yinka Shonibare. The British public will understand why tax payers pay for art, but only if it is world class.
Finally, I think that we need to make the following argument in favour of sustaining public funding for culture:
We absolutely need to reduce the budget deficit. This should be a priority. But the deficit was not caused by overspending on the arts and it will not be solved by cutting the cultural sector in half. It was caused by a speculative bubble in the financial services sector, which burst, removing credit from many. A liquidity crisis in the banking sector, in addition to bank failure, removed confidence and put people out of work. This increased benefits claims and reduced tax receipts. Hence the deficit.
If we stopped every penny of public spending on the arts immediately it would make little difference to the scale of the deficit, but every child currently inspired by seeing a beautiful Turner in the National Gallery would only be able to look at it in a book instead, for the sake of savings that will have very little effect on the scale of the deficit in the long term.
The deficit must be addressed by getting people back to work. This must be the priority.
Also, if organisations face drastic cuts in funding, it harms the possibility for development. The government can reprioritise lottery funding towards arts and cultural organisations, but if you are suddenly required to lose members of staff it’s going to be ever harder to find the time to make that application to the lottery. It’s unrealistic to expect that these welcome capital funds will address the difficult times ahead, managing budgets year on year.
The great Keynesian insight that the government should work against the economic cycle is understood by many in politics. My hope, as a new Member of Parliament, is to persuade them of Keynes’s other great perception: the public value of art.
A new report on craft and the economic and social contribution of its makers is one of the most significant pieces of research by the Crafts Council for a decade, says Karen Yair, the council’s research and information manager
The report, Making Value, puts craft squarely within the creative knowledge economy and provides fresh, vibrant evidence of the entrepreneurship, energy and integrity that makers bring to their work. And it gives us the message – loud and clear – that craft has a unique role to play in a changing economy and society.
We have found makers engaging in a far greater range of places, and with more different types of people, than has previously been realised or recorded.
The research comes at a crucial time. The past 15 years have been incredibly productive for the UK’s creativity and innovation, and craft has been a part of that success. The craft sector now makes a £3 billion contribution to the UK economy, and represents 13% of those employed in the UK’s creative industries. And however the world has changed, we believe that craft has a substantial part to play in the future. Making Value helps us to show the great contribution of makers in many different contexts and in sometimes unexpected ways. While many craft businesses are small-scale, they display great creativity, innovation and resilience.
We commissioned it to explore the characteristics of portfolio working makers and appraise their contributions to a range of industry sectors and community and education settings. Portfolio working is prevalent in the contemporary craft sector: other quantitative studies show 65 – 70% of makers creating their careers in this way. Making Value investigates the nature and impact of these makers who are working “beyond the making, exhibition and sale of a craft object”.
Of the portfolio working makers we interviewed, over three quarters work in other industry sectors; over half in community contexts; and just over a third work in education settings. And nearly a third of them are making across at least two of these three areas. We have found makers engaging in a far greater range of places, and with more different types of people than has previously been realised or recorded. From fashion to film, hospitals to heritage, manufacturing to mental health projects and from retailing to residential courses, these makers are highly motivated in applying their practice to make a difference. Their stories provide a rich and nuanced picture.
Makers with a portfolio practice take on multiple roles, consciously presenting themselves in different ways for different audiences, markets and areas of work. They have a deep sense of integrity about their creative identity and move with agility between different projects, finding creative impetus in their engagement with other sectors and settings.
They have developed their craft knowledges and craft thinking into valuable consultancy services, applying their understanding of the emotive qualities of materials to design which enhances narrative and characterisation in film, television, the performing arts and digital media. They contribute to economic growth in sectors such as manufacturing, driving innovation in products and processes through their materials knowledge. Their particular understanding of how people relate to material qualities and objects, in both a functional and emotional sense, informs distinctive contributions in fields as diverse as healthcare and cultural tourism.
In terms of craft and the social contribution of makers, through making, participants attain a sense of achievement and ownership; experience the enjoyment of the immediacy and concreteness of materials; and build confidence, self esteem and a sense of value.
Monica Ferguson, chief executive of The Stables and Festival Director of IF: Milton Keynes International Festival – this year running between July 16 and 25 - reflects on the challenge of staging a new festival from scratch within 18 months.
When I was asked by Sally Abbott of Arts Council England, South East, to rendezvous in central Milton Keynes with representatives from Milton Keynes Theatre & Gallery Company, little did I know what I was about to get us into. That was back in February 2009, with thick snow underfoot.
