Over the last couple of years the talk in the wide world of culture has almost incessantly been about funding cuts. Alongside that has been some fairly muted counterpoint from a few, some would say, privileged members of the arts community.

Every time we read about the case for arts funding it's usually being made by Nicholas Hytner (AD of the National Theatre) or the director of the Royal this that or the other.

Their arguments usually fall on deaf ears since they all come across as people speaking out in defence of their own substantial pay packets and even more substantial pension plans.

Disingenuous doesn't even begin to cover it.

So what of everybody else, the massed ranks of the small and mid-scale? Well, apart from a minor scuffle late last year over the failure of the government to include the arts as a mandatory requirement in the new EBacc in schools, that prompted a few dance companies to openly comment, they have all been as quiet as church mice.

Far from being a rich source of discussion, ideas and advocacy for the profession as a whole, dance companies come across, publicly at least, as being entirely disinterested in the world around them.

Last year when we published the piece on the shockingly poor pay for professional dancers at English National Opera, how many dance companies spoke out, openly, in defence of their profession's most vital resource?

None!

'The Royal Ballet's Women', a piece that focused not only on the lack of female commissioning at the Royal Ballet but the all too obvious sexism in the dance world, elicited the same level of response. In fact, only one dance maker we contacted actually agreed to comment for the piece.

No Idea

Just to give you some idea of the level of the open discussion being conducted in dance I give you the Rural Retreats, run by Dance East in Ipswich.

During the annual get together this month David Nixon, the AD of Northern Ballet, is quoted as saying;

"Dancers often used to be thought of as children and even now they are still sometimes called girls or boys rather than men and women or just dancers. I want to get to the point where dancers don't think of themselves as girls and boys... They need to think of themselves as adults."

Given all the ballet dancers working in the world today who have forgotten that they are adults this is probably sound advice or Mr Dixon should immediately resign, take your pick.

Mark Baldiwin, the AD of Rambert, who was also in attendance, said;

"It's important to create a culture within a company so that dancers can talk to you [artistic directors] whenever they want to."

Essentially, try not to be a semi-autistic, dictatorial, jackass if you run a dance company. Thinking of the very highest level.

Do More

Many would argue that simply doing what they do should be enough to demonstrate the merits of dance companies and culture as a whole to both the public and the politicians. In a perfect world that might be true, but in the current climate it simply is not, nor has it ever been, enough.

More needs to be done, much more. Tweeting links to petitions is just weak sauce. What the dance profession really needs is active and consistent participation in the discussions about the profession and culture in general. That participation needs to come from the company directors, choreographers and the dancers.

However, leadership must come from the top. Adding the voices of company directors and choreographers to the debate and discussion surrounding all facets of dance can only be a good thing for the profession as a whole, no matter what the topic.

This participation needs to be thoughtful and visible to anybody who wants to see it or read it. You all have websites, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, email accounts, phones, computers and a tongue in your head and I strongly urge you to use all of them.

If Akram Khan wants to go to the national press and complain about the arts having "too much" money then one of his peers needs to immediately debunk his ridiculous reasoning and do it publicly.

It's not about arguing, it's about setting the record straight and creating some balance in the narrative.

Stop waiting for somebody to ask you to get into the fight, just get in here before it's too late.

This Editorial was sent in email form to dance company directors and others across the UK.

Beth Haines Doran
Live Performance Department
Equity

Dear Beth,

With regard to your open meeting for actors and dancers at opera houses on 17 January 2013, please find attached my personal observations and proposals based on views I have heard expressed by a number of dancers (and one actor) over the past few years by acquaintances of my Equity member daughter who have performed in operas.

As you know, dancers and actors already striving to eke out a meagre living on short-term contracts and minimal wages are dependent upon being called to auditions. Perhaps understandably, many therefore lack the confidence to rock the boat by expressing their individual views robustly or publicly, or seek to negotiate reasonable improvements to their contracts.

And it has already been said somewhere that trying to persuade performing artists to undertake collective action in order to improve their own situation is like trying to herd cats.

I realise that fighting to introduce performers' fees that reflect a living wage is a perennial problem in the UK, but why is it? It is incumbent upon Arts Council England, performing arts colleges and theatre schools, impresarios and arts journalists alike - not just Equity - to properly address these issues by first asking themselves the following question:

"How is it that the very people who live off the work of professional actors and dancers by teaching them, contracting them, administering them and writing about them enjoy salaries, benefits, terms and conditions the majority of artists can only dream of?"

So I hope you will accept this document from an "interested party" (I'm actually a PR writer and editor). I may have bowdlerised your industry's jargon, and the views expressed in the attached paper may be arrogant, naïve and simplistic, but I hope they can add something to the debate, because I hope and believe your meeting could be a game changer.

All power to your elbow, and good luck!

With kind regards,
Name and Address Supplied

Identified Issues

• Current minimum fees, terms and conditions for actors and dancers at opera houses in the UK start from a pitifully low base (£25), as is highlighted when productions tour overseas.

• Opera company administrators appear reluctant to acknowledge actors' and dancers' expertise, or to value it as highly as that of singers, chorus members and musicians.

• The administrators who negotiate actors' and dancers' fees appear to base them on an arbitrary sliding scale that differs between different productions within the same company, and between different opera companies.

• Some opera cast administrators only forward casting calls and auditions notices to restricted lists of 'favoured' actors and dancers (ROH) - possibly those they know will accept lower fees. Others simply select the first batch of performers to respond to a call and ignore the remainder regardless of their eligibility, experience or expertise (Glyndebourne).

Both flout industry Best Practice - yet administrators are duty-bound to help directors/choreographers audition or call as many appropriately-qualified actors or dancers as is reasonable.

• Opera company administrators (rather than choreographers or directors) also make seemingly arbitrary decisions about what makes performances by actors and dancers 'worthy' of improved performance fees, including additional fees payments for cinema simulcasts, DVD filming, solo roles etc.

• A reason cited by opera companies reluctant to increase meagre fees for actors and dancers is the claim that "the production has gone over budget" - even as they alter set designs and costumes and pay singers multiple thousands of pounds per performance.

• All of the above results in contracted freelance actors and dancers in opera houses having to individually negotiate improved fees even as intensive (and often collaborative) rehearsals are taking place, ensuring a weak and fragmented negotiating position. It also leads to some productions lacking a 'cover' dancer in case of injury etc.

Proposed Motions

1 • That opera cast administrators follow industry Best Practice by announcing and/or forwarding casting calls and/or audition notices to as wide a selection of suitably-qualified actors and dancers in the UK as is reasonably possible, and assess ALL responses fairly and equitably

2 • That ALL actors and dancers contracted to perform onstage or offstage in UK opera houses, however briefly, be paid an Equity-Approved Minimum Fee, and that this minimum fee be made mandatory for all UK and visiting opera companies from 5 April 2013.

3 • That this Equity-Approved Minimum Fee be subdivided as follows:

a. Rehearsal Fees: Minimum £100 per day/£500 per week (Monday to Friday);
Minimum £150 per day (Saturday and Sunday).

b. Performance Fees: Minimum £150 per performance, however brief.

c. Additional Fees: Solos and/or featured roles: Minimum £75 per performance; DVD filming, cinema simulcast transmissions etc: Minimum £100 per day.

4 • That when requested to do so by any party Equity will arbitrate and/or negotiate on behalf of actors or dancers contracted by opera houses when disputes arise, with no subsequent professional disadvantage being conferred on the performers by the opera houses.

The views expressed here are those of the writer and not necessarily those of Article19.

More than five years ago we published a piece entitled "10 Things That Need To Happen in 2008". As the dance profession, en masse, moves into another new year what better time to take a look back and see if any of the things we discussed actually happened.

"ACE needs to support DanceUK's National Centre for Dance Health and Performance."

Not only did Arts Council England not support the renamed National Institute for Dance Medicine at all but they completely de-funded DanceUK. Despite that set back DanceUK did manage to open a starter clinic in London last year of which we shall have more in the coming weeks.

We should note that during the last 5 years ACE has squandered huge sums of money propping up failing, large scale arts institutions, handed over millions for pointless new buildings (looking at you Rambert) and continues to pay its senior executives salaries, that evidence suggests, they are entirely undeserving of.

So if it wasn't the lack of money, then what was it?

"Dancer's pay needs to get real."

Given the debacle last year with the English National Opera and the notorious £327 per week pay cheques and the fact that many dancers report not earning enough money to even qualify to pay any income tax we shall go out on a limb and suggest things have not improved a whole lot.

Equity minimums are still a complete joke and long term employment prospects and career development are pretty much just a fantasy for most professional dancers.

Over the five year period we have failed to note one single substantive position piece written by somebody in the dance profession about creating jobs for dancers.

If we missed it, then do point us in the right direction.

"A touring structure for new companies."

The National Dance Network had a brief experiment with some touring project or other but it was so brief and so badly publicised we can't remember what it was called. Resolution is the same as it ever was and a grander plan to get the work of new dance makers touring around the country on a regular basis is nowhere in sight.

"Dance companies need to actually embrace new technology, not just pretend they do!"

On this front there has actually been some progress. Websites, at least some of them, have improved and the overall content is better, if a little dry most of the time.

The standard and type of videos being produced is still very hit and miss however with too much emphasis being placed on marketing strategy as opposed to providing actual information or a compelling watch.

Just last week Dance4 released a video about 'Big Dance 2012' that was so laden with meaningless statistics you could have printed it out on paper and it would have made more sense.

"Dance bloggers need to write about stuff that's real."

This one is a little more difficult to measure but most of the blogs that were active in 2008 have either completely disappeared or are languishing, unloved and lacking any updates.

