Editorial/Rant – Page 23

Image of my gormless face taken by and shared with the permission of @documentally

The beginning of my week was spent at Shift Happens 2010, where I had the very awesome and slightly scary opportunity of giving a 10 minute talk on where I think theatre and digital tech are going. A brilliant couple of days, with inspiration abound, and some really lovely little pieces of performance woven in. I’m still not really up to long bouts of typing yet (the cast comes off in T-minus 12 days), so have embedded a couple of things here to give you a taste of what I took to the event, mostly in flash though, apologies for that.

The first a slideshare version of my talk – with me actually talking (apologies for the pops in the audio) through my ideas on it, and the second is a phlog done by a local community radio station talking to me and Babba Israel from Contact Theatre in Manchester. I’ve also put on Contact’s weekly video blog, the second half of which covers Shift Happens, which should at least give those of you on iPhones a sense of it. You can also download a pdf of the talk here, and for links to other presentations and sources mentioned, check out this very useful post by Matthew Linley.

It will be interesting to see where the next Shift goes. There was much less dissent this year, which although at least means the arts industry is catching up, perhaps means we now need to be pushing further, aiming to (as Andy Field had it)

“dream stupid, impossibly grand visions of what the future might look like”.

Do we now need an arts and tech conference which is more than just entry level? And that also challenge the conventions of a conference? I’m doing a joint paper with my supervisor for the TaPRA 2010 Conference which seeks to interrogate the failings of the top-down conference form in properly communicating the wholeness of performance and academic thought. To move the arts/tech world on do we need to find something that falls somewhere between festival, workshop, conference and digital and performative playground? What do you think?

Continue reading Shift Happens 2010

Image shared via a creative commons license on flickr by VampzX_23

“According to UNESCO the UK is the world’s largest exporter of cultural goods. Now there’s something. When have we been the world’s largest exporter of anything recently? And this is achieved with a tax payer investment which is 0.1 percent of the recent HBOS bailout. Not only that, with this tax payer investment we generate more economic activity than tourism, and we do this without a bonus culture, and without a ‘talent drain’. Now is the time for banks to have artists on their boards so they can understand how to use public money properly.”

Talking Birds are an awesome company, for more reasons than the above statement. I think every theatre, arts and culture company should have this on their website. Talking Birds did so just after the credit crunch hit.

Lots of blog posts are flying around at the moment about funding. Arts companies, used to the abuses of Tory rule, are battening down the hatches and readying their defences. Then, today came that expected announcement:

“Conservative MP Jeremy Hunt has been appointed as Culture Secretary – and he has already signalled that the arts are in line for up to £66 million worth of cuts as part of the drive to reduce the national debt.” (Source)

As DanRebellato Retweeted “So much for Vaizey’s ‘the Arts are safe with us'”.

This is a foolish move in the extreme. The Arts are largely seen as an easy cut, not necessary, and granted health and education sound much more important… if you believe the arts aren’t a part of either. However the truth is worse than that, the truth is that this action is at best, gesture politics, and at worst, extremely damaging to the economy. As Marcus Romer points out here

“Arts funding spend [only] amounts to 7pence out of every £100.00 of public spending”

The actual amount of public spending accounted for by the arts is minuscule. And then there’s the money it brings in. Following a recent question to Ben Bradshaw (the previous Secretary of State for Culture) Alexander Kelly of Third Angel found that:

“Last year, at London theatres alone, VAT on tickets generated £75m in income. Arts Council England invests just over £100m in theatre.

One way of reading this would be to say that the government doesn’t subsidise theatre, theatre more than pays for itself out of VAT alone”

It doesn’t just pay for itself, it brings money in, especially with the VAT hike that’s largely expected.

“The DCMS also point out the wider, and better known, arguments for seeing subsidy of the arts as investment that produces a massive return.

“However the economic impact of theatre and the subsidised arts is much greater than just VAT. The creative industries, including a number of subsidised sectors, account for 6.2% of the UK’s Gross Value Added (GVA), £16.6bn in exports, and 2m jobs.” (source)

All this on an investment of 0.1% of what we gave to HBOS during the banking crisis, for an amount that wouldn’t even register on this infogram of UK money

Continue reading Gesture Politics and the Arts