Category: And another thing…

Lest we forget: dear departed arts and culture organisations who won’t be remembered in despatches (unless we remind people)

As the recession continues its grip on arts companies, small businesses and sole traders up and down the country, its noticeable that many of them are slowly disappearing without a murmur. We don’t think that’s a fitting way to say farewell to those many organisations who have contributed to our national cultural health – whether they’ve been around for 1, 10 or 50 years.

If you’d like to commemorate any arts organisation’s demise, please let us know here and we’ll compile a list of unfortunate souls who didn’t make out of the credit crunch, recession or economic downturn or whatever it’s called today. We’ll make a list which we’ll send onto the relevant organisations (local authorities, arts funders, charities and so on) to put them in the picture of who we’ve lost. If you can add details of a website, numbers of jobs lost, matched funding opportunities missed – and other useful, public quantitative data – that would be great too.

In memoriam:

A-Foundation, Liverpool

Activ8 Success, Birkenhead

Aspire Trust and Aspire Creative Enterprises

Audiences Central

Brewery Theatre, Taunton.

Contemporary Urban Centre (CUC), Liverpool

Durham City Art

The Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs

Flambard Press

Foursight Theatre Company

Jazz Action

Lanternhouse, Cumbria

Matthew Street Festival *gone but not forgotten, even though some of us would love to forget it and all it stood for”

Pacific Road Arts Centre, Birkenhead

Pele Productions

Quicksilver Theatre, London. Lost the funding after 34 successful years.

7 Sefton Libraries

Theatre Writing Partnership

Urban Strawberry Lunch

Wolstenholme Creative Space

Whilst other organisations are not yet extinct, the combination of funding cuts at national and local levels is putting them under immense strain. Many organisations have seen massive staff cut backs or remaining staff giving their time for free in order to save the long term health of the company. Their efforts should not go un-noticed.

More at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17536195

The Tuesday Rant: how the arts sector is being shafted by parts of the public sector who should know better.

Dear local authority,

It has come to our attention that you are increasingly awarding tenders for arts projects to universities whose turnover is a zillion times higher than the value of that tender.

Do you not realise that you are undermining the sector you claim to represent?

Dear university, why do you insist on putting students on public projects which effectively takes the bread out of local artists mouths? Do you not realise you are shooting the local arts economy in the head every time you place an unqualified graduate into an arts project?  Would you accept student doctors diagnosing your children’s health if they’d done just one year in medical school?

Dear local authority, why are you complicit with this act under the guise of getting ‘value of for money?’ Old mill owners got value for money by exploiting their workers to within an inch of their lives.  Why are you contributing to this outdated industrial practice? And more importantly, why are you allowed to keep getting away with it?

Maybe you’ll appreciate our case once all your arts workers have lost their jobs because of your funding cuts and come back to the sector to look for work… Only to find there is a skeleton of a sector left because it’s been shafted by universities who place unqualified students on projects which should be run by qualified local professionals. And offer access to their so called ‘premium spaces’ in order to claw back some of the massive capital deficit they’ve built up in ‘investing’ in the local economy. 

Dear local authority, dear university, please don’t coming looking to the sector to dig you out of a cultural desert in a few years time. The responsibility for that emptiness will be yours and the students who have long flown the city.

The Tuesday Rant: write an Open Letter to a famous person!

The Tuesday Rant is an occasional series of irritated and indignant responses to various public figures, some famous, some infamous, others aspiring to be either one of the other.

The Open Letter format allows you for the possibility that your target might even care just a little bit about what you think about them, their practice, their pet dog or bar-room habits. Certainly enough to bother to read beyond the first couple of lines.

If you have any Open Letter you would like to share, then please feel free to add to the comments below. You never know what might happen next.

More Open Letters here.

Removing the Rat Runs: call for European Partners

New adult learning programme for 2012: Removing the Rat Runs

We frequently use arts and creative practice in the development of innovative community engagement strategies and work directly with local communities to generate new local policies in the field of health, environment, education and culture. In 2012 we will be focusing on the health and environmental effects of urban traffic and will be doing this through the delivery of our adult learning programme, Removing the Rat Runs.