Milton Keynes is set to become the tenth largest city in the UK by 2031, and having recently celebrated its 40th birthday it is turning out to be a great place to live, work and visit. Whether you are into extreme sports, beautiful parks, shopping or large-scale theatre, contemporary arts and music, you will find it in Milton Keynes. But compare it to Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton or any of the other major cities, and you would be forgiven for thinking it lacked a certain cultural vibrancy.
Our challenge that snowy day in February was to devise a project to attract the best artists and producers to Milton Keynes, and to create a vehicle for developing the arts infrastructure that would be appropriate for the burgeoning city.
We agreed on a festival format to be staged every two years. With 2010 marking the 40th anniversary of The Stables, my board had the courage and vision to see this as a great opportunity, and before long I found myself with my hand in the air offering to drive it forward as director. From that moment on my life was to change dramatically.
Every weekend spent standing in muddy fields at festivals around the UK, days spent in transit to international festivals and events, and finally Bill Gee walked into my world. As one of the UK’s leading producers of outdoor events and chair of the independent street arts network, I hadn’t envisaged we could have tempted him to Milton Keynes, but we did and our horizons shifted to another stratosphere.
With initial an investment of £462,000 from ACE, SE we established a steering group of stakeholders from across the city, set an artistic vision of engaging people with music and sound in surprising ways and decided to let the city be the stage by using temporary spaces and found places to stage and make work.
Bill got very excited by Midsummer Boulevard, the ancient ley line on which Milton Keynes is orientated, and on which the sun rises and sets on Midsummer’s Day. The city centre from Station Square to Campbell Park is a two-mile stretch, so much shoe leather was shed pounding the streets to find the right locations. Putting together the rest of the team, establishing the brand values, name and design without having programmed a thing. IF only we had more time…
Search launched to find private funder to fill subsidy holes after Osborne challenge
The National Campaign for the Arts have joined forces with Arts & Business to create a new forum to “reanimate” private sector cultural support to meet the government’s challenge for alternative funding.
Twenty forum members will be elected by the combined membership of the two organisations’ of 1,650 member bodies, focussing at first on England.
“The forum will be the independent voice for the arts focusing on the immediate needs of the arts and the role of the private sector in helping to deliver those needs” said Louise de Winter, director of the NCA. “It will be democratically elected ensuring that voices from large and small, metropolitan and regional organisations are represented. We will be offering the forum as the consultative group that the government can work with to make the best decisions for our cultural funding ecology going forward.”
It is to go into action almost immediately. The formal call for candidates was made yesterday, and the first dialogue of the elected forum members wil take place before the end of July.
Colin Tweedy, chief executive of A&B , said: “The chancellor has challenged the nation to begin a dialogue on the way forward. Arts & Business with the NCA are immediately responding by creating a dialogue with our combined arts memberships of over 1,650 cultural bodies, to identify the impact of where cuts might fall, where growth can come and how we can build our collective cultural capacity for the future.”
Winter added that arts organisations were particularly vulnerable to local authority spending cuts. “It is often those organisations away from the metropolitan centres that struggle with business and private funding” she said. “This forum provides an opportunity for the sector to identify strengths and weaknesses and create a platform on which arts organisations can build stronger relations with private funders, particularly in the regions.”
AI Profile, Julia Fawcett OBE, chief executive of The Lowry
There’s a sweet symmetry to Julia Fawcett’s success at The Lowry as it celebrates its tenth anniversary. She grew up at the Quays and a few hundred yards from the dock gates in a Coronation Street terrace – the soap is set in Salford, not Manchester.
“I went to school on Trafford Road and grew up there in the late 70s when the docks closed down” she says. “At the end of the street the fence was the beginning of the Quays and docklands, so every day I could look through and see increasingly derelict wastelands. The docks were major employers in the region, so when the gates closed the effect was profound.”
The Salford L S Lowry knew and painted rapidly disappeared during Fawcett’s childhood, and the family was moved to nearby Eccles when her home was demolished.
“Salford had a massive influence on me when I was growing up, and there weren’t many chances to develop aspirations” she says. Her dad is a manual labourer, her mum works on the Tesco’s check-out, and most of the boys in her peer group looked towards Old Trafford as the only way out with the examples of Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs fuelling their impossible dreams.
Early on Julia decided her way out was acting, and her hopes took her away from Salford and its seemingly inexorable decline. But in the 90s the city council, inspired by the promise of the National Lottery, was planning the Quays’ revival, with a gleaming stainless steel £106m arts venue designed by Michael Wilford that opened in 2000. It was supposed to be the heart of a revival for one of the most depressed post-industrial estates in the country and the Millennium Commission adopted it as one of the landmark projects for the new century.
