Charging for auditions (or in this case an audition workshop) is generally not accepted practice in this country or any other. We do, on occasion, see Israeli companies charging for auditions but even that is not standard practice.

Leaving aside the issue of companies trying to charge for auditions for now what was more striking was the company's response after we communicated to them that charging was highly irregular and would not go down well in the dance world at large.

Approximately 30 minutes later the company had dropped the charge from the audition notice and their website and other materials were updated within a couple of hours.

It didn't take three weeks, multiple emails and phone calls and lots of hand wringing and clumsily worded emails from press flacks trying to justify the reasoning.

There was a decision, a reaction and a change of policy, all in the space of 30-40 minutes. Which is exactly how it should be.

No Comparison No Contrast

If we compare and contrast the above to two recent interactions we had, one with The Place in London and one with Rambert Dance Company, the outcome could not have been more different.

In the land of pompous self-entitlement the reaction, if you dare to ask actual questions, is a lot of childish fist thumping on the desk as the flacks play out their "Press Strategies For Dummies" book in their heads.

More often than not all that happens is that simple, and perfectly legitimate, enquiries turn in to massively complicated problems for no other reason than too many press people in the arts are playing at doing their jobs as opposed to actually doing their jobs.

We once had to enquire about CRB checks and the change in policies surrounding those checks. The civil service press spokesman we talked to on the phone was able to have a detailed conversation, with no preparation, on the several questions we asked. That person knew the details of their department and its policies and was able to converse, on the record, with ease.

If only it were always that simple.

ACE Dance and Music showed that it is possible in the arts to react to emerging problems and either change the policy or comment about that policy and do it very quickly.

We shall leave you with a famous quote from American novelist Upton Sinclair;

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

That quote could sum up quite a few people in the arts. They operate in blissful/wilful ignorance because their jobs literally depend on it.

"If you were good writers then the acrid sarcasm and bitchiness might be excusable. There is plenty of space for a cynical voice, but you don't even seem to give thorough well researched information about the things you sling mud-in-the-form-of-bad-writing. In this piece you act like you are champions of the underdog but you've been known to say petty and nasty things about journalists praising those underdog companies and performers. The content on this site is a bit thin and shoddy to endure your taking this manifesto-like high road."

As comments go it's nothing new. We don't like you, you suck, blah blah blah. All written by an individual with the courage to throw some online punches but not leave a name.

Now, we don't mind that the commenter is anonymous, we allow that because sometimes it's important.

The problem with a comment like that though is the argument is not framed with any context. No specifics are given, no mention of the fact free mud-slinging the commenter alleges we are a engaged in or anything else for that matter. We asked for specifics in our response but, as we expected, none came.

You can remain anonymous whilst still giving some details about who you are and what you do and we could frame our response more easily if we knew where the commenter was coming from. It would certainly be easier to frame a response given some specific examples to defend. That's how a discussion works.

We get the feeling the person is a writer, and we have some idea which writer, but it's all speculation on our part.

The Wider Problem

If nothing else that particular comment illustrates a maddening issue with so many discussions in dance and culture in general. Far too much of it is specifically unspecific.

Arts Council England's "State of the Arts" conference, which was a stripped down affair this year, is/was famous for it. Lots of wooly discussion about anything other than real issues or specific problems facing the arts.

How many times have you, our dear readers, attended some conference or seminar only to find your very life essence being sucked out of your body by the whole sorry affair as somebody on the stage waffled on about "parallel marketing strategies"?

As for dance journalists, the ones "praising the underdog"? Well, the vast majority of their published work is reviews. Those writers might blame their editors for not allowing a broader range of writing to appear in the newspapers (online or otherwise) but there are plenty of avenues for them to express themselves away from the constraints of the narrow minded editorial decisions of the broad-sheets.

If those writers feel so terribly constrained by the iron fist of their bosses then what the hell, you can have a blog right here on Article19. As long as we know who you are you can even write under a pseudonym if you wish. Come hither and let loose your pointed insight into the wacky world of dance that has, for so long, been tempered by the mighty sword of your editors.

None will come of course. It's easier to say you're a rebel than to actually be one.

Provocation

Article19 exists for many reasons but one of the most important is to provoke people. Jabbing folk with sticks would be more fun but we prefer to use facts (as presented in our piece about the National Funding Scheme for example) to prod people with because facts are often more difficult to fend off.

The very fact that Mr/Ms anonymous up there posted that comment means we must be doing something right. We got under that person's skin, rattled their cage and other metaphors we can't remember right now.

We want people to talk about real issues that actually exist and have a debate about those issues. You don't need to like us or how we do things, you just need to have a coherent point of view.

Also, if all you can muster is the type of comment we've highlighted above then you're not having a enough fun in show business, and for that, you have our sympathy.

[ Then We Could Stop ]

The winter of a thousand nights appears, in some places at least, to be over so we thought, here in TheLab™, that it was as good a time as any to reflect on what's good in the wide world of dance because there is still some good stuff left.

We still have a couple of dozen NPO dance companies in the UK and a lot more dance companies all over Europe and the rest of the world doing their thing. You might not like all of it but there they are, making, touring, teaching and sharing.

The UK also has a lot more small-scale touring companies beating the odds, putting together work and putting together a tour or two. We're talking about Bgroup, Watkins Dance, Parlor Dance, Rosie Kay Dance Company, Tom Dale and lots more besides.

For better or worse the National Dance Network is still breathing and they're doing their thing (stop laughing at the back). Yes, they waste lots of money and are becoming more corporate by the hour but there is evidence to suggest they can be taught to change their ways. You just need to know where to kick them.

The day we spent with the students of Northern School of Contemporary Dance revealed a group of young dancers up for the fight and not at all cowed by the current attempts of the powers that be to permanently disable an entire nation. They've made their choices and they will take their chances.

You can see that video tomorrow.

