The Crafts Council’s new programme Collective offers contemporary craft makers the chance to direct and develop their own professional development. Rosy Greenlees, the council’s executive director, introduces it.
Craft is a lively, entrepreneurial and independent-minded contributor to the economic, social and cultural life of the nation. Our role is to enable those at the heart of the sector to develop and grow and supporting makers has been central to the Crafts Council’s work over the last 35 years. The Crafts Council Development Award alone has helped over 1,200 new makers, including Caroline Broadhead, Tom Dixon, Thomas Heatherwick and Shelly Goldsmith, at the starting point of their careers.
However, over this period craft practice has changed and makers now have diversity of career paths and opportunities. It is crucial, therefore, that makers are supported throughout their careers extending and challenging their practice if they recognise the need to do so. With this in mind the Crafts Council has launched a comprehensive programme of support for makers. This programme, Crafts Council Collective, comprises five strands: Hothouse, designed for new and emerging makers, Injection and Artistic Licence for more established makers and Craft Rally and Portfolio for all makers. Collective will provide tailored business development, time for makers to explore their practice and take creative risks, support from peers and experts, opportunities to develop aspirational models of practice and opportunities to share knowledge, resources and advice.
Crafts Council Collective has been developed following extensive evaluation of former schemes, recommendations from the Craft Blueprint, developed in partnership with Creative & Cultural Skills and from Turning Point, Arts Council England’s ten year strategy for the visual arts. It will enable the Crafts Council to have an programme of initiatives that collectively strive to meet the needs of all 33,000 makers across the UK at all stages in their career.
The success of Collective will rely on strong partnerships with other organisations across the UK. We want to connect with exemplar regional or locally focussed schemes that already provide development and networking opportunities and extend these to a national level. Craft Rally, Portfolio and Hothouse will be delivered with a range of partners whilst Injection and Artistic License will be delivered directly by the Crafts Council. Whilst we continue to develop these programmes we will launch the first initiative, Craft Rally, in February 2010.
Craft Rally is a democratic, inclusive programme of CPD opportunity for all makers, regardless of location, discipline, point in career, or any other set boundary. Digitisation and virtual communication have revolutionised the way makers communicate and practice. Craft Rally will help connect thousands of makers many of whom work in isolation and often feel they lack peer support or networks. Craft Rally is a physical and virtual knowledge transfer network where makers can demonstrate and share innovative and aspirational models of practice. There will be four rallies per year across the country. The first Craft Rally will take place on 25 March at 45 Millbank in London and will be delivered in conjunction with ArtQuest and Yorkshire Art Space. The content of this rally and indeed all future rallies will be generated and steered by makers through a virtual network ensuring its direct relevance to the needs of the craft sector. Craft Rally is for makers, by makers.
The broader craft industry contributes £3 billion GVA (Gross Value Added) to the UK economy, greater than the visual arts, cultural heritage or literature sectors. Collective will ensure that individuals can take control of their own professional and personal development and together create sustainable models of practice for the whole sector that will define contemporary craft practice in the 21st century.
More information on all aspects of Collective in the Professional Development section at www.craftscouncil.org.uk/professional-development
AI Profile – Farooq Chaudhry, chairman, Dance UK
Danny Boyle should make a movie about the new chair of Dance UK. It would be more dramatic than Slum Dog Millionaire, with the added thrill of being true.
Farooq Chaudhry, the dancer turned business brain behind the phenomenal success of the Akram Khan Company, was born in Lahore in 1960 and was three when his parents brought him to live in West Kensington. “We came into a very white culture in London that was intensely racist, and we experienced huge amounts of discrimination” he recalls. “It had a terrible effect my family, it damaged my parents’ relationship and they split up. At 14 I ended up in care”.
And there, as in countless millions of cases, the story would have ended, an unremarkable tragedy, had it not been for an enlightened social worker who perceived a spark in the misfit adolescent. While his elder sister Mighat went back to Pakistan, he was sent to Peper Harow, a psycho-therapeutic community in Surrey for troubled young people.
“There was no formal education – I didn’t take that up till I was 19 – and I was basically self-taught” he says. At 21 he went to Sussex University to read English, but joined the dance society and after his first session went to the dean and announced he was leaving. He was going to be a dancer. “The dean was very kind. He gave me a year and said if I still wanted to leave then I could”.
Where the urge to dance came from is a mystery. His family home had been a culture-free environment, yet his sister became a renowned classical kathak dancer in Pakistan and is now influential there in cultural politics.
