Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-74)
11 MAY 2004
MS JEANETTE
SIDDALL, MS
DEBORAH BULL
AND MS
ANU GIRI
Q60 Mr Doran: You do know about issues
such as low pay in dance, about the requirement for permanent
bases and these sorts of issues. What is your strategy for dealing
with these problems and the financial problems because that is
the hardest one to tackle, how do you get more money out of the
Arts Council and the Government?
Ms Siddall: Clearly dance does
collaborate enormously with other art forms and it benefits from
streams of funding that go to other things. Obviously if theatres
are regenerated and they are built in a more suitable way for
dance then dance is benefiting from that. What we are really talking
about here in terms of the figures that we supplied you with in
our submission is the direct investment in dance as an art form.
It is quite a small amount but it has a big impact in other areas.
I do not think it would be in anybody's interest to take money
from one part to give to another because that is just shifting
the problem around. I think we have got that evidence, we can
make that case. Relatively little money goes a long way. If we
were to ask the Committee to support us in anything it would be
not to go backwards. What we had for a number of years was a little
bit of boom and a little bit of bust and that does not do anybody
any good, it means that you raise expectation and then you disappoint
and people lose confidence, people being the public, the participants,
the audiences as well as the artists and they just think it is
a fly by night thing, it is not going to be sustained, but we
need to keep it sustained. We have started on the job of changing
that. The last Spending Review was very helpful, but the money
for that only started in April. The reality is catching up with
the perception in this case. When it comes to pay specifically
we have to work more closely and more proactively with the sector
because part of the problem is there is a culture of low pay.
When people apply to the Arts Council they often put a relatively
low level of salary in. The Equity minimum, which is the industry
standard, is a very low level. If you worked as a dancer for 52
weeks of the year on Equity minimum for a small scale company
you would be taking home just over £15,000. If you are living
anywhere, apart from with your mum and dad, you are going to be
rather skint, not because you want to be but because you cannot
afford anything else. We have got to change that culture, we have
to get the message across that it is not acceptable to the Arts
Council as much as to our colleagues within the sector to continue
that pay level.
Ms Bull: I speak as a dancer here,
or at least I used to be. Dancers really want to work, they are
incredibly generous, they are very often working with their colleagues
who have got an idea and want to make it real. So they are the
ones who will say "Just pay my tube fare" or "Buy
me a drink at the end of it" and it is that kind of culture
which has created such an extraordinary body of work, so much
wonderful stuff going on, so many good ideas being made flesh,
but it does create a culture where £15,000 a year is not
acceptable and that is before you have paid for your tights and
the like.
Q61 Mr Doran: You mentioned the improvement
in the Government response in the way that you are getting a cross-department
response. Can you give us some practical ideas about how that
is working and the benefits that you are seeing from it? I have
to say that my experience in this area is that there are lots
of warm words but the actual practical delivery is sometimes a
little bit harder.
Ms Giri: There was one particular
project where we have been working with the music and dance scheme
which sits within the Department for Education and Skills and
the DCMS and DfES have been working together with us in there
to create better opportunities for young people in music and dance.
One of the offshoots of working within that is it has enabled
us to lever money for the Youth Dance England, that came as a
direct result of the dialogue there and that released £300,000
to enable Youth Dance England to start. Also, there are significant
monies there to develop vocational training between 11- and 16-year
olds for music and for dance.
Q62 Mr Doran: There is obviously a long-standing
relationship between DCMS and DfES, but in my experience Health
and the Home Office are harder nuts to crack.
Ms Giri: Yes. Having said that,
it has taken us quite a while to get any investment directly into
dance in this way from the DfES. The whole issue of youth dance
has been on the agenda for a very long time and we have struggled
for many years, and this was a very clear indication that that
working together did result in cash directly for a very particular
initiative that has taken some years to get off the ground. I
agree with you that us working with health and youth justice and
all those areas is a slower relationship to build.
Ms Siddall: A practical example
is that recently the Arts Council has received a secondee or is
hosting a secondee from DCMS specifically to look at arts and
health. We are hoping that might be a very practical step forward.
Mr Doran: You are being very tactful.
Thank you.
Q63 Mr Flook: The salary is £15,000
if you dance all year. How many performances a week would you
have to do?