At Least We Can Laugh

Akram Khan is still making promo videos for his work that make us all smile. We smile for the wrong reasons but at least we're smiling. Sadler's Wells is releasing a book that will apparently tell us how awesome Sadler's Wells is! That's got to be funny, right?

Hofesh Schecter goes nuts on Twitter from time to time which is good entertainment value and he's making a new piece this year (finally).

The press staff at ThePlace are still completely adorable as they work through their DVD box set of 'The West Wing' in order to come up with a communications strategy that works. They're just cribbing from the wrong parts of the script is all!

From the wide world of ballet we have endless amounts of entertainment as they continue to do nothing much at all and spend huge amounts of money doing it. They should make a ballet about the current state of ballet, talk about comedy/tragedy.

It's also incredibly funny reading the ballet "journalists" twist themselves into pretzels trying desperately to defend the antics of guys like Sergei Polunin, a guy that just can't be bothered getting out of bed in the morning. He's lazy and stupid, but he can jump really high and at least he gives the hacks something better to do than watch 'Mayerling'....... again!

Cycles

We firmly believe that everything is cyclical. At the moment, from a financial point of view, things don't look so good. The hacks and the cynical politicians are always saying how "nothing lasts for ever", "the good times are over".

Well, the same goes for the bad times too and the same goes for the hacks and the cynical politicians, they don't last forever either.

Yes, things are bad right now, even crazy at times but it's not going to last. If a group of twenty year old students can put up a fight then we're pretty sure that everybody else in the wide world of dance and beyond can do the same.

So let's all have a good summer (spring is a bust) and let's try to figure out "what's next?"

To this we simply say..... No!

We would love nothing more than to bring you video features, interviews and all the other general information that we deliver to you from now until the end of time. If that was all we had to do that that would mean all the other stuff had gone away.

It would mean that all the dreadful, infuriating and crazy things had simply stopped happening and we could just spend all our time talking about the good stuff.

Stop

If Arts Council England would stop pouring money down the drain on projects like The Space, the Dance Register, Sustain and so many other things then we could stop.

If small and mid-scale touring wasn't being squeezed to breaking point through the lack of funds while ACE is blowing money like a drunkard in a casino then we could stop.

Just one of the dance projects funded on The Space would have paid for 33 touring performances.

If the dance profession in this country would work more collaboratively with one another, lose the egos and understand their single, common purpose then we could stop.

If theatres that have booked companies for performances actually helped to market those shows (assuming they have the money and resources to do so) then we could stop.

If dance companies could show that they at least support, in principal, ideas like 'The Fifty' and talk more openly about creating more full-time permanent jobs for professional dancers, then we could stop.

If ACE could stop being so completely clueless when it comes to how the public and the people they fund perceive them and why that perception matters then we could stop.

If ACE's response to public perception questions wasn't this "It is not for the Arts Council to speculate what anyone else's opinion may be." Then we could stop.

If ACE could grasp for just a second that what doomed the Film Council was arrogance, stupidity, incompetence and indifference then we could stop.

If all of that and a lot more like it stopped, then we could stop.

Knee High

Here in TheLab™ we are, as always, just a few short days away from online oblivion but we would rather keep fighting on our knees and then on our backs before we yield. Before we become like so many in the arts press. That is; boring, predictable, compliant.

Most of our readers would expect nothing less from us and we hate to disappoint. So if it's alright with you, we will just carry on until we can't carry on any more.

Stay Slippy!

So our question is this; Why are 12 year old little kids better at sharing information than the grown up professionals in the wide world of dance?

Immersion

Back in the day, during training, one of the first things we remember being told was to "immerse ourselves in the dance world". Know who was doing what, why they were doing it and where it was happening.

The web was just getting started back then but had it existed in its current form we imagine that knowing what every dance company and dance organisation was up to at all times would also have been part of the plea to get immersed.

Social media, if it gives us anything at all, provides the outsider with an illuminating insight into the thinking of your average dance organisation and, in many cases, it's like reading the playbook from some speaker at a marketing conference.

From what we can see there's not a whole lot of immersion going on at all. In fact most people appear to be caught in a bubble of their own making where they can only hear and see what their own company is doing.

Should something or someone else enter their orbit then that may warrant a mention but for the most part it's like being on the worst date ever.

A lot of dancing folk talk about engagement but they don't appear to know what that word means.

Testing Testing

A couple of weeks ago we published a feature on Verve, the post graduate company from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Late last week we did a little test tweet that you can see below.

dance companies of the world! how about a little love for #Verve13 | article19.co.uk/06/hdvideo/ver... | they might be working for you one day! #share

— Article19 (@Article19) March 15, 2013

Of the 9 re-tweets we mustered only two of them came from dance companies (2Faced and James Wilton) although Mr Wilton was one of the choreographers for Verve 2013 so that doesn't really count.

As for all the other dance companies out there? We know that nearly all of them follow us so why didn't they "show a little love" for Verve?

Chances are they never saw the message at all and wouldn't have no matter how many times we posted it because in the arts and dance in particular too many people are talking and not enough people are listening.

Tweeting or re-tweeting something in and of itself is a fairly minor thing and even if they had all done so the very nature of Twitter and tweeting would have resulted in only a small amount of additional click through traffic to that particular feature.

The bigger issue here though is one of engagement by the dance profession in the very profession they are a part of.

The Most You Can Do

For sure dance organisations are constantly telling us about shows and workshops and anything else that they might be a part of. But there is no larger, more general discussion of dance and the profession as a whole going on.

Some people are trying to make that happen (Female Choreographer's Collective for one) but as with so many other things they don't seem to be getting a lot of help from the profession at large, especially the NPO companies.

On the whole the industry appears to have adopted an "everybody for themselves" kind of attitude and in a profession as small as this one is, that's not gonna work.

Sharing information via social media is as simple, often times, as pushing a button on a web page and if the profession as a whole can adopt a more pervasive, engaged attitude about something that is so simple then bigger more complex things would surely be possible.

