by Article19

As we all know education is a big part of the wacky world of dance and to celebrate this Richard Alston Dance Company have set up a website that's all about educating the people.

Cleverly titled The Alston Studio (.com) it aims to give users a detailed insight into the inner workings of not only the titular dance maker but the company itself.

We won't be going through each and every bit of information on the site because there's too much of it and it's too fragmented, we're just going to cover the basics.

Features

The site contains 10 main sections and several sub sections, located within many of those. From the main sections we have "Richard", "Repertoire", "Music", "Creation" and so on. If you click on the section you get either some text telling what it's all about or a series of links.

The "creation" portion of the website, for example, includes several videos concerning the making of 'Gypsy Mixture', filmed at the company's studio in London.

These short videos feature Mr Alston talking through various sections of the piece with the dancers. Although the videos are reasonably interesting from the point of view of constructing movement sequences there's not a whole of depth in any of them.

In total, the four videos last for a little over 30 minutes.

Sadly, this lack of depth is something that permeates the entire experience at thealstonstudio.com.

At the bottom of the page are some links to PDF documents that act as written references for teachers to use if they are watching the videos with their students.

You can't download the video material for offline viewing however so if you don't have an internet connection handy you're out of luck. This is an odd decision on the part of the company, rectifying it would have been simple.

So it goes throughout every section of this website.

Issues

In terms of design and layout the 'Gypsy Mixture' section of the site is the perfect example of the poor design in evidence throughout.

The five videos that make up 'Gypsy Mixture' are just thrown onto the page one on top of the other. We feel sure there was a meeting held with RADC and the designer of the site where it was suggested that teacher's would just run the video full screen via a projector or interactive whiteboard.

Perhaps some teachers will do this but what about those using the site on their own computer, or in a computer lab? None of the videos has a text description alongside and each video is simply called "day 1, part 1", etc.

Despite the fact ThePlace has purchased a Vimeo "Pro" account at a cost of $200(US) none of the videos are in High Definition. If a teacher does blow these things up to full screen on a projector the students will not be amused by the pixelated mess that greets them on screen.

Let's just say that full screen on a 27 inch monitor was not a very pleasing visual experience.

Finally, whomever decided that a "credits" video needed to be created and presented separately should probably be relieved of their job.

Moving to No Music

Another section of this educational experience covers music. Music is of course very important to dance especially to the work of Richard Alston.

The music section however doesn't actually have any music on it. What you do get are some short quotes culled from various interviews with the dance maker where he talks about how he uses music and that's it.

Did it not occur to anybody that what they could have done was pick a nice piece of Creative Commons music (that is free from licensing restrictions), have Mr Alston craft a short work to that music, say 5 minutes, and then make a nice 10-15 minute video where he discusses musicality and how it relates to movement illustrated by this short work?

How do you encourage students to be diligent and work hard when the people who did this evidently couldn't be bothered?

We should also mention that Mr Alston does actually work for the company so it would not have taken a great deal of effort to conduct an interview with him.

Lighting The Way

Further issues with design and consistency emerge when you look at the lighting section.

We're not entirely sure why this is on the site at all but, like the music section, they try to talk about lighting with no visual explanation at all.

You do get some images of a lighting plot sheet and some sort of technical diagram but unintentional hilarity ensues when you click on the images and the resulting pop ups are too small to read the information on them.

Why are these "help sheets" in tiny image format and not PDF format like the other help sheets? Also, what exactly is a teacher or a student supposed to do with a highly technical lighting chart sans any detailed explanation from an expert about what's on it?

One of the images is below, actual size!

Interaction Action

A mainstay of today's internet is interaction. From simple comments to full blown web based applications the web is about being able to communicate.

The latter is usually very expensive but the former is a simple way to talk to your websites users. thealstonstudio.com doesn't even manage to do that though. There is no way at all to actually communicate directly with the company. A contact form is provided, if you can find it, but before you can use it you apparently have to agree to the terms and conditions for using the site.

You can't read the terms and condition though because the link to that page doesn't actually work.

Comment platforms like Disqus provide powerful and free systems to interact with your users. Again, we have to ask, why didn't anybody think of that?