By the time Fawcett arrived back in 2002, however, the Lowry, as it had been named after Salford’s most famous son, was in financial trouble, its future seriously in doubt, “a white elephant that scars the landscape” as Fawcett describes the way it was being perceived, and the Millennium Commission stepping in to see what could be salvaged.
Under her guidance, the white elephant was to become the catalyst for the Renaissance the city council had lost hope for, luring the Imperial War Museum to Trafford Park for Daniel Libeskind to create its northern branch, building a footbridge across the Ship Canal, and inspiring the BBC to start developing what will be Media City.
The 18-year-old Julia Fawcett went to Bristol University to study drama, film and TV, intending to start an acting career on graduation. But she needed to pay the rent and came back to Manchester to conduct tours of the Coronation Street studios and “taking the opportunity to move into the leisure industry” with the Granada giant. As well as making staple TV series, Granada was the third largest leisure group after Madam Tussauds and Pearsons, involved in theme parks, hotels, cinemas and bingo halls.
“I was developing my own skills set, though I had no career plan and was still looking at what I thought was going to be a long term acting career. It never happened, and you take the opportunities as they arrive” Fawcett philosophises.
She moved through the ranks of company as Granada was watching the arrival of the National Lottery with some scepticism, and at the often beautiful architecture and bad business plans of the Millennium projects racing for the 21st century. Fawcett saw with incredulity the banner ads on Manchester buses for the forthcoming Lowry.
Before it opened, however, she had gone north, drawn by another lottery project, Edinburgh’s Our Dynamic Earth science museum, as chief executive. She found an assumption that because it was in the city centre it was bound to be a success, despite the fact that science centres around the world had never generated more than half of turnover, and there was no revenue subsidy for this one. “The thing that sold it for me was the ability to take the rigours of the Granada process and apply them to a public facility to really make an asset work and generate a return. I had the opportunity to influence some of design elements, the revenue generating areas, the freedom to build up a team. it was a real experiment, quite bold, and of course very risky on the basis that there hadn’t been a great predecessor, Earth Centre in Doncaster”. The £60m Earth Centre opened in 1999, went bankrupt and closed in 2004.
Five years later she was back in Manchester, lured by an anxious Millennium Commission who wanted to know if she could turn the Lowry around. She was still only 37.
“They didn’t know I was from Salford. One of the Millennium Commission people said ‘It really is in a bad way financially, a tough one to crack, lots to be done, been massively successful in getting itself out of the ground, but glue holding it together missing’” Fawcett recalls. “Millions of visitors had come in its first year but the number dwindled quickly, and behind the scenes was incredible financial instability and escalating revenue loses, a failure of confidence from key stakeholder, the Arts Council and Millennium Commission pressing for significant change in organization”. The staff were exhausted, and regulatory monitors had been put in to oversee practically every department. It was inward-looking and had lost confidence in itself.
In two years she turned the institution around. “So much of what they’d done was absolutely right: the artistic programme was very ambition, the art director Robert Robson was here right from the start and is still doing a fantastic job. But the board needed to be open in terms of the challenges, the stakeholders up front in terms of issues, and the whole thing had to be wrapped round an optimism that if we could crack the things that weren’t working what was here could make it extremely successful” Fawcett says.
She took catering franchises back to optimise profits going back in the running, built an office block to lease out space, made co-production partnerships, and used publicity to bring the community in for the Lowry to “keep its feet in Salford Docks”. The art galleries are now free, the three auditoriums are ticketed, and the footfall is now 800,000 a year. Fawcett gets a subsidy of £1m from Salford and £1m from ACE, but earns 85% of her turnover.
“It looked very ropey in 2002 in terms of whether we could pull it off, but we emerged out of the crisis and made good our commitments to the community, which wouldn’t have been possible eight years ago” she says.
It was hard but rewarding, financially as well as spiritually, yet the financial recognition of what she had achieved also brought her lowest point when the Manchester Evening News revealed that in 2007 she was paid £310,000, with her salary of £125,000 augmented by a £185,000 bonus.
“I don’t think anyone should justify their own salary, it’s not for me to do, but it was a difficult period for organisation and for the board, and certainly difficult time for me personally” she says. “But it was a long time ago, rather I’d rather focus on what has been achieved, the sustainability of the organization. I’m very confident about the future for the Lowry, and that story is bigger than any about remuneration.”
