A new arts and entertainment initiative aims to do for the unlovely borough what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao
By Simon Tait
Independent on Sunday, 29 August 2010
Its mass of office blocks and car parks have earned it an unenviable reputation as one the ugliest spots in Britain. It’s boring, drab, dull. Call it what you want – nobody likes Croydon. There is universal permission to be as rude as you like about this urban punchbag. No joke too corny. Take Jimmy Carr, who was in town on Tuesday night, and quipped later on Twitter: “I’m having a knife crime in Croydon. Sorry, nice time. It’s like 1974.” When he played a gig there earlier in the year, he joked: “An audience member proposed – she’s not even pregnant. That’s a first for Croydon.”
The unwritten rule on the comedy circuit is that you don’t pass through these concrete woods without adding another line in the Croydon gagbook.
Blame David Bowie – who called Croydon a “complete concrete mess” when he was there briefly as a student. Or the 19th-century writer William Cobbett, who wrote: “From London to Croydon is an ugly a bit of country as any in England.” Selling Croydon may just be one of the toughest PR jobs in the country.
Yet Toby Kidd, who has worked with the rock group Franz Ferdinand, still believes he can help add some shine to the much-maligned south London borough. He has been brought in to curate a new arts and entertainment programme in the town hall building, transforming old rooms with disco lights and star performers. The idea is to conjure up some long-awaited Croydon cool.
Mike Fisher, the leader of Croydon Council, has heard all the teasing before. “It’s such a shame,” he said of Carr’s tee-heeing at Croydon’s expense. “It’s a cheap joke,” he sighed to the local paper this week. “Some of his jokes are more akin to the 1970s.” The trouble for Fisher and others is that, as far anyone outside of Croydon is concerned, the town is indeed trapped that bygone age.
When ambitious proposals to regenerate the area in the style of Barcelona, with new public squares and more interesting architecture earlier this year, the idea was roundly mocked. There was hardly a newspaper in the country which didn’t succumb to the temptation of a teasing compare-and-contrast factbox. Barcelona: Gaudi’s cathedral, the Picasso Museum and Barcelona FC. Croydon: A tram and the birthplace of Kate Moss. All the jokes, bruised Croydonites argue, actually mask a cultural heritage. The remind anybody who will listen – sadly for them, not many – that the Davis Theatre, which once stood in the High Street, could lay claim to hosting Buddy Holly, on his only UK tour, and Ella Fitzgerald. The actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft, poet John Ruskin and film director David Lean (there is a David Lean Cinema in Croydon) spent their childhood years there. Another treasured association is with the composer-conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who is buried in Croydon. And as Bowie did briefly, Malcolm McLaren, Roy Hudd and Ray Davies of The Kinks, studied at colleges in the area.
Toby Kidd and his colleague Sam Hunt hope their programme at the Croydon Clocktower Arts Centre, inside the Edwardian town hall building, might finally turn the tide and end the jokes. “The Clocktower has been an open secret,” Kidd says. “But there is huge potential in our customer base because there’s no other venue that gives the high-quality mix of art forms we can. We have to make the Clocktower represent the immense talent and diversity we know is here, and not behave like a backwater. We’ll be producing music, comedy and theatre in-house on a national scale.”
The test of their endeavours will come in November with a month-long festival entitled Are We There? Hip DJ Mad Professor and indie pop band Saint Etienne are due to play the Clocktower. The comedian Shazia Mirza also joins the bill, but will no doubt lay off any “Croydon is dull” shtick. New talent will be given a chance to shine, too. Sam Hunt said: “This is the biggest borough in London and 160,000 people work here in the centre, but none stays after work or ventures out at lunchtime. We’re going to change that, and show them what a great playground there is for them here. The programme has to pay for itself, so we’re going to use the skills we’ve learnt in the rock domain for Croydon’s workers and residents.”
Sad news from Wales. Bryn Terfel’s Faenol Festival, due to brighten up August Bank Holiday but which AI reported last time was in trouble, has been cancelled – for the second year in succession. In spite of the Welsh Assembly giving £250,000 in July for the next three Faenols, the festival chairman, Sir David Henshaw, says, ‘We could not waste the generous grant of public money’, with Bryn himself adding: ‘Advance ticket sales in this challenging economic climate have not been sufficient for us to feel confident that we can move ahead with a full festival’. There are now urgent discussions with Gwynedd County Council, also a funder, as to whether there will ever be another Brynfest.
