The Scottish government plans to maintain overall spending on culture, despite a cut in the government’s budget.
Culture minister Michael Russell said that he would continue to spend on his major priorities - setting up Creative Scotland, support for Gaelic culture and promoting Scotland abroad. However, he admitted this will mean cuts in support for “innovative cultural initiatives.”
He added that the Scottish government would continue backing major capital projects to widen access to Scotland’s national archives and collections.
The budget for Scotland’s National Performing Companies, which was originally meant to be £27.4 million is down to £26 million.
Local government supported arts organisations are also likely to face reductions, say observers, as the budget will mean a cut in grants to local authorities.
The Scottish Government’s draft Budget 2010-11 is published at: www.scotland.gov.uk/draftbudget2010-11

The Hippodrome theatre in Ashton under Lyme has been saved from demolition after English Heritage listed the building.
The Grade II listing means that owners Tameside Council cannot go ahead with plans to demolish the 1904 theatre and sell the site to developers. The theatre was closed in March 2008 after the council said it could not afford the £3 million to make it fit for use. The theatre was marketed in June but failed to attract a buyer, leaving the council with no alternative but recommend its demolition, say officials.
But campaigners lobbied for the building to be restored as a theatre and pressed for the listing.
Cllr Kieran Quinn, executive member for economic services, said the decision to list the building was “ disappointing”. He added,”We need time to think through the implications of what has happened.”
• In Derby a campaign group has been formed to lobby for a £14 million development plan for the threatened Hippodrome theatre there.
They want Derby City Council to restore the theatre as part of a regeneration scheme. The council stopped owner Christopher Anthony from demolishing part of the building without permission last year and is considering a planning application for full demolition. .
|The alternative proposal would see the Hippodrome with a modernised auditorium and new fly tower and an additional storey built to house a restaurant.

North East Somerset Arts (nesa) fears that it may have to lay off staff and cut its local projects because of a £25,000 shortfall in funding.

The community arts group, which runs projects to help vulnerable groups such as those with mental health difficulties or hard to reach young people, says that its income from trusts and foundations has dwindled as a result of the recession and public sector funding is likely to fall from next year.

Describing the shortfall as a “crisis,” nesa director Lesley Featherstone said,” There is much less money available this year, and more people going for it.” The arts organisation, which has been working with artists on small community based projects since 1981 is not a regularly funded organisation, but received money from the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts awards and from the local council.

But Ms Featherstone said the local authority had also warned of cuts in non-statutory provision from next year. “That presumably means us.” Funding for youth projects with nesa had been cut 18 months ago, she said.

Unless the shortfall is bridged, nesa will have to shed jobs and her own post would have to go part-time, she said.

ENDS

27 Feb 2008. Starting today, Dea Birkett, director of the charity Kids in Museums, starts a regular column

I’m cynical about the power of the press. I don’t mean that I’m anti-media. How could I be? My roots are in writing, broadcasting and journalism. I’m a great admirer of those who produce stories that millions want to listen to, watch or read every day. My cynicism is about the point of it all.

Last month we launched the 2009 Kids in Museums Manifesto – 20 ways to make a visit family friendly - compiled from visitors’ comments. The press coverage was, and continues to be, considerable, including in this magazine. It began on the day of the launch with news features in three national newspapers; it’s always best to get on the news rather than arts or features pages. For a start, the news pages are generally read by far more people. And, more importantly perhaps, they’re the place other media outlets - in particular radio and TV - pick up their stories. For example, our news feature in the Telegraph led to about a dozen calls from radio stations asking for interviews later that day. If we’d had a feature on the arts pages, this would never have happened.

During the following few days, comment pieces appeared in response to the news features. These led, in turn, to letters on the letter pages. This variety of sections kept the debate about welcoming everyone in museums going. In terms of column inches, the launch was a triumph.

But is column inches and interviews a good way to assess the success of media coverage in the arts? I once attended a press seminar for museum professionals given by David Yelland, former editor of the The Sun newspaper. He said straight away that there was not point in museums chasing national coverage. His argument was that if they wanted to pull in the punters, they should put up a notice in the local Tesco. Far more people would read it than any national newspaper article and, as a result, far more people attend your exhibition. It also required minimal effort and no cost.