Too often we here from small-scale companies that have managed, against all the odds, to put together a tour only to find out that the venues that have booked them can't be bothered to actually market the performance. That, right there, is Monty Python levels of satire.

NPO companies need to be openly and actively involved in helping out project based and independent dancers and choreographers (and vice versa if at all possible) in any way that they can and not just the ones they happen to know.

If a small scale company comes into their area then they should be immediately aware of it, reach out, ask them if they need any help with getting the word out, professional classes, setting up a workshop or two, providing some contacts or whatever it is they can do to provide some assistance.

Fundamentally, don't say "that's the least we can do!" ask "what's the most we can do?"

Perhaps, as an NPO, you are already doing these things or have provided support like this in the past? If that's the case then write about it and put it on your blog, the one that's on your company website. You do have one of those, right?

Most importantly though, make sure you tell somebody what you've done so others can learn from it, so that you, as an NPO, can lead by example.

Again, as an NPO company, ask yourself if you have done everything you can to make sure as many people who need to know something about your company are able to find that information. The more organisations and individuals that help you out with that the better things will be.

Even if the "most" you think can do is write about another company or tweet about them then make sure you do it. (TopTip™ it's not, nor will it ever be the "most" you can do!)

No Fear

For a lot of people in dance the profession itself can be a very scary place, even inside an NPO with regular funding and a modicum of security.

The advantages of the profession as whole being fully engaged (that means listening as well as talking) at all times are far too numerous to mention.

As a job it's always going to be hard but it could get a little bit easier to do so many things if the collective chipped-in and checked all the egos at the door.

Start with the simple stuff, like Twitter and Facebook, spend a bit more time talking about others (out loud where everybody can hear you, not in pointless meetings) and get engaged with the profession. Don't just say it, mean it!

Arts Council England was one of many organisations responsible for the venue simply not having enough money to operate. Funding had disappeared, in turn, from ACE, their local council and their county council. Closure was, perhaps, inevitable given how heavily the odds were stacked against them.

When you deal with an organisation like ACE, as a journalist, you go through the press office and, contrary to popular belief, the press officers inside organisations like ACE are not there to answer questions. They are there to run interference for their employers.

This is why there are often referred to as "flacks". Named for the weapons used by defensive ground forces against hostile aircraft.

Without actually calling the press office at ACE towers we already knew what they were going to say, that is, they were not going to say anything at all.

Of course they will put out a statement with a few platitudes about the, now, ex-venue along with a few more benign sentences about funding constraints, policies and national expectations but obtaining and then reading meaningless "statements" is not our job as journalists and it's not your expectation as a reader.

If we actually got through to one of the people responsible for removing the theatres funding in the first place and we could lean on them for 20 minutes, twisting them into a pretzel shaped object would be pretty straightforward.

The flacks know this of course which is why they won't put any of those people on the phone or in front of camera if they think for one second that the person on the other side of the questions will be, metaphorically, wiring their boss up to car battery.

Why do you think Alan Davey, the CEO of ACE, only exposes himself to the public (pun absolutely intended) via text based "web chats"?

What To Do?

Doing something about this intractable behaviour is a complex and slow affair. We do have the Freedom of Information Act which can be useful but is very slow and easy to get around for the organisations fielding the requests. So much so it should be called the "freedom to not give out information if that information in any way makes us look bad".

A more direct method is to do what we, here in theLab™, do all the time. Relentlessly and publicly needle them, point out every embarrassingly stupid thing they do and highlight the funding monoliths never ending hypocritically stupid behaviour. The same goes for everybody that enables them.

We don't do it because we think it's funny, which it often is, but because it needs to be done. Bad people are doing bad things and somebody needs to get in their face, so to speak.

While doing all that we have to, somehow, defend the existence of the Big Bad in the face of those that seek to erase it. What a strange world we live in.

And Finally

Since we are discussing the Brewhouse Theatre allow us to point out one more thing.

A blog post appeared on the theatre's website that has since been deleted. Who wrote it is not clear, it was not particularly inflammatory, but one thing did catch our eye;

"The beauty of being unemployed is that I can say what I like, so here goes".

Behind that sentence lies, perhaps, the crux of the problem. Only when the axe had finally fallen did somebody decide to speak out in very clear terms about the importance of the work the theatre was doing and take a jab at those responsible for the venues downfall.

Even then, somebody decided to pull the plug and pretend it never happened. So swiftly was it removed even Google's legendary cache failed to catch the page in its clutches.

We would like to remind everybody that works in the arts (yet again) that your right to freedom of expression is not rescinded just because you get a monthly wage, receive funding from ACE (or not) or because you believe in little more than self preservation.

You work in the arts, which is all about freedom of expression, and we would rather you exercised the right to free expression sooner rather than later or at the very least before pretty much everything gets closed down.

If you can't do it directly then find another way. You are, after all, adult human beings.

You would think that paying for a ticket would give you some sort of license to hang about after the show was over for a chat with your fellow patrons about the virtues (or not) of the work you had just witnessed.

Not so in some places apparently because as soon as you're done with all that pesky clapping and cheering you can bloody well get out and go home.

If you like, you can hang about in the overpriced and somewhat soulless bar area and have at it but after being tossed out of the auditorium by overbearing ushers why would you bother?

Some theatres have a tendency to operate like high end clothes stores. You know the ones; They never have any people in them and are staffed out with snooty, overly made-up individuals who, upon seeing you enter, give you the once over with a half cocked smile and a look in their eyes that says "you don't belong, this store if for anybody but you!"

Time To Go

We get that people who work in a theatre might want to go home but if you don't like being out late then perhaps the theatre is not your game, so to speak. The folks who paid for the ticket, and in most cases towards the subsidies that help keep the theatre operating, have come for a night out which means, more often than not, staying up past 10pm.

They also want to enjoy a polite, calm, welcoming experience when they come to your venue. Being herded about like cattle in an abattoir and then chucked out with the garbage at the end is not conducive to a pleasant evening.

