Feature tag:www.article19.co.uk,2008-12-13:/06/written_feature//45 2012-05-11T10:44:48Z written feature pieces Movable Type Pro 4.37 In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream tag:www.article19.co.uk,2012:/06/written_feature//45.3429 2012-05-10T12:42:49Z 2012-05-11T10:44:48Z You may or may not be aware that Arts Council England (ACE) in conjunction with the BBC launched an "on demand" service for the arts called 'The Space' on May 1st. The service will run for just six months and is designed to showcase new ways of commissioning "digital" media for the arts, or at least that what the press release says. Article19 http://article19.co.uk thespace.jpg

by Article19

You may or may not be aware that Arts Council England (ACE) in conjunction with the BBC launched an "on demand" service for the arts called 'The Space' on May 1st. The service will run for just six months and is designed to showcase new ways of commissioning "digital" media for the arts, or at least that's what the press release says.

For the purposes of this article we shall skip past the fact that anybody, anywhere has been able to put high quality audio and video media online for years and the only thing notable about The Space is it took them this long to do it and move on.

There are four dance projects funded to produce work directly for The Space. One has already happened, 'The Breakin' Convention' from Sadlers Wells, the others are a dance film version of 'The Rodin Project' by Russell Maliphant, 'Spill' from the Birmingham NDA DanceXchange and 'Come Dance With Me' (stop laughing at the back) from the Ipswich based NDA Dance East.

We're Breakin' Up!

The Breakin' Convention was broadcast live for seven hours (that's not a typo) starting from 4pm on May 7th. Following more than two hours of pre-show interviews the actual show ran for more than three hours, putting some of the oldest classics to shame in terms of sheer endurance.

Video quality was surprisingly good however and was very watchable, or at least it would have been if not for the antics of the vision mixer/producer who was apparently getting paid by the cut and kept switching the camera angle so often it made your head hurt.

We were also introduced to our old friend "hand held camera in the wings", the goto camera angle of the permanently inept.

Still, the idea was to boost the in theatre audience beyond the 1,400 capacity of Sadler's Wells in London. Here in TheLab™ we didn't watch the whole thing but at no point when we were watching did the "live" viewer numbers ever go above 280. The cumulative number, for the whole day, didn't get above 3,000. Eventually the number displaying the live audience was turned off, make of that what you will.

Curiously, press officers from both ACE and Sadler's Wells claimed they were unaware of the actual viewing numbers. Considering the whole point of the The Space is to boost audience numbers for the arts you would think such statistics would be at the very top of their press briefing sheet.

Apart from the "live" aspect of the show the other aim is to create lots of small highlight packages for The Space website and provide video material for the dance companies taking part in the show.

As far as budgets were concerned both press officers decided to play a game of tag, referring us to each other to answer questions. The cost of filming this show and showing it to a few hundred additional people? Just £53,000!

Neither organisation would comment about the fact that £53,000 is more money than most dance companies spend actually touring around the UK to perform in front of actual people.

Spilled

Currently The International Dance Festival Birmingham is up and running in, well, it's in Birmingham isn't it. One performance at the festival is 'Spill' a dance work created by Australian Shaun Parker.

The work itself takes place inside real playgrounds around the West-Midlands. For The Space, DanceXchange will be making ten, three minute videos about the project, when we asked them why ten short episodes they responded;

"The aim is to create bite-size viewing experiences suitable for online use, exploring different aspects of a brand new commission made for parks and playgrounds. (It isn't a serialised TV show)"

Suggesting that only "bite-size" pieces of video are suitable for the web is a very old and misleading position to take. It's also a curious position considering one of the partner organisations for the The Space is the BBC who run the very popular iPlayer service.

None of the videos on iPlayer are three minutes long. In fact people all over the world have been able to watch entire feature films and "serialised" television shows for years all on the internet.

The cost of each of these three minute episodes is just shy of £7,000. DanceXchange stated that the high cost was due to the;

"partnership with a highly experienced professional production company, Maverick TV. The budget was approved by ACE/BBC at the outset, and includes artist time, expenses and royalty fees, and production staff, technical equipment and editing time."

Maverick TV, the "highly experienced, professional production company" usually makes disposable television programmes for Channel4. Don't believe us, well here's a programme description for their current show 'Embarrassing Bodies'

"While Dr Dawn sets up a poo bar in Thailand, Dr James infects himself with hookworm parasites; Dr Christian jets to Ibiza to give the party crowd advice on safe sex, and Dr Pixie travels to the UK's favourite holiday spots with the EB mobile clinic."

We don't know what's worse, that people make a show like that or that people watch a show like that. 'Justified' it 'aint.

The Rub

The common refrain for the press flacks about The Space is "building digital capacity". That claim however is utterly ridiculous because they're not "building" anything at all. The Space will be taken offline in six months. From there the content, whatever scraps are left, will be fragmented across multiple websites and YouTube channels if it makes it online at all.

Digital capacity already exists on the internet and has done for years. Flickr, Vimeo et-al provide high quality services, for very low cost. You can create a website and serve video, audio and images from these platforms, you don't actually have to build any capacity at all.

If the collective brain trust of ACE and the BBC wanted to build "capacity" they would have set up a dedicated production company that did nothing but produce media content for dance, theatre, music, etc. This work would either be for free or at a cost more in keeping with what arts organisations can usually afford. The arts organisations that don't have ACE in their back pocket that is.

You could of course argue that third party services can shut down or go out of business and you would have to start all over again. This is true, but we'll wager that they will all outlast The Space.

The only hurdle is the cost of producing the material.

Bad Math

If a dance company or organisation approached us and asked for a three minute film of their project and we told them it would cost £7,000 they would laugh so hard hospital treatment would be required.

