May 28, 2004

New Building Under Way, Finally

After what seems like an eternity, construction was finally started today on the new National Dance Agency building for Dance City in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The launch was held on the site of the new building which, at present, is just a patch of empty ground located on St James Boulevard. Janet Archer, Dance City's Artistic Director, managed to to get several dozen dance students and assembled dignitaries and builders dancing around in the space for the assembled media to get their photo's and video footage for the evening news.

When it opens in late 2005 (or early 2006) the new facility will boast new studios, a studio theatre, office space and all the other bits and pieces you get with a brand new building. If you follow the link below you can watch a rather clever 3D Visualisation by Uniform of how the new building will look when it's finished.

Article19 had requested marching bands, cheerleaders and performing animals but sadly none were available. For more information follow the links below.

[ link ] Image Gallery of the event
[ link ] 3D Animation of the new building
[ link ] DanceCity Website

May 19, 2004

Listings Request

Here at Article19 we have noticed a large increase in the bandwidth being used by the listings section of the site.

We think the increase is being caused by subscribers to the system allowing their calendar to check the listings information on a regular basis. Although the subscription option is a very useful feature if too many users have their calendar software requesting information too many times per day this places an unnecessary strain on our bandwidth.

We are requesting that any subscribers to the system set their calendar software to check the system for updates only once or twice per day. If the increase in bandwidth usage continues we will have to suspend the subscription to the listings service for the foreseeable future.

[UPDATE: 25/05/04] Because of continued high loads for the listings we have removed them for the time being. Our statistics show more than 50,000 request for the pages over the last week which is way beyond our weekly visitor total for Article19. This means the content is being stripped from aggregators or calendar programs and this cannot continue. We will replace the listings by the end of the week, for more information on why this is damaging to websites read this Wired Magazine article for more information.

Freedom of Information Not So Free

The Freedom of Information Act which comes into force in January 2005 may become almost useless after the Treasury recommended charges ranging from £25 to a staggering £575 to find documents.

Under the act anyone will have the right to approach a government department or QUANGO, like Arts Council England, and request documents and information relating to how those organisations are run. If the Treasury gets its' way then most individuals will be denied the full use of the act because of the prohibitive costs involved when making a request for information.

Costs are dependent on the amount of time required to find the documents you are requesting and the Treasury is recommending costs of £25 per hour. The Department for Constitutional Affairs sees the charges as a way to prevent malicious requests for large amounts of information which would tie up a lot of civil servants time. Under previous guidelines request for information would only incur charges of 10% of the full cost. That would place charges in the £7.50 - £60 bracket for any request.

In the United States request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act, although chargeable, have a much lower fee structure than the one proposed for the UK. According to the Department of State website charges are made dependent on the level of the government employee dealing with the request. Fees range from $8.00(US) to $30.00(US) per hour. More importantly; US federal law states that;

"The FOIA permits agencies to furnish documents without charge or at a reduced rate if the disclosure of the requested information would be in the public interest and the information is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester (see the Department’s regulations- 22CFR171.15)."

Under the new proposals requests made to UK government bodies could be provided free but only if they were simple requests that took less than 60 minutes to process.

[ link ] UK FOIA

[ link ] Department of State FOIA Details

May 16, 2004

Clarification

With reference to the John Ashford story below, Article19 would like to clarify the following points about the audio recording.

Article19 was at the discussion to both participate in and report on anything of interest that arose from the discussion. The recording was not done "covertly" or using any "hidden microphones" but was simply a method of keeping track of what was said. We have provided a small section of that recording below to provide the full context of Mr Ashford's opening remarks at the discussion.

We hope this clears up any misunderstanding.

May 10, 2004

Ashford Accuses Goverment of Apartheid Like Thinking

In an extraordinary statement during a discussion forum on the benefits of integrating mainland European choreography with British dance on Sunday, John Ashford, Artistic Director of The Place, suggested that the government was introducing policies that were aligning the UK with South Africa during that countries decades of racial oppression and brutality.