As far as we could determine the company don't even have a Twitter account.

Dazed and Confused

From top to bottom thealstonstudio.com doesn't appear to know what it is supposed to be doing or who it's supposed to be doing it for.

Information is badly organised, badly presented and, more often than not, isn't actually that helpful or instructive when you do find it.

More attention seems to have be paid to picking pretty images to illustrate each section (a dreadful throwback to the 1990s) than to the purpose of the site and the information architecture within it.

A key mistake is the complete lack of focus. Instead of trying to do a single thing really well thealstonstudio.com does everything badly and it has all the hallmarks of a resource built by a committee and that committee had absolutely no idea what it wanted or how to achieve it.

Simply put, take this thing off the internet and do it properly before putting it back.

by Article19

Right off the bat the headline is beyond cheesy but let's just live with it and move on shall we? Currently, in the murk and grime that is London, the Resolution festival is plodding its way through innumerable performances from many a new dance maker.

The format of Resolution hasn't changed since the festivals inception during the reign of Ashford of Johns in 1786. It's just triple bill after triple bill, ad-infinitum.

Here in TheLab™ we thought the tired format could do with an overhaul, so let's take a look at what we came up with.

Wedge Issues

The central problems with Resolution are; A) too many shows, so much so that The Place actually brags about how many show there are and B) the emphasis on the companies participation is too heavily weighted toward the performance of a piece of work.

Any artistic director or dance maker with a brain knows that the end performance is about 5% of the battle at best. The show lasts for about 30 minutes, the creative period to make that show lasts for weeks if not months.

Most Resolution participants struggle with no funding, no rehearsal space and no time to actually make their work fit for presentation to a paying audience.

So here's what we need to do. Restrict Resolution to 30 participating dance companies, provide £300,000 in funding for those 30 participants, persuade the National Dance Network to get their ducks in a row to provide rehearsal space and tech support (lighting design, et-al) and that's it.

The whole festival is done in 10 days because you keep the triple bill format.

The Progressive Festival

Creating a new format for Resolution would provide numerous advantages over the current all or nothing "benefits" allegedly provided by performing on a stage in London alongside several dozen other new dance companies.

As mentioned, the creative/rehearsal stage is almost certainly more important for new dance makers.

Choreography is a craft that needs, above all else, time to be learned and honed to a fine point. You need the time in the studio to create your movement, experiment with ideas, make mistakes, throw it all away and start again.

Providing funding of £10,000 per-participant will give them the luxury of the time they need to work with their dancers (who will be getting paid).

For their part the dance makers will have to keep their production to between 1 and 4 dancers but that shouldn't be a problem. This is about learning a craft after all, not an excercise in drafting patterns for the corps de ballet.

Many of the fledgling dance works on show at festivals like Resolution also suffer from chronic under-rehearsal and the lack of rehearsal direction.

Years ago on Article19 we suggested that all National Dance Agencies should have an in-house rehearsal director to provide support and guidance to dance makers on the work they are making.

Many established choreographers don't rehearse their own work and they don't rehearse their own work for a reason. They are just too close to it to see potential problems.

The outside eye brings in invaluable experience at cleaning up movement, editing out the unnecessary fluff from a piece and generally making the thing both leaner and meaner.

This type of production support should be integral to the "New Resolution" because it's a big part of teaching dance makers to be "good" dance makers.

The Money Question

Believe it or not coming up with £300,000 per year to pay for this idea is almost certainly the easiest part. For every good project funded by Arts Council England they fund several idiotic projects like the Ballet Boyz vanity documentary that we have already ripped to shreds in this very publication.

The £7Million of funding given to Rambert to pay for their new building in London would fund this project for a staggering 20 years.

ACE has the money, they just don't use it very well. There is also no reason why the arts funders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could not contribute to the annual running cost of the project.

Additionally, after the Olympics packs it bags in the summer there will be considerably more money available to ACE via the National Lottery, according to ACE that is, so paying for this should be easy.

Making the Cut

If you are going to pick and choose who gets £10,000 in funding then you will need people to do the picking and the choosing. We hesitate to nominate the National Dance Network for this task but they do have the benefit of being located in various parts of the country.