The Lowry offers drama, opera, ballet, dance, musicals, children’s shows, popular music, jazz, folk and comedy and gallery spaces in its three auditoriums and 1,600 square metres of gallery space showing Lowry’s work alongside contemporary art.
A couple of years later Fawcett had to wade into a public row over the sudden announcement of the Royal Opera House’s plan to establish a northern branch in Manchester’s Palace Theatre, a direct challenge the Lowry’s growing reputation for offering touring opera and ballet.
“We had been talking to the Royal Opera House for more than three years about partnership, but what happened was that another conversation was taking place elsewhere and a proposal was developing at a rate of knots. It took a year for us to publicly come out and say we were not for this Palace plan. We had to try to influence the way it was shaping, because this way the cultural ecology of the region would be shaped differently”. She and her board campaigned, got the support of local MPs and eventually the culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, so that a new partnership has been forged involving the Lowry, the Palace, Covent Garden and other companies including Leeds-based Opera North.
The result is a harmonious relationship with the Royal Opera House which has resulted in the first chance to see an exhibition from the Covent Garden archive about he Royal Ballet with previously unseen images and untold backstage stories. Another exhibition resulting from the association reveals L S Lowry’s involvement in ballet and hoi music and dance influenced his work. To coincide with the opening of the exhibitions in the autumn, the Royal Ballet’s director Dame Monica Mason has created a piece which will be performed by the Royal Ballet, and a new piece by Will Tuckett is to be performed in the Lowry’s studio theatre.
Even most satisfying for Fawcett has been the scheme whereby 50 young school leavers from Salford have been given internships in every department of the Lowry, to give them “opportunity lines” and a way out of the bind she had to go to Bristol to find.
The Lowry is part of the North West’s 21st success story, but much of the success is owed to the mournful a little girls had as she peered through a fence at the wasteland that had been an early 20h century success story for the region. “It’s so important to me” she says. “It’s central to everything that drives the vision and the work I do here, and the future for Salford Quays is exciting thanks to the Lowry.”
In an old school annexe in South London, a dance studio has become a hotbed of cross-arts creativity. Simon Tait explored
The building at 85 St George’s Road behind the Imperial War Museum in Southwark looks like a Dr Who transformation of a much loved old pile into a whimsical monster, with its ribbed sky blue roof emerging from the familiar dirty yellow London brick.
In a way it is. In 2005 the Charlotte Sharman school annexe was transformed in an award-winning piece of architectural sleight of hand by Sarah Wigglesworth to become the Siobhan Davies Studios, less a building than a crucible in which dance and other artforms are made alongside, and influencing, eachother.
Siobhan Davies – Sue – is our leading contemporary choreographer who for almost 40 years and to international acclaim has been exploring dance and choreography and how they are experienced, particularly at Sadler’s Wells and through site orientated work (most recently at the Victoria Miro Gallery). She was awarded the CBE in 2002.
She is still exploring, and now based her own studios. “Initially we wanted a place where contemporary dancers should feel honoured, a place that fitted their purpose, and then from that security they can build up other energies, and the strength to feel valued as an independent artist” she says.
“But my second thought was that I don’t want just a home, I want far more – a secure place from which to become brave and rattle its walls with new ideas and information, testing the work that takes place in this building.”
And that requires getting information from other artforms, which for Sue began with Sarah Wigglesworth in devising the building within a building. That conversation lasted at least four years before the concept they contrived together was finished at Christmas 2005. Sue became absorbed in every aspect of the making of the building, she learnt about structural engineering and the craft the plasterer who use danimal hair as a binding agent in the traditional way.
The first feature of the building is the light which seems to fill every corner. Dotted through the three floors are pieces of ceramic and glass art by students from the Royal College of Art as part of its current contemporary exhibition. On the top floor, the theatre company Punchdrunk are in raucous rehearsal whose noise somehow doesn’t pervade downwards.
Sue Davies is perched in her tiny office pecking at Melba toast with a spread which she calls a sandwich: at nearly 60 she is impossibly lithe. On this ground floor is a curiously silent flurry of activity because Siobhan Davies, to distinguish the company from its leader, has a lot on.
The company has created a dance, Differences, for the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July, a collaboration that came after Sue had rediscovered poetry a year ago, and subsequent conversations with leading poets like David Harsent, Alice Oswald and Don Paterson. They confirmed that the art forms have much more in common than differences. Paterson told her “Each of the arts is tempered by its sister arts”, and that became a key. “If we don’t recognise eachother’s work and learn from it we’re losing out, and the audience is losing out and may forget to take information from one artform to another. We can ask the audience to make the horizontal leap”.