In his opening remarks Mr Ashford stated;

"I think it’s very important to remember that it is English which binds us together and [the effects] of British culture, which many immigrants have felt attracted to over the years and who have wanted to join. [And] the sense of being British has shifted in my life time quite radically because of the assimilation of [inaudible] cultures. Now what I’m worried about is that in a multi-cultural society [we] no longer seek to assimilate. I think if that is the case then we are on a dangerous path because I see indications of politics which will bring about parallel but separate developments. [And] if anybody knows the history of apartheid you know that that is a slogan of apartheid."

When asked to clarify his comment suggesting that government policy was leaning toward a South African like apartheid Mr Ashford simply responded; "Yeah!". Pressed further he offered this, somewhat mangled, response;

“I think we’re off subject, we’re talking about dance, Trevor Phillips [head of the Commission for Racial Equality] is attacking political correctness in terms of the way in which the sensibilities of the cultural minorities aren’t respected by main stream society and he’s using specific examples and creating quite lot of political debate. There’s one which he hasn’t used which occurred to me and I’m very confused about whether or not I would support the idea of an identity card and I think on balance not.”

Later in the discussion Mr Ashford informed the audience at great length of his desire to bring about cultural integration. However, he went completely off message, when he stated;

"On the train coming up [from London] I couldn’t understand the announcement about when the snack bar was open because the person making the announcement had an accent that was incomprehensible to me [inaudible] … it was not an indigenous, British accent. So just in the negotiation of our everyday, when I meet this person, how do we speak to each other?”

One commentator described the remark as "completely off the planet never mind off message."

The Place receives almost £1.5m in public subsidy via Arts Council England and the National Dance Agency(NDA) at The Place is probably the most influential dance centre in the UK. The Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) did not immediatley respond when asked to comment about Mr Ashfords remarks.

You can listen to the complete audio file by clicking on the link below. The sound was recorded through a Palm Pilot's Voice Memo system so the audio quality is relatively poor. Requires QuickTime from Apple.com to work.

[ link ]Complete Audio File

May 06, 2004

Prize Entrants Announced

The Place Prize short list was announced yesterday with little fan fare and even less ceremony. The lucky 20 are;

Jean Abreu (Brazil), Rafael Bonachela(Spain), Mayuri Boonham & Subathra Subramanian (UK), Rosemary Butcher(UK), Robin Dingemans(New Zealand), Sarah Dowling (Ireland), Marie-Louise Flexen (UK), Celia Grannum (Barbados), Henrietta Hale & Rachel Lopez De La Nieta (UK), Sean Tuan John (Wales) Martin Lawrence (UK), Liz Lea (Australia), Henry Montes (USA), Tharan Revfem (Norway), Tom Roden & Pete Shenton (UK), Marie Gabrielle Rotie (Wales), Hofesh Shechter (Israel), Bawren Tavaziva (Zimbabwe), Carmen Vilches (Spain) and Angela Woodhouse (UK).

The more numerically savvy readers among you will have noticed that there are 10 overseas choreographers and 10 UK choreographers. It's nice when international co-operation splits itself so evenly.

Guy Cools, dance dramaturge and Artistic Director Designate of the Foundation Jean-Pierre Perrault in Montreal said; "The applications for The Place Prize showed a variety and diversity, both stylistically, culturally and content wise that you would never find in any other European country. The twenty choreographer’s selected, reflect this diversity in an artistically very articulated way."

First of all, here in the Lab we think Guy Cools is a made up name and secondly; that comment is straight out of the Arts Admin's Guide to Making Banal Press Statements (ISBN: 100923874). A more accurate statement according to Fauston Carpet of the Amsterdam Research and Science Enterprise may well have been;

"Look we know this whole idea is not really that good and we had to choose 10 from the UK and 10 from countries other than the UK to make the whole thing seem diverse, you know? So get off my back okay! No my name is not bloody made up!"

[ link ]Prize Competition Website

[UPDATE] : It has come to our attention that another member of the Prize Panel is called "Jan Younghusband". If you're going to make up names, and we know a thing or two about making up names, then you have to try a lot harder than that!