Memorandum submitted by Ismene Brown
I have been the dance critic of the Daily
Telegraph for 10 years, and with the benefit of the interviews
I have had with most of the leading dance artists and managers
in Britain and many abroad, I should like to contribute observations
to the inquiry. I shall follow some of your topics as you set
them out. I shall send this by email and as a letter.
CURRENT SITUATION:
WHAT IS
THE CURRENT
STATE OF
THE DANCE
ECONOMY?
Response: How do you define "economy"?
I suggest it more helpful to define the dance "infrastructure",
considering the numbers and standards of dance schools and private
teachers (which I suggest need regulating as a matter of priority);
the number of professional dance job opportunities, their pay
and contract duration; the number of companies supported by Arts
Council funding and whether this is the only criteria for their
survival; the number of theatres in the UK that receive dance,
how many performances a year they receive, what financial support/costs
are involved.
Having defined the framework, it is then important
to define the potential: to survey all theatres and ask their
opinion of dance performance within their programme mix; to survey
British dance companies and ask what theatres they would ideally
like to perform in; to reassess current touring patterns, particularly
by the largest subsidised companies (the lack of touring by the
Royal Ballet, and the restricted touring by BRB and ENB, and the
borders involved in crossing between England, Scotland and Northern
Ireland, being priority issues).
This might assist a more accurate assessment
of the "economy", where its wastage is and where its
potential for expansion is.
ARE THE
BENEFITS OF
DANCE AS
A SPORTING
ACTIVITY RECOGNISED
AND BUILT
UPON EFFECTIVELY?
It is important to keep two issues apart—dance
as an art form, and dance as a participation ingredient of public
health policy. There is really very little link to be found, except
potentially as school level (see below). People do not watch dance
with more interest because they are going to dance classes, nor
do they help the art itself improve—any more than people
taking painting or pottery classes naturally turn into Charles
Saatchi's latest Britart sensation. Equally people taking part
in dance-as-health-activity are no more informed or receptive
viewers of dance-as-art than people not taking such activities.
There is a danger of skewing dance policy towards
dance-for-all that is not beneficial to the development of the
art form—for instance, many new dance centres have been
recently built that provide most studios for public participation,
but make little if any priority for active choreographers, who
remain misunderstood and underprovided for. I instance most troublingly
Siobhan Davies, the leading modern choreographer of Britain, who
has fought in vain to have a studio base despite being active
for more than 25 years (and having a CBE too). But elementary
salsa and line-dancing takes place up and down the land in state-of-the-art
facilities.
Further, the imbalance in the function of studios—far
more for dance-as-activity than for dance-as-art—means an
inevitable pressure to provide for more and more reasons to participate
in dance, spelt out with more and more emphasis, and generating
a rolling momentum of their own. Meanwhile, dance-as-art, on which
dancers and choreographers are traditionally shy of rhetoric,
has lost some of its recognition as the pinnacle of dance's achievement.
HOW EFFECTIVE
IS ARTS
COUNCIL ENGLAND
AT DEVELOPING
POLICIES, DEPLOYING
INVESTMENT AND
IMPLEMENTING POLICY
INITIATIVES?
The Arts Council is a generous engine, and I
hear praise of Britain's arts support very often expressed in
wonderment by Americans and Russians whom I interview. However,
the Arts Council appears to lack people qualified to find flexible
systems that suit dance artists and are geared towards the discovery
and the nurturing of excellence.
Two major complaints. ACE appears to shy away
from recognising excellence. And ACE's social agenda appears too
dominant, as if attempts at remedying perceived social imbalances
can substitute.
Excellence is very high in British contemporary
dance, for instance; we have at least a dozen major creative talents,
many of them now working for 10 or 20 years and now maturing.
Yet only one choreographer-led company is properly provided for,
Richard Alston. It needs to be asked why such exceptional creative
people as Mark Baldwin, Jonathan Burrows, Michael Clark, Siobhan
Davies, Javier de Frutos, Matthew Hawkins and Russell Maliphant
have not been consistently assisted by a willing ACE to fulfil
their gifts and delight the public, but have found existence a
hard struggle against a funding body not as receptive to high
individual talent as it should be. This experience is likely to
be replicated for younger talents emerging. ACE appears to find
it easier to identify and support companies with a fixed category,
"contemporary repertory", "classical touring",
"black contemporary", "African heritage",
and so on. Siobhan Davies put it to me once that there is "a
lack of trust of the artist" at the ACE.
Artists have been forced, often reluctantly,
into audience "education" in order to qualify for funding.
Many choreographers have complained to me about the pointlessness
and irrelevance of explaining in words after a show what did or
did not work as dance. One major choreographer told me it was
a prime reason why he left Britain for the freer working climate
in Europe where he could concentrate on his main function, to
create. Michael Clark recently told me: " I don't think a
good artist SHOULD be able to articulate what they're doing—that's
unfair." Rather than "education", I think artists
should provide "inspiration".