Chaudhry’s teacher back at Peper Harow suggested a visit to the London Contemporary Dance Theatre performing at Sadler’s Wells. “I saw amazing male dancers looking like gods, and it was love at first sight. I was mesmerised by it, I had to do it - but where could I find a contemporary dance teacher in Godalming?”
He devised an elaborate plan, creating his own dance society at Sussex for which members paid a fee, and with this he hired teachers from places like Pineapple and The Place. Whereas the club he had joined had 20 members at its fullest, in two months he had 400 members. “In six months the Observer Magazine credited as being the moist successful dance union in the country, and the wealthiest” he says. “It all came out of desire – I was dancing and at same time creating a scheme. I discovered I’m very entrepreneurial”.
In 1983 he got into The Place and joined a small group there called Images. “But there was no-one to manage it, so I volunteered, made it up as I went along, and started to raise money. I got it out of IBM, Digital, Reebok and I was inundated with offers to be administrator. But I wanted to be a dancer”.
He applied to join Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s renowned Rosas in Belgium and at the third try got in, aged 34. “I learned not only about being a dancer in a company but also to work out what was happening, the dynamic of relationships in organisatons”. He was Keersmaeker’s assistant for a year “and I began to understand the challenges, the issues and problems”.
But injuries were starting to set in, and in 1998 – by now married to Su-Man Hsu, a Taiwanese dancer – he enrolled for an arts management MA course at City, commuting from Brussels by Eurostar. “I didn’t enjoy it very much – it seemed very heretical because you disengage from practice, and there’s a tendency to idealise and romanticise the arts as some kind of social saviour, but it’s an industry”.
He joined IndepenDance, a new Arts Council sponsored agency for ex-dancers who wanted to be managers. “It was very protectionist, and it was weird working with people who has been professional for 20 or 30 years and were highly respected, but had become very cautious. But I’m an ambitious person, I like to dream, and I was frustrated, I wanted to go bigger”.
He saw a performance by the dancer Akram Khan. “I thought, wow! I liked this new language that was being spoken by bodies, a beautiful spiritual quality that comes with Asiatic aesthetics.
“Most classical/contemporary dance is monocultural, and when you get an artists able to speak more than one language in his work it’s really interesting” he says of Khan. “We spoke and there was an immediate chemistry between us - he found me as much as I found him. We both had a desire to go somewhere, I’d been offered work by various companies but wanted to grow with an artist”. He became Khan’s producer.
But Akram Khan was already £14,000 in debt, and somehow Chaudhry cleared it. He sent Khan to Keersmaeker for six months training in international techniques, and he returned brimming with ideas for a new piece. But he wanted three dancers, commissioned lighting, commissioned choreography, and Chaudhry sold his flat to pay for it.
That was Rush, which announced Akram Khan as the first cross-cultural, cross-art form choreographer, and soon he was working with Anish Kapoor, Nitin Sawhney, and even Kylie Minogue. Last year he collaborated with the National Ballet of China and the French actor Juliette Binoche on In-I. “My wife is a masseuse now and Juliette is a client of hers. She happened to mention that she’d always wanted to dance, and Su-Man said she should talk to Akram…”
Akram Khan’s rise has coincided with a revolution in dance in this country, partly led by Chaudhry’s predecessor as chair of Dance UK for five years, Alistair Spalding, chief executive of Sadler’s Wells. “People like Alistair are programming much more adventurously, productions are much better made, the quality of collaborators people are pulling in is much higher, and that means we’ve got a greater richness to the work and we’re drawing on a wider spectrum for audiences” says Chaudhry. “Dance UK has come in on that and created a wonderful momentum”.
But in taking over from Spalding he has walked into a series of challenges, the principal one being the dancers’ health pilot programme which he believes is essential for the future well-being of performers, but which was turned down for a £40,000 lottery grant by the Arts Council just before Christmas. “I will have failed if I don’t find the money to make this project a reality” he says.
Next will be to continue to engage politicians and ameliorate the effects of cuts promised by all parties after the election – “We have created this momentum with spectacular statistics - audiences up and dance all over the television - and it would be tragic if the head of this momentum is cut off because people are worried about the country’s debt”.
He is working towards a dance summit for 2012, not so much to thrash issues out as to establish a forum where creators can meet and talk. Dance UK could also start training programmes to help dancers into new careers after their performance life is over. “In how many professions could you start all over again at 40? I did, and it’s been fantastic.”
Dance still has a long way to go, and get help the rest of the arts sector with its challenges. “One of the problems for dance is people with lack of commitment, discipline and business acumen. How do you make it work in artistic framework? I believe that we need to be more perceptive, we need to be sharp, we need to know who we are. We need to know what people want when they don’t know they want it yet” he says.
