Arts programme
Report
This programme supports the development and dissemination of new ideas to increase people’s experience, enjoyment and involvement in the arts, with a particular focus on young people. Our open grants scheme benefits organisations and groups, while our special initiatives – Awards for Artists, JADE Fellowships and the Breakthrough Fund – currently focus on talented individuals.
2007-08 was an important year for the programme, as it was the first year when we started to fund work which met the much broader new priorities, which we had launched at the end of 2006. We also extended our Awards for Artists to composers and launched a new special initiative, the Breakthrough Fund, aimed at creative arts entrepreneurs.
Over the last 12 months the pattern of grant-making has shifted in response to the programme’s new focus. As we wish to support new ways of working with arts audiences and participants, most of our grants have backed projects that either test new ideas or extend existing programmes. The number of grants to support work that involves young people alongside children and/or adults has increased significantly. The average size of grant has also risen, reflecting the type of work we are asked to support and our desire to fund initiatives whose outcomes are more ambitious. Although our support in the main is still for three years or more, the number of grants for up to one year has doubled.
We welcomed Sir Brian McMaster’s review, ‘Supporting Excellence in the Arts’, commissioned by DCMS and published in January 2008, for attempting to shift how we view and talk about culture. It echoed our own programme priorities in its purpose and we welcome the debate it generated around the issues of excellence, innovation and risk-taking.
We were delighted that the Department for Culture Media and Sport and Arts Council England managed to secure such a healthy settlement from government for arts funding in England – especially as expectations from the sector were low before the announcement. We regret, though, that the subsequent controversy around some of ACE’s funding decisions eclipsed the good news.
Through the Breakthrough Fund we have strengthened our support for creative individuals, complementing existing schemes and balancing the open grants that are aimed at organisations. Set up this year, the fund is a new special initiative that aims to offer significant support to talented and visionary creative entrepreneurs in the arts at a critical point in their careers. Existing public and private funding schemes cannot always match the ways creative individuals are thinking about how best to develop their ideas. The Breakthrough Fund has been conceived to bridge this gap and help exceptional individuals realise ambitious ideas, either within an existing organisation or by setting up a new one. £4.5 million has been put aside for this scheme over three years. Nii Sackey, founder of Bigga Fish and one of the first Breakthrough Fund grant recipients, said: “with this grant we can now focus on building towards success, as opposed to subsistence. It has been refreshing to work within a flexible, open minded scheme that recognises risk and the unconventional as an opportunity for success and new models of best practice”.
We collaborated with the Association of British Orchestras in starting a sector-wide discussion to see how classical music organisations, and particularly orchestras, might be encouraged to develop new, more collaborative and joined-up ways of working with audiences and communities. We look forward to continuing our involvement in these conversations, which emerged from an analysis of our arts grants and our understanding of the changing priorities of schools in respect of collaborating with arts organisations to help deliver music education.
This year we contributed to and co-funded a research project initiated by the Clore Duffield Foundation to explore the role of learning within cultural organisations in the 21stcentury. This continues the work we supported through the PAE back Group in 2006-07 which looked at the impact of education and participation work on boards and trustees of performing arts organisations. We responded to a consultation paper it published, ‘Culture & Learning: Towards a New Agenda’, and we will review with interest the feedback this generates in order to inform the next stage of work in this project.
As for the future, we are currently researching ideas for two potential new special initiatives, one which will focus on participatory practices in regional museums and galleries, and a second to support the training of artists as workshop leaders. We hope to launch these new initiatives during 2009.
Special Initiatives
Awards for Artists
Support for individual artists
£416,858 awarded in 2007-08 (including support costs)
Recognising the difficulties that individual artists have to face – and valuing the contribution they make to the lives of so many people – the Foundation set up its Awards scheme in 1993 to recognise talent, promise, need and achievement. We aim to encourage recipients to develop their creative ideas and continue to practise regardless of financial or other outside pressures.