Thewinger.com, started by former NYC Ballet dancer Kristin Sloane, had a grand total of three updates last year, a depressing fall from grace.

If you know of any other dance blogs that may be of interest then please let us know, because we sure as hell can't find them.

"National Dance Agencies need to work together more."

Not only is that not happening but a few them are directly responsible for undermining the profession as a whole with some pretty ludicrous projects and wasting huge sums of money. Far from being a wealth of experience and knowledge they come across as ivory towers, in a swamp, surrounded by an impenetrable forest!

"Arts Council England needs to open up."

Stop laughing at the back. If anything they have gotten worse and the funding monoliths fake "live chats" over the internet are evidence of nothing at all.

Spare Change

So five years later and it seems not a lot has changed in the wide world of dance. If anything things might actually be getting worse.

Change is often slow to happen but some of the things we were asking for, like ACE being more open to the public about discussing their policies and admitting their failures, are pretty simple things to achieve.

Far from dance companies and agencies becoming more collaborative, at least in terms of how they talk about, debate, promote and support the art form, they look increasingly isolationist in their behaviour.

We are of course generalising but that still doesn't excuse the lack of progress in a lot of areas. Bad policy and bad decision making still persists throughout the industry.

Here in TheLab™ we can't make people do things differently, all we can do is keep highlighting the problems. We did ask for Phenomenal Cosmic Powers™ for Christmas but none came.

Without sounding like a commercial for Coca Cola the only thing left is for you, whomever might be reading this, to lead the charge for wider changes in the dance world on a whole range of issues.

Proactive organisations like the Female Choreographers Collective are one example of a big idea led by just two people (Holly Noble and Jane Coulston). It might work it might not work but at least they're giving it a shot.

Carol Lee, a costume designer from Leeds, took on the Big Bad (ACE) and lost, sort of, over their less than honest funding practices. Ms Lee fought the good fight however and that's better than nothing.

If you don't ask then you don't get, so start writing, start Tweeting or start calling because the ways things are going we won't see any substantive change until at least 2346.

2012, for us at least, started with some trouble after we published a piece that suggested Resolution, The Place's annual new-dance bun fight, could probably do with an overhaul. Funding the choreographers that take part was one of our suggestions.

Some readers disagreed though with one in particular saying;

"If you want to patronize, ridicule and insult those choreographers works, then i suppose you are entitled to your own opinion, but your poisonous - and frankly bitchy - wording that you seem to use, almost constantly, on your articles only support the downward spiral of support for young emerging artists."

[ Resolution Revolution ]

So, a good start to the year then and nice to know we are playing a big part in destruction of support for new artists.

Right on the heels of that was a review, of sorts, of the Ballet Boyz lamentable attempt at documentary film making as they got their fledgling dance company off the ground. It was all a bit self involved, pointless and, in parts, probably made up. This time the majority of reader comments and emails agreed.

Little did we know that the "Boyz" would be back in our sights, for much the same reasons, just 11 short months later.

[ Jingle Boyz ]

Clinical Bullying

February saw Janet Smith, the venerable AD of Scottish Dance Theatre, move to her new post at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. The move was accompanied by much cheering and swiftly followed by many a puzzled expressions as her replacement at Scottish Dance Theatre was revealed as one Fleur Darkin. The jury remains in deliberations as Ms Darkin embarks on her first tour in charge very soon.

In March we had some fun on Twitter. As those who follow us will be only too aware we do love a bit of heckling from the back. This time it was the vapid Digital Capacity Building project so beloved of ACE and those that directly benefit from it.

One of those beneficiaries is Marcus Romer, AD of Pilot Theatre, who decided to respond to our heckling by calling us "bullies" and "trolls". TheImp™ was having none of it and delivered a swift and decisive verbal beating and all was right in the universe again.

Freedom of expression just doesn't cut it for some apparently.

[ Please! ]

ENO Foot in Mouth

The month of March also brought one of our most comprehensive pieces when we tackled low pay for dancers at the English National Opera.

Throughout our investigation what struck us more than anything was how little anybody actually cared that this situation existed at all. Neither ENO, Equity or ACE could summon a coherent answer to any of the questions we put to them.

It takes a particularly kind of mendacity to try and justify low wages being paid by an organisation that has millions in subsidy and even more millions in surplus funds.

[ The United States of Nobody Gives a Sh*t ]

Dance UK finally got the National Institute for Dance Medicine off the ground in May with the opening of a new clinic at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London. It's a slow start for sure and funding cuts are not making it any easier. We'll have more in the new year for a follow up on how it's doing.

DIGIC Say What Again?

For our May feature piece on The Space (an ACE/BBC project that's supposed to bring the arts to the masses via the internet) we highlighted the massive and completely unnecessary amount of money the funding monolith was lavishing on their pet projects.

TheImp™ later highlighted the "Betrayal" of the arts in general by both DanceXchange and Dance East who had made the two most expensive pieces for The Space and then declined to talk about what they had spent all the money on.

It was pretty much 'The United States of Nobody Gives a Sh*t' all over again.

[ Betrayal ]

A theme that continued in our piece 'The Royal Ballet's Women' that highlighted the complete lack of top tier opportunities for women in dance. The Royal Ballet prompted the piece with their new show 'Titian' that featured no women in choreographic or creative roles.

It transpired that Monica Mason, the RB's former AD, hadn't bothered to hire a female dance maker even once during her tenure and the company in general hadn't bothered with a female dance maker for over 13 years.

Again, ACE said nothing, Monica Mason waffled and the dance world in general remained unsurprised and shrugged.

[ The Royal Ballet's Women ]

Dark August

August came with the very sad news that Nigel Charnock had passed away after a very short illness. Mr Charnock was one of the most vibrant dance makers/theatre directors in the business and his passing came as a shock to many. Watch the complete un-edited video we did with him, you won't regret it.

As we strolled into November something very reassuring came our way. A man called Peter S. Phillips (who just happens to work for ACE) told everybody in the arts that all would be well. Don't worry about cuts to funding because philanthropic giving, championed by ACE and the government at large, was an "infinite" resource.

Either Mr Phillips doesn't know what infinite means or he's fallen down and hit his head on something hard. This man's babbling theories were swiftly put down by TheImp™.

[ A Man With A Plan ]

With that we come full circle back to the Ballet Boyz who decided, against whatever practical and legal advice they may receive, to publish a ridiculously exploitative image of their own dancers.

When challenged by TheLab™ the old "boyz" said the whole thing "wasn't a story" and they would like it very much if we would leave them alone. Unluckily for them they don't get to decide what we think is a story. The image was removed, they remained tight lipped and the Ballet Boyz remains a completely ridiculous entity.

[ Hold The Junk ]

And Finally

Following a two week stint in Oslo for the Coda Oslo International Dance Festival we put together a short form documentary on a dance education project. Delivered between the UK's 2 Faced Dance Company and Oslo's Panta Rei Danseteater it's the perfect example of why dance education is important and why the arts "matter".

With funding cuts and the continued nonsensical behaviour of ACE there has never been a more uncertain time to be in the arts. As ever, you get the feeling that everybody, apart from a chosen few, are hanging on by their fingertips to keep the whole thing working.

2013 will be, if nothing else, interesting.

Op-Ed. Nick Keegan is a professional dancer currently running for a position with Equity as a Dance Specialist. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of Article19

by Nick Keegan

As any of you Equity members out there might know, if you go on their website in the members section, there are quite a lot of different categories that Equity provide guidance on. There are different guidelines, conditions, and rates specific to the 17 different categories, each one with documents for performers/directors etc.

There is not one basic Equity minimum wage, as many people think.

It can be quite difficult to find the documents that are relevant for a job because it is dependant on who's employing you, where the funding comes from, if it is 'independent' theatre , West-End Theatre etc etc.

Which is a good thing, because it should be specific to the line of work that you are in. An actor wouldn't need the same level of health and safety terms and conditions in their contract as an aerialist or circus performer for instance.

If the engagement is a large budget project then the extent of your contribution to performing/devising the physical and intellectual content should be reflected in your salary as a reasonable percentage of the total budget.

For instance, in a lot of touring ACE funded projects that I've come across, the weekly expenditure per person on travel and accommodation can often far outweigh the performers weekly salary. This might not seem that surprising, because touring can be very expensive, but if you consider a few other factors it is a very clear display of how little performers are valued when it comes to arts budgeting.

1. Almost all professional dance job listings require something along the lines of at least three years professional experience before you even get an audition.

2. The salary for those jobs are very likely to be the absolute minimum weekly wage they can get away with. (Some will even find loop-holes like 'contribution to expenses' to pay you even less.)

3. A lot of touring dance projects will arrange the performers' travel and accommodation in advance in an effort to be cost effective, but not pay performers for travel days.

So to sum up... they require professionals with years of experience, who have auditioned and proven themselves to be better than up and above of 600 other applicants, but they are unwilling to pay them what even they consider to be a reasonable wage. Performers are left fighting just to be paid the basic minimum wage for their profession, which can, in turn, damage their prospects of being re-employed in future.

There are many instances where you think to yourself; "I could have worked the same number of hours in a bar and earned more money." (and lets face it, most dancers are very experienced bar workers..)

If that's not under-valued and degrading for a trained professional (with a BA degree and a hefty student loan) then I don't know what is.

Tangential

OK so I went off on a bit of a tangent there. But to get to the point...

These documents and guidelines from Equity are there to protect performers from all of the above. For dancers, they are failing. One reason for this may be that they are completely irrelevant and outrageously out-dated.