Bringing in the AD's of established companies would be a good way of balancing out the inherent administrative crazy though. It would also be a good idea to bring the bigger dance schools into this. NSCD, Laban, etc could all provide invaluable support and guidance.

Spreading the application process across the country would also be a good way of ensuring that the "New Resolution" does not become London centric.

Being accepted or not is also not too hard on the applicants. Since the project is annual. Fail the first time? Then you just try again the following year. If you are accepted you can be barred from applying again for a year or two just to keep things fair.

"New Resolution" should be about providing opportunities. Not selecting people because you think they are the next Wayne McGregor, because one Wayne McGregor is enough after all.

The mantra for "New Resolution" should be; "You Can't Learn If You Never Get To Try".

The All New Resolution

Shifting the focus from the performance to the creative side of dance making will be an invaluable learning experience for any new dance maker.

Providing proper rehearsal and creative support, through the National Dance Network and established companies, would be hugely more significant than the plethora of meaningless "associate artist" schemes currently running throughout dance right now.

Those new to the game need meaningful support so they can figure out if being a choreographer is something they actually want to do and to figure out if being a choreographer is something they are actually good at.

Not everybody is going to make it of course, but that should be based on talent and skill, not on having friends in the right places.

You don't guarantee better work at Resolution doing it this way but you do guarantee that the work will be better crafted, better rehearsed and better presented year on year and the really good stuff won't get lost in the noise of several weeks worth of triple bills.

Resolution is a starting point and what better way to make that start than by ensuring the participants have every possible chance of getting it right?

by Martin French

The days of mailing in a printed copy of your CV for a job are over. That ship has sailed, anybody who thinks otherwise is probably working at the Royal Opera House but even that creaky old wreck is getting with the times.

Everybody tends to assume that you will have access to a personal computer and a word processor so you can put together your own CV at any time.

Even if you have your own machine though a straight forward word processor is not something that comes with a new computer, even the most expensive ones.

Before you run off a buy into Microsoft Office or some other offering from Apple, et-al there is a fully functional free offering in the shape of Google Documents.

Getting Started

The first thing you need is a Google account. If you already use Gmail then you are good to go, otherwise set up a new account by visiting Gmail.com or one of a million other Google related websites.

Once you have your account and you are logged in click on the main Google logo and select "documents" from the drop down list.

On the next screen you will either have a blank list or the "imported from Google Notebooks" document. Here in TheLab™ we never have used Google Notebooks so we have no idea where it came from. Just delete it if it's bothering you.

Click on the "create" button in the top left of the screen and select "document" to get started on your very first creation. You can create interactive spreadsheets and all manner of other things with Google Docs but we are interested in a normal text document at the moment.

You will then be presented with what looks like a very clean and simple word processor with all the usual controls to format your text and layout your new CV.

To change the name of your document simply click on "untitled document" and type in a new name.

There is no need to save at any time. Google takes care of all of that automatically as you type in real time. Even if the power is suddenly cut from the computer you are using then you won't have lost a thing.

Getting Things Done

Almost everything you can do with a regular desktop word processor is there. Fonts, tabs, bullet points, colours and images are all available should you choose to use them. Keyboard shortcuts also work for undo and redo as well as bold text, italics and underlining.

If you want to insert an image then click on the small icon illustrated in the screen shot.

This will open a small window and from here you have two ways to insert an image into the document. You can either drag an image from your computer's desktop into the large box (illustrated) or click on the "choose an image to upload" button.

Once the image is in place it will automatically set itself to "fixed position" which, on most occasions, is not what we want.

To move the image you need to click, somewhat confusingly, the "fixed position" text to switch it to "in line with text". This will allow you to place the image almost anywhere that you want within the document. This feature is probably one of the flakiest in Google Docs since the image seems to jump around fairly randomly and can make a big mess of the text if you're not careful.

If you really must insert images into your document then do so with care.

Share Time

Once you have completed your document then it's time to share it with the masses. Google Docs offers a number of formats for exporting your document so you can have a personal copy to share through email or print out.

The most popular format is PDF (Portable Document Format). To export to this format simply click on "File> Download as > PDF" and you will be prompted for a location to save the document.

