The Evil Imp Blog

The Main Event

Saturday, 3 May, 2008

The question that has often been asked is; "can dance be the main event?" Meaning, is this much maligned art-form capable of catching the public's attention in the same way as feature films and rock concerts and can it do so on a large scale?

Often times the answer is; "no it can't!" Dance performances are often done on a small scale to small audiences for a very limited period of time. It's simply not physically possiible for a small group of dancers to play to huge live audiences. When dance makes it onto television it's usually a one hundred year old ballet created by a dance maker that has long since turned to dust.

Others may cite the success of televised dance "talent" contests which, as far as we are concerned, here in TheLab™, are nothing more than Z-list celebrity audition reels.

So what else is there?

This past Friday the balance shifted slightly with a performance of 'Watch This Space', part of DanceXchange's IDFB festival in Birmingham. The outdoor spectacular put together by Hofesh Shechter and Tamsin Fitzgerald of 2FaCeD Dance Company not only managed to draw huge crowds but did so with well crafted work performed by some of the best dancers in the business.

Watching the general public gather in large numbers on a chilly May evening with the ever present threat of rain to absorb the 30 minute show with its earsplitting, thumping music score, live drummers, contemporary dancers, parkour "building jumpers" and various pyrotechnics was a genuinely inspiring sight!

A sea of cell phones recording video and snapping digital images of the proceedings was a visual cue that the assembled masses were lapping it up, contemporary dance went "Rock Star" even if it was only for a few moments.

Not only did they gather but, judging from their reaction when it was all over, they loved the show into the bargain. All in all, not bad for an evenings work.

There's nothing wrong with small-scale, in fact this business needs it to survive and nurture the new progressives who may just have enough moxie to drag this profession out of the dark ages. However, it's nice to know that when required, the fresh creative blood in the industry actually broke down some real barriers and brought dance to those that may otherwise have walked on by.

Cheap tricks and hapless celebrities were not required, creative skill prevailed and the profession is better for it.

[ IDFB ]

Eating All The Pies

Tuesday, 15 April, 2008

Some of you may well have noticed, and most you will not care one bit, that Arts Council England (ACE) has a new boss in the shape of Alan Davey their new Chief Executive.

When there's a change of leadership the hope is that things are going to be better than they were before. Considering the chaos ACE caused with their recent funding review it's hard to imagine things getting any worse.

So what are we to expect from Mr Davey? Well it turns out that he quite likes the arts which is a good sign if you're going to be running the organisation that provides them with the majority of their funding. He likes his art old, very old as it happens, but dead artists have made some good work so let's not despair just yet.

According to his interview in the "always friendly unless you're BAE" Guardian newspaper he's a big music fan, Justin Rutledge (that's a real person) in his favourite singer. Before becoming a paper shuffling ne'er-do-well for the Department of Culture Media and Sport he "researched Icelandic sagas for an MPhil [Master of Philosophy]". During that time he also learned to speak Icelandic and Danish (he also speaks Latin and Greek) for reasons past understanding.

Before taking up the post at ACE he was studying for a PhD in "Roman Masculinity". I swear on TheLabs™ cat's life that I'm not making this stuff up. One of his favourite things is Virgil's 'Aeniad', a very long poem written a very long time ago. Virgil himself is dead, very dead! His thoughts on the Potter books are, as yet, unknown!

We can gather from all of this nonsense that the man, to be sure, is an intellectual, a bit of a thinker. He loves his books, his languages and his music, so we're OK then? Right?

Not really. Because the intellectual stuff comes later in the interview. The revealing stuff comes earlier on with this particular comment;

"Next time we make funding decisions, we are going to have to make comparisons between different bodies. And when we come to disinvest it might not be from organisations that are inherently bad.

It's just that we might see something more fruitful coming out of investment with an emergent organisation, and therefore might have to walk away from investment in something that might have had years of not doing badly, but isn't currently setting the world alight. We are going to have to work out how to handle those people who are perfectly, well, you can't say they are terrible, but they are not as good as younger companies."

Mr Davey slipped into the language of the bureaucrat all too easily. When was the last time a regular human being used the word "disinvest" when they really mean "we're screwing somebody over for no good reason based on shaky information and adminstrative bungling"?

He almost had us convinced with all that Latin and Virgil talk. If there is one thing that we know about career bureaucrats, much like career politicians, its that they spend much of their time looking for ways to do bad things to good people simply to justify their own position. That's why they use words like "disinvest", their connection to reality is tenuous at best.

His first act in the new job was to launch an enquiry into ACE's behaviour over the whole funding debacle they brought upon themselves. The details of this enquiry will be kept a secret, only the top sheet summary will be let out into the wild for all to see.