The current up-to-date standard agreement document for Ballet and Dance working in theatre, was made between the Society of London Theatre/Theatrical Management Association (SOLT/TMA) and Equity on 22nd of March 1994.

It lists the minimum weekly salary as £199.00.... try living off that in London!!

Now the rates have at least been updated in a separate document from 2010, but if the conditions suggested by Equity for the safeguarding and protection of dancers' rights hasn't been updated since 1994 then what does that say about how well they are representing such a fluctuating profession??

Personally I think it is the Councillors' job to keep Equity's representation relevant to each genre, and it seems like that this has been lacking for a long time now.

Thanks for reading, and please follow and share my bid for Equity Council on the Facebook Page below, and feel free to contact me at ndlkeegan@googlemail.com

[ How To Vote ]

by Neil Nisbet

The tale of professional dancer's pay is a very long story that's never going away but things have reached a new low with the revelation that dancers working on the English National Opera production 'The Death of Klinghoffer' are being paid just £327 for what amounts to a 40 hour working week during rehearsals.

Perhaps more telling than the money is the attitude of the three key players in the latest farce that is the arts in the UK.

Those key players are the English National Opera (ENO), the performers union Equity and our old friends at Arts Council England. Between them they form the perfect circle of indifference, ignorance and incompetence.

The ENO

Our story begins with the UK's second largest opera company currently in receipt of £17,078,058 for the financial year 2011/2012 from ACE.

Their production of 'The Death of Klinghoffer' required 12 professional dancers and those dancers were employed on a contract that required them, for rehearsals, to work a 33 hour week. Not included in that 33 hours, and noted in the contract, is a mandatory "warm-up" class or what most professional dancers refer to as "class".

Such classes are, of course, very important to a dancer's working day but as far as the ENO and their contract are concerned this class is not part of the working day and is therefore unpaid.

In an attempt to draw attention to these issues dancers from the production contacted both The Stage and Article19. In our case we were also supplied with a copy of the contract (published below).

When contacted to answer questions about the dancers pay and the terms of the contract ENO, via a spokesperson, initially declined to say anything at all simply stating that;

"[ENO] don't comment on individual contracts or payments as these are confidential between ENO and the individuals concerned."

When Article19 pointed out that we had a copy of the contract and the dancers had, obviously, waived their confidentially aside ENO disagreed. ENO had not chosen to release the information and they would not discuss the matter any further, except they would.

As we pressed them for some answers some notable snippets of information did come out. Concerning the unpaid classes the dancers are required to attend but not get paid for the spokesperson told us;

"We would argue that they are paid because that's part of the contract."

Apart from the fact that the contract specifically states that the "warm-up" class is not included in the dancer's contractual obligation ENO just admitted that the dancer's working week was longer than 33 hours.

Article19 asked again why the dancers don't get paid to attend class. The response this time was; "...within the contract, they signed the contract, then they are required to attend the warmup."

But why don't they get paid for it? "[I] need to get you and answer on that!"

The spokesperson never did get us that answer.

GFA vs NPO

Beyond the specifics of the contract was the issue of the pay level itself a pay level of just £327 per week.

Here in TheLab™ we publish many many auditions. On average the pay level offered by independent dance makers to professional dancers ranges from £375 to £475 per week.

These dance makers are often working on a project basis with funding from Grants for the Arts. Funding that is almost certainly less than the £17,078,058 the ENO received from ACE for 2011/2012.

Never mind the £5Million surplus that the opera company has available to it according to their 2010/2011 published accounts.

After we had confirmed with ENO that the jobs the dancers were doing did actually require the skills of "professional dancers" and could not be done by your average press officer we received this, somewhat rambling, response;

"You are comparing apples and pears really, what I tried to explain in that [email] was that for an opera production, where, I've got to be very careful about the words I use here, for an opera production where of course dance isn't an [integral] part of it.

I wouldn't want to disparage the importance of the dance elements. Of course they are there because that is the vision of the director and it's not like a bolt on, it is an [integral] part of the performance but it is not the central focus.

So where, a dance company is putting on something that is essentially dance focused this is just one more element in an opera which is pretty much there to serve the music and the singing. So it seems unreasonable for a comparison between a dance company and an opera company where dance is, although an [integral] part of the production not the central focus."

I leave it to you, our dear readers, to decide just how "integral" ENO considers the dancers to be to the 'Death of Klinghoffer'

In our discussions with ENO, ACE and Equity the issue of just how integral the dancers were to the production was a recurring theme.

Missing the Point

What seems to have been missed by all three however is the fact that ENO needed professional dancers. You're paying for their skills and experience they don't get paid based on how long they are on stage or how important or not you consider them to be to the performance.

In response to that point ENO said;

"the pay level is agreed with the individual concerned and it is entirely legal and the contract has been signed by those individuals."

That the dancers signed the contract is a perfectly valid point. They knew what the pay levels would be, they knew about the hours, they also knew about the unpaid class, the lack of travel expenses and so on.

So why did they take the work?

Bargaining power over wages and working conditions comes from the existence of choice. If a company needs a skilled workforce then they need to pay for that skilled workforce. Should the company fail to offer the appropriate level of compensation dictated by the skills of the worker then the worker will go elsewhere and the company will suffer.

Unfortunately for dancers however there is a complete lack of choice. Jobs are hard to find, very hard to find. If these 12 dancers didn't take the work based on the pay and conditions offered then ENO would have found another 12 dancers who would take the jobs.

Absent that choice the pay and conditions provided by ENO are a simple case of exploitation. ENO is not paying £327 per week for financial reasons or because of how important the dancers are or are not to the production. They are paying this rate because they can get away with it, because nobody is going to stop them.

As for the ENO protesting that what they are doing is "entirely legal"? I can only imagine they are referring to minimum wage laws. Laws that were introduced to protect low paid, un-skilled workers from being exploited by employers. Yes, that's what professional dancers are, un-skilled workers, no different to a shelf stacker in Tesco.

The Union

Another part of the bargaining power of the collective workers lies with their union, in this case that union is Equity.

Unfortunately for the dancers Equity doesn't really seem to know what a union is supposed to do, at least if our conversation with Hilary Hadley, Equity head of live performance, is anything to go by.

Equity were not at all surprised to learn about the low rate of pay for the dancers, which Ms Hadley described as "woefully low". They were not surprised, because they are the ones that negotiated the rate.

In the quote above from the ENO their press officer mis-spoke when they said "the pay level is agreed with the individual concerned". The individual dancers have no say in the matter and that's all thanks to Equity.

In an interview with The Stage, Ms Hadley came to the defence of the ENO, not the dancers, when they reported that;

"Hilary Hadley stressed that ENO is heavily dependent on arts council subsidy and has recently suffered an 11% cut to its core funding."

In fact ENO's funding from 2011/2012 to 2012/2013 is exactly the same, it's £17,078,058, not to mention the £5Million+ surplus referred to earlier. The company's funding will continue to rise to just under £18Million over the next 3-4 years.

When we pointed this out, Ms Hadley doubled down;

"funding cuts are the reason the pay has not gone up in the last two years...... there has been a pay freeze because of the cuts in Arts council subsidy. So the fact that they may have received 18 million or whatever the figure was that you've just said is irrelevant in terms of it being their ability to pay an increase if it's actually been a cut"

If you're reading that thinking it doesn't make any sense, then we're right there with you.

With regards to both the pay levels and the surplus Ms Hadley explained;

"They are unwilling to pass on any of that £5million reserves or the £18million to anybody who works at the ENO. ENO can contract at that amount, they are unwilling to raise it"

It's here that we begin to realise that Equity doesn't understand what a union is supposed to do.

If an employer is unwilling to pay a fair wage to skilled workers when that company has admitted it needs those skilled workers, when it is demonstrable that the employer has sufficient financial resources to pay those skilled workers then the union is supposed to dig in and negotiate a better deal for its members.

If that deal is not forthcoming then the union would have little choice but to recommend to their members and non members, that they not work for that employer and also denounce that employer publicly for blatantly attempting to exploit potential employees.

Of course that would require the union to be armed with the same information we have but once again, if our conversation with Equity is any indication, they seem to be blissfully ignorant of even the most basic facts.

As mentioned, Ms Hadley had stated to Article19 that the pay level was "woefully low" and she would "....love it to be much higher". When we suggested that Equity recommend to their members that they not work for ENO as long as pay levels were so low she suggested that Article19 was trying to get her to "criticise" Equity's members.

Ms Hadley repeatedly refused to answer when we put it to her that Equity was not doing anything to protect professional dancers working under these conditions.

ACE In A Hole

Arts Council England over the last 10 years has provided ENO with approximately £170Million in funding to conduct their various activities.

The funding monolith's actions over the pay and working conditions at the organisations they fund have been sketchy at best. No matter how much money a company receives, the Big Bad doesn't like to get involved.

They told Article19;

"Individual contracts are a matter for each employer and, as mentioned, the Arts Council can't be seen as fixing rates. In regards to this particular circumstance, we understand that the 33 hour (plus warm up) is the contracted working week, however some weeks, particularly during the run of performances, fewer hours are required to be worked."

They can't be seen as "fixing" rates but they don't mind taking sides here, the side of their multi-million pound client.

The reference to "fewer hours" being worked relates to the performance schedule for the production. It isn't what we were asking them about but not to worry, let's pick it apart all the same.

For a performance week involving three shows the dancers are paid £305 which amounts to just over £100 per show. 'The Death of Klinghoffer' has a run time of 2 hours and 55 minutes (what? Ed!) To keep things simple let's call that 9 hours for the week or £33 per hour.

Sounds pretty good huh?