If you are on a shared computer then you can save to a USB thumb drive and take your document home with you on that.

The other way to share is straight from Google Docs. Simply click on the "share" button, in the top right corner. By default your new documents are private and cannot be seen by anybody else.

To change this, first of all select "change" on the privacy settings as illustrated in the image below.

When you select change we recommend that you use the "anyone with the link" option which you can then email to people who need to see your CV (no Google account required for viewing). Take care with the "public" option especially if your CV contains personally identifying information like telephone numbers or a home address.

Free and Simple

There you have it, a free and simple way to create your CV, or other documents, with Google Docs (other options are available from different providers).

Other than being free the main advantage is your documents are saved remotely, so no need to worry about things being lost and you can access your stuff from any computer, anywhere in the world.

The downsides? There may be performance issues depending on the browser or the computer you are using since the word processing application is basically running inside a web browser and there is a lack of flexibility with some of the features, like handling images.

Those are minor annoyances however when using what has become a very polished product and creating your CV and storing it this way could prove very useful if you need to apply for an audition and you don't happen to have a copy of it with you, digital or otherwise.

This years awards ceremony took place inside two fast moving vehicles on the south-bound carriageway of the M4. It made serving drinks a challenge and the Imp™ was driving one of the cars so it was all very exciting.

Our winners take away a giant bar of Toblerone, the losers will get run over by a combine harvester, just as soon as we can boost one from the local farmer!

Roll on 2012!

by Martin French

Video on the web has become as ubiquitous as fast food on the high street. Chances are most web users will watch at least a few videos per week online. Whether it's a full length TV show using on the BBC's iPlayer, an interview feature here on Article19 or something terrible on YouTube.

This widespread availability of video may lead some to believe that delivering the moving image on the internet is easy for websites like Article19 and all the others.

That belief however couldn't be further from the truth.

Allow us to explain.

Up until about 10 days ago video on Article19 was delivered using a format called QuickTime (developed by Apple). QuickTime is a so-called "plugin". This means you, the user, have to download a separate piece of software to plug-in to your web browser (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc) so you can view the videos we publish.

If you don't have the plugin you can't watch the video, it's as simple as that.

The other popular video capable plugin used by the vast majority of web sites is Flash (published by Adobe Software, the people that make Photoshop, among other things)

Websites like YouTube and Vimeo use Flash to playback the vast majority of their content.

Choices Choices

The video above is in HD Flash format, try it and see how it plays.

Publishers have to make a choice as to which video format to use on their site both for the convenience of their users, the technical requirements of their site and the cost and time involved encoding, uploading and serving each video.

The easy choice is to use Flash because it is, by a wide margin, the plugin most likely to be installed on a users computer by default. Since it is more likely to be installed then a user is less likely to be inconvenienced by having to download it.

Flash however does come with a myriad of problems not least of which is when playing high quality video material the plugin uses a lot of computer processing power. Depending on the computer and the operating system you are using you might experience poor quality playback when watching certain videos.

In our tests Quicktime uses 60% less processing power compared to Flash when using an OSX (Apple) based computer.

The QuickTime plugin is also not without its problems. Although it comes pre-installed on all Apple machines the same cannot be said for Windows based computers. The installed user base for the QuickTime plugin is also dramatically smaller than the Flash plugin.

Bizarrely, Apple's own iPhone and iPad devices, which do not support Flash, struggle to support QuickTime video material unless it is prepared in a very specific way.

Codec

Now, QuickTime and Flash are not actually video formats. You should think of them as "wrappers" that encase the actual video material.

All online video is compressed and encoded from its original format using what is called a "codec". This is an acronym for Coder - Decoder.

We encode the video and upload it then your web browser, via a plugin or other means, decodes the video so you can watch it, simple.

The particular codec we use is called H264, what that means is not at all relevant, and up until very recently we encased that H264 video in a QuickTime wrapper to deliver it to our readers.

The Third Way

There is a third way however to deliver video material to users thanks to the developments of modern web browsers and a little thing called HTML5.

Without bogging you all down in inane technicalities, HTML is, simply put, the computer language Article19 uses to display web pages to you and it is now in version 5 of its long and torturous development.