Removing the Rat Runs: calming local traffic through community actions

The ‘Rat Run’ project aims to increase local communities knowledge, skills and capabilities to reduce road traffic accidents in neighbourhoods and residential areas. Success of the speed reduction programmes in Liverpool UK, for example, has been proven to depend on good communications and building grass roots support and demand for reduced speed. It is the culture shift which ensures successful outcomes on traffic calming and road traffic accidents.
Grundtivg partners on the project will be involved in developing a European project which provides innovative insights and advice on best practice on establishing community based models of traffic calming.
Learners from the Grundtvig partners will be involved in designing local, national and European models of traffic calming based on the following model:

1. Devising a communications plan and overseeing an approach which will include
a. Identification of key stakeholders, interest groups etc and proposals for their engagement and recruitment to the campaign.
b. Utilise appropriate research to develop and co-ordinate a campaign across grassroots and influencers to achieve successful speed reduction
c. Develop key messages based on insight into attitudes, behaviours, motivations and barriers, and co-ordinate use across all partners for engagement and formal consultations to support consistency, using research to support targeting /effectiveness.
d. Develop communications protocol to ensure effective partnership approach
e. Develop supporting branding for partners to use
f. Develop a media relations strategy and action plan that will educate journalists, garner support for the agenda and result in positive media coverage.
g. Support community delivery partner / groups to run effective supporting campaigns – building community ownership and capacity
h. Evaluate the approach during delivery and refine approach in response to feedback

2. Identify community partners / organisations and individuals interested in championing this issue and taking the message into their own communities…eg schools campaigns, Councillors, parent led road safety campaigns, youth associations etc..
3. Ensure appropriate and effective reach of engagement with communities.
4. Facilitate with training, skills, financial and other resources, community led activities and campaigns to build support for the process and shift attitudes.
5. Integrate community activity with implementation phasing and partner agency communications to ensure an effective city wide approach.
6. Develop responsive and pro-active approach to engaging widely and building community capacity using social networking as one approach.

Do you want to be a Grundtvig partner?

We are now seeking European partners who would wish to collaborate on this project through a Grundtvig Partnership scheme. We are particularly looking for partners who:

* Regularly run innovative, creative adult learning programmes especially for disaffected and socially excluded adults

* Have experience of working within Grundtvig, Comenius or Leonardo European funding schemes

* Can bring a portfolio of teaching and learning expertise to the project including technical skills such as website design, production of learning materials

If you would like to become a Grundtvig partner please contact me at:

Aspire Trust Ltd
Valkyrie Lodge
30 Valkyrie Road
Wallasey CH45 4RJ

Tel. + 44 (0) 151639 9231
Mob + 44 (0) 77422 71570
Email nowen.aspire@btconnect.com
Skype name richardnyowen

Eurovision Song Contests: hey, musicians, your EU needs You!

Controversy about Englebert Humperdinck representing the U’nul-point’K and a gang of Russian grandmothers representing Roman Abramovich at the 2012 Eurovision summit in Baku has led to the resurrection of a song which narrowly failed to qualify for selection as the EU official’s entry to the competition back in 1995 when the Euro was unleashed on the world of Irish farmers, British shop-keepers and Bulgarian flea market owners.

Instead of asking nation states to generate nation-state-of-the-art-pop songs, the EU has decided its about time it waved its own flag and get some one in who can do some aural flag waving on their behalves.

The song – Ich bin ein Berliner and du bist ein dummkopf – was written by Brussels burocrats on a night out in Sunderland, picked by Georgio Morodor, given an electronic make over and played to the turbo-folk hoardes across the Balkans through the late ’90s and early ’00s.

The concept that the EU itself should be represented at Eurovision is being hotly contested by the UK government and UKIP as it’s being seen as a surreptitious attempt to ingratiate the British public into the benefits of the Euro: and their resistence ensured that the song was never released on the Great European Public.

But nevertheless, you can’t keep a good man down (as Hotlegs once mumbled on the B side of Neanderthal Man) and the song is attracting a lot of interest on social media.

Well, the lyric maybe: the Brussels burocrats have been politely snubbed by Morodor and they are now looking for a suitable composer and musical arranger to bring their collective efforts to an eager, new young Eurovision audience.

For those aspiring composers and arrangers amongst you, keen to gather fame, fortune and eventual ignominy through the joy that is Eurovision, here are the lyrics in all their unedited glory:

In a restaurant, the elderly memories
one German, one Brit, one Rumanian, 
two Turks, two Hungarians and a Dutchman, 
swapped over cheese, wurst and red wine.
Our gestures give us away; 
the sweep of the hand from the plate to the waitress, 
the cough, the handshake, the awkwardness.
Signifying troubling difference.

but the younger ones laugh
as if nothing were amiss.
This is about them, here and now, 
putting our history behind them.
They ignore the coughs and embarrassments of their elders
adopting the easy going nature of a young Hungarian lad
laughing with a Romanian girl 
with no more to it than that.