Not really because it's not 9 hours at all. All freelancers, in any profession, understand that the first tenet of doing business is understanding the "cost of doing business". That is, the costs incurred by the dancer to get their job done.

For the show day the dancers have to do class which is an additional hour or (done properly) would be 90 minutes. Then there is the travel time (which is unpaid and travel costs are not reimbursed), the pre-show prep with make-up and costumes, the post show time just getting out of the theatre to say nothing of taxes and national insurance.

In addition to that, what with dancers being dancers, they need to pay for regular classes to keep in shape, gym membership, health insurance (if they can afford it), physio costs, cell phone bills, the power to charge that cell phone's battery, etc, etc.

What's that I hear you say, "why should ENO consider cell phone bills?"

When you hire a photographer their daily cost factors in not just their time but everything else. From the cost of their camera gear through insuring the camera gear to paying for the electricity to edit your photographs the photographer factors all of that in as "the cost of doing business".

£105 per show does not cover a dancers cost of doing business, not even a little bit. Top price tickets for this show by the way are £95.

Static Interference

Funding application guidelines issued by ACE state that artists must be paid an "appropriate" amount for the work they are being asked to do. ACE has no definition for what is "appropriate" but in response to some questions a spokesperson did say this;

"As I mentioned regarding Grants for the Arts, if artists aren't appropriately paid for what they are doing we would reject the application."

That response would suggest that ACE, despite their protestations, does have some guidelines in place for what constitutes low pay and their willingness to act on those guidelines.

So we pressed a little further and put it to ACE that if they had prior knowledge of the pay and working conditions of the dancers working for the ENO on 'The Death of Klinghoffer' would their NPO funding application have been turned down.

"If this were a Grants for the Arts application, it would have been flagged as a concern and would have been followed up with a discussion to clarify terms and conditions. This is what has happened in this instance."

We've gone from an application being rejected to getting "flagged as a concern" all in the space of two emails.

At the time of publishing we were unable to clarify with ACE the details of the discussion they had with ENO.

ACE also did not provide any specifics or mention any specific applications or companies that the funding organisation had dealt with because of concerns over low pay.

Bad Attitude

As I pointed out a long time ago, at the start of this editorial, what we have here is a perfect circle of indifference, ignorance and incompetence.

It's hard to determine which is most damaging but throughout the discussions with Equity, ACE and ENO what comes through is their absolute indifference toward the dancers.

Equity adopts the defeatist position of "that's just how things are", the ENO can, evidently, do whatever they choose and ACE adopts the default position of lapdog.

Were Article19 the performers union the only thing we could recommend is that dancers simply refuse to work for ENO under these conditions.

Failing that we would actively encourage them to take to the stage in the last evenings performance and simply stand still. If they are of such little importance to the show, if the amount of work they do is so trivial, according to ACE, Equity and ENO, then it shouldn't matter one little bit. Of course we all know that's not true.

In situations like this it comes down to somebody taking a stand and the only ones left to take a stand are the dancers. Once again, they have to make the hard choice to tough it out and say no to the work or take on their employers and try to get better pay for themselves and all the dancers who will come after them.

Their union doesn't care and doesn't even know how to be a union. At this stage the only option for Equity is to bundle itself up into a bag with some heavy weights and have someone throw them in the Thames.

The ENO are the ones exploiting them and can't seem to decide who negotiated the pay rate, how "integral" the dancers are to the show or how they arrived at their pay levels to begin with.

ACE, meanwhile, is busy planning the next State of the Arts conference where they will not talk about issues like this.

As the title suggests, this is The United States of Nobody Gives a Sh*t.

ENO Dancer's Contract

There are many tasks that journalists must undertake during any given day but one of the most fundamental is conducting interviews.

Whether it's discussing the nature of things with a dance maker or a dancer about their work and profession or haranguing a politician or bureaucrat about their policy decisions the interview is a fundamental part of obtaining, more often than not, hidden information.

Sans diligent questioning from an inquiring mind such information may otherwise not come to light.

A journalist that never speaks to anyone is not a very good journalist at all. How can you ever understand something if you never speak to anyone about things that, on close inspection, don't make a whole lot of sense?

Due diligence is how we all know that the press are writing from a position of informed opinion and not just howling at the moon as many have accused this writer and this publication of in the past and near present.

Howling at the Moon

The problems begin when you actually try and obtain an interview. More often than not getting a choreographer or dancer to talk about their work is easy. You ask them, you sit down with them, often on-camera, they have little or no idea the questions you are going to ask them, and they discuss their work with you articulately and intelligently. It's simple.

Not so when you approach Arts Council England however. Not since we interviewed former ACE North East CEO Andrew Dixon, chaperoned by his press officer, in 2005 have we been able to interview an ACE employee on camera about any of their, for want of a better word, schemes.

ACE's most recent high profile scheme is the 'Catalyst Arts' project that, in theory, is going to solve all of the problems related to the government arts funding cuts using methods that don't make a whole lot of sense.

Our piece 'The Philanthropy Gambit' covers these issues in great detail. That piece was written after the communications office at ACE in London had declined to give us an interview with a staffer. The reason they gave, at the time, was 'Catalyst Arts' had not been formally announced, we could have an interview when it was announced.

When the project was formally announced we waited a little and went back to ACE on October 28th and asked them once again for an interview to discuss the issues we had raised in 'The Philanthropy Gambit'.

This time ACE declined because they said all of their staff were too busy and would be too busy until November 14th. On November 15th we contacted ACE one more time and requested an interview with a staff member with knowledge of 'Catalyst Arts' and, once again, we were rebuffed.

Same Old Song

The reasons given were, as the sub heading says, the same old song we've heard before.

ACE wanted to know the questions we would ask (we don't do that), the issues we wanted to raise and why we wanted to raise those issues when ACE had made sure they had explained everything in their own documentation.

Leaving aside the fact that all of those things had been explained to ACE time and time again and the communications staff in London had actually read 'The Philanthropy Gambit' think a little more closely about the last reason they gave for not speaking on the record about 'Catalyst Arts'.

ACE don't think they need to answer questions about a major policy initiative because they have already told the general public everything the general public needs to know in their own documentation.

Don't look now but ACE just became the United States of China.

They tell us what we need to know and how dare we, or anyone else for that matter, be so impertinent as to suggest they explain themselves further.

Trouble

As media strategies go, refusing to do a simple interview is puzzling to say the least because there is no way for ACE to win.

Let's look at this from ACE's point of view.

If you don't do an interview you look like you have no confidence in the scheme you are proposing. Lose!

If ACE thinks Article19 is irrelevant and not worth talking to then they look conceited and smug. Lose!

If you don't do the interview because you think you have told everybody everything they need to know then you look smug, conceited and dictatorial. Lose!

If you consistently stall, give different reasons for not doing an interview and, ultimately, don't do the interview, you look incompetent. Lose!

There is no way to win with this strategy. It's the equivalent of a petulant five year old stamping his or her feet and screaming "I won't, I won't, I won't!"

On the other hand if you do an interview you make the organisation look open, confident, competent, professional and whatever else you need to be to inspire some kind of trust from the tens of thousands of people who depend on you and your policies for their livelihood.

Of course the interview might go badly and expose your £50Million scheme as having more holes in it than a thousand year old fishing net but that's the price you pay for not living in China.

Sound The Alarm

It should be more than a little alarming if not downright terryfying to learn that when faced with a reasonable request for an interview ACE cannot provide a member of staff who can speak with both intelligence and authority on a policy that will ultimately cost £50Million.

The amount of preperation that would have gone into creating this kind of scheme would amount to many thousands of work hours, right?

Meetings and discussions with arts organisations large and small, policy experts, economic experts, communications experts, political experts and experts I can't even think of. Endless discussions running into to the wee small hours fine tuning every little detail, considering every possible stumbling block.

All of these experts feeding their cumulative experience into the hive mind of ACE, honing their knowledge of philanthropic giving to a razor sharp point.

This is of course pure speculation on my part.

Also, given that the member of staff (whom at this point is entirely fictional) would have had several months to prepare for the interview, thanks to ACE repeatedly stalling, talking about 'Catalyst Arts' should, in theory, be easy.

So their decision to hide under a rock is only more damning.

Arts Council England holds the cultural well being of this country in its metaphorical hands and you want those hands to belong to the best and the brightest.

The best and the brightest would be able to handle any question you throw at them about any ACE policy and do it at the drop of a hat.

Amatuers on the other hand will stumble, stammer and stall for all they are worth because deep down they know they really don't have anything to say.

'Catalyst Arts' won't stand up to a stress test and they know it.

Following Arts Council England's announcement of their NPO portfolio on Wednesday March 30th it's not too difficult, even with a cursory analysis, to determine that, as predicted, ACE has simply rearranged the deck chairs on a certain sinking ship. All the while hoping nobody is going to notice.

Looking at the numbers issued by the funding monolith we see the following. The top 9 organisations, in terms of the amount of funding they receive, have each been cut, in cash terms, by 6.6% apart from one, the ENO, who were cut by 2.3%.

Now, try to imagine the statistical probability that organisations as large as The National Theatre, English National Ballet, Welsh National Opera, The Royal Opera House, The Southbank Centre, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Opera North and The Welsh National Opera with all their financial and operational complexity would need to be cut by exactly the same percentage.

That's the kind mathematics that supercomputers take a week or two to churn through. ACE achieved this Herculean feat of number crunching in just 60 days with more than 1300 other applications weighing them down.

What could they have done instead of plucking a seemingly random percentage number from thin air?

Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet are two large companies of comparable size. One operates in Birmingham however and the other operates in the worlds most expensive city, that city being London. Different cities, different financial pressures, surely BRB could take a bigger hit?