I know any arts PR person reading this will be shaking their head at this point. They want to slap down a pile of double page spreads in front of their client to prove what good coverage they secured. But big isn’t beautiful if it’s in a paper few read (and that includes at least one national) or in a section that only the converted turn to. (An arts page review might only be read by people who were going to go to the event anyway, rather than attract new audiences.) With press coverage, size really does matter. But not as you might imagine. Often the smaller, the better. A single column is far more widely read than any 1200 word feature.

It’s important for all organisations, and particularly those working within the arts sector, to ask what’s the point of press coverage. Why do we want to attract attention and from whom? And what would we consider a good outcome of this coverage?

For our launch, we wanted to achieve two outcomes. First, we are a visitor-led and focussed organisation so it’s important that visitors and potential visitors learn about our work. The coverage on local radio helped in this enormously. People don’t tend to get involved with something promoted in a national newspaper but do if they hear about it on Wolverhampton City Radio, where it sounds as if it’s meant for them.

Secondly, we wanted to put the issue of museums being welcome to all, of any age, on the arts agenda and before opinion formers. The national coverage has been particularly useful in this, with the comment pieces at the heart of drawing this attention. Without them, and the ensuing letters, the issue would just have been a story that lasted for the day. Now it’s a subject of debate. It’s just important for us to remember that these are two different audiences, reached through different media outlets.

And, of course, that’s without tackling the internet as a media tool. But then I’ll do that next month …

To order a copy of the 2009 Kids in Museums Manifesto email manifesto@kidsinimuseums.org.uk. You can also join the discussion boards at www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk.

News makes drama at the Pleasance Edinburgh starting tomorrow as part of the Fringe when A British Subject opens. It’s by the actor Nichola McAuliffe and tells of a British subject in the little sentenced to death in Pakistan for allegedly shooting a taxi driver. Prince Charles got involved, and an official visit was almost called off when the then Pakistani president climbed down. The freed man now lives somewhere in Surrey, but credit was given to Amnesty International for negotiating his release, when actually it was down to HRH and a conversation in a lift, according to the play. And how does McAuliffe, best known to telly viewers as the crusty lady sawbones in the sitcom Surgical Spirit, know so much about it? She happens to be married to the Daily Mirror reporter Don Mackay who ferreted the story out in the first place and stuck with it

Sad news from the campus at Dartington where musical adventurers are gathering for the give weeks of the Dartington Summer School. Gavin Henderson, the subject of the AI Profile last time, has resigned as director just as he celebrates 25 years in the job. He will stand down after next year’s summer school. He won’t talk about it, but it appears that the reason is that accommodation at the site is going to be effectively cut by more than a third. The 1,200 acre site is the base for the Dartington Hall Trust which runs a series of charitable programmes there, including the summer school, and it was where the progressive Dartington Hall School was founded in the 1920s by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst and it was the alma mater for the likes of Lucien Freud and Michael Young, founder of the Open University. It closed in 1987, but the college of arts continued and expanded, and Dartington it was a happy place for many years. Times have changed though, and the college cannot afford to stand-alone any longer, so is moving to join University College Falmouth. Accommodation for the summer school has always been problematic, and when the school closed became student accommodation providing 160 beds; now it’s to be converted into retirement homes, and that will mean trimming the summer school dramatically. It means Henderson won’t be able to beat the record of the summer school’s fonder, William Glock, who was its director for 30 years.

The Sustain awards – the first handouts from the £40m pot the Arts Council set up in June as a hedge against the effects of recession for RFOs - were pretty good news for the ten who got some cash out of it this week, but ACE were rather selective in the way they put the story out. The press release actually announced five of them, mostly comfy regional organisations – Ikon in and the dance Consortium in Birmingham, Nottingham Playhouse, South Hill Park in Bracknell, and together they didn’t get as much as th e fifth on the list, ENO. What isn’t in the press release, and you have to persevere through links and references to find them, is that other five are nearly all are very big fish: the Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, plus British Youth Opera and the Derby-based Sinfonia Viva. And of the £4m dished out, more than £3m has gone to ENO, the ROH, WNO (which also got £300,00 from the Welsh Arts Council) and the RPO which will not be lost on those who watch ACE’s alleged preoccupation with its big favourites first out with the begging bowl, and the Great Wen. There were 87 applications, and more grants are coming this month and next, but two have actually been turned down: New Writing North in Newcastle and the Everyman in Cheltenham, we’re not told why or how much the wanted.

