Examination of Witnesses (Questions 48-59)
11 MAY 2004
MS JEANETTE
SIDDALL, MS
DEBORAH BULL
AND MS
ANU GIRI
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming
here today. I will call on Derek Wyatt to start the questioning.
Q48 Derek Wyatt: Good morning. In much
the same way that I alluded earlier to the fact that we ask a
lot of teachers, we keep squeezing them to do even more and more,
do you feel in a way that is the same with the Arts Council in
that we are demanding more and more of you and at the end, therefore,
things get squeezed and what is at the margins gets squeezed the
most and dance seems to be at the margin? Is that a fair comment?
Ms Bull: I think you are right
that we are squeezed to do more and more, but I do not think that
is just the Arts Council, I think you as Government are squeezed
to do more and more, so we are kind of all in the same boat. I
think there is a fine difference between pushing people in which
we can achieve more and over-pushing people, in which case everything
falls apart. I think what we try to do at the Arts Council is
ensure that it is not the small things that get squeezed out at
the margin. We have already talked about what we call in shorthand
the cutting of the cake and whether the cake that we have can
be cut differently or whether the cake just needs to be bigger.
I think our main role is to oversee what we have and to ensure
that the allocation of it is appropriate and that it is not the
small and the little and the extreme that gets pushed out.
Ms Siddall: I think we can be
quite proud of what we have achieved in dance, growing something
that was very much smaller 20 or 30 years ago. In some ways the
way that we operate as officers is we have a metrical approach,
so we are working in depth as well as in breadth and the people
you have here today are some of the depth people. So we would
be very concerned not to allow the small things to get squeezed
out.
Q49 Derek Wyatt: Can you explain how
you fit into the Regional Development Agency, regional arts and
regional sports structure? They have all now been given almost
independence of the national bids. Can you explain where there
is one scheme going on in any of the English regions where the
RDA and the sport England equivalent and the Arts Council are
working together on dance or music or anywhere really?
Ms Siddall: One of the things
about the new Arts Council, where it has been reorganized so that
it is one organisation rather than the previous ten or 11, is
that it has been quite useful for a relatively small art form
because it means that we have got dance officers in each of the
regional offices who can deal with that patch in a very particular
in-depth way, and we all work together across the whole organisation
in order to make sure that to some extent we are moderating what
we do, we are learning from each other, we are ensuring that we
meet our promise to artists to give them equality of treatment
wherever they live and that has been a step forward, but we have
only really been working like that for a year. I would quite like
to come back in a year or two and tell you what the real benefits
are. It certainly feels very positive and we are poised to make
a real step forward in terms of that national overview.
Q50 Derek Wyatt: If I am a kid of eight
or 15 or, like me, old but I love dancing or have seen Billy
Elliot, can I go now to a website and will it tell me where
the dance experts are, where the studios are, where I can get
tuition? Is there one place I can go and, if so, where?
Ms Siddall: There are several,
and I think that is also a bit of the problem.
Ms Bull: You have talked about
Regional Development Agencies but not about National Dance Agencies
and I think it is worth mentioning the benefits of information
and practice.
Ms Giri: One of the things we
are doing in London is very much that. There is a new approach
called Team London where Arts Council London is joining up with
the LDA, all the cultural agencies and have created a brand called
London Unlimited, it is with tourist agencies as well, to invest
in the culturalness of London and raise its profile. Within that
we are one of those partners looking at how we can promote London
better. Linked with this idea of working together is there have
been five local authorities called the Western Wedge in London
who do not have very much dance activity going on and however
Wembley arena is being built in this regeneration area and they
are working with us, the Arts Council, to audit dance in that
area and develop a dance development strategy because that is
what they see as a way of connecting their five boroughs. So you
can there is a cascade effect from the Arts Council London regional
office engaging and then a more localised thing with local authorities
and us in dance working with them.
Q51 Derek Wyatt: The social anthropology
work going on at Cambridge and Stanford, where are you in that?
Are you clued in to that or is it just luck that it is at Cambridge?
If you are locked into it, what are you doing about it in terms
of those deprived areas where we know this is the way into them?
Ms Siddall: There are a number
of things we would like to thank the Committee for and that is
one of them. You are right, it is luck, I did not know about it
personally and I think that is one of the things that we could
all work better at, but again it is one of those issues where
there is so much information, there are so many websites and there
are so many places to look that making sure we have communication
systems that work when rooted into all those different agendas
and different pieces of research is quite a complicated issue.
Ms Bull: I think Jeanette is speaking
in some ways as an individual because I did know about that work.
That work informs the approach on the ground of many of our practitioners.