It's business as usual at ACE towers.

Magic Roundabout

Friday, 11 April, 2008

File this one under "don't we make fun of you enough already?" because Wayne McGregor has become the all new, the one and only, wait for it....... "Youth Dance Champion" (seriously, stop giggling at the back!)

That's right boys and girls; Just like Hercules, Perseus and Doogal from the Magic Roundabout the young folks of this fair land now have a champion to look upon with awe. A towering edifice, a colossus, a stout warrior with the heart of a lion, the fortitude of a thousand men and the intellect of a slightly confused physics professor.

It would appear that somebody, somewhere, in a fit of pique has determined that what we really need to save the youth of today is a "Youth Dance Champion". Admit it! You thought we were making this up?

Of course, the only organisation or individual stupid enough to come up with an idea like this has to be connected to the government and in this case it was the Culture Minister; Margaret Hodge. Exactly what Mr McGregor will be required to do as the YDC is not at all clear but if it involves putting on a any type of costume that includes a cape then we'll be in the front row to watch that!

Let's get one thing clear. Wayne McGregor is a nice guy, he's a smart guy and if you tell us you like his choreography then we'll believe you. However, if you're going to get somebody to be a champion of anything shouldn't you pick someone that wouldn't get flattened by a low speed collision with a feather duster?

There are lot of great dance makers out there doing a lot of great things with "young people" and they are every bit the inspiring creative types that the government is trying to prove it cares about. Exactly what impact having an "inspirer in chief" will have can probably be measured in millimetres, if it could be measured at all.

It's also slightly galling that every time the suits in London announce something like this they pretend they just invented dance education work.

Just in case you care; The whole point of this exercise was to put a well known name, relatively speaking, to the government's plan to spend £5.5Million on "dance opportunities" for embattled youngsters in the UK.

You can't help but wonder if Mr McGregor is sitting somewhere, sipping a glass of sparkling water, polishing his head and laughing his arse off! Youth Dance Champion! Stop giving people stupid titles and get on with doing something real, would you please!

Please Die Quietly!

Tuesday, 1 April, 2008

If life has ever been inexplicably cruel to you, God himself has forsaken your soul and you have run out of chocolate chip ice cream you may have found yourself watching a live snooker* match on television.

You will notice that the only thing more mind numbingly irritating than the game itself is the constant sound of people coughing and spluttering for no apparent reason. From the crescendo of phlegm hacking noise going on you get the impression that a particularly virulent strain of tuberculoses is laying waste to the population but instead of killing the afflicted, which might actually be helpful, it's just making them cough, almost constantly.

This wretched symphony of ill health is becoming ever more common in the theatre these days. Our collective, fuzzy memory here in TheLab™ remembers a time when you could attend a performance safe in the knowledge that the silent parts of a particular show would be just that, silent!

You can pretty much guarantee that when the music drops a little and a bit of dramatic tension is called for it will begin. It starts with one person, innocently clearing their throat of, what sounds like, a rusty bag of nails and that's your starter for ten. Like a wildfire in tissue factory it begins to spread as more and more perfectly healthy people try their damnedest to hack up one or both of their lungs.

It's not the disease the first person has that's infectious it's the coughing itself. The group cough is a disgusting form of "keep up with the Jones's" with retching noises and nasal mucus! (yikes! Ed!)

Let's be clear. If you're coughing like that because you can't help it then clearly you are sick, very sick so you have no business hanging around the general population making the rest of us sick and, more importantly, ruining the show. Stay at home or check yourself into a hospital because whatever you have, we don't want it and being doused in Dettol™ and bundled into the boot of a car is unpleasant at the best of times.

If you're coughing like that and there is nothing wrong with you then you're just sick in the head and you need to get out of the theatre because the rest of us are going to throw you under a bus.

We would urge all theatre goers to exhibit just a little bit of self control when you're in the company of others. If you think you might want to cough then buy a bottle of water and sip out of it for the duration of the show. Failing that, stick your head in a pillow, stop smoking or immediately refrain from doing whatever it is that's causing your permanent respiratory distress.

As for the sympathy coughing? We're listening and there are plenty of buses due!

*To our American friends. Snooker is a longer, more boring version of pool. It takes about four hours to play one "frame" and there are more rules than there are flavours of pasta sauce. Speaking is also frowned upon.

Content is King

Monday, 31 March, 2008

When the internet was nothing more than a fledgling technology project, way back in the 1990's, the mantra of those in the know was simple. "Content is King" - Meaning that simply having a website was not enough, the material on that website counted more than anything else. Sadly, that simple principle is becoming increasingly obscured in today's online world.