Are the Scots being adult and responsible about their arts funding, or hopelessly naive compared with the English? Fiona Hyslop has announced that there will be no cuts in arts funding north of the border, at least until the Scottish government gets its funding settlement from Whitehall. She told the Beeb’s Will Gompertz, during his EdFest mission, that while international tourism has slumped by 2%, in Scotland it’s gone up 4%, at least partly because of the arts. And after all, Scotland has already gone through its arts quango transformation, however torturously, in joining the old Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen in the new Creative Scotland, halving the bureaucratic cost. It seems like impulse denial for the Scots not to go for the slash and burn option, but let’s ee if they are allowed to get away with it, and if they are who is right.
It looks like the government has decided to merge English Heritage and HLF in its quango blitz, while the MLA will disappear into the Arts Council. You can make out the shape of things to come by the shade on the wall, this time by the increasingly shrill objections to the expected coalescence from the Heritage Alliance. ‘English Heritage covers England and is an official advisor, HLF is UK-wide and a lottery distributor and doesn’t give grants to private owners’ says the Alliance’s Kate Pugh. ‘They have different remits, I am not convinced it is a happy marriage’. And then there is the National Heritage Memorial Fund, set up after the war to preserve the built heritage as an imaginative memorial to the war dead with a stonking £50m from the redundant National Land Fund. That money went, often on some pretty idiotic acquisitions, and it subsists on a government grant now to be a ‘fund of last resort’ operated separately within the HLF. That separateness might not be to the taste of Mr Hunt. The whole thing is reminiscent of the way the extra quango, HLF, was created inth efirst pl;ace, under Lord Rothschild. When the National Lottery was created a fifth of the good causes windfall was to go to heritage, and the then relevant minister, Peter Brooke, had it in mind to hand the money to EH. But the lottery was UK-wide, EH only serves England, so he looked to the NHMF. This was national but much too small, so the HLF was created around it. Rothschild and the first CEO, Georgina Naylor, came to a lunch with arts journalists to be asked what the new body was going to do. ‘We were rather hoping you would be able to tell us’ a bewildered Jacob Rothschild responded.
Here is one of those deliciously savoury ‘why I hate Ryanair’ stories. A 12-year-old has been banned from taking her violin has hand luggage on a flight, despite having been told before hand that it would be OK because, of course, committing the instrument to the hold would mean its instant death. It looks beastly, and the Incorporated Society of Musicians is righteously furious, but maybe there is more to it than has been reported. After all, was a time when gents with pencil moustaches, shades and chalk-stripe suits carried violin cases whose shape belied their actual contents, so maybe this was a security thing. But a 12-year-old from Manchester? More likely, perhaps, that having had experience of pubescents with musical instruments airline staff in Berlin made her play a few bars and humanely decided that their English friends should be spared a similar experience, so we should be duly grateful.
The Stage, 26/8/10
At one point, it looked like the Edinburgh Comedy Awards might not happen. Until Foster’s stepped in. Simon Tait explains why corporate support is becoming increasingly important to the arts
Edinburgh 2010 and the fringe is as bouncy, bumptious and bountiful as ever, with the comedy as raw and edgy as we have come to expect.
But only a few months ago, there seemed no certainty that the 30-year-old fixture in the fringe firmament, the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, would be a part of it this time. So there was quite a party at the beginning of the summer in Joe Allen’s in the West End to celebrate a new sponsor.
It was with child-like glee that the West End producer and theatre owner Nica Burns, inventor of the awards that bore the Perrier name for 26 years, announced that Fosters, the lager people, were taking it on. ‘A natural fit,’ she said, beaming over coffee and Danish. ‘Comedy is in our DNA,’ chuckled the Fosters man, Dave Jones.
While other lager brands are plastered over football of different forms, this one is turning to the other thing lads like to do. Well, the other other thing, laughing.
But for such a perfect fit, the sponsor had been elusive. Perrier’s immediate successor was an Edinburgh banking concern, Intelligent Finance. So, for three years we had the IF Comedy Awards. Then IF, part of HBOS, caught a serious ague in the credit crunch and withdrew leaving Burns in an unfunny situation. Last year, she had to sponsor the awards herself.
Fosters is part of the Heineken global marque, and Heineken UK is based in Edinburgh. The commitment is for a nominal three years contractually, but Dave insists they’re in it for the long term.
To listen to the government, though, you’d think sponsors like Fosters/Heineken are a thing of the past. The future of arts funding, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt believes, is in ‘philanthropy’, and some sponsors have even taken to using the word to describe their business association with arts organisations, which are clearly not philanthropic.
