Category: Funding

Controversial plan to amalgamate opera

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opera_merge

Yesterday’s Irish Times carried a story about plans afoot by the Arts Council to merge Wexford Festival Opera, Opera Ireland, and Opera Theatre Company:

The Arts Council is working on a proposal that would see all three companies, whose combined track record of opera production runs to nearly 150 years, cease to exist.

The companies’ current functions would not be lost, however.

A new company would be set up to mount productions in Dublin, run the Wexford festival, and provide small-scale productions to tour around the country. Staff in the existing companies would not automatically transfer to the new company, which would be based in the new €33 million Wexford Opera House.

This is one of the most dramatic cost-saving measures yet to emerge, although according to the piece the AC has been in discussion with the three since the beginning of the year. With opera comprising an underfunded art form which has struggled historically to find audiences in Ireland, the merge makes some amount of sense (more so than, for instance, the proposed merging of the national art institutions)– however the differences between Wexford Festival Opera (much more international in its programme, talent and target audience) and OI/OTC (largely Dublin-based, and focused on Irish talent, although OTC does tour more) are significant enough. And it certainly sounds like job losses would be part of the equation, no matter how the merger shakes down.

The McCarthy report has recommended slicing the AC’s budget by €6.1 million, meaning there are undoubtedly more cuts in the pipeline… frustrating and anxious times for any organisation heavily dependent on an annual grant.

Ireland & its arts centres

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Civic Theatre Tallaght

Civic Theatre Tallaght

In today’s Irish Times, a very interesting article on the expansion of arts centres during the last decade, many funded under the Cultural Developments Incentive Scheme:

If the physical landscape of Ireland will never be the same after the building boom of the so-called Celtic Tiger years, with all its modern apartment blocks and endless motorways, then neither will the cultural landscape, which has also been transformed by the country’s now-lamented economic prosperity. Nowhere has this been more evident than in infrastructural developments for the arts; the appearance of theatres, galleries and arts centres in the most surprising sites across the country: in satellite suburbs and small towns, from Coolock to Doolin to Naul.

Written by Sara Keating, the article contains interviews with then-minister Michael D Higgins, and directors of arts centres including Dunamaise Arts Centre (Portlaoise), An Grianán Theatre (Letterkenny), Civic Theatre (Tallaght). According to Higgins, fears that the newly built centres would become white elephants haven’t borne out… however it is also true that it hasn’t been an easy ride for them all: witness the recent woes of the Riverbank Arts Centre. Such places are unbelievably important to their communities as spaces for art and performance, and one can only hope they will continue to flourish with community and government support.

Now, if only something could be done about the disgrace that is the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre in Dublin…!

Facebook campaign for Irish arts workers

Members of Theatre Forum are leading the way to establish a series of Facebook group pages for the various constituencies across the country. The idea was mooted at the recent Theatre Forum annual conference, and so far 26 groups have been formed (a great summary of this year’s lively conference was written by Sara Keating in the Irish Times).

The aim is for the campaign to raise awareness for councillors and TDs of how many arts workers live in their constituencies, and support ongoing initiatives to support the arts.

To sign up to a group in your area, or to launch one in the 43 remaining constituencies, click here.

Gloomy days for the arts

It’s feeling cold out there, and not just from the dusting of snow outside this morning.

Continuing on from Friday’s post, this morning’s Irish Times carries two more articles on the effect of the Arts Council’s funding cuts on theatre and music. Peter Crawley reports on the closure of three small production companies (Galloglass, Storytellers and Calypso) as a consequence of the new strategy to cull organisations perceived as artistically weaker from the AC trough, while maintaining funding for the biggies. This predictably has met with mixed reaction, which Crawley (to his credit) fairly assesses, noting that the slippery criterium of ‘artistic excellence’ has served as the fulcrum for artform funding decisions:

There is more sense in the strategy than some would care to admit though. A couple of years ago, during Theatre Forum’s annual conference, one of the best attended and breathlessly titled discussions was: How do we Approach the Issue of Encouraging the Arts Council to Cut Companies Who are ‘Past It’ to Enable New Talent to Breathe?

With the economy then going strong, but arts funding forever in short supply, theatre companies themselves harboured the suspicion that there were simply too many of them to sustain, and that the council was notoriously slow to cull the panjandrums. Now the problem is deciding who’s ‘past it’.

Not an enviable position for David Parnell of the Arts Council, partially tasked with making such artistic evaluations:

The Arts Council will not discuss individual cases with the media, but David Parnell admits that artistic quality is the ultimate measure. In the case of de-funded companies, he says, “ultimately the work is not as good as the work being offered by other organisations, and in the context of shrinking budgets we have to take these difficult decisions . . . Fundamentally, it comes down to the quality of the work offered and the ambition of the work.”