In dance terms the content is, of course, the actual work that choreographers and dance companies make and then show to the world, usually, via live performances. All too often in the discussions about how to spread the word about that work, using the internet or any other method of communication, absent from the dialogue is any comment about the work being, you know, any bloody good!

Wandering out onto a stage and flapping your arms and legs about is not something people will care to watch. They want some craft, they want some quality!

Were you to take leave of your senses and have a good look around YouTube you would find that the most popular video on that site is called 'The Evolution of Dance'. This performance is cited by many as proof that Google's omnipresent video site is "good for dance" because it's been viewed 80 Million times (a figure which cannot and never will be independently verified).

The only problem with this "comedy" dance routine is that it's unremittingly awful in every conceivable way. To be fair, the person in it (Judson Laipply) is not a dancer, he is, apparently, an "inspirational comedian" (what the hell is that? Ed!) although all the evidence suggests that he's not a very good one. At one point simply standing on one foot proves to be a struggle for Mr Laipply.

Many of the views of the video appear to have been prompted by user curiosity over the videos ever growing popularity, the videos viral nature having kicked into high gear and stayed there. If you bother to wade through the comments, there are 136,000+ of them, you will see that, on the first 14 pages at least, most people are either deriding the content, spamming or making accusations about the parentage of other commenters!

'The Evolution of Dance' is a classic example of the mechanism succeeding where the content is clearly failing. It was easy to make the video, it was easy to place it on YouTube, it's easy for people to watch it, rate it and comment on it. None of that however will ever make this material any good. The only thing it's got going for itself is a number. It's a throw away piece of work hardly worth the 5 minutes it takes to watch it.

A lot of writers in the technology blogs are sounding the death knells of the big media companies, especially big music labels, movie studios and television production companies. Online distribution mechanisms make it easy to disseminate content so their time is up, the consumer wins, everything will be driven by advertising and free!

Which is complete rubbish of course because we need the content producers to actually produce the, wait for it, content! No NBC - no 'Heroes', no BBC - no 'Torchwood', No ABC - no 'Lost', no Time Warner, New Line, Universal, Columbia - no movies, no professional dance companies - it's Mr Laipply and his "inspirational comedy", etc, etc. Music is a slightly different beast but the principal is the same; no talent, no content.

Absent the creative skills of writers, actors, dancers, musicians and production crews all you are left with is some very clever technology (the internet) and not a lot else.

The driving force behind the success of the iPod/iTunes combination from Apple is not the easy to use technology, it's the music. People want music and they want it all the time and the iPod/iTunes combination provides the easiest way to keep that music with you wherever you go. Without the music content however all you have left is 50,000 podcasts about stuff nobody could care less about. The public at large could live without the iPod, but could they live without the music?

Apple hasn't recorded 4 billion podcast downloads, they have recorded 4 billion music sales. You have to pay for the professionally produced music, the podcasts are free!

The beginnings of a good piece of dance, worth promoting via the myriad of technologically advanced methods available to us all today, starts in the studio with real dancers and real choreographers. It may be easy to film something and put it online but it is certainly not easy to make something worth filming and put online for promotional or any other purpose.

If your work is of the very highest quality you can muster, if it's lavished will every ounce of craft you can wring from your own creative ability then it will stand a chance of being noticed. All the technology in the world is not going to make this profession any easier for anybody. Certainly not dance makers or the dancers themselves. Think before you hit that upload button!

One final word on YouTube. It seems strange that camera technology and computer based editing are making high quality video production an easier thing to accomplish and YouTube users are running as fast as possible in the opposite direction. Why spend months crafting your new show only to denigrate it with a worthless 3 minute piece of mush on that particular website?

Shoot your own video, compress your own video and host your own video, your work will thank you for it.

Everything Old Is New Again

Friday, 14 March, 2008

For a small profession, relatively speaking, the dance world has an awful lot of awards ceremonies going on all the time, with the emphasis on the word "awful"!

This time it's the Olivier Awards, named for Laurence Olivier the well know thesp and all-round ham. Although they are not specifically for dance they do have dance awards in them for reasons past understanding.

The big winner on the night was The Royal Ballet who won both Best New Dance Production and the Outstanding Achievement in Dance for 'Jewels'. Now this would be rather unremarkable apart from the fact that Jewels is 40 years old and was made by George Balanchine (now deceased) in 1967 for the New York City Ballet.

A more appropriate title for the award might well be Best New Dance Production That's 40 Years Old You Robbing B*stards! The awards website says the gong was given to; "The Royal Ballet for its revival of George Balanchine’s three-part ballet Jewels at the Royal Opera House".