The glass and ceramics, Out of Practice, is an assignment for MA students who, after Sue had made the link with the tutors, were told to go to the building where their work would be seen and be inspired by either it or the activities within it. “These artists have brought such a wit, as well as beautifully made objects” she says.
It will be followed next month by 60/40, in which a textiles maker, a furniture maker and a potter will produce work also inspired by the studios’ ecology, and in which they will explore the blurred line between craft and art – Sue says the right word for both kinds of exponents is “maker”.
Then there is Big Dance, the London-wide festival devised to encourage children to, if not go perform them, to find interest in dance. The studios have become the south London hub, and Davies’s team is working with 270 schoolchildren. “Not everybody wants to dance, and if we trigger the right response there are other ways of intriguing them – they could be writing about dance, photographing it, filming it, and you begin to open up doorways not only to what dance is about but how we all learn and explore the world through movement”.
And they are working on a project, called Rotor, which will be performed in the autumn. Sue has created “a tightly structured compact dance” and invited a composer, a ceramicist, a playwright, a poet, a visual artist and a filmmaker to see it and accept a challenge to work from it.
“The whole project is complex. Each of he artists has rotated their work out of the dance using their particular mediums. The building will have eight artists’ responses placed throughout, each brought into being by observing the dance”. What it will not be is a jumble of different artforms somehow trying to interlace with eachother: each will be a separate event with the audience taking their own path through each one.”
Sue Davies isn’t currently making dance for theatre. In 2001 she made a piece which contained theatrical elements which was performed in Victoria Miro’s art gallery, and last year when she was given the opportunity to be in that space again, she made the work differently and specifically choreographed for an art gallery.
“With theatre, there’s a chasm between the audience and the performance” she says. “I am incredibly intrigued by the detail of observing an audience’s response to a live dancer close up.”
Buildings have a way of creating a their own impression which can influence the perception of the art, which is not fair on the art or the audience.
Dance, she says, can be so much more than it is recognised to be, both on its own terms and alongside other artforms. “The combination of thinking and physically doing is what makes this is a distinct artform. Choreography can exist just as well without a dancer, and the glorious thing is that when a choreographic practice on its own terms joins up with an articulate and knowledgeable dancer, you get two engines working together to make something with which an audience can connect.”
A unique, fun, digital-dance event created by teenagers for themselves, their families and the general public is to open on 23 June in an empty shop in Coventry’s City Arcade. Cathy Connan reports
The Bubble Chamber, being produced by Mercurial Dance, is a three year project exploring the artistic dialogue between technological spaces, visual imagery, live performance and non-conventional performance spaces.
The first “installation” is being created by pupils from Coventry’s Cardinal Wiseman Catholic School and Language College ,and over time more and more young people will be engaged on further installations taking place in cities throughout the West Midlands.
Each will build on the previous one, and the whole project will culminate in a major event to celebrate all that will be achieved throughout the period.
The Bubble Chamber is the brainchild of Oliver Scott. Artistic director and choreographer, Oliver set up Mercurial Dance in 2003 to explore the integration of dance and technology. Young people are at the core of his work as an artist: creating work with them, for them to perform to their families and friends; and creating work for them to immerse themselves in, to experience and to enjoy. His artistic foundation is dance and his work embraces a style that is physical, fluid and immediate. His technique explores the integration of new dance & release-based traditions with contact improvisation and martial arts forms.
While utterly original, the Bubble Chamber is typical of his work. Explaining the project, Oliver said that he is exploring a number of fascinating questions with the pupils. “How can we create a space within which the audience will want to dance and move? How does the interaction between the body, the projected image and the tracking across a screen affect choreography? How do people respond to space and engage with it and how can we exploit the potential of technology in this context?
“So far the students from Cardinal Wiseman are relishing the challenge and are using dance, live images and video to turn an empty room into a space with eyes and ears, responding and changing as viewers move through it.
“They are also getting the chance to develop their skills in dance and technology, using the professional software application ISADORA, which is rarely if ever taught to young people.”
The students began by creating mind maps of their ideas for the project and fixing them all over the walls of the space so they can look back at their ideas throughout the creative process.
They then tested their choreography in front of the digital sensors, using ISADORA to turn their work into a matrix-style display. They used cameras and projections to duplicate their movements across the space and used the projections to critique and improve their own movement as they created it.
“Everything is beginning to come together now,” said Oliver. “We are incredibly excited about the launch on June 23.”