In 2007, each award increased from £30,000 to £45,000, to be paid in three equal instalments over three years. There were eight recipients in total: Claire Barclay, Phyllida Barlow, Michael Fullerton, Ryan Gander and Mark Lecky who won Awards for Visual Arts and Iain Ballamy, Luke Bedford, Jonathan Lloyd who were the first recipients of the newly launched Awards for Composers.
The names of the eight 2008 Awards recipients will be announced in November 2008, when we will also mark the 10th anniversary of the Awards for Visual Arts.
Luke Bedford, 2007 Awards for Composers recipient, said “I will be in the privileged position of being able to dedicate my time solely to composition, and also of being able to develop the pieces in the manner that I choose. This sort of freedom is very rare for an artist in any medium.”
Jane Attenborough Dance in Education (JADE)
Fellowship Career development for dancers
£50,000 awarded in 2007-08 over two years
Set up in 2005 for five years, the JADE Fellowship supports a professional dancer each year coming to the end of their dancing career and wishing to transfer their skills to dance education and community work.
The third JADE Fellowship went to Tees Valley Dance for René Pieters, with a close mentoring relationship with Northumbria University. Pieters said “The Fellowship is making it possible for me to take all my knowledge and experience to another level, whilst also enabling me to continue my career in dance.”
During 2007-08, the first JADE Fellowship, to Rambert Dance Company for Simon Cooper, came to an end, and Andy Barker, the second Fellow, continued to deliver education work for Northern Ballet Theatre while broadening his skills. An evaluator was commissioned to assess and share the learning from the three Fellowships to date. Fellows and host companies came together at a public event at Sadler’s Wells in February 2008, to share experiences with each other and the wider dance sector. Films of these presentations are available on the Foundation’s website. The JADE Fellowships were established to commemorate the Foundation’s former arts manager, Jane Attenborough, who died in the 2004 Asian tsunami.
Breakthrough Fund
Support for creative entrepreneurs in the arts
£1,292,263 awarded in 2007-08 (including support costs)
The Breakthrough Fund differs from other funding schemes in that the Foundation makes a commitment to support a talented arts entrepreneur before their plans are fully worked out: each grant revolves around developing a close relationship with the individuals who will outline, plan, budget and realise the work.
Typically, a grant might cover core costs (from rent to a contribution to overheads or salaries) and artistic expenditure (from developing new programmes to growing or consolidating existing work), as well as elements of scoping or research and development. Centred on individuals, the grants will be made to the organisations with which they work.
Outstanding individuals are nominated by a network of respected practitioners and leaders from different art forms throughout the UK, which changes each year. The individuals are then asked to submit a simple outline of what they would like to do. In the first year, nominations resulted in 46 applications, from which five grants were made. The Breakthrough Fund has supported:
- Stuart Bailie/Oh Yeah Music Centre £191,858
- Felix Barrett and Colin Marsh/Punchdrunk £300,000
- Gareth Evans/Artevents £250,000
- David Jubb/Battersea Arts Centre £300,000
- Nii Sackey/Bigga Fish £250,000
Nominations for the fund’s second year will be sought in autumn 2008, with a view to approving grants early in 2009.
Open grants scheme
Grants awarded in 2007-08
CandoCo Dance Company
Building regional infrastructure for integrated dance
£176,961 awarded over three years
CandoCo Dance Company, a leader in integrating able-bodied and disabled dancers in the UK, has recognised the potential for more proactive use of its education resources. Our grant will allow it to see through a development programme in five regions called Moving-Bodies, which focuses on sharing models of good practice and building local knowledge and skills. This work will be delivered in partnership with local artists and organisations, spanning a broad age range and providing coherent progression routes in dance for disabled people. Through partnership with local authorities and regional dance agencies, CandoCo aims to embed integrated dance provision into the local arts infrastructure in each region.
