The dancers are far from happy. Opposition to the proposed Irish Academy of the Performing Arts, as outlined in the Government's Renshaw report, is almost unanimous across a broad spectrum of dance practitioners: dancers, teachers, company directors and, particularly, those working in dance training.
At a meeting on Tuesday at the Irish Writers' Centre, chaired by Tania Banotti of Film Makers Ireland, a wide range of issues surrounding dance training that are ignored in Renshaw's findings were identified. It was agreed that it is of vital importance to begin dance training at an early age, rather than wait until students are 18, as would occur at IAPA. Dance schools in Britain accept students in their mid-teens and combine dance training with A-level education. A similar type of programme could be possible in Ireland through a creative use of the transition year and applied Leaving Certificate, it was suggested.
Many feel that the idea of scattering the different disciplines between Dublin, Cork and Limerick is inappropriate as it does not allow for interdisciplinary work and crossovers between the various art forms. Artistic directors are already looking for people with a broad range of skills across different dance disciplines and art forms. In the next decade, they will demand dancers with even more of these skills - yet the IAPA in its present form will not produce such people. While the Department of Education's Planning and Steering Group declares itself open to submissions, educators are now pleading for anonymous consultation to be replaced by more interactive dialogue.
`DIALOGUE" is this week's signature word, it seems, but don't for a minute confuse it with the "enhanced dialogue" that you will engage in if you are part of the Arts Council's pilot process for devising multi-annual funding agreements with arts organisations, as outlined in the Arts Plan 1999-2001. This was the resounding message from last Thursday's Arts Council Seminar in Limerick, "The Arts Plan in Practice", in which three of the participating organisations - Red Kettle theatre company, Daghda Dance Company and the Architectural Association of Ireland - described their experiences of the consultation process, which began in August 1999.
Seventeen organisations participated in sessions with the Arts Council, facilitated by the British cultural commentator, Francois Matarasso. One of these, Rough Magic, did not proceed to the next stage, as its plan was not accepted for three-year funding. The remaining 16 prepared fully documented proposals for the council's consideration, based on the strategies outlined in the Arts Plan, "establishing the plan as the only framework for making any decisions", as Artform director, Dermot McLaughlin put it. "There is no other show in town for Arts Council grants," he said.
Liam Rellis of Red Kettle echoed this: "This is the only plan we've got. If you want to be a client of the Arts Council these are the rules." He was happy to accept the rules in exchange for the benefits of multi-annual funding, which allowed the company to plan ahead and present an ambitious artistic programme. For the Architectural Association of Ireland, a small resource organisation, the pilot process was "an unequivocally good experience", its director, Conor Moloney said, describing it as "moving towards bespoke tailoring rather than one size fits all".
The dance policy specialist, Catherine Nunes, who was engaged as a consultant by Daghda Dance Company during its consultation process, also endorsed the pilot process. "This should be viewed as an opportunity rather than a threat," she said, before raising some questions and misgivings which resurfaced during the hour-long question and answer session with the audience. These were: how do organisations get onto the funding ladder? Is there a danger that small, young, fragile organisations, which don't have the management capacity or time to scramble for multi-annual funding, might be marginalised? What was the place of the independent individual artist in all of this? And, most importantly and urgently, what were the Arts Council's criteria for evaluating artistic work and the creative process?
Matarasso acknowledged that "the most important project for the Arts Council now" was "to explain what the criteria of judgement are" in its artistic assessments.
Incredible as it may seem, the National Concert Hall's programming for the next 12 months includes two visiting orchestras, the European Youth Orchestra (under Vladimir Ashkenazy on August 21st) and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (under Manfred Honeck on February 7th), both playing Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The third visitor in the NCH/The Sunday Business Post International Orchestral Series is the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, in an all-Beethoven programme under Petr Altrichter on June 8th. The NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Recital Series includes the Dublin recital debut of Russian soprano Galina Gorchakova, re-scheduled to next March from last December. The rest of the offerings are from the NCH's narrow roster of safe names, favouring the return of Alfred Brendel (August 15th), Radu Lupu (October 8th) and Joshua Bell (February 18th). Also appearing are Julian Lloyd Webber (November 25th), John O'Conor (January 21st), Emma Johnson (May 10th) and Anne-Sophie Mutter (July 13th).
The Orchestra of St Cecilia's regular November series will be devoted to Bach, featuring violinist Catherine Leonard with Barry Douglas conducting, and the Composers' Choice series of last April is to be repeated next year.
Ninety-two per cent of punters surveyed at the eight festivals which received extra funding last year as "Millennium Festivals" declared the show "good", "very good" or "excellent", with those at the Galway Arts Festival, Wexford Festival Opera, St Patrick's Festival in Dublin and the Belfast Festival at Queen's being particularly buoyant . . . The Millennium Festivals have also proudly announced that the Millennium Drum, made by Bill Wright and Seamus Purcell, has been confirmed in the Guinness Book of Records to be the biggest drum in the world . . . The playwright Gary Mitchell reads from his work at the English Lecture Theatre, Queen's University, Belfast, tonight at 8 p.m. . . . Poet and prose-writer John F. Deane reads with the Puerto Rican/American writer, Martin Espada, at the Galway Arts Centre on Saturday at 8 p.m.
frontrow@irish-times.ie