Here in the most bitter north we have Northern Stage. After a very expensive refurbishment they ended up with one of the nicest restaurant/bar areas we've ever seen in a theatre. The food is good, the service is efficient and you can hang around as long as you like, or at least until it closes, after the show is over.

It might not be the cheapest place in the city (it is certainly not the most expensive) but it actually has an atmosphere that makes people want to stay.

People Problem

Every theatre in the country should try and mimic the Northern Stage experience. Of course, some theatres do just that but far too many don't. It might be bizarre to suggest this but some theatrical venues seem to have a people problem.

Absolutely every facet of a theatrical venue should be geared toward making the people who come there (performers and audience) feel as welcome as they possibly can because why would anybody want to come to a place that is hostile, unpleasant and expensive?

If you run a theatre and the bar area and other social spaces are miserable, cold and unwelcoming then fix them. If your staff are sullen, uncooperative and rude then get new staff or beef up your training to include a whole day on "How Not To Be A Git and Other Tales".

Getting people through the door is hard, in fact it's very hard if not nigh on impossible at times, so when they do come make sure they have an experience they will never forget. That's how you get them to come back, over and over again.

It's amazing what you can achieve with a pleasant demeanour, a bit of patience and some, dare we say it, charm!

Theatres can't do much about the quality of the work in a show but they can do everything to set the tone of a patrons personal experience. It's not about getting people in and out as fast as possible so you can lock up and go home. That's what Ryanair do, and we all know just how much everybody hates that wretched company.

In October last year we covered the story of a £22,000 website being built by the NDA DanceXchange, in Birmingham. At that time they declined to answer any questions about it but since the project is a website it had to show its face one day, and that day has come.

Westmidlandsdance.com (WMD) is intended as a platform to distribute information about what's happening in dance around the West Midlands of England. Why such a small demographic you may ask? We will give good odds on that being part of the funding agreement.

A more nebulous aim is to connect dancers and others in the region so they can become aware of one another's existence and then great things will happen......... eventually.

Special Offers

Upon opening the homepage what you are greeted with is something akin to the annoying special offers leaflets that get posted through your door from Ikea or Tesco.

Information is presented in randomly sized panels with no forethought given to what that information is or why anybody would want to know about it.

Performance information is presented alongside "resource" info, random collections of images from old projects and whatever else the administrators have thrown into the database to be served up according to whims of chaos theory.

If you click on a performance link you will get information about that show, so far so good. Clicking on the link for the theatre entry for that show does not provide you with a list of shows at that venue though. What you get is press blurb about how awesome the venue is, or information that nobody wants, to put it another way.

To bring some order to the chaos you can click on specific categories, like "what's on", that present you with the same randomly sized tiles telling you about performances, this time in chronological order.

From a user's point of view though you still get a massive list of shows presented in a way that wastes a huge amount of space. Even on a wide screen display you have to do a lot of scrolling and clicking in the hopes of finding something that you may actually be interested in.

The map option isn't really a map at all, it's a search option. You search for shows on the map by typing in the name of a city or town. When we tested "Birmingham" what we got in return was the screen below.

The Big Pink Dot™

A meaningless pink dot in the middle of the screen. Clicking on that dot brings up a panel for "West Midlands Dance Mike". No actual shows are listed at all, no matter how much you zoom out. This is odd because the "Tesco Leaflet™" screen showed us that there were quite a few shows to be found.

Directory Enquiries

The "directory" section of the site is the "social" section where you can sign up for a "professional profile" and do whatever it is people do with social networks.

Except, this is not a very "social" network.

You can't follow people (figuratively speaking that is) or even message them. When we signed up for a demo account to test the professional profile it resembled an Arts Council England application form, right down to the "do you teach specific groups of people" question.

At the time of writing our dummy professional profile was not activated, apparently that has to be done manually by a human.

What you can do, while you wait for permission to be a professional, is "love" somebody's profile that, apart from being a bit creepy, seems to have no practical purpose.

The main directory page is not broken down into categories (people, venues, agencies, companies, etc). All you get is an alphabet menu and off you go.

Bizarrely, if you click on the "map" option in the directory it gives you a map of venues that will (with a bit of clicking) show you a list of performances at each of those venues. The "what's on" map doesn't do that.

Basket Case

The "collections" and "resources" section of WMD (a somewhat unfortunate acronym) are much the same thing. It looks like, in a somewhat desperate attempt to fill the site with content, that somebody has entered passages from funding applications to try and describe the project.

Example: For the entry named "Dance Transformations" we have this;

"On successful completion of the project, the artists will form the core of a regional community of practice, able to act as advocates for their art form and as champions for further opportunities for disabled dance artists as dance makers."

If that's not "application form speak" then TheImp™ will eat a bargain burger from Tesco for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Process Story

The Directory of Eternal Mystery

It is, perhaps, the "resource" section that emphasises more than anything what kind of website WMD really is. It's an information resource designed by a committee.

Westmidlandsdance.com has no purpose, no point and no personality. It's little more than a faceless collection of mostly useless information with a social aspect bolted on that doesn't provide any actual social utility.

The design is reminiscent of a "colourful shiny thing" that a government department would force upon an unsuspecting public to try and prove they "get" the internet and here's something to prove it.

Ironically, before it was changed, WMD was a simple blog. It wasn't particularly entertaining (well, it wasn't entertaining at all) but it did have the air of something written by a human being.

There is no actual writing on the new version though. Like so many websites on the internet now it thinks it can survive if everybody starts using it and adds their own material which they won't because why would they?

Who is going to read the things that might get posted and why would they use WMD instead of Tumblr or Posterous which have millions of users, are completely free and are fully customisable by the user?

As we said in "The £22,000 Question" there is nothing this website does which could not have been achieved with a myriad of free services that already exist on the internet. A little bit of work and a lot of imagination and you could bring together a regional group and share information between them very efficiently.

A far cheaper and simpler WMD could have served as the public face of such an endeavour.

Sources close to this project told us that nobody actually wanted this thing to exist. It came into being because the money had to be spent on something. Dance professionals wanted something else but DanceXchange decided to build WMD.