“Dancers can be the best the best entrepreneurs and business people, but they’ve always got to be some way ahead of what’s happening.”
Polska! is introducing us to another side of the nation many of us know only as diligent migrant workers
It might be the start of our calendar year, but the UK is in the middle of a year of culture that has seen Polish visual art, music and drama in corners of the country that rarely get the attention of arts touring planners as well as the national venues.
The year will be rather more than 12 months, too, having started back in March 2009 and scheduled to run until May.
The reason, says Aneta Prasal-Wisniewska, is simple. “2009 was the 70th anniversary of the second world war when we remembered Poland standing with Britain, it was the 20th anniversary of fall of communism for us, this year is the bicentary of the birth of Chopin, our greatest composer.
“But these are all excuses. The real reason was that with a million Polish immigrants in this country, Britain needs to know more about Poland and Polish culture so that we can communicate who we are.”
Polska!, or PL! as the press material has tended to shorten it to, is a saturation exercise that began in Canterbury Cathedral with Penderecki’s St Luke’s Passion – conducted by the composer. The Barbican had the Gospels of Childhood, a mixture of traditional story-telling and contemporary theatre direction. The Sainsbury Centre at Norwich had a show devoted to Tadeusz Kantor, the legendary Dada-ist artist-performer who died ten years ago, coupled with the work of 16 of Poland’s New Wave artists.
Poland’s designers and architects were a big part of the Design Festival in the autumn, and Polish film has figured large at the Southbank and the Barbican. For the next six weeks or so, Chopin is the centre of attention at the Southbank Centre.
Visual art has been the biggest domain among more than 200 events on offer, with the first serious solo exhibition here for Robert Kusmirowski, Bunker, for which the Barbican’s Curve gallery was transformed into a second world war bunker filled with found objects from the time. The Tate has just acquired its first piece of work by Artur Zmijewski, perhaps Poland’s; most provocative artist, and he has just had a major retrospective at the Cornerhouse in Manchester. And at Dulwich Picture Gallery, whose collection was based on the national collection being put together by the last King of Poland when he was forced to abdicate, London-based Antoni Malinowski created an installation to link the 18th century with the 21st.
Modern Art Oxford is currently hosting Pawel Althamer’s extraordinary piece, Common Task, in which the 33-year-old intertwines sculpture and performance. Althamer’s has taken to travelling al over the world with groups of friends and neighbours, mostly unassociated with art in their normal lives, who become parts of his creations.
Poetry and prose performance is a growing theatre form which Lit Up both examines and promotes. Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow explain.
“Spoken word in a way is a very new artform but… communicating to your community with your voice is also as old as time”. Baba Israel, artistic director of Contact Manchester, offered a historical context in his keynote speech at the Lit Up showcase and conference last September at the Albany, Deptford. The event was the second in a series of three, the final one taking place in a few weeks at Bristol Old Vic on February 16.
The Lit Up events explore the exciting potential of the artform, aiming to bring spoken word into established theatres and arts centres. “Spoken word” and “live literature” may be hard-to-define, somewhat slippery terms, but they represent a fast-growing body of work in the UK.
Live literature includes performances of poetry or prose-based work, often (but not always) performed by the writer. Live literature blurs the lines between theatre and other artforms but, as Antonia Byatt, the Arts Council’s director of literature strategy, said at the last Lit Up, “let’s not worry about defining it too much, it combines writing and performance, but trying to put it in a box is probably a mistake”.
Why then is it exciting as an artform and why should it be of interest to theatres and arts centres? For performer Stacy Makishi, “it is about your own personal breath, sharing stories that are very close to you.” At its best, it is very direct, even visceral, often political, and certainly very personal. It provides artists with a whole range of possibilities, and venues with opportunities to attract new audiences. In particular, it often has a strong appeal to young people as both audiences and performers. In some ways it is the essence of the communal live experience, creating a very intimate relationship between the performer and audience.
Whilst the hybrid nature of the form might bring problems of definition it also brings a real diversity and the almost limitless creative potential. Lit Up’s own commissions, which include new work from poet/musician Zena Edwards and a collaboration between novelist Jonathan Coe and musician Sean O’Hagan, illustrate how music from jazz and pop traditions, as well as folk and hip hop, are enriched by their meeting with spoken word.
Spoken word’s collision with theatre is also a rich area of possibility. Poet Inua Ellams’ first full-length show The 14th Tale was profiled at the Lit Up event in June, and after a successful autumn tour will find itself on the National Theatre’s stage for a short run this spring. Lit Up associate artist Polarbear will premiere his “spoken screenplay” Return at BAC in March, having previewed the work in development at each of the Lit Up events. Both are clearly spoken word performances, but can also be seen as boundary-pushing theatre productions.