Quick note: if something is a "revival" then it's not "new" it's old, it's been done before and I'll wager it's probably been done better.

If you're wondering why nothing outside of London ever wins one of these things it's because the people who vote for these awards are hundreds of years old, delusional, and under the misguided impression that London is the centre of the universe, allegedly!

Londondance.com, the capitals stenographers in chief, have worked themselves into a complete state because a lot of the award nominees, not the winners, put their shows on at Sadler's Wells Theatre, where LD.com is based. To Londondance the words "Sadler's Wells", "award" and "press release" all in the same sentence are like the proverbial moth to a flame or a prostitution ring to the Governor of New York.

Of course, just being nominated is an honour and you can still put it in a "news" story and mention "Sadler's Wells" five hundred times for no apparent reason!

If you care, full list of winners at the link below.

[ The Awards Page ]

Cultural Politics

Friday, 14 March, 2008

The current political shenanigans going on the in the United States of America are historic for a number of reasons, not least of which is when either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton secures their party's nomination it will be the first time in history that an African American or a woman has been nominated to run for President.

US politics has always motivated those in the creative industries and the arts a lot more than here in the UK. Liberals, who lean more toward being culture vultures, also tend to approach their politics in the most creative way possible. Musician and producer will.i.am has taken a speech given by Barack Obama and turned into a song featuring a few dozen celebrities and the man himself. The overarching message of the video is "Yes We Can".

Mix in a clever video and high production values and you have a very effective message that's helping to motivate hundreds of thousands become a little bit more pro-active in the political sphere.

The next time some bubble head tells you creativity and culture don't matter please don't point them toward this video, just tell them to bugger off safe in the knowledge that you know it does matter. Some people are beyond help.

There is also a version of the video where each frame is made up of thousands of user submitted photos to create the final video image. You need a very hefty computer to run that version but the normal one runs just fine on even a coal powered machine.

You can watch the video below or see a larger version on the DipDive website (link below).

[ Video on Dip Dive ]

Extraordinary Times

Tuesday, 4 March, 2008

It occurred to us, here in TheLab™, while watching the dancers of Verve do their thing with the current touring material of the 2008 programme, that these particular individuals, along with all serious dance students, are extraordinary individuals in our time.

When you think about it, far too many people today are consumed with the desire to either be famous and rich via one of a dozen or so television "talent" contests, follow, in excruciating detail, the lives of those that are already famous, or acquire as many trinkets of a, so-called, "normal life" as humanly possible before it's time to retire and play golf or yell at small children for being nothing more than small children.

Choosing a life as a professional dancer in this particular sector, contemporary dance, will deliver none of the above. If you're in this slightly odd world it's not because you want to be famous, it's certainly not for the money and achieving any kind of normal goal, like owning a house for example, is the exception rather than the rule.

So why do they do it? We would guess that each dancer would give a different answer but at the root of it is probably the desire to do something unique, to take the less traveled road because the alternative is probably too frighteningly mundane to contemplate.

The dancers we know tend to be more free spirited than your average citizen. Unafraid to take off at the drop of a hat to secure the next piece of work and experience a new workshop or group of people, bereft of personal or financial security.

Of course, the lack of financial security is not something to be championed but this particular mode of life would almost certainly scare the silent majority into early retirement and the peaceful calm of their golf course.

It's a well worn cliché, probably first said by someone with a beard, that it's the journey that matters, not the final destination. How many people could say, that in their life time, they accomplished something as challenging, creative and professional as the performers of Verve or any one of the hundreds of professional dance companies, large and small, from around the world?

That young people in their late teens, perhaps one of the most derided social groups by the "village elders", would willingly choose three or four years of extremely difficult training followed by nothing more than perpetual uncertainty is something to be championed.

When you strip away all of the bureaucracy, the funding, the festivals, the eduction programmes and the politics what you have, at the very core of this profession, are some of the most laudable individuals in our society. A group of people who choose to do something not for personal financial gain or for the glory but for a gloriously unquantifiable reason.

Saints they are not, but professional dancers are commendable in our time, that much is certain!

[ Verve 08 Video Feature ]
photo by Chris Nash

Camel Culture

Wednesday, 20 February, 2008

The UK government's recent announcement that all school children aged between 5-16 years old should receive at least five hours of cultural activity per week has met with mixed reactions from the arts and teaching sectors. Emotions range from gentle praise to outright hysteria at the very thought of compartmentalising the arts in such a way.

Initially the scheme will run as a pilot project funded by a meagre £25Million with backup funding of £110Million from yet another government scheme, in this case Creative Partnerships. In keeping with today's formula of treating everything like a talent search competition the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is calling the project "Find Your Talent".