A big part of HTML5 is a zero tolerance for plugins, especially when it comes to multi-media, especially when it comes to video.

All the new versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and the mobile web browsers used on the iPhone, iPad and some Android based phones, support HTML5. They all support it to differing degrees but that's another discussion and one that you are probably not at all interested in.

These new browsers all support the direct playback of online video material without any plugins at all. As long as the video is correctly formatted then you don't need to download any additional software.

What this means is that we no longer feel the need to use QuickTime to serve any of our video material. In fact all of our HD material has been switched to HTML5. The older videos will be switched to the new format over time.

So that's great, no more plugins, no more hassle, everything will now "just work"?

Unfortunately not. Remember the "codec" thing we talked about before? Well, in their infinite wisdom the makers of the web browsers have all decided to support different codecs for their particular browsers.

Safari, iPhone, iPad and IE9 support H264, Firefox supports something called Ogg Theora (not making that up) and Chrome (made by Google) supports another codec called WebM.

Chrome initially supported H264, and at the time of writing still does, but Google, in their infinite lack of wisdom, didn't like playing with the other children and switched their support to WebM. A format that they, coincidentally, own the rights to.

As a footnote, IE7 and IE8 don't support HTML5 video at all.

The video above is in H264 format using Sublime Video Player

Same Old Problems

So for us, here in TheLab™, what does this mean? Well the HTML5 specification makes it really easy for us to serve up the video that works on the browser you are using.

All we have to do is create a video in each format and all will be well. So if we take the bgroup video 'The Lessening of Difference' as an example we just need to create an H264 desktop version, and H264 mobile version, an OGG Theora version, a WebM version and a Flash version (for IE7 and 8).

Instead of creating 2 versions (H264 desktop and H264 mobile) we now have to create 5 versions which would dramatically increases the amount of time it would take to create a feature to say nothing of the uploading time and the storage costs. You can't store video online for free you know!

So how is HTML5 helping us out then, why not stick with QuickTime?

Step forward a small company called Jillion and their brand new service modestly titled "Sublime Video Player".

This player is a so-called "cloud" service which means that the video player itself is not stored on Article19's web server at all. Every time you load one of the videos in the HD section the player is actually loaded from Jillion.

Why do this?

First of all it means that the player itself stays constantly up to date and nobody, especially the user, has to download anything. No plugins, no updates, no nothing.

Secondly, thanks to some clever coding the player will automatically detect which browser or mobile device you are using and make the video play.

Here in TheLab™ all we have to do is make our usual two versions of the video (H264 Desktop and H264 Mobile) and the Sublime player does the rest.

In our tests it works seamlessly across all browsers and mobile devices no matter what their level of support is for HTML5 or particular video codecs.

All Is Well

Sadly all is not well. The Sublime Player is very clever but really what it's doing is trying to sort out the mess that is video format support across different web browsers and mobile platforms.

If you look at our videos in Firefox then the Jillion player has to apply a Flash wrapper around the H264 video to make it play because Firefox doesn't support H264 and we don't support OGG Theora. We don't support it because, to be blunt, it's crap. The same goes for IE7 and IE8.

It also adds another layer of complexity to watching video material. The player has to be loaded from a server that is not under our control. If Jillion's server goes down then the player will not load and you can't watch video material.

HTML5 and Sublime Video also can't fix the myriad of idiosyncrasies of the web when it comes to delivering content to your computer from a remote web server located thousands of miles away.

There are still a lot of things that can go wrong which might stop you from watching a particular video and, sadly, there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

by Michelle Lefevre

Coming soon to an application form near you is Arts Council England's secret plan to fight government funding cuts to the arts with a £40Million philanthropy push. The plan is a secret because they won't talk about it, at least no yet, so we, here in TheLab™, thought it might be a good idea to take a look at the potential pitfalls of the funding monoliths latest big idea.

We should point out that this plan is not actually ACE's at all. It's been pushed on them by the coalition government via the Department for Culture Media and Sport. ACE didn't do a whole lot of pushing back though so they're fair game.

The £40Million in funding, imaginatively titled "Catalyst Arts", will be broken up into the three parts but, essentially, it's all about "enabling" arts organisations to enhance their fund raising abilities so they can plunder the hitherto untapped vast wealth of private individuals and corporations. Or at least that's the theory.