Or how about this. ACE comes up with a funding cap on large scale ballet. If they can cut funding with such mathematical precision then why can't they award funding with equal mathematical precision?

Set them both on £6.1Million and free up several hundred thousand pounds for the small and mid-scale. It would also be a useful experiment, and we know ACE is fond of experimenting, to see which company could operate better, The one in London or the one in Birmingham.

Should the one in Birmingham manage to cope better then it would be a signal for the other one to up-sticks and haul ass to Sheffield or some other "regional" locale that is, you know, cheaper!

If that sounds ridiculous then consider this. ACE has already done it with four other organisations. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society and The Halle Concerts Society both received the exact same, multi-million pound grant for 2011/2012 (£2,071,667) as did The London Philharmonic Orchestra and The Philharmonia Orchestra (£2,030,404). This is not an aberration, they've been doing it for years.

The funding for the Royal Opera House actually returns to a higher level than this year by 2014. You can argue about the "real term" effect but that relies on the false premise that everything gets more expensive over time. Some things do, but a lot of things don't. In fact a lot of things, like technology, actually get cheaper.

It also doesn't take into account variables such as reducing costs, reducing a large workforce and reducing enormous, unsustainable salaries. All things that the large scale can do very very easily. If you don't believe us take a look at 'Numbers' (linked below) that cites figures from the mid-scale.

The Mid Scale Blues

The dance numbers specifically don't make a whole lot of sense either. Perhaps the biggest shock was the complete removal of funding from the Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, a dance company with over 25 years of producing, touring and education experience.

Longevity in and of itself is no reason to keep your funding but when you note the other companies that received large increases you wonder what it is that they are going to do more of that the Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs weren't doing already.

Random Dance [ Company* ] and Hofesh Shechter's company were both awarded large upticks in their funding. The combined amount of their increase is over £300,000. The funding for the Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs for this year is just over £360,000. Why do we get the feeling that one company had to be sacrificed to push more cash into the current flavours of the moment in the dance world.

Mr McGregor, AD of WMRD*, is also supported by The Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells, does he really need the additional financial support from ACE?

Hofesh Shechter's company (Mr Shechter is also an associate artist of Sadler's Wells) also seems to be doing just fine. A minor uptick in his company's funding would probably have been more than sufficient in these "difficult times".

Also, did ACE just come to the conclusion that the Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs kinda sucked after 25 years? No longer worthy of any support whatsoever they just get thrown in the trash with no right to appeal or overturn. So long, farewell, thanks for all the work but we're done with you. Charming!

DanceUK Irony

Another shock was the absence of DanceUK from the NPO list. Just a few weeks ago Article19 asked the national advocacy organisation to comment on the hypothetical situation of two mid-scale dance companies losing their funding completely while Tony Hall and Antonio Poppano were raking in £1.1Million between them at the Royal Opera House.

DanceUK declined to comment at all on any questions we put to them.

Well as it turns out two mid-scale companies were stripped of their funding, the Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs and Henri Oguike. Along with DanceUK the funding total for the three of them comes to well under £1.1Million.

Irony, evidently, has a cruel sense of humour

Geography

Since Wednesday morning there has been a lot of blustering in the media that poor old ACE was put into an "impossible" position by the jackals from the Department for Culture Media and Sport.

That the DCMS is equally culpable for this mess is not in dispute but ACE is the sharp end of the stick when it comes to arts funding and once again they've made a big mess into an even bigger mess.

By failing to adequately tackle the large-scale and dramatically bring their funding down over the next 4 years they have condemned themselves and the arts to repeat the same cycle all over again.

The funding monolith clearly has so much confidence in its new philanthropy plan that all large-scale organisations have their funding cycle running on an inverted bell curve. They get hit next year but then it starts climbing again, for all of them.

This must be reassuring to The National Theatre for example who just secured a £10Million pound private donation from the uber rich owner of Travelex, not so encouraging however for the small-scale dance company that doesn't have any rich friends.

How much money would you like to bet that the lions share of the £80Million promised in match funding for the philanthropy plan ends up in the already deep pockets of the big players?

Even their meddling in mid-scale dance funding makes little sense either fiscally or artistically. DV8 haven't made a new work for two years but suffer no repercussions while Jasmin Vardimon Company has three active touring works but receives £180,000 less than DV8. Say what?

Let us be clear, no one company or dance maker is more important than another and no dance maker at this level is any better at dance making than any other. The critics can wail their subjective disapproval all they want.

For its part ACE can keep pushing the "great art" mantra until they are literally blue in the face because this funding review is a hasty, ill-considered, whitewash for the large-scale and, as far as dance is concerned, an exercise in pinning dance organisations on a map to prove how national they are as a funding body.

ACE even provided their own maps to prove it.

[ The Results ]
[ Numbers ]
[ Mute ]
[ So Now What ]

Arts Council England (ACE) has a plan, a philanthropy plan! Well, it's not their plan it's the DCMS's plan and it was, evidently, dreamt up in a hour during a coffee break while the political hacks were figuring out how to work their new microwave oven.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport then foisted this plan onto ACE and said "deal with it". ACE, of course, obliged and now we're stuck with it. At least we will be stuck with it should it ever get out of the discussion phase.

ACE's plan is simple. £80Million is being put up for grabs. If you, as an arts organisation, raise some money then you can apply to ACE for match funding (to differing degrees) and everybody's happy. What a great new idea huh?

Of course it's not a new idea, it's just ACE's current funding framework done in reverse. If you've been in the game a long time you will know that the funding monolith has never funded any project at 100% of its cost. When you fill in the forms you have to specify where any additional money or support in-kind is coming from.

It's always been like that. ACE and the DCMS are moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic and are hoping that nobody will notice.

Whichever way you do it, getting the private money first or second, it's not going to make getting the private money any easier or any more likely, especially if you don't have huge sums of money to spend on fund raising.

I suppose ACE could always start up a special fund that you could apply to which is specifically to help you with fund raising, only 75% of the cost of course, you would have the find the rest from private sponsors and............... oh never mind!

Lurching

Were you to take a look at the list of organisations funded by ACE under the current RFO scheme (soon to be renamed NPO) you would, I imagine, see the following.

The top 49 organisations, that receive in excess of £1Million, absorb £192.3Million in funding. The remaining 792 organisations in the scheme receive a total of £132.5Million.

ACE's funding strategy has always been top heavy and one of their biggest failings over the last 10 years has been to do absolutely nothing about it.

The Royal Opera House and their ilk may whine that ACE's funding only makes up a certain percentage of their income but you never hear them offering to actually give it back. They won't give it back because, however reluctant they may be to admit it, they depend on it.

When the large scale get themselves into a crisis, real or imagined, ACE comes up with hat-in-hand schemes like Sustain to bail them out. It's a never ending cycle of lurching from one crisis to another.

The independents, small-scale and mid-scale trundle on regardless however, doing what they do with the little they have.

10 Years

Ten years ago or more ACE should have put plans into place to start weaning the large scale organisations off public financing. Either proposing to remove it completely or setting a maximum limit.

You give them five years to get the private sponsorship in place and then, when the clock runs down, that's it, the little ducklings are set free to swim around the lake all on their own.

During this time ACE is vigorously and relentlessly lobbying the DCMS and central government to get effective philanthropy orientated legislation in place to help the large-scale organisations make up the shortfall in their funding.

It doesn't matter what the legislation is (tax breaks, investment incentives, etc) just as long as it's substantive and actually encourages philanthropy, which the most recently proposed scheme does not.

As ACE is recouping massive amounts of money from the large-scale over that five year period it begins funneling it into the rest of the arts. You know, the ones trundling along "making-do" all the time.

But, as we all know, ACE didn't do any of those things. ACE has consistently maintained a policy of panic stricken reaction. Wait until something bad happens then make a bigger mess trying to clean up the first mess.

Anybody with a brain who is only half awake knows that the independents, the small and mid-scale cannot raise money from corporations. They can get some money from foundations and trusts but Pepsico isn't sponsoring Motionhouse Dance Theatre any time soon.

We need to get over the fact that if a lot of arts activity is going to survive then it will have to be, for the most part, publicly funded. As Bill T. Jones said on HBO last Friday;

"... we cannot take it for granted that art, like everything else, can be commoditized and [will] compete in a Darwinian environment".

The coming funding announcements from ACE will be the first indication of whether not they have the balls to eviscerate the cosy world inhabited by the large-scale. Don't cry too much for them if it happens, they'll survive in the long run, especially when they don't have a choice.

History and all the evidence however says that as far as ACE is concerned it's going to be business as usual. They'll just move the deck chairs around a little and pretend that it isn't.

The first round of cuts for those in receipt of regular funding was 6.9% across the board, no exceptions. ACE has hinted that as many as 100 of these organisations could cease to be funded after 2011.

For this editorial we won't be focusing on the cuts though. Instead, let's take a look at the dance professions response to those cuts, or rather the complete and utter lack of response.

If perusing the Twitter feeds, the Facebook pages, press releases, newsletters and the websites of dance organisations across the country was your only source of information about the profession then you would have absolutely no idea what had taken place just a few short months ago.

The relentless chirpiness of the media output, such as it is, belies the struggle going on beneath the surface. Much like the proverbial duck, the dance world is furiously paddling away while presenting the cliched "stiff upper lip" to the world at large.

Many organisations are, of course, being pragmatic and this is absolutely necessary. There is nothing to be gained from kneeling down in the mud, throwing your arms in the air and screaming "why!" at the gods of arts funding.

Let us not forget however that contemporary dance is an artistic profession, a contemporary artistic profession and artists are supposed to comment on the world around them.