AI Profile - Patrick Spottiswoode

Work has just begun on creating the Shakespeare Globe’s £6m education and rehearsal centre in what used to be the theatre’s headquarters, known as the Bear Gardens. It’s a very fitting way to mark the 25th anniversary of the arrival of the director of education, Patrick Spottiswoode.

There’s an historical symmetry about Globe Education going back in the Bear Gardens, 50 yards away from where the theatre now stands. It was from this ramshackle Victorian corner building in Park Street that Sam Wanamaker conceived what has become Shakespeare’s Globe, a recreation of the theatre Shakespeare and Burbage built which has become as much a part of the London tour as Tower Bridge and the London Eye.

But the whole thing started as an education project, something the callow Patrick Spottiswoode was unaware of when he turned up for an interview.

“I saw the ad in the Guardian, ‘museum manager’, and it said there were two theatres to manage, an exhibition, a shop, a café… I thought I was going to the Barbican”. The two theatres turned out to be a room and a 30-seater auditorium, the exhibition was a ramshackle collection of theatrical memorabilia, with a vast stuffed bear at the entrance, and the café was a kettle. Exhibition were an eclectic mix of Sam’s interests, from bear and bull baiting to the trade union movement to Thames watermen.

But he was caught by the Wanamaker dream. A Warwick University PhD student suffering from second year PhD ennui he was looking for something to fill a year’s break from his paper on Sydney, Spenser and Shakespeare, and he has never picked up that particular pen again.

Instead he became Wanamaker’s amanuensis, keeper of the flame Sam had lit of finding out about how drama worked for Shakespeare by remaking his theatre.

Robot technology is becoming more a d more sophisticated, and although they may not be about to take over the world, are they about to make important contributions to the arts world? Simon Tait meets the man behind RoboThespians, Will Jackson.

How closely related are theatre and the latest generation of robots? Is the connection the art, the mechanics, the humour? Is the difference computer technology? Actually, the relationship is pretty damn close.

Next year could see their coming of age when they take part in a play at a new science centre opening in Warsaw next year.

The moving, talking, singing, acting, sort-of-dancing RoboThespian, or RT, whose eyelids even close over his moving eyeballs as he speaks, has been developed in Cornwall by Engineered Arts whose director is Will Jackson.

He had studied 3D design before finding himself in the film industry making advertising movies – RT’s earliest ancestor, believe it or not, is the furry pink rabbit of the Duracel ad. He went to New York where his textile designer partner Tracy had work, but he found Madison Avenue well paid but, well, dull, and they moved on to Australia for a couple of years, working on animation.

He began building his own machines, specifically unique slot machines, working with the automaton designer Tim Hunkin, and some of Will’s creations are still part of Tim’s Under the Pier collection at Southwold in Sufolk.

Together they worked on the Science Museum’s The Secret Life of the Home – Will has a knack of getting to what children really need to know, and developed the cut-in-half-toilet to show exactly where the poo goes.

Then came Cornwall’s Eden Project, the “biomes” which constitute more than a green theme park for which he and Paul Spooner, another artist working with automaton machines who uses his carving genius to make his pieces, created figures that would show what the world would be without plants.

The Arts Award started in October 2005 giving an accredited qualification to young people in everything from rock music to photography. As Nick Beach, deputy director of performing and creative arts at Trinity College London, it’s coming of age.

It used to be hard for colleges to take artistic capability seriously, simply because it was difficult to quantify. Now, it is a genuine key to university life for youngsters who might never have thought of it.

And it’s down to the Arts Award.

Launched by ACE four years ago, it is the first accredited award scheme to recognise young people’s development through the arts. More than that, this national qualification for young people aged 11-25, Arts Award supports students to develop as artists and arts leaders, and it’s working.

Arts Award – offered at three levels, bronze, silver and gold – is being used by the Universities of Hertfordshire, Southampton and University of the Arts London to reach young people who might not have considered going on to higher education by giving them a flavour of university life.

“Delivering the Arts Award in a university setting has made a real difference to participants and how they perceive higher education, and knowing they have as much right to participate in university as everyone else” says Ronda Gowland, Arts Award adviser for the John Hansard Gallery at Southampton University.

Ronda’s team has led over 30 young people on intensive supervision and surveillance programmes (ISSP) through their bronze qualification, supporting 16 year-old Carl Morgan, to achieve a gold award earlier this year who is aiming for an art foundation course next academic year.

“I learned that I can express my views through art and that there are lots of things young people can do in the arts” he says Carl. “It helped me to learn to be more focused and think about what I want to do in the future.”