Secondarily to this issue, there is perhaps
an over-eagerness in ACE to deploy labels and categories. In interviews
over the past 12 years, I have found prominent dance artists—while
grateful to be supported—often slightly resentful of labels
and proofs of ability with which they must abide to receive funding.
Fundamentally, these labels are more limiting than helpful. Asian
and black categories, in my experience of what people say, tend
to point artists unnaturally towards "their own" audiences,
affecting their creative output, and also the natural body of
public likely to go and see them. But categories have been even
more unhelpful to those wanting to work across arts; I know of
outstanding choreographers who draw heavily on visual arts and
installation techniques, and who have been driven virtually to
closing down by the inability of funders to think more flexibly.
This means that artists feel obliged to check out what might suit
funders' ways of thinking, before they go on to imagine their
next creation. This is clearly tail wagging dog. It also does
not assist a due responsiveness to emerging trends, such as new
companies now who do not work in conventional ways.
I deduce that some of these problems emerge
because relatively inexperienced and uninformed people (bureaucrats)—out
of the best will in the world—are setting strict frameworks
that they hope will provide for all and cover all the options,
but which are not very responsive to the relatively experienced
and informed practitioners (artists) at a given time.
IS PUBLIC
INVESTMENT IN
DANCE AT
A SUFFICIENT
LEVEL? CONSIDERING
THE IMPORTANCE
PLACED RECENTLY
ON "ACTIVE
LIFESTYLES" BY
THE GOVERNMENT,
DOES THE
FUNDING LEVEL
NEED REVISION?
More money does not make better decisions. However,
making dance easier to attend—through ticket pricing and
easier booking, and more proactive scheduling (eg, Sunday matinees)—should
be urged firmly on the larger, flagship companies. Investment
in dismantling the obstacles to broadcasting dance on BBC would
certainly be productive (revising copyright and union fees, etc).
YOUNG PEOPLE
AND DANCE:
WHAT OPPORTUNITIES
AND SUPPORT
CURRENTLY EXIST
IN ORDER
TO PROMOTE
THE INCLUSION
AND PROGRESSION
OF YOUNG
PEOPLE IN
DANCE?
Is this question aimed at dance-as-healthy-activity
or at dance-as-art? If this question is about the standards of
professional dance training offered to young people, and the decline
in excellence of British ballet dancing, that is a very serious
and worrying issue. The national ballet companies are presently
dominated by dancers from other countries, some of which (such
as Spain) have not much indigenous ballet tradition of their own,
and yet are now out-performing British dancers at top level. However,
the British standards in modern dance and modern choreography
(involving much smaller numbers of dancers) I think could be described
as high, largely thanks to the excellence and inspiration of so
many leading choreographers—whose influence on professional
standards cannot be underestimated, and whose opinions should
be routinely sought in upgrading and adjusting standards in British
dance training.
WHAT IS
THE ROLE
OF DANCE
WITHIN EDUCATION
AT PRESENT?
SHOULD THIS
CHANGE IN
THE FUTURE?
Yes, in two ways. Provision of dance as PE in
schools assuredly should be given a major new push (eg Leeds became
a powerhouse of black male modern dance thanks to the clever promotion
of dance-as-sport by Nadine Senior in local schools—and
from the fire she built up emerged professional dance companies
such as Phoenix and RJC). Dance is a physically healthy and vibrant
alternative for children who dislike competitive sport—and
for those who like it too. Further, if well taught, dance strengthens
not only personal confidence but adds important outlets for extending
self-expression and imagination through musical and dramatic development.
It is also accessible to all social-economic groups at low equipment
cost.
It is important to define what styles of dance
would be taught in school: a curriculum should probably be aimed
at a generalist range of styles that young people would be likely
to enjoy continuing in their own time (hiphop, jazz, popular social
dances such as swing, jive and tango) after they leave school
(thus continuing longer-term health benefit). I suggest that ballet
and contemporary are better left to specialist classes. A reassessment
of dance in the public eye is overdue, and would be timely after
the success of the film "Billy Elliott" and Matthew
Bourne's "Swan Lake" have made old social prejudices
out-of-date.
This school dance curriculum should be supplemented
by schemes to ensure that children visit dance performance a minimum
of once a year through their school. On the wider point, I think
that schools should regularly organise trips to theatre, concerts
and exhibitions—and major subsidised organisations might
well be helpful in financing or discounting to attract the next
generation of attenders. Such visits not only develop a child's
imaginative experience, but make that essential differentiation
between dance/music/drama done as a fun activity for one's own
pleasure, and the excellence of the real art-forms, whose effects
are so very different—and must be clearly acknowledged as
such.
April 2004
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