The recession has forced private arts investment down by 7%, according to Arts & Business, including individual giving. And A&B chief executive Colin Tweedy has warned there is worse to come.
The figures announced this week for 2008/9 show a £31m slump from the previous year’s record overall high of £686m to £655m.
While business investment was already in decline last year, individual giving in 2007/8 had defied the trend and risen by 25%. A year later the graph has reversed its direction, heading down by 7% with a £19m drop from the record level of £382m to £363m.
All three private sectors have fallen, with business investment down 6% - a slowing decline on last year - and standing at £157 million, 24% of the overall private sector contribution.
Trusts and foundations, a sector which had been a reliable friend to arts organisations and had also continued on the up in the previous figures, have also lessened their contributions by 7%, down from £141m to £135m.
“We would like to be optimistic, but predict the worst is yet to come with 2010/11 being the low-point” Tweedy said. “But we must remember that despite the economic difficulties, the UK’s arts fundraisers have still secured close to £655 million from the private sector – which is a remarkable achievement. We must now give them every opportunity to maximise their skills and ideas.
“In this fiscal climate there is still enormous pressure on the arts. With much focus on public expenditure budgets, many are looking to the private sector to contribute more – we believe it can”. He said that businesses seeing attendances up on average by 12% will also see potential gain for them in targeting these markets and their future consumers.
‘New policies are the way forward’
Colin Tweedy and A&B are calling for three policy initiatives to stimulate private sector support for arts and culture:
1. New far-reaching incentive schemes to encourage businesses.
2. The training and knowledge to deepen a pro-enterprise and innovation culture throughout the arts.
3. New challenge funds to grow and inspire cultural philanthropy, which has huge potential for growth.
“Be clear” Tweedy said, “there is no magic bullet for cultural philanthropy. We need challenge fund programmes to motivate individuals; yet wider recognition and celebration of philanthropists; better use of existing and potentially new tax incentives (the extent to which Higher Rate Tax Paying donors are claiming the tax breaks due to them); a stronger provision of legacies; enhanced donor care and the training of the real skills to make the case for culture to potential donors. These are all part of any future growth.”
The arts are sprouting them, but are they worth anything? Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums which has just produced its latest, wonders
We all love a good manifesto. The 11 point Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, the first arts manifesto of the 20th century, called for the demolition of museums and libraries, but its centenary was still celebrated this year as if it had paved the way for every arts initiative since. Manifestos are credited with having clout beyond that of any mere document or proposal. Just the name is enough to conjure up visions of revolutionary change.
I’ve noticed that, as the political parties clamber to construct their own manifestos, the arts world is also drawing them up by the dozen. The National Campaign for the Arts’ Arts Manifesto, the Manifesto for Children’s Arts, the Northern Ireland Manifesto for Children’s Arts, Manifesto for Participation in the Arts and Crafts … It seems there are so many of them, organisations are struggling to find a new name for each. To fit in with this trend, we’ve also been busy producing our own 2010 Kids in Museums Manifesto – 20 ways to make a museum family friendly – compiled from visitors’ comments. (See page 4)
There are some really good examples of arts manifestos, I hope ours included. The Music Manifesto, for example, with its key five aims, demonstrates how something simple can have real force. However, I’ve also noticed that many manifestos are so in little more than name. That doesn’t mean that they don’t meet the dictionary definition – a public written declaration of the intentions or motives of a party. It means they don’t work. And the reason they don’t is because they’re nothing more than yet another report on the arts, thinly disguised as something else.
I believe the heart of a useful manifesto is brevity. It can’t only be called it, it must be it, and that means it must be a call to action that can be easily summarized. We keep our Kids in Museums Manifesto to one side of one sheet of paper. I have yet to come across a shorter one, although I’m sure there is. But longer ones – I’ve found plenty, and the more you write, the less gets read. If you write one page, everyone reads it. If you write two pages, hardly anyone even reads the first page. I learnt this over years as a journalist. I’ve noticed, since I’ve strayed into the world of the arts, that arts organisations like to have big, fat publications, not single sheets of paper. How can people rally around essays?
In addition to brevity, there must be clarity and clear purpose. It’s no good having a manifesto with aims that boil down to nothing more than “enabling more people to have access to the arts” or “placing the arts at the core of improving people’s life opportunities”. Or, even worse, things like “expanding the cultural offer”. These may be rallying cries – but to do what exactly? It’s rather ironic that so many manifestos call for accessibility in totally inaccessible language. Phrases like that have no real meaning and no clear aim. It’s what I call a Motherhood and Apple Pie Manifesto - asking people to sign up to what everyone wants to happen anyway. A manifesto must have things in it that people object to, otherwise there is nothing to implement. It also must have an outcome that is measureable. There’s no real way of assessing when and if any of the above are achieved.