Now they've got it, they will have to live with it because everybody else will probably ignore it.

[ The £22,000 Question ]

Anton Ego from the Pixar movie 'Ratatouille'

We passed on making fun of the National Dance Awards (NDA) this year because, let's face it, there's not a whole lot more to say that we haven't said already.

The Critics Circle, who decide the winners of these awards, are still picking the usual suspects, still cannot define what an "independent" dance company is (even though they give an award for the "best" one) and they still take terrible press images.

Award ceremonies not withstanding there is a bigger issue with the Critics Circle and with critics in general.

The NDA, like most award ceremonies, picks a short list of people, the nominees, gathers them all together and then tells one of them that they have won. The others are, by definition, the losers who are, of course, "happy to have been nominated".

It's not at all clear how you decide that one dancer is "better" than another or more accomplished or why the "best" dancer doesn't also win the "outstanding" performance award because if they are the "best" then surely then should win both prizes.

Asking such questions though would give far too much credit to the analysis that takes place when giving out these awards in the first place because there is no analysis. From the point of view of the Critics Circle it doesn't matter who they nominate or who wins because it's all about projecting authority and power.

"You're good because we say you are" and just to prove it, have a few stars, or some formed polymer with your name etched on it.

Critics love to think of themselves as the arbiters of good taste. Something is good because they say so, end of story.

Film critics get their knickers in a knot on a regular basis if a film is released without being shown to them first. "How dare the film company bypass us", they wail, "they must be up to something."

Rotten Tomatoes

The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives 'Skyfall' (the latest James Bond film) a combined score of 92%.

Here in TheLab™, when we saw that film, we thought it was a ponderous, sloppy, boring waste of time with a story that was just about worthy of inclusion in an episode of Spooks and Daniel Craig needs to work on a few more facial expressions because "pissed of GQ cover guy" is getting old.

So, are we right and the critics wrong? Who cares!

We paid our money, we took our chance and we got to see the movie and we made up our own minds about what we thought of it.

Critics, reviews and aggregation websites, like Rotten Tomatoes (we're not aware of any culture equivalent), are just playing into the idea that something has always got to be better than something else. Everything has to have a score, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.

Malevolent Ego

Although most critics would deny it, what they really want is the kind of power exhibited by the fictional restaurant critic Anton Ego from the Pixar movie 'Ratatouille'. He sits in his coffin shaped office handing down success or failure to restauranteurs on a whim.

"I will return tomorrow night with high expectations. Pray you don't disappoint me" Mr Ego warns in the movie. How many critics are thinking like that as they take their seats, pens at the ready, vicious intent primed and ready to go?

Arts marketing folk enable these misanthropes by putting their pull quotes all over the publicity material. If anybody actually cares what critics think, and film box office takings would suggest they don't, then what exactly are dance companies and choreographers going to do about it?

Will dance companies start making work to order just get favourable reviews? Well, some companies will do that because they have all the artistic credibility of a BBC producer, but most certainly will not. So why even quote them?

If critics want to write about dance then they should write about it. If you want to give awards then just give them, no ceremonies, no nominees just say "hey, we thought you were cool, so here's a piece of plastic for your efforts". Ok, you might want to be a bit more grandiose when you hand it over!

You might have been told that your work is not good for "them" because "their" audience doesn't respond well to abstract work. "They" prefer the more lyrical kind of dancing, you know, "dancey, dancing!" Or the exact opposite of that if you work happens to be the more "dancey" kind of dancing.

Reading between the lines, they are either true believers or they just want you to go away so they can book Richard Alston again!

Such thinking extends to taking work from one country to another as well, it's just the words that change. Is a work "international" enough? They will ask. How will it "translate" to another country, even if there are no words in it?

Dutch people prefer this, Danish people prefer that and the Germans, well, "they" don't like anything! International audiences, "they" are very "different" aren't "they"?

It's gotten worse with the advent of so-called CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that many theatres and large companies have become completely enamoured with.

This software tracks all manner of statistical gibberish on people who come to a theatre, buy tickets, give money, sign up for friends schemes and all the other sleight of hand used by culture organisations to get money out of people.

Garbage In Garbage Out

The fundamental problem with a lot of this is the fact that your system (computerised or not) is only as good as the data that goes in it.

Look at it this way. If your theatre is known for programming unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work then the people who come through your door and keep coming through your door will tell you that they love it and they want more of it.

If you then program something which is the complete opposite of that in your theatre then the people who like work that is not unintelligible hyper abstract and conceptual still won't come.

They won't come because they think you're the theatre that programs all the unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work so why should this other thing they have never heard of be any different?

Those people will spend their money on a nice meal and a few drinks. The people who do actually come to your show that's different from the normal stuff you program will probably have expected the unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work, won't like the new stuff you have brought in and will tell you that.

The conclusion? Simple, "our" audience doesn't like anything but unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work so we won't programme stuff that doesn't conform to that creative template. Why? Because our CRM software says so!

You never get any data from the "other people" that don't like unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work because they never come through the door. They're onto you, so no matter what you program they won't come. You (the theatre) have made your bed so now your stuck with the unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work brigade until the end of time.

Takeaway

So, what do you we take from this? You need to reach the people who don't come to your theatre, you don't actually "know" your audience at all because "your" audience is not some sentient being that is capable of forming a single opinion.

Everybody likes different stuff, so mix it it up a little and unintelligible hyper abstract conceptual work kinda sucks anyway!

More often than not notices are composed so that they can be printed out and displayed on a noticeboard (apparently people still use those things). This involves a lot of FULL CAPS writing, an excess of information and, often times, bullet points.

At the other extreme we have notices that amount to little more than an email address and a date alongside a proclamation that "we need dancers" so come on down.

Such notices are of little help to the dancers looking for work because too much information is a pain and too little information, especially if they have never heard of you, might put them off applying in the first place.

