The Irish Academy of the Performing Arts is due to take another step towards realisation today. Victoria White examines some of the correspondence relating to it.
The expected announcement today of the interim governing authority of the Irish Academy of the Performing Arts (IAPA) is another storey on a structure without foundations. Only the urgent desire of the Government for good publicity and the strong aspirations of a few individuals keep it standing.
The idea was that of the director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), the pianist John O'Conor. He imagined an Irish Academy of the Performing Arts in the buildings now occupied by University College Dublin, in Earlsfort Terrace, in communion with the National Concert Hall. He managed to get sell his idea to Síle de Valera, Minister for the Arts, before the last election, and got it onto the new Government's agenda. UCD was not going anywhere fast, but this was the least of the plan's problems. What was being proposed was a new third-level and fourth level institution to teach would-be professional performers music, dance and drama. This is obviously a development which should have evolved from years of research and consultation.
John O'Conor's quick-fix approach was simply to amalgamate existing educational facilities, which would then by osmosis become a world-class FAME school. As well as the RIAM, the Gaiety School of Acting (GSA) was in there from the beginning. O'Conor wrote in his proposal that chairman Joe Dowling's "high profile in the States" would "help with the fund-raising drive".
The University of Limerick's Irish World Music Centre and the Institute of Choreography and Dance in Cork have been added to the list of constituents in the "nodal" academy based in DCU to which the Government committed £44.4 million (€56 million) in 1999. The RIAM pulled out in 2000 due to disagreement as to who it would be combined within the IAPA. But the fact remains that there was never any comprehensive survey of existing third-level providers: the ones who had political influence.
In July 2000, Dr Danny O'Hare, ex-president of DCU, who became chairman of the IAPA's Planning and Steering Group, returned to this basic problem in an astonishing aide memoire to the Department of Education. He wrote that neither the RIAM nor the Gaiety School of Acting "could be regarded as world-class".
He continued: "It should be noted that the RIAM/Gaiety special priority involvement in IAPA was not seen by all in the artistic community in Ireland as desirable or welcome or deserved . . . It is not universally accepted that either of them is the best in Ireland."
He outlined how differently the academy could have been instituted: "The ideal solution would have been to create an autonomous IAPA from scratch, with no linkages to other institutions, with the president and staff focused exclusively on achieving world-class status and not carrying any baggage from any other institutions. In these circumstances it would not be compromised in recruiting academics of world renown and would only accept outstanding students even if that meant small enrolment."
Dr O'Hare seems to have been annoyed by Joe Dowling's insistence that if the Gaiety School of Acting were to participate, its director, Patrick Sutton, would have to be Head of Drama. Patrick Sutton also works with the Taoiseach on the presentation of his public image. He was appointed to the Arts Council by Ms de Valera. Dr O'Hare points out that he told Mr Sutton that "I would wish to protect the Government from criticism in the media, which criticism would be very scathing because of the relationship between the current director and members of Government."
By the time the Working Group on the IAPA appointed an independent consultant, the Irish World Music Centre (IWMC) and the Institute of Choregraphy and Dance (ICD) were involved, but no transparent competition between institutions had taken place. The ICD could be seen to have been helped by the fact that its director, Mary Brady, was on the Arts Council, and IWMC by the University of Limerick president's hint that Ms de Valera's leadership should not be "damaged by perceptions of regional bias".
Even then, the project might have been salvaged by a competition for the contract as independent assessor and an intensive, exhaustive research and consultation process. None of this happened. Instead, the Department simply chose Dr Peter Renshaw of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, explaining its choice by the fact that he had reported before to the working group (his name had been suggested by the Arts Council Director, Patricia Quinn) and he was in a position to do the work quickly.
There is, however, a cryptic hand-written note in the Department files: "Don't believe there is only one expert in any field!"
Three visits to Ireland were envisaged for Mr Renshaw and a list of interviewees drawn up. He could not have developed his blueprint for the IAPA, which was largely adopted by the Government, from scratch in this time, and it is obvious that he relied heavily on the work which had gone before. He did not, for instance, interview anybody from the Samuel Beckett Centre at TCD, which, unlike the GSA, offered a full scale acting degree. His notes, like the hand-written one which reads "GSA needs to be firmed up with technical as- pects" make it obvious that he accepted the Gaiety school as part of the plan from the beginning.
He was informed by a document, which rammed into the development of the IAPA in 1999. The Deloitte and Touche report on IAPA was commissioned by Patrick Sutton, John O'Conor and three dance educators; neither the Department of Education nor the Department of Arts seems to have had any knowledge of it.
The report, marked "private" in the Department of Arts files, reads more like a manifesto. It espouses the idea, supported by the Taoiseach, that DCU should be the site for the IAPA, and then proceeds to show how the Gaiety School of Acting and the RIAM will form its core.
The IAPA could only be seen as a truly positive development if the new board and new president agreed to build it again from the ground up. However, apart from its own foundations of transparent consultation and research, it needs foundations in performance education at primary and secondary level. It is arguably undemocratic to commit this funding now to a third-level institution which Irish students will have difficulty entering unless they are privately educated.
The Music Education Action Group has presented the political parties with a five-year plan to get music into Irish schools.
The best thing the new government could do for performance education is to implement it, along with programmes in dance and drama, and use the time to build again, from scratch, an Irish Academy for the Performing Arts.
Victoria White is Arts Editor of The Irish Times