The intention is to give children, in the pilot study areas, at least five hours of access to something cultural. This includes visiting museums, live performances in theatres, participating in actual performances, etc, etc. If you can call it cultural then the kids are going to be doing it.

In and of itself the project appears to be fine. As virtuous as any plan could be! Who doesn't want to provide children with access to as much culture as they can get? Like most things government orientated however you quickly begin to realise that it looks good as a press release and not much else.

Compared to the annual amount of money spent on the entire education infrastructure across the UK, currently over £77Billion per annum, that £25Million is bordering on pathetic at best. What is it exactly that can be achieved with £25Million where £77Billion is so obviously failing?

The scheme also overlooks the huge amount of education work already done by professional artists in schools, colleges and so many other places. Ask any professional dancer (outside of a ballet company) to name the schools and education projects they have worked on in any given year and they will struggle to recall them all for sheer weight of numbers.

Also, why five hours? Why not four hours or seven hours or more? The answer comes from the DCMS themselves when you read their own press release. In the footnotes for editors there is the following statement;

"The Government aims to offer all children, aged 5-16, five hours of sport a week by 2010. This will be a combination of PE and sport within the curriculum and outside school."

It's five hours because everything is being broken down by the numbers. Five hours of culture, five hours of sport, five hours of science, five hours of English and maths and so on. Everything is compartmentalised so it looks good on a chart because if kids are getting even numbers of everything then they'll come out of the other end as well rounded human beings. Right?

Nobody in their right mind would question the notion that culture needs to be used in schools but it needs to be threaded through everything children are taught. There is culture, drama and wonder in everything that kids should learn about in school from Pythagoras' theorem to Galileo to Dickens to George Balanchine and so on, ad-infinitum (that's Latin for infinity, see what I mean?)

The method is the responsibility of the teacher. If teachers are suitably inspiring, imaginative and, one would hope, well educated then integrating cultural relevance and education into everything that kids learn should not be a problem. £25Million and a government press release is not going to make that happen.

Teaching kids maths until 2pm and then making the teacher say "now it's time for your culture" is the educational equivalent of a camel; That's a horse built by a committee. It won't work very well, it'll look ridiculous and it's going to spit on you!

Dust for Brains

Wednesday, 23 January, 2008

The New York Times if often the place to turn for sober news coverage, informed editorials and a progressive voice or two. Unfortunately they get as slack as any other major paper when it comes to fawning coverage of the arts. The grandfather of dance, Merce Cunningham, one of New York's perennial dance personalities, is the subject of the latest exercise in objective reporting.

The Cunningham company has announced plans for, what they call, "Monday's With Merce" (come again? Ed!) Whereby once every two weeks the company will post a full-on documentary of the Cunningham company class online for the benefit of all mankind, or words to that effect. Each video will be available free of charge for anybody to watch and, presumably, learn Cunningham technique from the man himself.

Except of course you won't be able to do that because the idea of taking a professional level class via a video link is patently ridiculous. Teaching class is a hands on experience which means touching, feeling and lots of other things our over protective society does not approve of! If anybody's looking at it from that perspective please stop it now!

Not only will there be video of the class itself but interviews with Mr. Cunningham, the dancers and probably lots of oddball academics and historians because the whole project is being handled by New York University. By the time they are through with this project a total of 26 documentaries will exist.

The idea itself is fine, possibly even useful to some limited degree - particularly to dance students the world over who are forced to write essays about Mr Cunningham and his work - the problem is both the New York Times and the company come across as utter buffoons who just discovered the magic of electric power and the convenience of the horse-less carriage.

Trevor Carlson, the executive director of the company, is quoted as saying; “The actual hope became: How can we take Merce outside our studio without actually having to take him out? How can we bring what he does here, what we do here, to the outside community?”

Putting aside the comedic image of Merce Cunningham being "taken out" it took these guys more than two years to figure out the cryptic connection between digital video cameras, the internet and DVD's. Make that three years, the whole project doesn't go online until September this year. Article19 has been putting video online for 8 years now. Granted, none of that video has been of Merce Cunningham but I'll bet all the money in my pocket if we did, very few people would want to watch it.

Nancy Dalva, a dance historian, says in the piece; “we can go get archival footage of ‘Beach Birds,’ which has the same circle in it, and show the same Matisse poster, which Merce saw in his dentist’s office before he made the dance.”

What Ms Dalva is describing is called editing, possibly one of the few things in the world that's been around longer than Merce Cunningham himself. You have to wonder if these folks have been lurking in dusty New York studios for too long.