Most dancers pick up auditions online and notices that are formatted for print end up looking messy and confusing if they are not reformatted for on-screen presentation.

The Middle Ground

People don't like reading lists of things especially very long lists of things. Anybody who knows how to read finds it much easier to rapidly take in information when it's formatted into simple, short paragraphs.

We are, after all, talking about auditions notices, not the next Great American Novel.

For the purposes of this piece we have created the entirely fictional, and yet completely plausible, Custard Company of Dance, they create work that is, predominantly, about custard.

First of all, introduce yourself

"The Custard Company of Dance is a small-scale contemporary dance company based in Edinburgh and we specialise in creating dance theatre work for touring to schools and theatres."

To start off with you have told them who you are, where you are and the kind of work that you make. If you are located in an obscure town or city then mention the name of the country. We put country IDs next to auditions but not everybody does that.

Next up, tell them what you need.

"We are looking for 4 professional dancers who have either 3 years professional performing and touring experience or a recent graduates who can demonstrate exceptional performance ability. Our choreography is predominantly contemporary based with a lot of physical partnering and floor work. An aptitude for teaching young people would be an advantage."

Two more sentences and you've laid down the technical/professional requirements that you need from your dancers. If you specifically need male or female dancers then say so but if not, leave that information out.

Dancers can only be male or female, we don't have dancing robots just yet.

Then we move on to when you will need the dancers and what for.

"The creative period for the work is from June 1st to July 1st, this will take place in Edinburgh. We have touring booked throughout Scotland from July 4th until September 12th. Employment between those dates will not be full time. Current bookings will require 22 days of commitment between those dates."

Now, it might be tempting to include a list of exact dates the dancers will be on the payroll and if it's just two shows on two specific dates then ok. If not, your notice can easily become a massively confusing list of dates and times.

Professional dancers are used to working multiple projects so if they really need an exact break down they will ask for it. Have the exact breakdown handy in a simple text file so if somebody emails you for it you can reply straight away.

Finally, you specify pay levels and how they can get in touch with you.

"Pay for rehearsals is £425 per week plus travel costs to and from Edinburgh if you live outside the city. Shared accommodation will be provided if needed. For touring the pay is £125 per performance plus all travel costs and an additional £65 per "travelling day". Workshops will be paid at £45 per hour. To apply or for more information send your CV and a link to your video showreel to dougal@custarddancetheatre.co.uk."

There you go. 132 words and you've told dancers exactly what you need and exactly what they get in return for coming to work with you.

Auditions by their very nature of course are always a little bit different but try as hard as possible to decant the information you need into as short a notice as possible.

The notice should be about getting a dancers attention. If they need more details then they will ask for them and it's easy to keep more detailed info in a pre-prepared document or on your company's website.

Well formatted, short notices can also be copied and pasted into various formats very easily, like emails, cell-phone note applications etc.

Application Forms

Finally, a word of warning. Under no circumstances should you require dancers to fill out an application form. Dancers are a pretty nomadic bunch and don't always have access to the their own laptops or the correct software to fill in a Word document.

If they only have access to a cell phone or a tablet then the inherent file system restrictions on these devices may make it impossible for them to edit your application form. Think about how people are going to get their information to you.

All you're doing is adding a layer of unnecessary complexity to what should be a very simple process. Emailing a CV should be more than enough along with a video showreel if they have one. Don't make things harder than they already are.

The chairman of that organisation is Tony Hall, the former CEO of the Royal Opera House, recipients of tens of millions in pounds of funding from ACE.

Such news would normally be unremarkable but this particular job shift was accompanied by the revelation that Ms Stark was still being paid her rather hefty salary of over £150,000 as she was, technically, on "sabbatical" from ACE.

Ok, so now it's starting to get weird. AP also pointed out that after Ms Stark's sabbatical comes to an end in July she will then qualify for an estimated £100,000 in severance pay.

On the face of it it would appear ACE granted Ms Stark her "sabbatical" so she could receive the six figure severance package. A convenient technical construction, engineered for little more than personal financial gain.

That's How You Get Capone

ACE of course denied any suggestion of impropriety. Through a spokesperson they claimed that Ms Stark's move was justified in support of the funding monolith's key goals in achieving "great art for everyone".

To anyone on the outside of the ACE bubble though it appears to be nothing more than people in positions of power looking out for their own to secure large sums of money for themselves and others.

Article19 asked ACE if senior staff members should be contractually forbidden from taking employment with any organisations that may be connected to their own funding decisions for a period of at least two years.

The Arts Council is a porous organisation which works extremely closely with the arts and culture sector as you know. Many members of staff throughout the organisation come to us from within the sector and bring with them their expertise and a working understanding of what the sector and arts organisations need and how they function. This ultimately is a great benefit to us but the advantages go both ways. In turn, when Arts Council staff enter the arts and culture workforce they go with a strong understanding of the political nature of the sector and how best to engage with the Arts Council in order to communicate needs within it. This knowledge sharing only makes the arts and cultural sector stronger and it would be a shame to implement any restrictions which would result in this coming to an end.

Such restrictions are not unusual. US politicians (Congressman and Senators) are forbidden from becoming lobbyists for an extended period after they leave office. This is, in theory, to prevent the possibility of elected officials manipulating policy to favour their own future job prospects.

They Send One Of Yours To The Hospital

Perhaps the most difficult part of this situation to reconcile, for most rational people, is the fact that ACE did not see this problem coming from 100 miles away.

It reminds us, here in TheLab™, of the situation that arose when New Adventures and Mathew Bourne awarded a substantial cash prize to two former employees. Many failed to see the very obvious ethical conflict and just how easily it could have been avoided.

If you want to avoid the appearance of impropriety, the appearance of ethical and, in extreme cases, actual corruption then don't do things that look corrupt.

A senior employee from a funding provider moving to a new company, the chairman of which is also the CEO of a major ACE client, looks corrupt. It doesn't matter what anybody says or how ACE tries to spin the story because it will always look corrupt.