The Fundraiser Gambit

One possible hypothesis is a dance company, let's say a mid-scale one, get's a £25,000 grant to employ a specialist fundraiser for 12 months to, you know, raise some funds.

If the fund-raiser manages to score £25,000 then the whole thing has been a waste of time because ACE could have simply handed over the £25,000 to the company for their artistic work. To make the whole thing finically viable the dance company would probably have to raise double the amount it cost to employ the specialist, if not more.

Since the mid-scale dance company is not living in a bubble then they will have to compete with all the other arts organisations out there for the same limited sponsorship money that is, allegedly, available. Unless the specialist has a "no compete" clause in their contract they could, potentially, be working for more than one organisation at a time.

From the specialists point of view they could care less who actually does well out of employing them since they get paid anyway, have no long term commitment to any company and they will only ever brag about their success stories, not their failures.

It's also not clear if there is a significant pool of fund raising talent available for companies to hire. We feel sure that many will come out of the woodwork when they get the scent of free money in the air but the quality of their skills will almost certainly be untested in the arts arena.

If their skills have been tested then where have they been all this time?

The David and Goliath Gambit

Large scale organisations like Sadler's Wells and the Royal Opera House currently spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year on fund raising. Organisations of their size have entire teams of people devoted to doing just that and only that.

Does ACE imagine that these large-scale players are all going to step back and make way for all the small and mid-scale companies who, thanks to the cuts, are going to be looking to the same corporate sponsors for support?

Also, does ACE imagine that Sadler's Wells, for example, is going to give up all its fund raising tricks and their list of contacts to anybody who asks?

The idea that the large-scale is going to come across as all magnanimous to help the smaller fish in the pond is completely laughable especially if the big fish are going to get hurt in the process.

Additionally, more often than not, large-scale organisations have the one thing that corporate sponsors are really looking for when they give money. Big shiny buildings with meeting rooms, conference halls, caterers and splashy shows with expensive programs for them and their corporate buddies.

Dance companies, for the most part, don't have those things, so what are they going to offer in return for the corporate shilling?

They could try offering dinner dates with their dancers, as Scottish Ballet did a few years back, but such things are not recommended unless you want to be hauled across the coals for the rest of your life.

The USA Gambit

Much has been made of the way the USA deals with the arts. Public funding is relatively low while private giving is relatively high but the UK is not the USA, not even a little bit.

That might sound blindingly obvious but bear with us here. First of all the United States is a vast country that covers four time zones with more cultural and socio-political differences than you can shake a few million sticks at. California is nothing like Illinois which is nothing like St Louis which is nothing like New York which, in turn, is nothing like California.

Ask a theatre company in Minnesota or Connecticut if they find it as easy, relatively speaking, to raise funding compared to a theatre company in New York.

Covering that vast country you have a plethora of state and federal laws that help or hinder cultural organisation to raise money from private sources, mostly in the shape of tax incentives. The UK has few such incentives and thus far the DCMS and the Treasury have announced no firm or coherent plans to introduce any.

Size also plays a part in the competitive nature of actually raising money. A mid-scale theatre company in New York State will be unlikely to try and tap the same funding sources as a mid-scale dance company in Washington State, some 3,000 miles to the west.

In the UK it's safe to say that arts organisations in Liverpool, Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham are all going to be going after the same potential sources of sponsorship. To put it simply, this country isn't big enough to stop everybody from every art form bumping into one another as they seek out private sponsors.

The We're Gonna Ignore The Fact That Companies Already Do This Gambit

If you have ever filled out an application for funding from ACE then you will be well aware of the fact that the funding monolith does not fund any project to 100% of its cost and they never have.

Even if your company is an NPO/RFO you don't get all the money you need to operate.

All arts organisations raise money from other sources, in some cases dozens of sources, so they can carry out their activities.

Most of this money comes from local authorities, charities, foundations and development agencies. It's somewhat ludicrous of ACE and the DCMS to think that for the last twenty years or so everybody has been willfully ignoring the £25Million ACE claims they will be able to raise over the next four years when Catalyst Arts starts running.

