On Tuesday I took part in a telephone meeting with Chris Warner and Jayne Stokes from the Regeneration Directorate in the Department for Housing, Regeneration and Heritage at the Welsh Government and Peter Owen from the Culture, Sport & Media Division. This was a follow-up to the meeting Hamish and I had with Chris and Peter in March. We talked about how to involve the voluntary arts sector in the forthcoming review of the Welsh Government’s approaches to regeneration. We also discussed the potential for developing some pilot projects to look at the role voluntary arts groups can play in relation to regeneration, possibly linked to the new Voluntary Arts Wales Up for Arts project in North Wales.
Robin Simpson.
On Wednesday I had a telephone meeting with Dr Andrew Miles at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester. Andrew is leading the Understanding Everyday Participation project – a five-year research study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Communities, Culture and Creative Economies funding programme. Voluntary Arts is one of the project partners and Andrew and I discussed the role Voluntary Arts will play in the initial phase of the study which will focus on mapping the cultural ecosystems in six contrasting communities (four in England and two in Scotland – supported by additional funding from Creative Scotland). We also talked about the parallels and potential overlap with Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme.
Robin Simpson.
On Tuesday afternoon I was at Tate Britain in London for a meeting organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to discuss the honours system and how to increase the number of nominations for women in the arts and media. Lord Stevenson, who is Chair of the Arts and Media Committee which considers nominations from these sectors, chaired a fascinating session of presentations and discussion. He was joined by two other members of the Arts and Media Committee, Dame Jenny Abramsky and Dame Liz Forgan (“a gaggle of Dames?”) to talk about the quite shocking disparity between the numbers of nominations for male and female candidates for honours. Jenny Abramsky said “the honours system should be diverse, should be fair and should recognise what is going on in this country”. Liz Forgan said “the honours list is a very cheap, simple way of saying thank you to people”. She felt there was no shortage of potential nominees in the arts and media. Alison Bennett from the Cabinet Office, which oversees the honours system, explained that nominations are considered by eight expert committees (including the Arts and Media Committee). The Community, Voluntary and Local Services Committee (CVLS) accounts for around 40% of the honours list. Nominations are received directly from members of the public as well as via Government departments. Alison told us that women have never made up more than 47% of the overall list and the disparity was particularly bad in the higher level awards. In the 2012 New Year honours there were 7 Dames compared to 27 Knights. Within the arts and media nominations only 37% were for women (and only 33% were awarded). Pat Le-Bruin from DCMS said that it seemed that “everyone assumes someone else is doing something”. She emphasised that DCMS is happy to work with organisations planning to nominate someone, to advise them on how to create effective citations etc. We also heard from the playwright and critic, Bonnie Greer OBE, who spoke about how she had felt on being awarded an honour. She talked passionately about why she had decided to accept and said “if I can be awarded an OBE then everybody can”. It was a fascinating and inspiring session and certainly succeeded in enthusing me to look at what more we could do to encourage nominations for honours from the voluntary arts sector.
Robin Simpson.
On Thursday I was at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to attend ‘Because we’re worth it!’ – a national summit exploring and celebrating the value of participatory arts. The event was organised by Connected Culture and Mailout. Connected Culture is a network dedicated to adult participatory arts and Mailout is the national online resource for participatory arts. Welcoming us to the ICA, Arti Prashar of Spare Tyre and Rob Howell from Mailout said they had been overwhelmed by the positive response to the summit: they said they could have sold it out twice over and there was clearly a massive interest in participatory/community arts. Rob Howell said that Mailout has calculated that only 7.5% of Arts Council England’s core funding goes to participatory arts: he challenged the sector to work to increase this to 15% by the next round of ACE National Portfolio Organisation funding. Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, delivered the keynote ‘thought for the day’, suggesting that the arts sector “had it pretty good” under New Labour but he didn’t think the sector as a whole had exploited the opportunities as much as it should have. Too many arts organisations are too dependent on arts grant funding. Matthew Taylor asked us whether we could make a new case for the arts. He said “the arts sector should not be afraid of instrumentalism but it should be our instrumentalism” and he felt this “would lead to a shift in arts funding towards participation”. But he warned that we need to be able to distinguish between good and bad practice: “the Achilles heel of the arts is that we are all too polite to each other”. During the questions and answers at the end of the opening plenary session, Matthew Taylor used a sporting analogy, talking about his son’s involvement in football and cross-country running. When you take part in amateur football you never encounter a professional: the professional and amateur football worlds are very far apart, with most of the money heading towards the elite professional end of the spectrum. But in cross country running the beginner can find himself competing alongside someone who runs for the national team. And, even if you finish 15 minutes behind that international athlete, you all sit down together and have a cup of tea afterwards. Matthew Taylor asked us whether the arts is more like football or cross country running. He pointed to the answer by referring to a session he chaired in the ACE/RSA State of the Arts Conference in 2011 when John Hope-Hawkins from the Society for All Artists – a national voluntary arts umbrella body – spoke about the work the SAA’s amateur members were doing in old people’s homes to encourage people to paint. No-one at that massive arts industry conference seemed to take any interest.