The people who have talked to you are funded by Arts Council England,
amongst others and so that work is informing practice and development
and research and new policy.
Q52 Derek Wyatt: Let me put it a different
way. We developed what were called Educational Priority Areas
(EPAs) and we announced dozens and dozens and dozens of these.
To what extent was the Arts Council involved in that, and to what
extent was it able to influence the type and scale of education
going to those priority areas?
Ms Siddall: From a dance perspective,
limited opportunity; from an Arts Council broad perspective, there
have been lots of conversations with the Department of Education
and Skills about the way in which the arts generally can contribute.
We are talking about a particular art form.
Q53 Derek Wyatt: I was thinking wider
than that because you would hope dance would be in it. Can you
point to a school or an area where art has had the most profound
effect because of what the EPAs have done?
Ms Siddall: I can point you to
a website. The National Dance Teachers' Association was involved
in a partnership with the Department for Education and Skills
which was about looking at highlighting best practice in the way
that Dance in School has been developed. Some of that is about
particular case studies, the way in which young people have developed
through dance, in other words it is about a whole school development.
There is quite a wide range of case studies. The Arts Council
put funding into the National Dance Teachers' Association to enable
them to work with the Specialist Schools Trust.
Q54 Derek Wyatt: What would you like
us to recommend in this report?
Ms Bull: I think there are a number
of things we would like you to recommend. We have been very encouraged
by the early results that can be achieved by joined-up Government,
by departments talking to each other about the whole of dance,
particularly within health and working with young offenders and
the work, which is very limited within prisons, limited for obvious
reasons, has had extraordinary results. I am talking about government
talking to itself and making sure that it is working together
across departments to reap the benefits of dance. I think advocacy,
we have talked about a number of issues, men in ballet, the old
and the new which you have said people think the public perception
is. In some ways we can help public perception but not as much
as you can and certainly not as much as the media can, the way
ballet and dance is written about, the way it is talked about,
the level of knowledge. Parliament has a long history of being
interested in dance. In 1781 it was closed so that you could all
go and watch dance when the Vestery brothers were performing at
the King's Theatre.
Q55 Derek Wyatt: Those were the days!
Ms Bull: I think there is a role
in talking about and acknowledging dance. I am always concerned
that you are always so busy you only ever see the front page of
a newspaper.
Q56 Mr Flook: And the back page.
Ms Bull: Exactly, and the articles
are on page 28 right behind the obituaries. It is about finding
ways for you to know about dance and to share that. The role of
dance within the curriculum, it concerns me personally that it
sits within PE because it becomes an optional subject for the
school before it begins to touch on what are the real benefits
of dance, which is the development of the individual, the whole
person. It is only obligatory in the system where it is in primary
schools and then it is only about physical. So when dance begins
to touch on you as an individual, who are you, what do you believe
in, how can you talk across borders, how do you develop trust
in your colleagues, how do you develop self-criticism, independent
thinking, it happens beyond the point at which dance must be taught
within the PE system. So many kids are not getting it. That is
something you can influence. I would not be doing my job if I
was not saying funding. The cake is bigger than it was, we are
very grateful for that, but it needs to be bigger.
Q57 Chairman: When you jocularly talked
about the back page of the newspapers, would it not be a very
good signal if well-known footballers did some of their training
with ballet dancers? After all, the physical requirements for
both are similar. Perhaps the requirements for ballet dancers
are greater.
Ms Bull: You are right, it does
happen. It is always a good story, it gets the photographers in
and it gets the profile raised. I would suggest they do not do
ballet, frankly, because if the ball is going that way and your
feet are going that way in ballet you might not score quite so
well. I would advise them to study dance rather than ballet. I
thank you for saying the skills are probably greater within dance,
I am sure they are. That does a few things: it raises the profile,
it gets people talking, but I do think you have to think of a
sustained profile raising exercise above that because you can
only hit the headlines once every so many years with that one.
Derek Wyatt: There was a footballer who
played for Sheffield Wednesday called Albert Quixall who did dance
as a boy and he was a sensational forward, but we are talking
about 1959 and he transferred for £45,000.
Q58 Mr Doran: It was probably tougher
being a footballer and dancer in 1959 than it would be now. Can
I pick up the advocacy issue because that is a bit of a bugbear
of mine. I think everything you have said is quite important,
but what I need to know is what dance intends to do about it.
We are politicians, we tend to be reactive rather than proactive
and we listen to the people who bring messages to us. I have to
say that the message from dance is not very loud and it is not
very clear.