The whole project will cost more than $250,000 to produce and you can't help wondering why they don't make 26 documentaries of 26 different dance makers, perhaps that would be more useful? At least the dancers are getting paid for it but a lot of people would also be very grateful if they stopped acting like they just invented the wheel!

'Monday's With Merce' (stop giggling at the back) starts in September.

[ The Cunningham Company ]
[ NY Times Story ]

Pan Handling

Monday, 21 January, 2008

One of the often missed services that Arts Council England provides is something called the Arts Jobs List. It's basically an old school email bulletin. Subscribers to the list get an email when somebody, somewhere posts information to the list and it is, remarkably, free of spam.

What it is not free of is a never ending stream of people offering work in the fields of design, photography and film making (amongst others) but these people have yet to find a budget to pay for said work so instead you, the aforementioned photographer, filmmaker or designer, will be thrilled to learn that this "job" is, in fact, nothing more than a fantastic opportunity to augment your threadbare portfolio.

Here in TheLab™ we are very familiar with the word "opportunity" in relation to the dance profession. Professional dancers are often presented with tremendous "opportunities" of one sort or another but rarely does this "opportunity" provide the dancer with the "opportunity" to pay their rent, eat out, buy a car or "have a life!"

Let's make one thing clear. Working for nothing, when you are asked to do so, is not an "opportunity" for the person doing the work it's an "opportunity" for the person asking to get something for nothing. The person asking wants to take advantage of someone else's skills with the faint promise of.......... we're not even sure what these people are promising to be honest.

Look at it this way. Do you imagine that an accountant would do your tax returns for free and see it as an "opportunity" to enhance their form filling and receipt sorting skills? Would the postman deliver some mail for you in the hope of augmenting their walking and carrying a heavy bag portfolio?

Altruism is rooted in volunteering. If a suitably skilled individual or organisation offers you their services for free then it is an opportunity. It is an opportunity for them to show their selfless good grace toward others by providing a service or services that may otherwise be out of reach.

When people put out "job" advertisements stating that all they are going to do is take something from you and further compound their arrogance by suggesting that by simply working for them you are being afforded all the compensation you will ever need you begin to realise just how far some sections of the arts community have become detached from the real world.

There are many in the arts who are endlessly giving. Stop insulting them by asking for everything and offering nothing in return. That goes for the entire industry, not just ACE's email list!

Hissyfit

Thursday, 17 January, 2008

Hard as this may be to believe the arts, as a whole, is working itself up into an enormous lather over the recent cuts announced to regularly funded organisations by Arts Council England.

Such is the outrage that artists took to the streets this past Tuesday wearing masks and wielding banners, (stop giggling at the back), to vent their anger over the funding giants behaviour.

The Stage newspaper is even quoting Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre, as saying that the cuts are a "strategic catastrophe" and, I kid you not, "bollocks". If any of our non UK readers are confused about the last one it's a less than polite way of saying the cuts are wrong!

The Stage is also reporting that ; "....more than 500 actors and theatre professionals gathered at the Young Vic [in London] to pass a vote of no confidence in the council..". Such a vote has no force or effect of course and it's not too surprising to learn that artists have little or no confidence in ACE.

As much a point of contention as the cuts themselves is the manner in which ACE has handled them. Arts organisations in receipt of regular funding were informed just before Christmas of the decision to either cut their funding, reduce it, keep it the same or increase it. 194 of them got the bad news that their funding was being completely removed and they had just 4 week to appeal that decision.

The National Campaign for the Arts is also up in arms and has sent a letter (yes, people still do that) to James Purnell the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport. They claim that ACE's reasoning behind some of the cuts is both "inaccurate" and "flawed".

Here in TheLab™ the appeals process strikes us a little more than a procedural gesture. If all of the appeals were successful then ACE would be up a certain rancid waterway lacking a certain essential method of propulsion because the 80 new regularly funded organisations would be left out in the cold. We imagine their protests would be just as vociferous.

Were ACE to backtrack on these cuts right now it would almost certainly create an even bigger mess than the one they have already caused and would probably lead to an official enquiry by the government about how the council was being run. It would be a massive embarrassment to ACE and their elected handlers so don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.

It is encouraging that the arts has managed to develop a sense of outrage and even take to the streets when a perceived injustice is being perpetrated against them. You can't help wondering though where they are the rest of the time? It's not like ACE started acting like a basket case in the last two months and lobbing bricks (metaphorically speaking) at the outgoing chairman Peter Hewitt (he is soon to retire) is a bit pointless.

It will be interesting to see just how many of those 194 appeals are successful!

Reviewing the Reviewers

Sunday, 13 January, 2008

The reviews section of Article19 lurks at the top of the page like a street urchin few people want to go near. We've never been a big fan of reviews here in TheLab™ so there it sits, looking nervous, waiting for the hammer to fall. Perhaps one day it will!