Hunt made proselytising philanthropy one of his five priorities for his first month in office, after Schools Olympics (results to be announced in September) and before Broadband (to eradicate ‘not spots’). Last month, he reported on his blog: ‘Have written to top 200 donors to cultural organisations to thank them and am currently looking at how to make it easier for cultural bodies to raise funds. The current financial environment makes it essential to improve both our culture of giving and also our culture of asking, both of which arguably suffer from our very British reluctance to talk about money’.
If don’t ask, you don’t get.
He has filled his diary with one-to-one meetings with potential donors to the arts, no civil servants and no lawyers present, as he does personal research into how we can emulate the American system of giving, as he prepares to slash 25%-40% from the arts subsidy. And he may be not be diverted from his course by the letter signed by Sir John Ritblat, Anthony D’Offay and other philanthropists saying that their money is not meant to replace subsidy, they give it to add to the national subvention. As Vikki Heywood said, the RSC is worth £58m a year to the West Midlands, more when the new theatre is finished at the end of the year, and philanthropy is simply not a serious option there.
The truth is that business sponsorship is not dead, and Fosters is far from alone in stepping forward. In fact, the last published figures from Arts & Business showed that business sponsorship did, indeed, decline last year – by 6%, a percentage point less than the fall in philanthropic giving to cultural concerns and projects. Business sponsorship was still worth £157m, a quarter of the private sector contribution, which takes into account trusts and foundations as well as philanthropy.
In the last month or so, the likes of UBS, HSBC and Shell have all announced new cultural sponsorships, and most managing and working in the arts are praying that the demonstrations against BP by the self-styled Good Crude Britannia artists’ alliance (particularly angry about the oil company’s support of the Tate who were celebrating 20 years of their association) won’t scare off them or any of the other corporates who help keep the machinery of the culture industry running fairly smoothly.
Meanwhile, the poor, beleagured British Film Institute, its plans for a Southbank National Film Centre in ruins after the new government pulled the £45 million personally pledged by Gordon Brown and bewildered as to what the abolition of the UK Film Council will mean to them, had something to smile about. American Express have stepped forward as principal sponsors for an undisclosed but, says director Amanda Nevill, ‘very substantial’, amount.
The fact is that many, if not most, philanthropists are also the industry moguls that sanction the sponsorship of the likes of, say, Unilever, without whose business support Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall exhibitions could not happen, or Travelex whose £10 tickets have now notched up a million happy National Theatre goers. And the Arts Council’s own calculation shows that 75% or more of arts philanthropists are giving their money in London: in the regions, theatre companies and venues simply dare not believe that philanthropy will replace subsidy, or that corporate sponsorship is a thing of the past.
Art is organic, the funding of it cannot be. By all means woo the generous rich to give, but philanthropy is uncertain while it is the well established process by which businesses see commercial sense in being associated with culture that puts a smile on the face of the arts.
Classical Music
17/7/10
From the initial stages of finding a composer to the playing of a new work, the process of commisioning takes time and trust. But the end result can be both rewarding and inspiring. Simon Taitreports from the recent Orchestras Live gathering
The questions are quite simple: why do we, on one hand, write orchestral music, and why do we, on the other, pay composers to do it?
The answers are not that simple, as a packed St Pancras Room at King’s Place discovered when, for their annual conferene, Orchestras Live gathered the composers, the promoters, the musicians, the publishers, the venue managers, the conductors and the organisers of festivals and orchestras. Orchestras Live, said its chief executive, Henry Little, a third of whose programming is based on commissioned new work, would be the ‘expert broker’.
So, how, he asked, does this ‘living, breathing art form for all of us’ actually happen?
‘Love (of making music),’said Alec Roth, ‘and the need to feel useful’. The response is not as glib and simplistic as it looks. Roth, a composer who works a lot with schools, chorale and small ensembles, illustrated his point with an anecdote of a conversation with a poet friend who had been commissioned to put some words to a piece of music. Roth asked him what it was for: an anniversary of a chamber ensemble in a private house, not a large event, his friend replied. ‘”No, what is it for – soprano, piano, are there strings?” And I thought, how narrow minded we are, when the “what’s it for” question is the most important, and it’s for different things for the different elements involved.
‘It’s not an isolated process, it’s collaborative with all the different elements involved in making the music.’
In the commissioning of a lot of new music there is a high element of trust, not in the composer so much as in the audience because it can take years for new work to be widely appreciated. ‘There’s a need to keep the repertoire moving,’ said Andrew Burke chief executive of the London Sinfonietta. ‘New work that was witnessed a few years ago as challenging now has made its way into the repertoire, and you can look at a pattern of work among orchestras now where it’s become a badge of honour to be engaged in new work. It’s constantly fascinating to be addressing new artforms and discovering something new, and the question is how to make that work for an audience.’
