Three gents called Jungle Leaders may seem unlikely propaganda agents for the tax man, but that’s what they became this week. They are a leading popular music combo from Sierra Leone who are not unknown here – last year they toured London and Manchester as well as Berlin and Eindhoven – and the subject of their expected latest hit is entitled, um, the Goods and Services Tax. Back home in Freetown, SL’s capital, the government has introduced this new tax, with the help of our own Crown Agents, but the problem was how to get the message across. There’s a high degree of illiteracy in the country struggling to recover from civil war, but also a devotion to music of the kind Messrs Leaders (Handel Metzer, Sahr Josiah and Alfred Mansaray) purvey. So what the National Revenue Authority has done is to commission a song about GST from the lads but with the lyrics in the Creole argot, and this week they pushed it out to the nightclubs, radio stations, DJs and discotheques that proliferate in the former Portuguese colony, with every expectation that it would hit the top of the charts, if SL had charts. Alfred Akibo, Sierra Leone’s assistant commissioner for the scheme, says it’s efficient, reducing admin costs for businesses but raising vital revenue for the government. “During training sessions in preparation for GST we asked members of our staff to think about phrases that would highlight the advantages of the new system over the old. They came up with almost 100 slogans, and we gave this list to the Jungle Leaders who composed a song incorporating these messages”. And the shoe-in hit has the catchy title and chorus of “Pay de tax, pay de tax”, with no hint of embarrassment.
News focus
Four arts partnerships across the UK involving 23 organisations have been awarded a share of £260,000 to develop future leaders.
The money comes in the second round of the Meeting the Challenge initiative run by the ACE-based Cultural Leadership Programme (CLP).
All the projects will run for 18 months using activities including placements, secondments, networking, coaching and mentoring, and will benefit from the support of a lead advisor provided by the CLP.
It is the second manfestation of the scheme launched at a closed conference in April of last year as the first major programme after CLP’s one-of funding of £12m for two years direct from the Treasury was confirmed with a further £10m , after which 20 cultural instituions shared £200,000 so that organisations like Tate Modern, the Royal Opera House, Farnham Maltings, the National Theatre, the PRS Foundation and the Serpentine Gallery were able to work together to bring on their brightest leadership talents and open a way ahead for them.
The four are:
Four York, a partnership between York Museums Trust, York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre and York City Archives and City Library which will spend £51,000 to “bring our four organisations together to help to raise cultural ambition and practice in York”;
The Leadership Lab, a north-west-based partnership of three performing and music organisations, the Performing Arts Network Development Agency, the Greater Manchester Music Action Zone and Music Leader North West, has been put together with Substance, a leading IT specialist, and gets £60,000 to develop a programme for leaders both within and outside the partner organisations.
The Associate Company Scheme is a combination of three producing companies working at the Young Vic, The Opera Group, Fevered Sleep and B3Media, which gets £50,000 for formal mentoring, consultation and advice sessions from senior Young Vic staff to create work in new collaborations which build capacity and expertise.
The Leadership and Organisational Development Programme is led by Tate and has been awarded £100,000 to develop a programme in 11 museums and art galleries in England - all of which are starting or are in the middle of capital development projects – including The Hepworth, Wakefield; BALTIC, Gateshead; Firstsite, Colchester; Ikon, Birmingham; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; mima, Middlesbrough; Newlyn The Art Exchange, Penzance; Nottingham Contemporary; Tate St Ives, Cornwall; Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; and Turner Contemporary, Margate.
More than two decades after live drama disappeared from our television screens, Sky Arts are bringing it back.
In echoes of Armchair Theatre and Play for Today of previous eras, starting in July Sky Arts: Theatre Live! will bring six new half-hour pieces from established writers – though not necessarily established as playwrights – and with a specially assembled company.
“The current debate around cultural television programme will rage on, of course, but we’re absolutely convinced that a project as innovative and entertaining as Sky Arts Theatre Live! proves just how committed we are at Sky Arts to ensuring that arts on TV thrives” said John Cassy, Sky Arts channel director, the subject of a forthcoming AI Profile.
Writers include novelists Kate Mosse and the duo Nicci Gerrard and Sean French who write as Nicci French, Michael Dobbs and comedian Jeremy Hardy. Directors will include John Alderton and among the cast will be his wife, Pauline Collins.
Each play will feature between two and four characters who will rehearse at The Orange Tree Theatre for two weeks before moving into the Sky studio. Each performance will be broadcast live in front of an invited audience of about 140 people, and performances will not stop for any reason (line fluffing, set issues, technical difficulties, actor illness) exactly as would occur in a live theatre..
Doubling as artistic producer and presenter of the series is Sandi Toksvig. “For the first quarter century of British television drama was live” she said. “Live drama has a rawness and immediacy in which anything can and did happen, including on one sad occasion the death of the leading actor (Gareth Jones in ‘Underground’ on Armchair Theatre in 1958). Now Sky Arts brings back genuine ‘reality’ television – drama as it happens, whatever happens. Vibrant, immediate, warts and all. I started my career in live television. It has an energy that cannot be found elsewhere and I am delighted to be going back.”
Too many major arts organisations are not committed to the importance of creativity in forming the British citizens of the near future. Nor is the Department of Schools Children and Families, and unless they do commit “we are doomed”.
This is the view of Paul Collard, chief executive of Creativity Culture & Education, the new identity of the recently made independent Creative Partnerships, expressed in a frank exclusive interview with AI (see page 12).