With Resolution, the annual dance festival in London, come The Place's traditional reviews of the new companies that manage to get themselves onto the Robin Howard Theatre's stage. It's here, and with reviews in general, that Article19 is starting to wonder if dance criticism is put together by bored writers messing around with fridge magnets.

One set of reviews, for January 10th, caught our collective attention because we know one of the pieces very well. After a quick read we were, thanks to the ReviewOmatic™ writing, non the wiser about the other two. Sanjoy Roy and Kate Larsen were on call for the night, Resolution reviewers work in rotation, to watch Katja Nyqvist, All Play and Underground 7, they came with fridges in tow.

Mr Roy gets things off to a breezy start by calling the audience stupid. In describing All Play's 'It's Rude To Point' he opines;

"mostly they stay wacky, as if anxious that anything less lightweight might alienate their audience."

To prove his literary prowess he uses his full complement of magnetised words and brings "kooky", "riot", "garishly" and the aforementioned "wacky" in to play but when you get to the end of the review you have no idea what he actually thought of the work. Hard to believe he writes for the Guardian newspaper, or perhaps not.

Ms Larsen get's her review of All Play under way with a bit of fridge magnet sleight of hand by stating that "It's Rude to Point is self-consciously unconventional". See what she's getting at? The work is deliberately trying to be different, as apposed to work that's different by accident I suppose. It would appear that deliberately trying to be original is frowned upon and in order to obtain credibility, at least with these writers, you must bump into your uniqueness on a drunken night out in Slough!

Next Ms Larsen shows us how clever she is by bringing her readers an exclusive new revelation. Dancers rehearse!

"All Play's practiced enthusiasm and pre-planned banter (as well as their cute-but-quirky costumes) give them an air reminiscent of children's television presenters;"

Yes, dancers, dance companies, choreographers, comedians, actors, etc all rehearse. You figured it out, feel free to open the fridge you're writing on and help yourself to a cornish pasty. I'm assuming the "children's television presenter" comment was supposed to be an insult since there are few things worse than that (being a dance critic for ThePlace perhaps? Ed!)

When the writer gets to her piece on Underground 7's 'On The Edge' she complements Mr Roy's statement that the audience are all stupid with; "Visceral and fearless, this is uncommonly intelligent work." I'm not sure if Ms Larsen is saying that all the other pieces in Resolution are stupid or the collective works of contemporary dance as a whole, to date, are a bit dim-witted but you get the point.

It makes you wonder if these writers have been told to be as condescendingly neutral as they could possibly be. Every negative, or apparently negative, comment is followed by a half hearted attempt to be nice, to provide positive re-enforcement to fledgling dance makers, even if that's not what they are.

Combine that with these nonsensical statements;

"a hypnotic work that's quietly compelling without ever becoming dramatic"

"a crescendo bold in its stillness and simplicity."

"arcs and sweeps through thickening, syrupy air, her body a pendulum propelled by the force of breath"

and you are forced to ask this question; What are these reviews for?

There are absolutes in life, of course there are. A pane of glass is either a pane of glass or it's not. There's no in-between, you can't argue that a pane of glass is a cow and have any credibility although dance critics may give it a go. The arts are more problematic because most of the time it's not about quality or craft it's about taste.

Do these reviewers imagine that all Resolution participants will be reading these pieces and making changes accordingly? Are they trying to sway the paying public's future ticket purchasing choices? Is it a comprehensive statement on the very nature of dance and its place in the world? Or is ThePlace so devoid of ideas about how to actually cover their own festival that the best they can come up with is a couple of hundred half arsed reviews written on the side of a Sub Zero & Wolf (look it up)?

My money's on the last one!

Resolution reviews continue until the end of February or until they run out of magnets, whichever comes first.

[ The Place ]

Bad Acting in HD

Tuesday, 1 January, 2008

You know you're watching a high definition (HD) television channel because all the station ident logos, like the one above, have lots of wispy clouds of colour floating around to emphasise the fact there is more detail in the picture. They also add the "HD" tag onto absolutely everything lest the poor viewer becomes confused about why their television picture has been a bit rubbish for the last 50 years.

Over the Christmas break we, here in TheLab™ were lucky enough to catch the BBC's broadcast of a couple of Royal Ballet performances in all their aforementioned HD glory and a couple of things immediately became apparent.

First of all ballet dancers, no matter what other skills they may posses, couldn't act their way out of wet paper bag with a big hole in it decorated with a large flashing neon sign, in pink obviously, saying "Exit"!