There are familiar complaints as well about the lack of transparency concerning decision criteria and a flawed appeals policy, as well as the interesting suggestion that the shrunken funding pool may push forward a new model for theatre production, away from the company model and towards a new ‘hub’-like structure. Well worth a read…

Michael Dervan offers another take on the harsh economic climate for the arts, revisiting the music cuts which have already been well covered by the IT (Opera 2005 in particular), but mentioning also the anticipated drop in corporate sponsorship:

The nightmares that the banking sector is living through will have consequences for the arts too. Sponsorship and other forms of corporate generosity will be reined in. One of the major musical sponsorships of recent years has been Anglo Irish Bank’s support of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s subscription series at the National Concert Hall. RTÉ has always given the impression that Anglo Irish managed to strike a happy balance between the supportive and demanding sides of sponsorship, meaning that the bank’s profile in the deal was clear but not obtrusive. Although the sponsorship was a long-term one, it was reviewed – and hitherto renewed – on an annual basis.

However, with the bank in a crisis that has led to its nationalisation, the sponsorship deal, believed to be worth six figures, may not survive assessment in the light of the new realities.

More on this on a forthcoming post, which will review two new reports recently released on philanthropy and sponsorship in Ireland…

Funding cuts in the arts: opportunity knocks?

An interesting article by Mick Heaney appeared in the Sunday Times on Jan 25th, calling on arts organisations to become more creative in their approaches to funding in a climate of recession (apologies, no link seems to be available!). While I would agree with some of the article, especially his suggestion that arts organisations need to diversify their income in order to better weather recessions, I would take issue with some of his points:

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First is his use of statistics to highlight areas of the arts sector worst hit by the Arts Council recent budget cuts: when it comes to numbers and percentages, it’s easy to arrive at a multitude of conclusions to suit one’s own argument. Heaney asserts that theatre suffered the largest cutback (-12.7%), but he is including in his numbers The Abbey’s funding (which distorts the picture, as they are on a separately-assessed funding track)– whereas Deirdre Falvey in the Irish Times in December had come up with dance as the worst hit (-11%), followed by literature (-9.5%, a significant part of this owing to the axing of the Irish Writer’s Centre annual grant), and finally theatre, less the Abbey’s data (-8.37%). Although this is perhaps a minor point, it’s easy for such numbers to be manipulated, and such figures should be reported carefully. I also frequently see articles on the arts making claims using absolute statistical data, rather than adjusting numbers for inflation to arrive at their real equivalent– not so much an issue when the gap is a year or two, but significant when discussing growth/decline over a decade.

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Second is his statement (which reads as a criticism):

The most obvious legacy of the boom years is the stratum of administrators who run the sector. While such professional expertise may be necessary to run companies efficiently, their support role has increasingly been placed at the heart of the arts sector: few organisations are contemplating laying off the backroom staff; the need to preserve professional experience is a mantra that pops ups repeatedly.

The problems with this are threefold: one, what basis is there for stating that managers’ support role has increasingly been situated  ‘at the heart’ of the arts sector? Again this seems a subjective claim; I might equally counter with the argument that the Arts Council has increasingly swung back towards grants for individual artists (as Heaney himself points out), the culture of arts managerialism is far less developed here than in the UK or the US, and if arts managers in the past few years have seemed more numerous, that’s probably due to the growth of the arts sector overall in the country, not their displacement of creative folks within organisations. Also, Heaney makes quite clear in the article that he supports the diversification of organisational income, to lessen reliance on government funding– and yet, this is the type of goal only achievable by the addition of managerial staff with expertise in marketing, development etc. Finally, as someone who manages an arts jobs webpage and has close contact with people entering the Irish arts workforce, I would suggest that while layoffs do not yet seem to be happening, there is a definite slowdown of new hires and staff turnover.

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Third is his claim that ‘the increase in funding has not brought a similar upsurge of quality art (…) well-crafted but generic work… has dominated Ireland’s well-funded art sector’, and that the recession may offer ideal conditions for artistic innovation. Yet all of his examples are drawn from theatre– obviously the art form he knows best, but not a claim I would dare to make about the arts sector as a whole, let alone theatre (any views out there in agreement, or to the contrary?) What would Theatre Forum think? (WWTFT?)

However I do think it’s useful that the article contributes to the discussions happening now in response to cutbacks, as the Arts Council is forced to make tough choices. The responses for-and-against cuts to the Irish Writers Centre in particular (see Jan 13, Jan 15, Jan 17 and Jan 24 in the Irish Times) and the elimination for funding for Cork Opera 2005 (see 24 Jan and 27 Jan) can obscure the view that I share with Heaney: there shouldn’t be room for complacency in the arts sector, and those organisations, companies and artists who excel at what they do will survive and indeed flourish in spite of the downturn.