But if you’re looking for a composer, where do you look? For Burke and his ensemble it’s a matter of keeping an ear to ground, maintaining contacts with those who can spot some of the promising young ones, ‘and you keep awake about it’. But it can be a long process, of making oneself available to read and hear work, to engineer meetings between composers and ensembles before a commission is in the air, and it can take years. ‘Sometimes you hear something on the radio that hits you in the stomach – for me it was Tavener’s The Protecting Veil – and you know you have to have something by that composer; in this case it took 20 years’.
And it’s a matter of trust, said Nick Collon, conductor of the Aurora chamber orchestra. They were already in the room’s good books having started the day off with their first performance of part of a delightful wordless opera commissioned from Julian Philips, head of composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Collon swears by the perspicacity and generosity of music publishers after a visit to the Boosey & Hawkes library where the librarian told him to choose whatever he wanted and the scores would be sent on. ‘I took about 40, and from that point I’ve submerged myself in publishers’ offices and found a lot of new music I wouldn’t have otherwise found’.
But that’s finding by browsing. How do you identify your Julian Phillips when you don’t know who he is? Context is the key for him. ‘Who’s it for, what’s it for, and when you know, find young composers in your own area, and talk to the music colleges,’ he advises. ‘In the current climate when there’s very little money to go around, to commission cold is not a good idea. It’s about building, and you need to take time to develop relationships, however they might emerge’.
And, said the oboist and conductor Nick Daniel who had commissioned a lot of work both as a soloist and for ensembles, be prepared to make partnerships: for him, working with Arts Council East, for instance, has been ‘wonderful’. And, of course, talk to the Society for the Promotion of New Music.
But once the composer is found, the commission made, how does the music happen? ‘It comes from all these relationships, and it’s only in retrospect that you realise where all these ideas have come from,’ said Roth.
The best commissions, he said, come from unexpected places, a bar or a restaurant, but can a composer actually be told what to write? Well, writing to text can be like that, Phillips said: ‘I’ll never do it again. The danger is that you an never look in the mirror and ask yourself “what am I doing this for”. You need a commissioner to not burden you with too many agendas and leave you free with your imagination’.
What is important though, said Ian Ritchie, director of the City of London Festival, is that a composer can work with the orchestra in the process of making a work, as with the ground-breaking Panufnik scheme in which the LSO works with young composers. ‘Composers who are established perhaps get insufficient opportunities to do this,’ he said, and Roth mourned a loss of the tradition in which musicians got involved in the creative process.
For the commissioner, finding the artist to make your work and having the final score plop onto your doormat was just the start of the process. More extensive touring gives opportunities for new work to be played more than once – ‘one night stands do you no good’, warned Daniel. ‘But,’ said Andrew Burke, ‘it has to be afforded, where do I put it in the programme, what do I put around it?’
But that is part of the mechanics of bringing new work to audiences. ‘Commissioning is the best thing in the world, to be able to say to a composer I’d like you to write something for me,’ he said. ‘Almost as exciting is to be able to say to a composer, ‘Whatever you want to do, do it and we’ll be your partner’.
When the opera star Bryn Terfel appealed to his Faenol Festival audience to dig deep in order to keep the event afloat, it was a sure sign of a wider struggle. Simon Tait and Elisa Bray report
Independent
Friday, 23 July 2010
The last dance? Revellers at the Glade dance festival, which has been cancelled this year in the face of increasing costs
The acclaimed singer Bryn Terfel, who created the Faenol Festival 11 years ago to bring music and money to the undernourished corner of North Wales where he was born, has appealed to audiences to book now for this year’s August bank holiday weekend event. Otherwise it may be short of some acts.
It is symptomatic of a downturn threatening what only two years ago a survey called the UK’s “cultural powerhouse”: arts festivals, the event form on which the Cultural Olympiad is being built for 2012. “Every festival is feeling the pinch,” Terfel says. Until now, though, none has found it necessary to appeal directly to audiences to put their hands in their pockets.
“Many outdoor events are struggling, and there are a lot of factors at work,” said Stewart Collins, chair of the British Arts Festivals Association, who also runs the Henley Festival. “Audiences are thinking twice about whether they can afford the treat in this economic climate, and bearing in mind three bad summers for weather in a row, they are waiting until the last minute before deciding.”
Added to that, sponsors are either reducing their grants or withdrawing altogether, and the local authorities that support many outdoor local festivals are under increasing pressure to shift funding from such “soft” commitments.