He says that too many cultural organisations believe involvement in creativity among young people is not their responsibility, and that they want to confine their activity to their own production. He also says many schools are afraid to commit to creative activities because they believe they will distract from securing the good exam results their futures may depend on.
“The question is whether art wants to make a claim to having a contribution to make to creativity - I think it’s got a massive contribution to make - or it can decide that it doesn’t want to play that game, in which case there are all sorts of other people who will do that, like scientists, mathematicians, fashion designers” he says.
His view follows the findings of a report, Get It, by the new Culture and Learning Consortium which calls for central and local government, and cultural organisations to ensure, for instance, that there is specialist training for teachers.
He also says that DCMS has been too anxious to keep the creativity agenda to itself, when the need was for all government departments to sign up to it.
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, wants to put children where they belong – with the rest of us
Who doesn’t want more for kids? Eureka!, the National Children’s Museum in Halifax, is hoping to develop a children’s museum for London in the developing King’s Cross area.
I know it sounds like an odd position for the director of an organisation called Kids in Museums, but I prefer places which aren’t just for the young. There’s a difference between more opportunities for children in museums, and more children’s museums. I personally believe that kids have the best time in a museum when there are also lots of adults there, also having a good time.
PLUS
The Great North Museum opens
AI Profile - Margot Heller, director of the transforming South London Gallery
Rolemop - drama and technological games to help the unemployed
20 Minutes with Geoff Rowe, creator of the Leicester Comedy Festival
Ann Petherick’s Rant
Simon Tait’s Diary
Making our young people creative is crucial to the nation’s future, according to a reborn Creative Partnerships, but too many key players in the arts, politics and education are not yet convinced, reports Simon Tait
Cultural heavyweights – the likes of Nick Serota, Ekow Eshun, Vikki Heywood and Carole Souter - were out in force in the lecture theatre of the RSA a month ago for the launch of a paper entitled Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning, produced by something called the Culture and Learning Consortium, a new name on the scene. In the front row, looking not a little proprietorial, was the chief executive of another new name, Creativity Culture & Education.
He is Paul Collard, who until the start of April was director of Creative Partnerships, the sometime controversial creativity programme for schools set up nearly seven years ago under the Arts Council with, in that time, an accumulated £110m of revenue funding. Since then it’s worked with almost a million young people and 5,000 schools across England, liaising with artists, arts organisations and local authorities to bring programmes to young people.
CP has now enlarged itself into CCE and the advents of the new organisation, the new consortium and the paper are all connected with the fact that, for all its cash, its 200-odd staff and its successful initiatives, the CP message still hasn’t been getting all the way home.
Some government departments, schools and even the arts and cultural institutions themselves, says Collard, have not entirely bought into the fact that creativity is, in effect, the fourth R. Unless we all get it we are doomed, he says, it’s as fundamental as that.
Up to 10,000 new jobs for young people in the cultural sector are to be created in a new joint initiative between the DCMS and the Department of Work and Pensions.
Part of the £1.1 billion Future Jobs Fund announced in the recent Budget, the scheme will allow local authorities and arts organisations to bid for funding to create new, innovative jobs.
Already UK Music, set up six months ago as a new umbrella organisation for all those involved in the music industry, has developed a programme with Jobcentre Plus to offer 200 jobs to young unemployed people in this summer’s music festivals.
Launching Lifting People, Lifting Places, culture secretary Andy Burnham said: “International recognition and awards for British talent and content show what we’re really good at. But getting in to these sectors can be hard, especially for young people and those coming from disadvantaged groups and deprived communities. The Budget announcement of a £1 billion jobs fund provides a real chance to help put this right.”
Four museums and galleries have been shortlisted for the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for 2009, which will be presented at the RIBA on June 18.
They are the Centre of New Enlightenment at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow; Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham; Ruthin Craft Centre, Denbighshire, Wales; and the Wedgwood Museum, Stoke-on-Trent.
Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery is dropping its entrance fee for one day, May 16, to launch its campaign for free admission.
The gallery, which won the £100,000 Gulbenkian Prize (now the Art Fund Prize) in 2007, hopes to be able to scrap admission charges by 2012 by raising £4m.
“This will be our contribution to the cultural and sporting celebrations which will take place in that Olympic year” said director Stefan van Raay. “It’s something we’ve always hoped to offer: free entry to everyone, for ever. It would be a lasting legacy to Chichester and the UK.”
The gallery has been building an endowment for th last seven years with the support of individuals and the Friends of Pallant House to generate the funds which will cover the costs of free admission.
Although visits went up to 35% of Britain’s museums in the six months September 2008 to March 2009, budgets were cut in 65% according to a survey for the Art Fund.
The fund expects the disparity to widen, with visitor numbers continuing to rise and budgets tightening further over the next six months.
However, the survey found that donations of money and of objects were holding steady for museums, though many are worried about future fundraising prospects and corporate support. And as visitor numbers rise, there is more reliance on volunteers to help with stretched staff resources.
David Barrie, the fund’s outgoing director, said: “It’s not good news to hear that so many museums have suffered or expect cuts, but the fact that visitors are on the up shows how much museums matter to people, especially now that times are hard.
“There is a really important message here for our political leaders: think very carefully before you risk doing lasting damage to organisations that cost relatively little to run but matter such a lot to the communities they serve.”
