Be Brave Arts Council

I want to start by applauding Arts Council England for making the bold decision to open up its application process for the first time in more than 60 years.
This is a truly exciting time and practitioners seem genuinely energised and galvanised by it. An unprecedented level of soul-searching and hard-nosed business planning has led to a real shift in gear, direction and ambition for the sector. Many artists and unfunded companies feel they have everything to gain and are 100% up for it.
Having been given this strong incentive to raise their game and articulate their vision, these organisations will not turn back now. They know what they want to do and they are going to find a way of doing it - arts council or no arts council Last week, I facilitated an Independent Theatre Council artistic director’s forum - a diverse and highly vocal group driven by an insatiable energy for creating work, engaging audiences and ensuring a vibrant future for the arts. The mood of this group was intensified by its shared experience of facing massive change and transition.
Leaders of small venues, touring companies, regularly funded organisations and Arts Council National Portfolio hopefuls were preoccupied by the same issue: “What if the arts council gets it wrong on March 30? What would wrong look like?”
The new artistic director of Actors Touring Company, Ramin Gray, had this to say: “It’s thrilling that ACE is taking out the garden shears to do some radical topiary on the arts. This could be the moment for a powerful restatement of the idea of subsidy - to support work that may be in advance of public taste, that stretches, provokes and challenges and that would not otherwise be made.
“When cuts are being made as a direct result of the crisis in the capitalist system, it’s surely a chance to reframe our artistic economy away from the intense obsession with novelty, superficiality and disposability to a saner world of sustainability, depth and genuine exploration. Let’s hope those garden shears cut us through to an exciting new landscape.”
And if ACE’s decisions don’t help produce an exciting new landscape, what then? I fear a real crash in the morale of arts practitioners if, after all the excitement and expectation, the status quo is maintained with just a few token gestures to the ‘new and emerging’.
On Radio 4’s Today programme last week, I heard the Royal Shakespeare Company’s executive director Vikki Heywood challenging arts minister Ed Vaizey about the fate of the arts. She expressed the fear that smaller, non-building based companies would be hit hardest. I hope this was not an expression of prior knowledge on her part, but rather pessimism about ACE’s vision.
Personally, I remain cautiously optimistic that ACE is sincere about nurturing a broad arts ecology. But, my concern is that, in its desperate attempt to get the process right - transparent, robust, administratively unassailable - it might lose sight of the vision. A beautiful landscape is made up of many features, both large and small.
It would be sheer lunacy to focus the cuts on smaller organisations. Firstly, masses of them would have to be lost to make even a modest saving. Secondly, they are amazing value for money. I keep hearing ACE staff preparing the sector for disappointment, saying: “There is bound to be some potentially great work that we won’t be able to fund.” Why so defeatist? ACE has opened its doors to let great work in, so let it in.
At ITC’s conference last summer - entitled Evolve or Die - the artistic director of a newly-funded organisation said to me: “Do you think it would help if we approached ACE and offered to manage with less while working closely with a group of currently unfunded companies?”
This was not naivety, but a spirit of generosity and regard for the wider arts ecology that I often encounter among ITC’s membership. It inspires me and also gives rise to some dreams and hopes for the future of the sector.
Imagine this - quietly, in the last few months, the RSC and the Royal Opera House have approached ACE and said: “Listen chaps, we think we can manage with 50% less direct subsidy from you. We both have phenomenal international brands and we think we can rise to the challenge - with some advocacy back-up from you and the promised extra support from government - to raise the additional funds from philanthropic sources. After all, the shortfall only amounts to about half a dozen senior bankers’ bonuses each, and we think there must be plenty of embarrassed people in the City keen for the redemptive opportunity of supporting some top-class art.”
Something else has been playing on my mind recently - does the public actually realise that their taxes fund the arts? If they really appreciated this, what would they expect from the new landscape?
We pay for many things as taxpayers that we don’t directly benefit from. I, for one, am quite happy that my taxes pay for the lives of 5,000 schoolchildren in Birmingham to be enriched by the work of a company like Big Brum, or for ex-offenders to be offered new hope and opportunity by a company like Clean Break, or for Foursight, a small company in Wolverhampton, to create the extraordinary Thatcher the Musical!
But, as Foursight’s artistic director Sarah Thom said at our forum last week: “I fear that, due to the severity of the cut passed on to ACE by government, we are not in for a healthy pruning of the theatre portfolio, but a slash and burn with more than a quarter of existing companies up for the bonfire.”
Be brave, arts council. It is a huge responsibility, but the moment is yours. Make that landscape as rich as it can be.