Terfel’s Faenol is based in a part of the country where sponsorship and philanthropy are as rare as summer rain is frequent, and Faenol has had a troubled history. Set near Caernarfon in largely rural Gwynedd, its tenth anniversary programme was cancelled last year when Welsh Assembly funding was agreed too late. This time the Arts Council of Wales have pledged £240,000 for the next three years – controversially, because at the same time, other arts organisations in Wales were having their funding cut – and ticket sales for 2010 were doing well until the Budget in June, after which they slumped.
In the past, Faenol has attracted around 30,000 visitors over the four days, and this year an extra comedy day, led by Al Murray, has been added. A craft village is also a new innovation, but the festival’s success depends on advance ticket sales, Terfel said, and he has given audiences until the end of this month to pay up and give a vote of confidence.
“I know things are tough economically, but I am hopeful that our audience will give us the signal we need right now,” he said. “To that end, I urge anyone who wants to attend Faenol Festival this year to buy their ticket within the next ten days, and commit to coming along and enjoying a wealth of world class entertainment.”
He has a “Plan B”, he said, although he would not elaborate – but it would mean support acts being axed (headliners such as Westlife and Rolando Villazon have already had to be paid and will appear). Faenol has local sponsors but no major core names; its chief support, Gwynedd County Council, is maintaining commitment for now because the festival brings £3m in extra spending to the region, but the full effects of national cuts on local councils are still to be felt.
Henley Festival, in mid-July, also had difficulties, with over £100,000 being lost in corporate sponsorship, presaged by a poor turnout in 2009. To offset the effect, Collins created a “New Patrons Club” to attract private funders, and raised £50,000 towards the £1.8m turnover. Even with a risky enhanced line-up devised to help audiences to decide to come, which included Terfel and Nigel Kennedy, ticket buyers were slow to commit. Nearly 20,000 came in the end, better than last year, but 15 per cent down on 2008, so that this year the Henley Festival broke even.
As local authorities feel the effect of £1.1bn in Treasury cuts and corporate sponsors reconsider the wisdom of hosting champagne events when staffs are being reduced, festival organisers are having to be inventive about programming and fund-raising.
Cheltenham now has four festivals – jazz, science, music and literature – spaced throughout the year, and four years ago a single chief executive for all four, Donna Renney, was appointed. Within a year she experienced a £220,000 local authority cut, and has had to build an infrastructure to cope with that and the recession that followed. There were many late bookings for the 2010 music festival, which ended last weekend; it experienced a great deal of seeming spur of the moment decisions by ticket-buyers, or “walk-ups”. There was an 8 per cent improvement in box office in the final tally.
“It’s down to marketing – and larger organisations like this are big enough to plan,” Renney said. This year she started a membership scheme for the music festival that already has 4,000 members, and though it has only broken even, it is the core of a new support group for all four events from which she hopes to develop donors. “But smaller festivals can’t have that kind of infrastructure, and they are going to find it very hard.”
One festival casualty of 2010 is The Magic Loungeabout, which took a sabbatical year in 2009 and hoped to return as an extended three-day festival with a bigger capacity this year. Having added a speaker’s tent, a cinema, a restaurant, a tea shop, an old school games room, doubled the entertainment on offer to children, and improved on production, a main investor pulled out at the last minute, leaving them with a sizeable funding gap.
Many pop festivals do not have the benefit of corporate back-up, and in priding themselves on being sponsorship-free events, their independent nature leaves them more exposed to the risks of slow ticket sales. Some festivals ease the pressure of ticket sales by offering early-bird tickets for the following year’s event at a reduced price as soon as the festival is over, catching their buyers early.
Although many have felt a buoyancy in sales, including last week’s Latitude and the forthcoming Green Man Festival – both selling out months early thanks to loyal followings developed over their consistent successes of recent years – there have been 13 festival cancellations to date this year. Among these are the dance-oriented Glade, which has been going since 2004 and which had Orbital, Simian Mobile Disco and Tricky on the bill. Organisers cited council restrictions as the main cause for their closure this year. They are an example of how increased requirements imposed upon festivals for policing, security and stewarding can be crippling for festivals who are forced to drive up ticket prices.
On their website, they stated: “As many Glade fans will know, over the years we have fought hard to maintain the integrity of the event against steadily increasing restrictions imposed by the local authority and police. The resulting compromises have led to increased costs, increased ticket prices and a throttling of the very essence of what we wanted to do. It led to us finally having to move from the lovely Wasing Estate due to late night noise restrictions and the police’s demands for an ever-increasing security and police presence at the event.”