The simplistic facial expressions and gestures that ballet choreographers use to describe everything from "I love you" to "there's an army massing to the east, a force 10,000 strong, shouldn't we do something about that your highness?" are exposed for what they are. That is; nothing more than filler in-between the interesting bits. Unfortunately the interesting bits in Kenneth MacMillan's version of 'Romeo and Juliet', one of the performances on offer, are few and far between but that's another story.

When the BBC cuts to its frequent close ups on the dancers "acting" all you really get is Carlos Acosta with a sweaty face and neck looking a bit dim-witted. Tamara Rojo's frightening make up was no better!

Mimes in ballet were supposed to be seen from a minimum distance of about 30 feet and even at that range nobody is being fooled.

The other problem is the BBC. They can't shoot dance. For some reason the producer/director of the filming on both occasions (the other performance was Darcy Bussell's excruciatingly long farewell show) was trying to pretend that the dancers were not in an auditorium.

In a desperate attempt to keep the frame full and the front edge of the stage out of the shot the dancer's feet were getting cut off all too often or they were so tight to the bottom of the screen the framing looked awkward. Only when they retreated to the middle or rear of the stage was the shooting acceptable.

Broadcast television has two mantras which are; "Fill the Frame" and "the more edits the better", or words to that effect. Like a school boy/girl on a sugar high the director was chopping the shots all over the place including some ill-advised hand held work from the wings. Whomever this person was, we couldn't find out at the time of writing, needs to learn that a live theatrical performance is not an episode of Eastenders. Applying a little more subtlety and craft in the shooting and editing departments is what's needed.

It's a shame because HD video is perfect for dance. The image quality was superb and the level of detail in the wide angle and full frame shots of the dancers, when they were framed properly, was stunning. Sure, the limitations of the dancers acting ability was thrown into sharp focus but you don't go to a dance performance for good acting.

It will be interesting to see some contemporary work in this new format, I wonder who will get there first?

ACE Drops The Hammer

Wednesday, 19 December, 2007

On October 16th this year Arts Council England (ACE) told Article19 that the "vast majority" of regularly funded arts organisations (RFO) in England would be receiving "good news" about their ongoing commitment to provide support.

It would appear, following some recent revelations, that ACE has an interesting interpretation of the phrases "vast majority" and "good news".

194 organisations are having their funding cut or, as ACE describes it, "not renewed" when the new financial year comes around on April 1st next year. This cull is from a total portfolio of 950 arts groups across England. ACE did stress that 80 new clients will be added to their RFO portfolio but we imagine that's of little comfort to those who's jobs have just been put under threat.

In a typical example of just how much common sense ACE appears to lack when dealing with these matters we turn to the story of The Exeter Northcott Theatre which has just been redeveloped at a cost of £2.1Million (USD $4.2Million). The redevelopment of which was funded, in part, by ACE. Having rebuilt the theatre ACE has decided that the annual grant of £547,000 (USD$1.09Million) will be cut in its entirety.

The theatre has already set up a "Save Exeter Northcott" website to muster public support.

Nick Capaldi, Executive Director of ACE South West, told the Guardian that the decision was "not made lightly" along with some other references to audiences being "loyal" but "static".

We feel sure, here in TheLab™, that everybody in the arts feels his pain at having to make these tough choices. All we can hope is that Mr Capaldi can summon the courage the have a relaxing and care free Christmas holiday on his annual salary of £77,000. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt being spread throughout the arts in England by these cuts will ensure that a lot of people have very little time to relax and enjoy their holidays.

There is still a chance that organisations like The Northcott can have these decisions overturned, their ultimate fate should be known by February next year.

Some of you may be wondering why ACE is cutting funding at all when their own finances were boosted by 2.7%, in line with inflation, just two months ago. The reasons are simple and they are summed up in the wonderfully compact RentaQuote™ phrase that is "Thrive not Survive". This means that ACE doesn't just want to fund companies to exist they want them to be able to grow, so thinning the herd is the only way to get that done.

You could argue that ACE should have tried harder to secure more money from the Government, cut back still more on their own enormous operating costs of £51.6Million (USD $105.3Million) and not allowed themselves to be so completely shafted by the Olympics. Having achieved all of that, the cuts may not have been quite so deep, but we digress.

ACE will be letting Article19 know by the end of today how many of these arts organisations are in the dance field. Citing confidentiality reasons, they are unable to tell us the names of the companies however. If you are a dance organisation and ACE is dropping a very big hammer on your head then let us know.

Update: ACE have told us that of the 77 dance organisation currently with RFO status 12 of them will not be funded from next year, an additional 8 will be added in their place.

[ Save Exeter Northcott Website ]

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