Ms Bull: That would depend on
the contract. Some of that might be rehearsal time.
Q64 Mr Flook: But a fair amount.
Ms Siddall: It does not leave
much time for other jobs, no.
Q65 Mr Flook: So these are full-time
individuals. Do you know whether or not the audience contributes
more to go and see a dance performance than, say, against the
theatre or another art form?
Ms Bull: I think that is cheaper.
Ms Siddall: It is quite difficult
to give you a very straight yes or no answer.
Q66 Mr Flook: I can appreciate that.
Ms Siddall: Excuse me if I blether
on a little bit! We can say that quite often the way that dance
tours to other venues works is it is not necessarily setting its
own ticket prices in every instance. What the audience pays is
mediated through the theatre in some cases. Sometimes it is about
having a box office split arrangement whereby both the theatre
and the company are interested in getting the audiences in and
sometimes it is a different kind of arrangement. That impacts
on how much money is being paid. Every year the Arts Council does
an annual survey of the organisations it funds on a regular basis
and then pulls statistics from that which are kind of illustrative
or indicative. If you look at that, certainly the amount that
people are paying to see dance out of their own pockets is virtually
the same proportion of income as that which the Arts Council is
investing on behalf of the public, it is about 43% either side.
It does not quite answer your question. It is not so much that
people are not willing to pay, but quite often we are actually
asking audiences to take a bit of a risk because if you are going
to see more established work, repertoire work, you know what you
are getting. You know that if it is a play by Shakespeare it is
going to have "funny" English. If you are going to go
and see a new dance piece by Wayne McGregor you might not know
what his stuff is about.
Q67 Mr Flook: You might not recognise
the music either.
Ms Siddall: It is quite likely
it will be new music, new lighting design. Dance has had a huge
impact on the creativity of our technicians in theatre. Lighting
design has gone so much further ahead. They had not even heard
of sidelights until contemporary dance started. There have been
all sorts of spin-offs from that, but we are asking audiences
to take the risk, so we do tend to attract risk taking audiences.
Q68 Mr Flook: We may not know precisely
what audiences are contributing. Do we know if the costs are more
against other performances put on in other art forms?
Ms Siddall: There are aspects
of the creativity that are more expensive. Quite often if dance
is touring it takes a bit longer to set it up and get it into
the theatre, although not necessarily. There are pros and cons.
Ms Bull: It depends. If there
is an orchestra you are immediately doubling the cost because
you have probably got as many players in the pit as you have got
on the stage, sometimes more. Dance is almost always set to music,
not always, so then there is music rights to be paid. You can
imagine the other costs which come with it.
Q69 Mr Flook: I believe Les Miserables
has had problems in reducing the size of the orchestra. Is the
Arts Council saying maybe one way we can get more dance out there
is by reducing the costs of the music by having more of it piped?
Is that feasible or not from an artistic point of view?
Ms Siddall: Our perspective will
always be it is an artistic decision. There is some music you
cannot play live because of the way it is played. There is other
music which you can play live. There are theatres where you cannot
get the orchestra into a pit because there is not one. So there
are a number of reasons why music may or may not be live, but
our view would be that it does add to the quality of the experience
for the audience, which is the thing that we are interested in,
but it is an artistic decision . . .
Ms Bull: —which we would
not seek to influence because the artist has their vision and
our role is to try and make that happen.
Q70 Mr Flook: You also mentioned about
a little bit of boom and bust in the way that dance has performed
financially.
Ms Siddall: I was talking about
public investment funding.
Q71 Mr Flook: I note from the figures
you have given us that investment in dance was 43% of total income
compared to 38% across all art forms, ie the Arts Council is contributing
more to dance than it is to other art forms. Interestingly, there
has been a growth in the average earned income, in other words
from ticket sales primarily, it has risen from 31% to 43%. Is
that because more people are going to watch dance?
Ms Siddall: Overall, yes.
Q72 Mr Flook: How has that come about?
Has it come about from television where something like Lord
of the Dance appears and everyone says I want to go and see
a dance? How does it work?