The Match Funds Gambit

Some of the money from the program is going to be used for match funding. If you get money from a sponsor then ACE will, if your application is successful, match that sponsorship money with some of their own. So far so good.

What's not clear is why this match funding is going to act as incentive to the potential sponsor. Why do they care that your company will get more money from ACE if they give you some of their money?

There is certainly an incentive for the company trying to raise the money but it won't make it any easier for them to get the sponsorship in the first place and that's the really hard part of the equation.

No More Gambits

From what we know at the moment Catalyst Arts doesn't seem to address any of the fairly serious issues outlined above never mind the fact that the arithmetic doesn't add up. Spending £40Million over 4 years and only guesstimating that you'll make an additional £25Million for the arts across a country of over 40 million people is a pretty poor investment.

Companies that recieve grants to employ fund raising "experts" won't be able to retain those experts without additional funding year on year. If the fund raising "expert" is raising money just so they can retain their own job then........ well, you get the point.

We feel sure that ACE will be able to explain all of this when and if they ever put somebody up for interview. Given their track record on NPOs, RFOs, Sustain and lot's of other big ideas there's probably not a great deal of confidence that the answers they give will make any sense.

(we recommend you watch in full screen mode)

by Martin French

Social networks are supposed to make sharing easy but they only work if everybody actually shares material and does it with some consistency. Reaching a lot of people should be a very simple task.

To illustrate the point we've made the above video which you might like to share with people, or not if our theories are correct.

We, here in TheLab™, have pointed out before that the wide world of dance was quick to share information about Google and their brief sojourn into the wacky world of dance with a short Martha graham doodle on their homepage.

Google is a multi-billion dollar corporation with a staggering global reach and needs the publicity about as much as a dog need instructions on how to chase a cat.

When it comes to sharing information about, you know, dance, the profession retreats back into its clamshell and says nothing. National Dance Agencies, dance companies, ACE, you name it, there is no end to the amount of information they won't share about each other no matter what it is or how important it might be.

Companies and organisations are also not really adept at getting their own staff in on the sharing game using their own social networking connections.

It's just an awful lot of people talking about themselves all the time. There's nothing wrong with talking about yourself of course but if that's all you ever do then people can and do get tired of you very very quickly.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this issue is that all that is required to make it work is the will to do it. It doesn't cost money, you don't need training, you don't need to hire a specialist, you don't need to fill in an application form and you don't need anybody's permission.

You just have to do it.

by Article19

In the old country we often describe trying to get someone to talk to you who is being particularly intractable as being an experience akin to "pulling teeth". It's messy, painful and getting people to sit down and take that pain is getting harder and harder even though it might actually be good for them.

Over the last several weeks Article19 has been trying to get various people to talk about various things with little or no success. They either outright refuse to do it or fall back to their default position of suggesting we ask them the questions via email.

Start Pulling

Take Arts Council England (ACE) for example. The London based funding monolith has announced its plans to boost philanthropy in the arts not once but twice, the latest announcement coming a little under two weeks ago. The first announcement was in December last year.

While the practical plans for the project, called 'Catalyst Arts', seem straight forward enough the actual thinking behind how it works appears to be completely non-existent. The second press release from June 29 says this about the £30Million section of the scheme;

"It is anticipated that the £30 million fund will enable arts organisations to generate around £25 million of new money from private giving by 2015."

Throughout the rest of the release there are words like "develop", "ideas", "capability", etc, etc. No actual details on how ACE came up with the numbers, how the £40Million in total funding was split into three sections and how or why anybody should believe that any of this is actually going to work.

From the press release the whole thing looks like a gold mine for consultants and advisors. Another pot of money that has nothing to do with creating jobs for artists and has a lot to do with creating another layer of bureaucracy.

And by the way, if you're spending £30Million, essentially on administration, and only getting £25Million back by 2015 that seems like a bad investment. Why not just use the £30Million and invest it in actual arts projects?

So we asked ACE for an interview with the person in charge of 'Catalyst Arts' because it might be good for ACE to talk about this and explain the missing details.