And what binds us? The young to the old?
A spirit of peace, democracy and don’t forget the economy.
Its all about the economy, stupide.
You are the next generation of refuge workers
who will do shite jobs for the lousiest of pay
and then not unreasonably
apply for a national, legal identity.
Wir Sind  Berliner aber Sie Sind dummkoepfe.

Nudeln, rosti, pommels frites, pasta,
The European carbohydrates
Differ only in their shape and texture.
Deep down, the Bucharest lady
Secretly harbours the Irish waffle;
The ancient Bulgarian
Longs for tender mung beans,
Yet the Brits all gather around chicken tandoori.

Come in, Graham Norton: your time is up!

Self esteem is part of your body!

Workshops and Activities at the Healing Space have been offering workshops and a self help service which aims to:

* Take Care of your Skin
* Take Care of your Immune system
* Take Care of your Nervous System and Stress Response
* Take Care of your Digestion
* Take Care of your Self Esteem

Answers on a postcard please as to where your ‘Self Esteem’ is located in your body.

Flow: prayer for a provisional ending

As life begins
The circle of evolution continues
Life flows through my body
like the wind blows through nature.

Flowing beside the city
Beside the river
Down by the docks
Along the far side of the port,

My words and stories evolve into thoughts and memories
and through these
my world becomes a performance.

A place where the boats fill up
The seagulls fly straight
And the passengers look out
To a place and time

Where my imagination flows
My humanity becomes a performance
Where possibilities begin
And end and begin again.

The tide surges
It falls back
The salmon are left on the shoreline
Waiting for the signals

To call them back
To the ocean
And back to the stream
They left in their youth.

But will the flow ever end?

Composed with Emily Frodsham on the morning of the death of Steve Jobs, as part of the final performance of the Flow Community Arts Autumn School, Sigdal, Norway.

Geoff Pennycook, in memoriam.

Why is Health and Safety a contradiction in terms? Some advice for Human Resource Managers

If a healthy mind and body can be associated with minimising fear, hence reducing insecurity, increasing confidence and so on – then why does a combination of health AND safety in policy documents and organisational habits actually cause the opposite – ie encouraging tendendencies to be risk averse, to be fearful and anxious – and hence feel less secure, less confident?

Being healthy is not the same as being safe. “Health and Safety” as a policy mantra has the makings of  a phrase which has a capacity for its own inbuilt contradiction and self destruction. It’s a fallacious concept behind which many human resource managers cower and attempt to frighten their resources into behaving and moving in particular ways. They would be clearer in their intentions if they were to relable their policies as “health and risk” or  “fearfulness and safety” or  “health and insecurity”.

Being risk-tolerant (and attractive even)  is possibly one of the key features that makes us healthy, alive individuals instead of cowered, withdrawn amoebae.

Might the arts be bad for your health?

There is a wealth of data, strategy documents and rhetoric out there which make the case that participating in, or experiencing, arts practice, is good for one’s health and wellbeing. This ‘good’ is frequently expressed in psychological terms, in social terms and of course with the usual economic justifications somewhere, sotto voce, off-stage. It seems that there’s nothing that a good dose of arts workshop, performance, practice or building can’t fix – or at least ameliorate – these days.

But is there a risk that in promoting this all-encompassing goodness of the arts that we risk exaggerating and glorifying what effects they can achieve? Our ever-increasing instrumentalisation of the arts might be good for the arts economy but is it good for the arts? And actually is it all that good for us?

Lets face it, if we break a leg, we go to hospital, we don’t go to see the local choreographer and ask them to repair the bones and ligaments. If we need come root canal work done, chances are we’d rather have an injection of some rather powerful lignocaine in our gums rather than opt for the opportunity to sing away the pain.

Perhaps the best we can say is that the arts don’t actually do us any harm and that after a broken leg or that excruciating root canal work the best thing we can do is read some poetry or listen to some Beethoven whilst we keep taking the Neurofen.

But perhaps not. Perhaps there’s a possibility that drama work we so fond of might actually be damaging our mental health. Perhaps learning the guitar is tantamount to smoking 5 cigarettes a day. Perhaps the choir we joined is actually increasing infection rates of airborne diseases by factors which we can only wildly guess at the moment.

These are possibly quite preposterous suggestions and the evidence, strategies and rhetoric will flatten them in the matter of seconds. But perhaps not: there might well be a nasty surprise in the middle of all that goodness which will come out to bite us when we’re least expecting it.