Ms Siddall: The Billy Elliot
effect had a lot to do with it and it certainly attracted a lot
more boys to think about dance as a career. I think for the first
time the Royal Ballet School had a 50:50 intake, male and female,
following on from that. Also, the work has got better. I have
to say thank you to the artists, it was not anything the Arts
Council did other than support them, but it is much more inventive,
there is much more choice and the standard of performances has
gone so much higher than it was.
Ms Bull: Many of these companies
are touring regularly to venues and building a relationship there
not only with the venue manager and the marketing people but with
the local people through related education work. Most companies
will be doing work in the community which, of course, leads people
to better understand the work, to feel involved with it and then
to come to the performances. It is a long-term relationship building
exercise.
Ms Giri: There has been growth
in the number of dance companies. There are more companies out
there and, therefore, they are reaching more people and I think
the investment in those companies has then delivered more audiences,
so it is growing apace.
Q73 Mr Flook: You could put another side
and say that the 43% means that this art form is more state sponsored
and you could make an argument that that cannot continue necessarily
in the weightings, that what goes around comes around, that you
will not continue to be the most state sponsored. Do you have
a goal for reducing that in five years' time and increasing audience
participation and charitable funding?
Ms Siddall: We are working on
all of those things in slightly different ways. I would like to
say to start with that the good news is that the situation is
now much better than it was four years ago because of the comparison
of statistics over that period of time. I think it was something
like 53% four years ago, it is now 43%. We are going in the right
direction. When we look across the piece, some of the things that
have helped that right direction to be taken have been building
the capacity of organisations. We are talking about a sector which
has a large number of individual artists working in it. Someone
mentioned earlier about how entrepreneurial they learn to be,
but even the organisations are quite small, we are talking mostly
about less than ten people and that would include your dancers
in quite a lot of cases. That does not allow organisations to
do enormous amounts about looking for sponsorship, looking for
partnerships. The world is much more sophisticated. You need to
take a longer-term view to building those partnerships than you
did five or ten years ago. Sponsorship needs a lot more nurturing
and a lot more maintenance and we do not have the people to do
those jobs and so one of the things we are working on is building
capacity within the organisations because they are best placed
to do it for themselves. At the same time we have been working
with two or three of the foundations that do support dance in
a significant way, they make a big difference. One of those I
would like to mention would be the Jerwood Foundation and we have
heard about the special unit at Birmingham Royal Ballet for health
and injury prevention, and Esme«e Fairbairn put a lot of
money into the touring of dance which has really complemented
what the Arts Council has been doing. We work quite closely with
those trusts and foundations to encourage them to carry on funding
the artists but also look at ways in which we can build on that.
Q74 Mr Flook: Finally, when dance companies
go and knock on the doors of corporate sponsors what sort of response
do they get when compared to the Royal Shakespeare Company? Your
involvement has undoubtedly helped raise the profile of dance.
How much has it helped?
Ms Bull: There is a range of responses.
It is going to depend very much on the person you get to talk
to in the organisation. I was involved in something to celebrate
a sponsorship deal and it turned out that the man's daughter was
doing kids' classes at The Place. That is not entirely why he
funded it, they have a history of funding things in the arts anyway.
You also have to remember that many organisations are very risk
averse, they want to sponsor something which is very safe for
their clients. Others do not, others want to be involved with
the big names, the next big thing, they want to take that risk.
There is a range of responses. I think it is a problem when they
are going to say, "Yes, we know her name, we will go with
her one" because that is not necessarily fair. For us it
is about training people, giving people the skills and the resources
to find out how to do those jobs, how to make those approaches.
Ms Giri: The Place theatre in
London have developed their building into a far more modern state
of the art dance building and also received investment from us
to reposition themselves in a different way. Since they have done
that they have been able to approach sponsors in a far more confident
manner as they have this building and the resources behind it
to offer sponsors more and they have secured sponsorship from
Bloomberg for a number of years to run The Place Prize. I know
that they are currently talking to several other sponsors who
are now beginning to show interest and that is partly because
we have been able to build their capacity with them to put them
in a position where they can have that kind of more grown-up conversation
with businesses.
Ms Siddall: I would like to add
a very small point which is the building issue because it is the
infrastructure, the buildings for dance that does help in getting
sponsorship. Where do you put the label? Where do you put the
name? You cannot put it on tutus.
Chairman: Once again, thank you very
much.
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