I think the reason so many manifestos are written is that the idea sounds simple. Just write a list of points. But being clear and precise is far more difficult than any amount of waffle. If the arts sector wants things to be done, and just not talked about, they need to get a little better at being brief and being clear. In these times, we need rallying cries. But we also need to understand what they are.
To order your copy of the new 2010 Kids in Museums Manifesto, just email manifesto@kidsinmuseums.org.uk.
To download a pdf of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
Education secretary Ed Balls has pledged £25,000 to introduce a “flexible family ticket” for museums. The new concessionary ticket is one of the recommendations in the new Kids in Museums Manifesto, and the announcement was made by Balls at the British Museum launch of the manifesto yesterday.
“The present two-plus-two concession whish is only available to a family of two adults and two children ignores the shape of the modern British family” said Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums. “It takes no account of single parent families and it is the lower income families that tend to miss out. The new flexible family ticket will take into account the different make-ups of families visiting museums and we think it will give a lead to all sorts of other public attractions that will follow suit”.
A “flexible family ticket watch” is to be set up by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Kids in Museums whereby museums will report back on the needs and wishes of families visiting museums.
The flexible ticket is one of a number of surprising revelations in the manifesto, including the fact that museum visitors don’t want hands-on computer driven attractions any more, preferring traditional object displays.
“Visitors have said they don’t want unlimited hands-on any more, they can do all that at home now” said Birkett,. “What they want is to touch a real bone, they want to be tactile and get a sensual experience. Let’s face it, the technology is never going to be as good as Avatar. They want the thrill of the real”.
The manifesto also calls for pram parks in museums, adding to the convenience of mothers with small children and other visitors who often find large buggies impeding their access to objects, .
Visitors have called for flexible family tickets for paid exhibitions and institution, too, instead of the “two-and-two” system which only gives concessions for two adults with two children.
Like you I’m sure, I had hoped the Ben and Boris Show, or Wadleygate as it has inevitably become known, would be fading away, at least until an ACE London chair is appointed. Fat chance. I’m talking about Boris Johnson’s attempt to get his cheerleader, erstwhile Standard editrix Veronica Wadley, into the job, culture secretary Ben Bradshaw’s resistance and the collateral involvement of Liz Forgan, ACE’s national chair. First, a stream of emails has mysteriously appeared which point to a complex strategy – conspiracy? Of course not! – to get Wadley appointed. Now the lady herself has waddled on stage in this developing pantomime, showing through a column in the Spectator what we would be missing if she failed to get the job. ‘A waspish Hampstead shrink recently diagnosed Bradshaw as suffering from “malignant narcissist syndrome”’ she writes in the latest Spectator. ‘I think that’s far too grand’ she opines. In her view Bradshaw ‘doesn’t deserve serious analysis’. So instead she treats her readers to her unreconstructed Thatcherite view that arts organisations need to ‘monetise assets’ and warns, ‘Subsidy junkies take note’. Well, the job has been advertised again and she’s had a letter from someone, she doesn’t say who, ‘inviting me to re-apply for the chair’. Will she? Buoyed by having been ‘overwhelmed by support from London’s cultural leaders’, she lets on: ‘You bet’.
Morecambe has just opened at the Duchess, a delightful one man show which ingeniously gets overt the problem of the best loved comedian every having been half of a double act. But I gather Ernie Wise’s widow, Doreen, is less than amused that her beloved is being portrayed as a ventriloquist’s dummy.
A preview visit to Leighton House, the Kensington home built for himself by the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton, which is due to reopen in the spring after a £1.6m refurbishment. It is the gloomiest place I’ve ever been in, everything painted in what a contemporary called ‘peculiar blue’ and actually a dark bottle green. Leighton was the only person ever to live in the sepulchral place, and I can understand why. When he died in 1896, three weeks after being made the only artist baron, his sisters couldn’t sell the enormous pile because it only had one bedroom. It has always been a supposed that the ‘aesthete’ Leighton never married because he was a closet gay, but there were rumours that he had fathered a child on one of his models. Now the refurb has disclosed a backstairs, leading straight into his capacious studio – still gloomy despite the large north-facing picture window – up which he seems to have smuggled the likes of Ada Alice Pullan, the alleged model for Leighton’s chum Bernard Shaw for Eliza in Pygmalion.