Yet the combined forces of the dance world have barely mustered a single word in public to either condemn the governments behavior or rally the troops to fight the cause much beyond adding "twibbons" to social networking avatars.

It's not just the funding cuts either.

A reader recently pointed out that our piece "An Inconvenient Truth" about dance companies and their attitudes towards dancers with disabilities caused a near riot. "The Surplus", on the other hand, that demonstrated ACE's utter incompetence in handing over more than £700,000 in additional money to the already well funded Sadler's Wells Theatre barely causes a raised eyebrow.

ACE wants to give £7Million to Rambert Dance Company for a new studio during a time of massive funding cuts? No problem.

Huge salaries and bonuses for guys like Alistair Spalding (AD of Sadler's Wells) while dancers, in his own words, are paid a "pittance". Whatever.

ACE wants to cut your funding by 6.9% based not on sound financial analysis but expedience? Silence.

The list of things this profession won't talk about is as long as it is infuriating.

On many levels the relationships between the funders and the large scale and the small to mid-scale resembles that of an abusive personal relationship. They promise a lot, deliver a little and every so often you get kicked in the head but you know they love you, probably.

Those new to the professional dance world may well be looking around them and asking; "Where are our leaders? Where is the leadership?"

Thus far this profession has gone gently into the night with naught but a whimper.

Don't forget that what's happening now is not just about you or your company. How the dance profession deals with these issues could affect the art form and those that work in it for a generation if not longer.

Speak, Write, Type

Arts Council England, NDA's and many other organisations have told to us that they welcome criticism. They welcome an open an honest discussion, so they say. There will be no repercussions, so they say. There will be no problem, so they say.

So here it is, your chance to speak up and tell them, us and anybody else that cares to pay attention what you think about what is happening to the arts and to this profession.
Say it here, say it on your own website, say it on Twitter if you must but say something that has nothing to do with how "super excited" you are about a new workshop!

Speaking out behind closed doors or in endless meetings wasn't acceptable before and it's completely unforgivable now. These issues will not go away because we don't write about them or because you don't talk about them.

Note: We cannot migrate the comments from the page where this editorial was originally published. To read those comments click on the link below.

[ The Open Letter ]

by Neil Nisbet

Trying to make a salient point on a rapid fire radio programme is no easy task, as I found out the hard way whilst appearing on a live programme a few weeks ago on BBC Radio 4.

Summing up important arguments about why funding the arts is actually a really good idea into pithy one-liners is not something I would encourage others to do, even if you're good at it, which I'm not!

It is particularly difficult when you are facing arguments that are so ridiculous all you really want to do is sit back and say "huh?", such as the attacks made by Stephen Pollard (editor of the Jewish Chronicle) on street theatre. Perhaps the cheapest and most accessible of all the things funded by Arts Council England.

Such debates/discussions are perhaps better had in less time constrained formats. The bun-fight of a radio debate might be fun for half an hour but it doesn't really help when you're trying to get a point across.

Killer Yoghurt

Over the last few months, since the new coalition government was formed and they began their relentless, negative, puerile threats against pretty much everything, the arguments for and against arts funding have been flowing thick and fast.

From comment threads to the editorial pages in broadsheet newspapers, from the extreme left to the extreme right, a lot of folks have been expressing their views.

Arguments against state funding of the arts are, more often than not, largely based on falsely connecting thing A to thing B. For example; "why should we spend money on the arts and not on the NHS (the UK's National Health Service)?"

First of all you have to ignore the ludicrous assumption that people might be dying for lack of healthcare because a young dance-maker has been given a £5000 grant to make some new work.

These arguments always overlook the fact that in this country the government spends £105Billion, or thereabouts, on health services per year vs £430Million on centralized arts funding.

The entire budget for the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is dwarfed by the funding for the Department of Health (DoH). The rhetoric doesn't fit the facts but if you're an ideologue then what does that matter?

While we're on the subject let's take a quick look at health care spending (which is being protected by the coalition government from any cuts). Whenever politicians, or anybody else for that matter, talk about health care the one thing they never actually discuss is health. In other words, why are so many people in dire need of medical treatment in the first place?

Imagine going into your local branch of Tesco and being presented with a choice of two yoghurts. One is healthy and the other one is responsible for killing more than 100,000 people every year in this country and another 4-5 million people world-wide.

Would you or anybody still buy the killer yogurt? Do you think the killer yoghurt would still be legal? Would the people who made that yoghurt be sent to prison?

The British Heart Foundation puts the cost of treating smoking relating illness at £5Billion per year and that's a conservative estimate at best. When asked, the DoH agreed with the estimate. Illness related to alcohol abuse? Well, that's another £2.7Billion. All of this expense is completely avoidable because it's all self inflicted.

Yes, it's smoking that kills more than 100,000 people every year and you can buy tobacco products in Tesco.

One of the main reasons that health care spending is so high and why services are so stretched is not just because of bureaucracy or poor management it's also down to far too many people deliberately and willfully neglecting their own health. It's easier to blame a faceless, nameless administrator than it is to look inward however.

Arts funding has nothing to do with it.

Toys for the Rich

Common misconception number two is that the arts are only for the rich, with opera being the goto art-form to substantiate that particular argument.

Well, I hate to break it to the working classes, but most people in this country aren't rich at all, depending on your definition of the term that is. You know those people who help you at the bank? The ones behind the counter? They're not rich either and they work in a bank.

There are plenty of opera seats available for not a lot of money but the arts are comprised of a vast range of performances, events and opportunities happening in almost every part of the country. Opera is a very small part of the overall equation.

So, either the few people who are very wealthy are running around the country at breakneck speed perpetually attending theaters, galleries, and museums or that assumption, to be blunt, is a load of crap.

Issues of accessibility are a complete red herring when it comes to arts funding. Any individual is free to attend any arts performance they wish no matter where it is in the country. If your argument is that people cannot afford to attend then you are inadvertently making the case for increased subsidy, not the other way around.

If your argument is why spend money on things some people don't want then I would counter by suggesting how do you know you don't want it if you've never seen it or experienced it?

Much like health it's your own choice how much or how little you choose to engage with the society you live in.

One more example. Arts subsidy detractors should ask themselves why those with no children should help fund the primary and secondary education system through their taxes? They derive no personal benefit from it so isn't that unfair? Of course it's not unfair because everybody realises (one would hope) that a good education system is vital to the development and progression of any country.

Like the arts in many ways.

Looking for the Bad Guy

When it comes to funding cuts politicians and many others are always looking for a bad guy. If it's not context free public spending trivia (like pot plants in offices) then it's the CEO of a quango making an inordinate amount of money or it's arts funding.

It is often the case that the things that cost the least amount of money are the things we derive the most benefit from. All too often though it is the relatively inexpensive things that get set upon first.

From a politician's point of view though petulantly cutting arts budgets is a lot easier than telling people that they need to stop eating garbage, stop smoking and take some exercise. All of which can be done for free!

That involves trying to tell people what to do for their own good though and Conservatives don't like that.

Cutting arts budgets is a lot easier than tackling transportation infrastructure problems that causes air pollution that cause respiratory illness that costs the NHS a huge amount of money to treat.

It's a lot easier than trying to persuade this country to stop acting like a militaristic world power and cut the massive defence budget from £40Billion to £5Billion.

The list is almost endless.

Ironically so much of what goes on in public life is nothing more than political theatre. It's doing things to placate the political base of a particular party rather than actually achieving anything tangible or long lasting. The ultimate goal of too many in power is nothing more than to keep it.

Until we have a political machine that actually works intelligently and diligently for the good of all its people and appreciates the fundamental values of education, scientific and cultural advancement then this nonsense will never end.

That last sentence probably would have sounded good on the radio! Typical.

[ Photo by Vlasula from Flickr ]

by Article19

Let's talk politics! Now, we know what you're thinking but stay with us, politics are important, sadly, so we're just going to have to put up with them for the time being so listen carefully and we'll begin.

If you want to be a government minister in the UK then there are five departments that you really want to be in charge of. The Home Office, The Ministry of Defence, Department for Education, Department of Health and The Foreign Office.

Why do you want those jobs? Because they have all the money and the Foreign Office let's you hob nob with presidents and prime ministers, so lots of fun travel for the lucky person in charge.

The more money a particular government department has the more chances there will be for you, as minister, to wield a large amount of power and exert massive influence over a huge number of people. Giving yourself a nice little legacy, positive or otherwise, in the process.

The Department of Health, which runs the National Health Service, has a budget of over £95Billion every year. Compare this with the Department for Culture Media and Sport which distributes, on average, about £2.5Billion per year in grants to various agencies, including Arts Council England.

If you watch television news or read newspapers written by adults the big five are the departments that get all the attention, nobody gets famous running the DCMS.

On The Hunt

The latest incumbent at the DCMS is of course Jeremy Hunt, political climber extraordinaire. Press rumblings have him as leader of the Conservative Party when David Cameron, the current Prime Minister, gets bored with yelling at the middle east and goes walkabout.

If you ask us Mr Hunt comes across as a bit too much like a Thunderbirds™ puppet, only less charismatic, but each to their own.

Needless to say you don't go from DCMS Chief Bottle Washer to party leader along a straight, smoothly paved road. You have to climb your way to that job, throwing weaker folks to the side as you go.

So how is he going to get there?

Hunting for Cuts

Cue Mr Hunt's announcement that he plans to cut 50% of the staff at the DCMS. Not cut the arts budget by 50%, but the staff who actually work for him, the cuts to grants come later. He did this weeks before any other minister has put forward their spending plans to the Treasury, the folks who control all the money.