A spokesperson at ACE said this in response to our interview request;

"As outlined in the release, the fund is still in development and last week's announcement was an update on our current thinking.  More information and details of criteria and how to apply will be available in the autumn.  In light of this there is not much more detail we can give at this point."

Apparently in the last 6 or 7 months the only things ACE have come up with is how to distribute the money and some numbers evidently pulled from thin air.

Tapped Ideas

When the website IdeasTap, kind of like LinkdIN for young arty people, announced they were associating themselves with the Sky Arts Ignition Fund we, here in TheLab™ , naturally enough, and any intrepid journalist worth their salt is going to pursue such an announcement with questions about associating yourself with Newscorp.

Of course Newscorp is owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns News International that owned the now defunct News of the World along with a lot of other charming news outlets like The Sun, Fox News, the London Times and of course Sky Television.

No dice there either unfortunately because their editor James Hopkirk, who used to work for The Sunday Times coincidentally, and is also a journalist wouldn't be interviewed on the phone, only via email.

We don't do email interviews for the fairly obvious reason that there is no way we can verify if the person writing the answers is the person we're asking the questions of, it's too difficult to do follow ups and it actually takes a lot longer than spending 10 minutes on the phone. And, yes, it's far easier to squeeze people when you're talking to them.

The list goes on and on.

NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) either wouldn't talk about or seemed completely incapable of discussing their "£1/2 Million research fund to stimulate digital innovation in the arts and culture" which they are launching alongside ACE and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

In fact they initially asked if they could see what we were going to write before it was published so they could edit their responses. (say what? Ed!) We of course refused that request.

ACE, again, wouldn't allow any journalists into their Building Digital Capacity for the Arts seminars lest we ask some awkward questions of the protagonists that might just expose these things as nothing more than a talking shop (they told us there wasn't enough room in the venue).

ACE also declined to provide interviews with senior staff about the funding cuts and what their level of responsibility/involvement was in that process. The funding monolith is particularly adept at not giving on the record interview about its programs.

The Green Room in Manchester, which recently closed down after losing its ACE funding from next year, declined to be interviewed about why they were shutting the venue down so quickly (they were funded for the rest of the the current financial year). From the outside it looks like they just locked the door and left town.

Over at the BBC they refused to put Jan Younghusband (commissioning editor) up for interview to discuss their train wreck of a documentary about contemporary dance or in-fact the entire train wreck of a contemporary dance season on BBC4 that featured very little actual contemporary dance.

Dance UK, the advocacy organisation for dance, wouldn't answer questions about funding cuts even after they themselves were cut completely. Such is their displeasure with Article19 they point blank refuse to link to anything we publish because pretending we don't exist is far easier than having to deal with our impertinent questions. So much for providing information to dancers.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

Perhaps the most puzzling or disturbing realisation to come from this culture of silence and obfuscation is that many of these people, and dozens more like them, are the ones responsible for pushing and promoting dance and culture in general to government, policy makers and, ultimately, the general public.

It should be alarming to all that when asked questions about the reasoning, operation and viability of a particular project those responsible stutter and stammer and stick their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la la la I am not listening to you".

The recent debacle with Opera North canceling a community performance, making a spectacular mess of explaining why and then humiliatingly re-instating the performance is perhaps the most graphic illustration that the management/administrative side of the arts are just holding on way too tight.

If you don't talk it looks like you're afraid, that you have no confidence in your project or the capability of that project to deliver its goals. If you only communicate via email then all that illustrates is that you lack confidence and are petrified of making mistakes. If we we're being more blunt we could call you a coward.

We've said this before and we're going to have to say it again. Just because you don't want to talk about the potential shortcoming of your work doesn't mean those shortcomings will magically go away.

Many working in the arts are beginning to resemble failed US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Ms Palin doesn't give interviews (unless they are on, of course, Fox News, the cable news network that pays her to appear).

Ms Palin feels, even though she seeks high public office, that she should not be accountable nor pressed on important issues because, in her eyes, the media will distort what she says. All the media will actually do however is report what she says, her own words and ideas are the things that constantly bring her down.

Making mistakes is not the end of the world so we strongly urge you all to own what you do and own what you say and take some responsibility. Being compared to Sarah Palin is not something you really want to be stuck with.