Opera North
Interactive collage of stories and music by Leeds community
£27,000 awarded over one year
Opera North has been working with cutting edge music technology organisation Incidental to record sounds, songs and voices from the diverse communities of Little London, as part of a long term residency in its own neighbourhood. Our grant is funding Echo Archive, an innovative strand of work which brings together residents of the Leeds inner city closest to Opera North to celebrate their cultures and allow their voices to be heard. Groups including primary pupils, refugees and isolated older people have created a unique online audio portrait of the area resulting in a diverse sound collection from Ghanaian folk songs to industrial machinery, remembrances of bygone times, calypso music and dubstep. www.echoarchive.com makes the sounds of Little London accessible to others for listening or remixing into new compositions which can then be uploaded to the site.
Welsh National Opera
WNO MAX programme in the South Wales valleys and Cardiff Bay area
£280,000 awarded over three years
WNO MAX produces an integrated programme of activities beyond the main stage that aims to energize communities, the company and the art form whilst encouraging creativity. Through singing and song, our grant will deepen WNO’s existing relationships with two communities that have undergone intense change over the recent years and struggled to retain their cultural heritage. The work will start with mapping out the current situation in these two areas in terms of singing, before developing relationships with specific community partners. WNO MAX will work locally and bring individuals and groups to performances and workshops at the Wales Millennium Centre, WNO’s home. Over the three years of the grant, they want to establish a new, flexible and inclusive contemporary tradition of story-telling through music. It is also intended that this social engagement will impact on the company and orchestra, informing WNO’s future planning.
Wysing Arts Centre Linking artists with local people in three Cambridgeshire villages £60,000 awarded over three years Wysing Arts Centre re-opened after a major refurbishment in January 2008. Our grant to this rural arts centre will help it build sustainable relationships with communities in three of the Cambridgeshire villages closest to it. A continuous programme of participatory projects will encourage residents’ involvement in Wysing’s artistic programme, building on previous collaborations between artists and local people. Combining outreach with the centre’s artistic values in this way is intended to increase access, develop artists’ practice and put Wysing in a position of dialogue and partnership with the people who live nearby. It will also provide a means for the centre to make international models of artistic best practice relevant in its local area.
“Wales is the Land of Song and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation has helped Welsh National Opera bring singing alive for a new generation by supporting transformative work driven by communities in the South Wales Valleys and Cardiff Bay.”
– John Fisher, General Director, Welsh National Opera
Ongoing Grant Scottish
Poetry Library Development of readership in poetry
£42,844 awarded over three years
The Scottish Poetry Library is a unique national resource and advocate for poetry. It offers a wide collection of contemporary Scottish and international poetry for all ages, available in books, online and to listen to. The second year of our grant is helping to develop a readership in poetry, targeting a wide range of people with varying levels of knowledge and experience of poetry. Librarians are being trained to develop poetry within their libraries, with two workshops having taken place to date; poetry box resources will be placed in mainstream libraries and online which will then be the focus of work by poets working in partnership with libraries to bring the outreach collections alive and sustain interest in them.
Completed grant
Theatre-Rites
Workshops to accompany a dance tour
£27,600 awarded over five months
Leading children’s theatre company Theatre-Rites collaborated with choreographer Arthur Pita to create a ground breaking piece of contemporary dance for children, Mischief, which toured to 13 mid-scale venues around the UK in the autumn of 2007. The partnership was initiated by Sadler’s Wells, who recognised a lack of high quality contemporary dance for children and families. Our grant funded a well attended symposium that debated issues of risk, aesthetics and experimentation in making innovative dance for children. It also enabled outreach workshops, led by a team of dancers and object manipulators, that increased access to dance.
The production gained broad critical acclaim and another tour is planned for 2009, with interest from international venues. The workshops were successful in engaging children and their families and every workshop participant saw the performance. The symposium generated a healthy debate that highlighted the absence of quality contemporary dance for these audiences and influenced ongoing debates.