Ms Bull: It is a shame it is not
very clear. I can understand it not being very loud because we
are a relatively small sector, but, as you have heard today, we
are incredibly articulate and incredibly passionate and we have
a lot of evidence to back up what we are saying. It can seem as
though it is just words, but we could all tell you places where
we have seen at firsthand how dance can change lives. So the evidence
is there, the articulacy is there. I think the platform is a difficult
one. We are all jostling for space in the media all the time and
the media more and more likes bad news stories and not good news
stories. There is less and less space for rational argument. There
is more space for tabloidism even amongst the non-tabloid newspapers.
The Council has various strategies. Certainly the organisations
you heard from first, Foundation for Dance and Dance UK and so
on have regular initiatives to get the message out there. I do
not know whether you want to say anymore about those.
Ms Siddall: I would like to reiterate
that. In lots of ways what we are doing is it is a slightly uneven
battle. We are the smallest of the performing arts so even within
our own nearest colleagues we are still very small. We do not
have huge deficits, we do not have huge crises, an awful lot of
it is good news. It is a long way to make the journey that particularly
theatre has been on for about four hundred years, but we started
25 years ago. A lot of our energy in the last 25 years has been
spent on working out who we are, what we do and how we do it most
effectively and we are still on that journey. It makes it quite
difficult to stand back and acknowledge the progress that has
been made. I would say that this inquiry has been incredibly helpful
in helping us to garner our energies and our arguments and we
have had some very helpful conversations. I think we are a step
further ahead than we were three weeks ago. We have been doing
some small pilot seminars because I think there is a level of
skill we need to build within the dance community and we have
done a little bit of that, we hope to be building on that shortly,
it is paying off already, but it is a skill and people who are
learning to turn their feet out that way are not necessarily open
their mouths loudly enough or frequently enough or in the right
places.
Q59 Mr Doran: I will not push the point
any further. I am interested in the submission which the Arts
Council has made. Clearly a huge amount has been achieved over
the last few years and it is quite important that there is that
new focus and things are being achieved. What I do not get out
of your report is any long-term strategy. You highlight the problems
that dance still faces, but I want to know how these issues are
going to be addressed. One of the issues I am going to pick up
later with the Minister from DCMS is that quite a lot of the responsibility
for funding dance from the public purse, if we leave aside the
Arts Council for the minute, seems to lie with the Education Department.
It seems to me there is a danger that, certainly in the education
system, the whole purpose and point of dance as it is being presented
here today is buried under the physical education banner and controlled
by the Education Department who may be looking for something completely
different.
Ms Siddall: There are quite a
few things in there. On education, I think Mr Bryant's experience
is a very familiar one. We have joked about the fact that this
side of the table is mostly female and that side of the table
is mostly male. The policy-makers and the decision-makers in this
country predominantly have an experience of dance which was rather
like that, it may have been a girl on a Thursday and a boy on
a Wednesday or whatever it was. It is actually not a very useful
kind of experience on which to start building that change that
we want to bring about. In a sense, to go back to the beginning
of your question, what our long-term strategy is as the Arts Council
is we have to continue doing the three things that we highlighted
in our summary, which is to do with balancing the artistic development,
the experimental, the new, the different, the things that will
be the heritage of tomorrow, but we are also having to support
that heritage which only lives when it is danced by dancers on
stage. So it is quite a big job to start with. At the same time
we have to take audiences with us and I think Mr Bramley mentioned
earlier that there seems to be evidence that audiences are growing
at least in pace with the growth in dance activity and I think
some of it is to do with where society is now, and we have to
be specific and address specific groups. So that diversity is
helpful, but building and strengthening the capacity in those
diverse forms and taking audiences with us is a bit like herding
cats and, of course, the funding never comes in line with things
like artistic energy. It is a very dynamic job and we can have
strategies about specific aspects and our long-term ambition and
we are ambitious for dance, but we are always having to adjust
those and fine tune those in light of the reality and the resources
because the thing that enables artists and audiences to meet is
the environment in which all that happens, which we are also having
to develop and grow and shift. We have heard quite a bit about
public perception of dance today. It is probably always the case
in every aspect that perception tends to lag behind the reality.
We have obviously got a big job to do in building that profile
and helping people understand what it is we have to offer.
Ms Bull: The important thing about
dance is that its long-term strategies need to be as flexible
as its dancers. You have heard from some of our creative artists,
our job entirely is to make sure that they are able to do what
they do and we do not know what they are going to do next, that
is the fantastic thing about it. If you think about some of the
developments that Wayne was talking about with technology, nobody
could have anticipated those even five years ago. Having the flexibility
and the awareness to respond to those is a really important part
of our strategy.
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