Why do this? Well Mr Hunt is showing the rest of the party what a good little conservative soldier he is and he's doing it with a department that is not, from a public perception point of view, terribly important.

The minister has also unceremoniously kicked the Film Council into oblivion, along with several other quangos, without so much as a meeting to ask anybody what they thought about it. Just hack and slash and prove how tough you are while telling the folks how fundamentally important to our survival the cuts are thanks to the mess the other guys left behind.

During a recent appearance on the BBC political programme 'The Andrew Marr Show' (catchy title! Ed!) Mr Hunt couldn't seem to make up his mind about the health of the cultural sector. On the one hand he decried the Labour government's lack of stewardship with regard to the arts whilst simultaneously discussing the great cultural legacy this country has built up over the last 15-20 years.

So which one is it Mr Hunt?

Hunting for Perception

From a perception point of view it costs Mr Hunt nothing to strip the DCMS down to the bone, and all the areas they fund with it. Arts Council England is the single largest recipient of DCMS funding after the Olympics.

We have mentioned before that you don't win elections by standing up for the arts. You also don't lose elections for cutting the arts down to almost nothing. Far too many people think that the arts sector is filled with ne'er-do-wells ensconced in fancy buildings having long lunches at the public's expense.

There's good and bad everywhere but if you know anything about the arts then you know that perception couldn't be any further from the truth if you stuck it on a rocket ship and sent it to Mars.

Over £1Billion of the figure mentioned above is for the Olympics in London in 2012. After "the games" and the possible large scale cuts take place the DCMS will be almost gutted so will be of even less political value to Mr Hunt. He will have proven himself ruthless enough to move up the food chain when the next cabinet re-shuffle comes.

Hunting for Cause, Hunting for Effect

You think it sounds a little far fetched that a government minister would eviscerate an entire department for his own political purposes? Wars are waged and maintained for nothing more than ego and legacy building so stripping funding from theatre companies, dance companies, museums and libraries is child's play for the seasoned political operator.

In a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph Mr Hunt was talking about an "electoral mandate" that he doesn't have. The vast majority of people in this country voted for different ideas and different policies by a factor of 2:1.

When we spoke to one of Mr Hunt's "special advisors" that advisor told us that the country had given the coalition government a mandate. Overlooking the fact that we don't vote for coalitions, we vote for political parties and nobody bothered to ask the voters what they wanted.

Recent economic reports show that the UK's economy is growing, meaning we are no longer in a recession, but the government is unmoved and still maintains draconian cuts need to be made. Further proof, as if any were needed, that these cuts are driven by ideology, not fiscal prudence.

Funding the arts didn't cause the recent financial crisis and cutting them won't fix the problems. The amount of money involved is just too small to make any difference.

Mr Hunt is pandering to his party (the Conservatives, not the coalition) and their base voters for no other reason than it's good for his career. The person responsible for the cultural well being of an entire country is using his position to climb a ladder, nothing more. Every time he speaks with that self satisfied smug grin on his face he sounds more and more disingenuous.

We'll bet all the money in our collective pocket that Mr Hunt, sans any PR calamities or sex scandals, will be moving on as soon as the Olympics closing ceremony sets off its last firework.

Politics is perception, nothing more and at the moment the perception of Mr Hunt is right where he wants it to be.

by Neil Nisbet

The arts world has been in a bit of panic over the last few days since it became clear that the Conservative Party had, apparently, won the general election in the UK and, in short order, the arts would be doomed.

First of all let's clear something up. The Conservatives didn't win anything. In order to form a government in a UK parliamentary election you need a majority, not just any old majority but 326 MPs (Member of Parliament). The Conservatives got 306, it's a majority but close enough doesn't count, no 326 MPs, no government for you.

To form the government they had to make a deal with the Liberal Democrats and their 57 MPs. If the Conservatives want to get anything done then they need those 57 MPs to vote with them. The rule of politics is simple, you can't govern if you don't win and that goes for everything, not just elections.

Votes are needed to pass everything from creating new laws and reforming old laws to passing budgets. If you don't have the votes then you're not getting anything.

If the Conservatives start getting too right wing radical for their new Liberal bedfellows then combing their 57 MPs with the 258 from the ousted Labour Party's voting bloc is enough to put the brakes on.

There are 28 votes to be had from the "other" category than includes The Green Party and the Scottish National Party, amongst others, but the Conservatives would have to bring at least 19 of them over to their side of the fence. Not at all likely considering the ideological differences at play.

Of course should the Liberal Democrats be so suitably horrified with a Conservative proposal that they, en masse, turn against their new best friends then the coalition would be effectively over and we would all be in for some seriously fun times in the world of political theatre.

Ideology

Many news commentators have pointed out that a coalition of the right wing Conservatives and the left wing Liberal Democrats is on the same level as George W. Bush being Vice President to Barack Obama. It really is just a bit mad.

As far as arts policy goes however the two parties are in agreement. Being unreservedly vague is the best policy!

The Liberal Democrats say this much;

"Liberal Democrats have a proud tradition of championing the arts, culture and heritage. Liberal Democrats recognise the enormous contribution that arts, heritage and culture make to the lives of citizens. We believe that culture should be valued for its own sake as well as for the undoubted benefits to other areas, such as the economy, health, crime prevention and education."

With the Conservatives saying;

"Culture, media and sport are all vital for our quality of life, as well as being huge generators of wealth and prosperity for our economy: tourism is the UK's fifth biggest industry and the creative industries account for 7.3 per cent of GDP."

Two things we know for sure are the Conservatives want to cut £66Million from the budget of the Department for Culture Media and Sport (which provides Arts Council England with its funding) and they want to shore up arts funding from the National Lottery.

When it was first created, the UK's National Lottery did just that, provided money to the arts (which it still does although to a lesser extent). There's nothing really new in the proposal then. The crucial factor is how Central Government funding will be balanced with Lottery funding. Will the numbers go up, or will they go down?

The Liberal Democrats are apposed to this idea. Their manifesto states that; "We would also change the way the Lottery is taxed to generate more money for good causes."

If you work in the arts then, realistically, it shouldn't matter where the money comes from as long as it comes and is sustainable in the long term.

There's nothing to suggest that the National Lottery is more or less dependable than the whims of Central Government and the vagaries of the global economy, the reasons for which we're facing cuts to begin with.

Pressure Points

Should the worst come true with massive cuts in central funding to ACE and arts programmes across the country then the new coalition government does at least make it easier for activists to put pressure on the politicians.

There are 57 particular pressure points we can think of, here in TheLab™

No matter your personal political ideology the Liberal Democrats are, whether you like it or not, in a very strong position to veto almost anything the Conservatives want to do, they just need to summon up the courage to do it if things start getting really bad. They are, effectively, an opposition within the Government itself.

Via their website the Liberal Democrats provide a handy list of who their MP's are and how you can get in touch with them and start lobbying when things get tough. DanceUK's "Dance Vote" project was a bit weak willed, now they have some real targets to focus on.

Let's also not forget that elections are happening all the time (thanks to people being corrupt or dying, etc). Finding Conservatives who won their seats by slim majorities is very easy thanks to the BBC's Election 2010 website.

Eric Ollerenshaw, a Conservative MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, won his seat by just 333 votes. That's a big incentive for him to not act like a right wing jackass for the next 5 years.

He, along with many others, should be a prime pick for activists to lobby in terms of specific policy votes because you only need to get a few hundred people in his constituency to vote against him to put him out of a job and chip away at the Conservatives shaky "majority".

The more people that remind him of this, the more insecure he will become.

If you think that sounds too much like hard work then consider this. The Conservative party picked up 10.7 million votes from the 29.6 million people who voted. That means the vast majority of people who voted wanted another party to be in power.

Sadly, arithmetic and democracy are not always on the same page but there is a loud opposition voice, we just have to needle it a little to wake it up.

Get Off The Floor

For the moment we would advise the wacky world of the arts to stop freaking out, threatening to leave the country and to generally stop laying down on the ground and crying like little children begging the big bad government not to hurt them.

Get up because there's a fight to be had and nobody says you have to fight fair, it might even be fun!

[ Photo by Coldspire ]
[ Liberal Democrat MP List ]
[ Election Results from the BBC ]

by Neil Nisbet

If you follow politics anywhere in the world, especially around election time, there is one subject that dominates almost all others that politicians will speak about and that subject is job creation.

Take a long hard look at the US political scene at the moment and all of the current chatter (aside from the healthcare debate) is about creating jobs or what can be done to stop jobs being lost. Creating jobs, we are told, is the key to economic recovery, economic stability and joy throughout the land.

Jobs make people happy, provide them with money so they can live their lives, they can spend that money on goods and services which is good for the economy and pay taxes which is good for the country, etc, etc.

Jobs are good, we know this because everybody keeps telling us that.


So why don't we ever hear any chatter from the funding bodies, the government or pretty much anybody else about creating real jobs for artists? Of course, here in TheLab™, what we choose to focus on is creating jobs for professional dancers.

What do we mean by "real jobs"? Well, that would mean being employed full time with holiday pay, sick pay, maternity leave (for men and women), overtime, pensions, meaningful enforceable contracts and all the usual good stuff. You get that working in a bank so why not working as a dancer?

Dirty Numbers

Some quick and dirty arithmetic throws up some interesting numbers.

If we look at the regularly funded dance companies in England and Scotland, the ones that provide the closest thing to full time employment for dancers, then we have (approximately) 145 dancers in 19 companies. Few, if any, of those are full time employees however with most on irregular contracts with extended "off contract" periods.