Robin Simpson.
I was at the Senedd in Cardiff on Thursday afternoon to give evidence to the Welsh Assembly Communities, Equality and Local Government Committee’s inquiry into participation in the arts. The inquiry was launched to look at whether budget cuts in the arts sector may be having a negative effect on participation in the arts among some groups of people. You don’t get the chance to say much in these sessions: I was one of three witnesses in a 30 minute slot. It was good to be alongside Maggie Hampton from Disability Arts Cymru and Leanne Rahman from the Black Voluntary Sector Network – together we were able to stress the need for funding, support and collaboration to encourage disabled people and BME communities to participate in the arts. I said I felt questions about the relationship between the Welsh Government and the Arts Council (the arm’s length principle) and whether we need greater scrutiny of the Arts Council were red herrings in relation to how we address gaps in arts participation. Most participation happens through organisations that are not funded by ACW. I made the point that the amateur arts is largely self-sufficient and sustainable and the overall levels of participation were almost the same in 2010 as they were 10 years before (according to the ACW Omnibus Survey). You could get rid of the Arts Council and not affect the overall levels of participation. But the effect of cuts in arts funding is to further disenfranchise those parts of the population who tend not to participate in the arts and need support and encouragement to do so. So arts participation as a whole always survives funding cuts but is likely to become less diverse and favour people from more affluent, cohesive communities. Finally I stressed the need for a more radical approach to raising the levels (and diversity) of arts participation by developing collaboration and links between professional participatory/community arts and the amateur/voluntary arts sector.
Robin Simpson.
I was at the National Theatre in London on Tuesday to take part in the World Shakespeare Festival partners’ meeting. This event, chaired by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Director of Communications, Liz Thompson, brought together marketing and communications officers from organisations including the National Theatre, Barbican, Sage Gateshead, Royal Opera House, British Museum, National Theatre Wales, Birmingham Rep, Northern Stage, Shakespeare’s Globe and Brighton Festival. Our Open Stages project and the way amateur theatre groups are getting involved in the World Shakespeare Festival got prominent attention (it was the first item we discussed!). Ian Wainwright from the RSC outlined the progress of Open Stages and representatives of three of the Open Stages partner theatres (Contact in Manchester, Questors in London and the National Theatre of Scotland) described the plans for their forthcoming Open Stages showcase events. It was also fascinating to hear about the multitude of other World Shakespeare Festival productions in preparation across the UK – from Simon Russell-Beale in ‘Timon of Athens’ at the National Theatre to ‘Forests’, a new work based around the forest and heath scenes from a variety of Shakespeare plays which is being directed by Calixto Bieito at Birmingham Rep, to a new Welsh language translation of ‘The Tempest’ by Gwyneth Lewis which will be performed at the National Eistedfodd. There is so much going on within the World Shakespeare Festival it is very difficult to grasp all the details. But that is nothing compared to the mass of events under the wider Festival 2012 banner: we had a presentation from Claire Hutchinson from LOCOG, Head of Marketing for Festival 2012, which was mind boggling in terms of the scale and variety of activity due to take place around the country over the coming months. The World Shakespeare Festival starts on 23 April (Shakespeare’s birthday), full details at: http://www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk/
Robin Simpson.