When you add to the mix the fact that Ms Stark is still being paid by her former employer, so ACE is essentially subsidising another company to employ one of their own staff members, you think it can't get any worse or look any more suspect.

Until you factor in the substantial severance pay that Ms Stark will receive after her "sabbatical" is over. Anybody with a half an ounce of cogent thought will surmise that the whole thing was a set up between friends so somebody could get a payoff.

You Send One Of Theirs To The Morgue

The solution to this problem for ACE is clear. Ms Stark's "sabbatical" needs to be ended immediately and any prospect of receiving her severance package should be nothing but a distant dream.

She should also repay any money she has received from ACE since leaving her job. Money which would be replaced by the salary she should be getting paid by her current employer.

ACE should also apologise unreservedly for once again being completely tone deaf in the face of the ludicrous cuts they have been imposing on everybody while offering up nothing more than a withering defence against the onslaught.

This is one of those situations where ACE could actually gain some yardage by enacting some strong leadership and by taking decisive action.

Sadly however, those phrases are not in the ACE playbook.

At the time of writing Arts Council England had not responded to further questions put to them by Article19 regarding this matter.

Update 23-01-2013:

In a belated response to further questions ACE admitted that Ms Stark was involved in funding decisions connected to the Royal Opera House including the most recent decision that awarded the London theatre £10Million for refurbishment. They stated their own strict "governance" policies as being sufficient to prevent any suggestion of impropriety.

Ms Stark was one of the staff members who was set to lose her job with the funding body because of the DCMS enforced re-structuring. Arts Council England declined to speculate on what the public reaction would be to news of Ms Starks "sabbatical" and the subsequent tax payer cost of the move.

[ Arts Professional : Andrea Stark ]

The Big Bad (ACE) is about to hand down another, albeit smaller, cut to the arts in the shape of a 3% snip over the next two years. If they do it right then it won't hurt too much. Cutting is never a good thing but it is what it is, for now.

ACE and their partners in crime at the DCMS have placed all their bets on replacing the money lost from central government funding on philanthropy. For most that's not going to work so are there any other ideas?

Vacuum

At the moment ACE is entangled with the BBC on the misguided Space website. A project that's duller than a rusty hatpin. Combined, the two organisations have spent millions of pounds achieving pretty much nothing at all.

Just like ACE, the BBC is funded by the general public, not through taxes or the Lottery, but through a legally enforced "licence fee" that people must pay to watch television in the UK. Even if they watch programmes that are not on the BBC.

How much is that licence fee worth to the BBC annually? Well, just over £3.6Billion every single year. The corporation also brings in almost £900Million in other revenue (from government grants, commercial enterprise, etc).

Given the scale of the BBC's income it really does make you wonder why they are always complaining about not having any money, but we digress.

What do they spend all of that money on? Well, apart form paying off employees that resign with alarming regularity, they do have several television channels and radio stations to operate. The lions share of the cash goes to BBC One and BBC Two, they cost just short of £2billion between them annually.

Synergy Baby

It's fairly obvious to anybody with a brain that there is a natural synergy between what the BBC do and what Arts Council England do. Basically, they both fund creative activity. You might not always like what they fund but there they are, doing it anyway.

The BBC itself is continually coming under fire from critics for the paucity of cultural output on the network as a whole. In response the BBC makes reference to the annual "Proms" at the Royal Albert Hall then rapidly runs out of steam.

The much loved, by some people at least, BBC4 television channel is often seen as little more than a poor third cousin on the network as a whole. It attracts less than £70Million per year in funding, about £60Million less than Radio 4.

Why So Serious?

If ACE and the BBC want to strike up a partnership, why don't they stop shuffling about with terrible projects like The Space and get a lot more serious.

What we are suggesting is an annual investment, by the BBC, in the arts across the UK (the BBC is not bound to just England). ACE could then collaborate with the funding bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to distribute that funding to the arts.

Now, we're not talking about spending millions so the BBC can "live stream" ENO on the iPlayer or make fawning "aren't you awesome" shows about the National Theatre.

The money should be distributed, predominantly, to the mid-scale and, to a slightly lesser degree, the small scale performing arts companies and individual artists. Individuals and the small-scale should be adequately supported by the increased amount of money available through Grants for the Arts (in theory at least).

An initial commitment to £60Million annually would have the effect of mitigating some of the problems caused by central government cuts (in England at least).

As for the BBC itself? Well they could ramp up the output on BBC4 to include lots of nice documentaries on artists, complete recordings of theatre, music and dance performances that don't happen in large scale venues and yes, the occasional ballet here and there and maybe an opera or two.

Despite what ACE and the BBC would have you believe, filming live performances is not a hugely expensive endeavour.

Other than the inevitable bureaucratic tangle there is literally no downside. Arts output at the mid-scale level could potentially increase and the BBC, with a new commitment to covering the arts beyond the wretched Culture Show and Newsnight Review, could put individuals, small scale and the mid-scale right in front of hundreds of thousands of people via BBC4 and the iPlayer.

In addition to that the BBC could actually call itself a "Beacon of Culture™", or whatever, and fend of the critics in a meaningful way. Putting Melvyn Bragg on the radio every so often doesn't count.

If you think this sounds ridiculous, which it isn't, consider this. The BBC already spends almost £30Million per year on in-house orchestras so providing funding for other art forms is not a big stretch.

The money is there, it always has been, but, as always, the people in charge just need to spend it more thoughtfully.

Over the next two years, ending in 2015, ACE will lose another £11.6Million of funding. Since the Big Bad has already cut itself to the bone by sacking staff members and reducing admin costs then the money is going to come directly from the National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs).

As you would expect from ACE they accepted the cuts without so much as a shrug and proclaimed, via a press release, that;

"Some organisations are also having to deal with Local Authority cuts and so the situation is extremely challenging."

Climbing a 60ft high wall with your hands tied behind your back is "challenging", being an inert funding body with all the vigour of an Egyptian mummy is business as usual for ACE, but we digress.