20 of those dancers work for Rambert and some of the 145 dancers are apprentices and get paid little or nothing to gain experience with a professional company. As you can imagine, going by the name of this website, ballet companies are not included.

Essentially however most of those dancers are part-time employees.

In England and Scotland there are nine National Dance Agencies* (all publicly funded as are the dance companies) and they employ 195 administrators including full-time and part-time employees. The number is approximate because figuring out just how many people work for The Place in London is not at all straight forward (we put their numbers at 60 regular employees).

There are of course innumerable smaller dance agencies and organisations working to "promote" dance and there are many project level dance productions going on all over the country. Trying to guestimate those numbers is something Arts Council England does in their 'Dance Mapping Study' so download that and revel in the fantasy.

It is safe to assume though that there are more full-time, better paid jobs working in dance administration than working as a professional dancer in England and Scotland, two countries with a combined population of 54 Million people.

Training for Unemployment

A few weeks ago the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) announced that a new dance school would be opening at their home base in Glasgow at the cost of £6 Million. When we asked them if any thought had been given to where the graduates from this school would find work they said;

"All degree programmes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama are subject to a rigorous process of scrutiny prior to validation.  The BA Ballet programme at the Academy was no different.  Prior to validation there is a period of wide and thorough consultation within the HE and FE sector, with arts organisations and with potential employers. 

The validation panel for each degree programme includes external representation from the profession, working practitioners and leading academics.  

The Degree of Bachelor of Arts (Modern Ballet) at the Academy, in partnership with Scottish Ballet, Scotland's award winning national dance company, combines the specialist facilities, resources and knowledge of the RSAMD with the artistic input and guidance of Scottish Ballet making the degree programme an excellent opportunity for gifted students who wish to pursue a career in professional dance."

We don't know what any of that means but basically it comes down to this. Once they graduate, the RSAMD has no earthly idea what their students will do about finding work because Scottish Ballet cannot possibly absorb all, if any, of their graduates.

To put it simply, too many dancers are being trained and nobody is working to create jobs for them when they graduate.

Off the Record

If you want to know where the funding bodies are on this particular issue then we have to do something that journalists are not supposed to do other than in exceptional circumstances and these are, as far as Article19 is concerned, exceptional circumstances.

We're going to tell you something that was said to us "off the record".

An off the record discussion is not like attorney/client privilege or doctor/patient confidentiality. There are no laws governing an off the record statement and being "off the record" does not give someone a remit to say whatever they choose secure in the knowledge that such statements will never be repeated.

We won't tell you who said it or where that person works just that they are a high ranking arts official. During a discussion about jobs and dancers pay and what this particular organisations position was on that subject the official told us (and we're paraphrasing because there is no recording of this);

"...if dance companies want to pay their dancers more money then they are free to hire fewer dancers, it is the dance companies own choices that dictate the amount their dancers are paid."

What is strange about that particular comment is that it's both completely accurate and completely ludicrous. Let's set aside for the moment the fact that a high ranking arts official is actually suggesting that the dance sector employ fewer dancers, actually cut jobs where there are none to begin with.

Yes, if you employ fewer people you can pay those people a lot more money. Dance companies could all employ one dancer each and those dancers would be fantastically well paid, very lonely of course, but the market for creating solos would be booming.

The downside is you have fewer jobs, a massive reduction in creative potential for choreographers and it's bloody stupid!

Ironically if regularly funded dance companies (RFO) stated they wanted fewer dancers because they wanted to pay their dancers more ACE or Creative Scotland would probably question why they needed increased levels of funding year on year because they had fewer staff.

Creation

In terms of creating more jobs for professional dancers there are a number of ways to do it. First of all you could increase funding to current RFO companies to enable those companies to extend employment contracts so they are actually full time.

Enhanced funding would also enable companies to employ more dancers than they actually need for touring and performing. Why do that? Well since dancers are not indestructible they tend to get injured so additional dancers mean rotating casts, more coverage on education and teaching projects and a general smoothing out of the workload.

You could also increase the number of RFO companies by expanding smaller project based companies with more dancers and longer employment contracts. This doesn't necessarily mean more touring what it does mean is more time spent on creating work, it is after all the raison d'être of a dance company, and less time "getting things done in two weeks" that is the current norm in all too many cases.

What about paying for all of this?

Well this is one of the richest countries in the world and there is plenty of money to go around. At one end of the scale we could spend slightly less money on fighter planes and nuclear submarines we don't need to protect us from terrorists too stupid to buy travel tickets for the planes they want to blow up with fictitious explosives.

At the other end of the scale ACE managed to conjure up £40 Million to prop up failing large scale arts projects that were over dependent on rich people giving them money that wasn't really theirs to begin with. £40 Million buys a lot of jobs at the creative end of the arts sector.

If we look at the 'Dance Mapping Study' released by ACE some months ago they boast about spending and stimulating spending on new dance buildings to the tune of almost £500 Million over the last few years. They boast no such numbers when it comes to creating jobs for professional dancers.

ACE could also not spend £50,000 producing pointless mapping study reports full of fictitious numbers and information. There's plenty of money, we're just not spending it very well.

A lot of people work in arts administration, we're sure they can come up with a plan of some kind to help create full time jobs for dancers, there's so many of them it's like group thinking on steroids.

A prominent dance education principal said to us recently that he couldn't understand why ACE, the Government, et-al didn't spend money creating jobs for dancers because, after all, it would be a lot cheaper than creating jobs in other industries.

Go figure!

[ photo by Dunechaser ]

A comment we, here in TheLab™ and you, our dear readers, probably hear or read quite often is "we encourage healthy debate on (insert you're own topic here)". The comment is usually made by the individual/group/organisation that is being debated but more often than not they would, if it's all right with you, rather you actually did the exact opposite and didn't debate them at all, healthily or otherwise.

Also, the end of the "healthy debate" comment is almost always followed by the mightiest tool in the PR handbook, the word "but".

Our recent piece on the integration of dancer's with disabilities, 'An Inconvenient Truth', provoked, somewhat unexpectedly, a lot of comments some of which were quite angry about the fact that we had even dared to raise the issue to begin with.

One commenter, not published on Article19 but on a protest group on Facebook (and that's not a joke), even suggested that Article19 was behaving in a "fascist" like manner and how dare we "interrogate" dance companies with our impertinent questions?

Article19 has also been criticised for not doing enough "real" dance writing or covering "what's right" in the dance profession instead of what's wrong in the dance profession. All conveniently unquantifiable.

For the record, Article19 considers its "positive" material to be the video featuring. The actual illustration of the wok being created and performed by companies large and small across the UK and beyond.

Some may disagree and there are certainly many more positive aspects to the dance profession than creation and performance but that's one aspect we choose to focus on and one aspect that we can successfully highlight.

Reflection

Upon reflection and looking around the rest of the dance/arts media it's not hard to understand why some readers get a bit ruffled with some of the things this publication chooses to write about.

Cheerleading is standard operating procedure for pretty much every website/print publication or blog that covers the wide world of dance. No matter what particular element of the art form they cover the tone is almost always relentlessly upbeat. The mainstream press follows the same mantra. The end of year or the coming year reviews/previews from the broadsheets read like press releases from the Dance Profession is Holier than Though Coalition.

There's nothing wrong with being upbeat or positive but there is danger in choosing to blinker yourself to the multitude of problems faced by this profession.

It's asking for trouble if you choose to ignore the fact that dance, especially in the, so-called, higher echelons of the profession, is run by people, people with egos, agendas and personal issues that may cloud their judgement and steer their decision making process in somewhat puzzling directions.

We all do it but personal decisions rarely affect large numbers of people in a professional context. Simply because someone wears a suit or has the title "Artistic Director" or "CEO" doesn't make them immune to the human condition.

It is for those reasons that Article19 is required to get on the phone and ask questions, often times over and over again. Nobody is being "interrogated" however, they are being asked straightforward questions and the answers we get (or not) are the things that will save them or sink them.

Irony

There was a hefty dose of irony from one particular comment on 'An Inconvenient Truth' citing Janet Smith's response to that piece asking why we couldn't write something like that instead? Completely overlooking the fact that without Article19's piece and without us contacting Scottish Dance Theatre seeking answers to our questions Ms Smith's response simply would not exist.

Healthy debate can only exist if all those taking part in that debate speak openly and honestly about the issues that affect them. It's only healthy if organisations or individuals respond openly and honestly when questions are put to them not only by us but by anybody with an enquiring mind looking for answers.

As is so often the case somebody will be on the receiving end of bit of harsh commentary. But if you really believe what you're doing is right then it should be fairly easy for you to defend yourself. Article19 isn't coming at you with swords and shields, just some pointed words.

If you have screwed up, own up, say sorry and try to do better the next time. Don't try and play the political communications game because the world and its' dog got wise to that a long time ago, we all know spin when we hear it and read it.

Just in case you haven't noticed there is no debate, discussion or much of anything going on in dance right now. Discussion is happening, it has to be going on somewhere surely, but it must be happening behind closed doors because we can't find it.

The British Dance Edition in Birmingham, coming up in February, has no real debates or alternative presentations to counter the cheerleading culture when that type of gathering would be the ideal place for some honest back and forth.

There are no discussions about pay for dancers, healthcare, job creation, contracts, funding, touring, integration or anything of any real importance. Just John Ashford and meaningless chit chat about the previous nights shows. Nothing for anybody to get upset or feel uncomfortable about, because why would we want that?

Article19 is going to continue doing what it does for as long as possible, nothing lasts forever after all, so for 2010 why not tell us what questions you would like to ask and of whom you would like to ask those questions. Maybe you can even ask them yourself!

[ Ad Photo by Jason Whittaker ]