Déjà Vu

On the face of it the cuts are not that bad, totalling about 3% over the two year period. The last time a small cut was handed down to ACE by the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) however they applied the cuts, as a simple percentage (6.9%), to each of their regularly funded organisations.

The more funding you received in the first place the more funding you lost.

At the time ACE claimed universal cuts were applied for no other reason than simple expediency. No sophisticated rationale, no detailed financial analysis, it was just easier that way.

If the new 3% cut was applied universally as a cash amount then each of the NPOs would lose just under £20,000 over the next two years. No big deal to the Royal Opera House or the National Theatre but a very big deal to a small or mid-scale organisation.

Applying the cuts as a percentage will, as before, mean the large scale lose more money than the small and mid-scale but the latter will still feel the loss more than the large scale.

Catalyst Arts

Those of you following along will know that Catalyst Arts is the Big Plan™ to save the arts from public funding cuts by increasing levels of philanthropy. ACE and the DCMS are so confident in this plan that they pointedly refuse to answer any meaningful questions about the project.

It is however common knowledge that large scale arts institutions are much more likely to pull in significant sums of money from both sponsors and very wealthy people with a few million pounds burning a hole in their pockets.

This would suggest that the latest 3% cut given to ACE should be passed on to the largest of our arts institutions, leaving the small and mid-scale relatively untouched.

Why?

If ACE and the DCMS are so sure of their hugely expensive philanthropy plan then all the big players should have no problem replacing the £11Million (and change) between them when the axe eventually falls.

Right?

The Royal Opera House could cut nearly £800,000 per year from its own budget if they just paid their Chief Executive and Music Director a perfectly reasonable salary of £150,000 per year each.

No need to even hold a fund raiser. The English National Opera gets along just fine paying their "top staff" that kind of salary although they do have other problems when it comes to paying people properly.

Don't You Dare

As is so often the case with ACE, funding cuts tend to highlight the weaknesses in their overall funding strategy. A complete lack of confidence in one grand plan manifests itself as panic stricken decisions taken in response to the government of the day imposing its twisted will upon them.

Common sense dictates that those with the most should take on a bigger share of the cuts, however small the percentage might be over the long term. The large scale have plenty of fat they can trim.

Doing anything else only serves to illustrate that Catalyst Arts is a bad joke and that ACE is a rudderless ship in dire need of a new captain before it finally runs aground.

So it continued last week with the Chancellor of the Exchequer's "autumn statement" that was long on doom and gloom and short on smiles. One particularly hilarious news headline went along the line of "cuts to fund spending!"

Facing yet more cuts to arts funding, Arts Council England (ACE) released a statement which rolled out the same old talking points about how £1 of investment returns £6 of something else.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) countered with a statement using their standard talking points about deficits, sharing, pain and worthless poor people. (or words to that effect)

We've all been here before and none of it worked the last time to anybody's benefit. The arts took a beating and this country is more of a mess than it was.

Social Emotion

So let's change tack a little shall we. Let's change the discussion completely and talk about freedom. You know what freedom is right? It's the mother's milk for all the right wing basket cases and their soldier hugging, body scanner buying buddies.

Funding the arts is, perhaps, one of the single most important expressions of freedom you can imagine. It is a persons fundamental right to have the freedom of choice to do whatever it is they want to do with their life. It is their life after all.

If a person wants to be a poet, painter, dancer, sculptor or a food service employee then that is their choice. It's not the government's choice and it's not your choice, it's their choice.

What could possibly be a more grandiose expression of personal freedom than to choose to embark on a career that is the very definition of the road less travelled? (that would be working as an artist, not a food service employee!)

Call us idealistic all you want but since when was being idealistic a bad thing?

Engineering

"But wait!" the nay sayers cry, "be an artist all you want, but pay your own way, if the market wants it you can survive on your own".

It's a fair point. It's wrong, but it's fair.

Governments all over the world (well, some of them at least) go to great lengths to try and engineer the right economic conditions so lots of disparate industries can survive in the "free marketplace".

There is no free market for nuclear submarines, fighter planes or tanks. The entire defence industry is one gigantic, subsidised boondoggle for huge corporations. Without subsidy there would be no market for military hardware. The market was created artificially by governments.

So why is it different when it comes to the arts?

Governments provide all sorts of financial incentives for all kinds of industries to thrive. Tax incentives, business grants, loans, infrastructure investment and more besides are all geared to artificially levelling out the playing field.

Simply because certain aspects of society cannot compete in the "market place" does not mean they are not vitally important to that society.

The Individual

Subsidising the arts is nothing more than creating the right economic conditions so that the arts and all the good things that go with them can exist in a capitalist environment.

Also, funding the arts is a more potent expression of "freedom" then all the soldiers, fighter planes and attack helicopters in the world. They also have the added advantage of being considerably cheaper and a lot less accidentally lethal.

From the largest companies all the way to the plucky individual, subsidising the arts is, for the most part, about investing in people and counting on their ability to be more than the numbers they enter on a tax return.

It is the single minded and completely ignorant view of far too many people that the only way to measure an individuals contribution to the world is to look at how much money they earn and calculate how much tax they pay.

A recent dance education project we filmed highlighted an instance of a young girl who had no friends. She took part in the project, a social barrier is broken and that young girl now has friends. It might seem trivial to some but probably means everything in the world to that young girl.

Without the money invested in the project and the dancers who made that project work at least one individual would almost certainly be facing continued social isolation.

When Bernd Neumann the German Culture Minister announced an 8% increase in funding for his country's culture sector (taking it to over £1Billion annually) he said;

"[this money is not a] grant, but it is an essential investment in the future of our society."

The point we are making here is that the arguments in favour of arts funding are not economic they are social and moral in nature.

If ACE and our so-called "arts leaders" keep trotting out the same £1 to £6 numbers then the results will be exactly the same as before. It's time to sing a different song.

We're going to say this one more time; The arts, always arguing about the wrong things!