Also, do you really think we could do what we do at Article19, filming live performances and publishing them online if it actually did cost £53,000 to film a show? Even if we sent six operators to each show (which is four more than you really need if you're being extravagant) we couldn't spend that much money.

The live streaming portion of the 'Breakin' Convention' was not the most expensive part of the project. Despite being partnered with the BBC the live stream was handled by UStream, a live streaming service available to anybody. Their most expensive package costs $999 (US) for one month, that's just over £615 (GBP).

In the video and film production business people can pretty much charge you whatever they want, or whatever they can get away with. You want Technocranes, Steadicams, food trucks, lights, producers, visual fx and more? Fine, just pony up the cash and you can have it all. It probably won't make your production look any better but it will certainly be more effective at indulging the egos of the people at ACE towers and the BBC.

If it's expensive, it must be good, right?

There is also no other way to explain the arrogance of a 7 hour long live broadcast from just one show. As mentioned earlier, £53,000 is more money than most dance companies spend on actual touring.

Face Palm

Here in TheLab™ we're all for getting more stuff about dance online but doing it this way is completely unsustainable and down right crazy.

Ridiculous sums of money are being spent in service not of dance or the arts but individual projects and personal indulgences. The only people benefitting here are video production companies.

As a comparison. Article19 was given £4,500 to support the production of our video features. We created 27 video features of 26 dance companies from 7 different countries for a total of 56 videos or 9 hours of published material.

That's more material than these projects combined at a cost of more than £250,000.

Make of that what you will but ACE never again gets to use the terms "value for money" or "cost effective" because clearly, they haven't got a clue.

At the time of publication nobody from Dance East or Russell Maliphant was available to comment.

'Spill' debuts on The Space in July.

]]> Pay Me My Money Down tag:www.article19.co.uk,2012:/06/written_feature//45.3412 2012-04-18T13:46:33Z 2012-04-19T15:00:17Z by Martin French If you're a bit of a news-hound you may have noticed some folks in the media complaining about proposed changes in tax law that might mean fewer large donations for the great and not really that... Article19 http://article19.co.uk tax.jpg

by Martin French

If you're a bit of a news-hound you may have noticed some folks in the media complaining about proposed changes in tax law that might mean fewer large donations for the great and not really that good at all in the arts.

Missing from a lot of the coverage is any form of explanation as to how the changes are a bad thing for the arts or why tax changes should stop rich people being nice.

Step forward your good friends in TheLab™ to make everything nice and clear because we spoke to the people that know the facts.

If you think of ACE as the Big Bad then a Bigger and Badder would have to be The Treasury, the people that decide what all the money is spent on.

Say What?

We know what you're thinking, how do changes in tax law for wealthy people, and people in general, stop them giving money to the arts. Will they have less money?

The simple answer is, sort of. Let's use the example of a fairly well off individual who earns £250,000 per year and also has significant cash assets available to them.

First of all, kudos on all the cash. Second, that level of income means that you fall under the 50% income tax bracket. Before you have even started you are going to be giving £125,000 to the government in income tax alone. Someone earning that kind of money has no personal "tax free" allowance.

Anybody who has ever filled in a tax return however knows that the mothers milk of a tax return is in the deductions. You deduct certain expenses, payments and hundreds of other things to ultimately reduce the amount of taxable income you have.

The sheer number of possible deductions you can use, especially when you start bringing company ownership, assets, property, overseas income and more into the mix is pretty staggering.
  
What we are concerned with here however is giving money to charity and almost all arts organisations are charities. Currently giving money to a charity counts as a deduction, an unlimited deduction.

If we take our well off person making £250,000 per year what they can do, at the moment, is deduct their entire income tax liability by making charitable contributions. If they donate £250,000 they can deduct that entire amount and pay zero income tax.

The Treasury told us that wealthy individuals use a variety of methods to limit tax and it would be rare for somebody to use just one method to reduce their tax liability. But you get the point.

Using our very simple example you can see why giving money to a charity works for you if you are wealthy because if you are smart you get almost all the money back that you gave in donations.

Change Down

The proposed changes will mean that the maximum deduction that any one person can make for charitable donations is either £50,000 or 25% of their income, whichever is greater.

It's important to note that last phrase; "whichever is greater". If you earn £1Million pounds per year you can still claim up to 25% of your income as a deduction which amounts to £250,000. Still a significant deduction.

Remember, you can only claim the deduction if you actually give money to charity. The charity is still benefiting even if you disagree with wealthy people being able to deduct their tax liability down to almost nothing.


Fear and Loathing In Central London

For the most part none of this affects the small or mid-scale because rich people don't often give them any money anyway. It's the large-scale that's sweating the details on this.

Many, like The National Theatre, claim that sans the incentives wealthy people will show that while giving money to their favourite theatre is a nice thing to do it's even nicer if you can claim it as a tax deduction and get your money back.

Asking around some of the big venues we got these responses. First of All from Sadler's Wells CEO Alistair Spalding;

"At a time when the government is placing such emphasis on individual philanthropy as an important substitute to government funding across arts and charities, it is unhelpful and indeed damaging to now create confusion over how private giving can be managed. The existing allowances and Gift Aid provisions ensure that giving to Sadler's Wells is as tax efficient as possible, and although at present we don't have any concrete examples of private donors being affected by the current tax limits under discussion, we would regard with great concern any step backwards in legitimately facilitating those who support the arts."

Geoff Sweeney, Birmingham Royal Ballet's Development Director was somewhat more concerned;

"We are gravely concerned that the budget sends the wrong signal to those who we are encouraging to make large donations who will see the cap as a disincentive. Given the small pool of potential donors we are working with, the margins for error could have a significant financial impact even if just a handful of donors are discouraged by these measures."

The National Theatre, who have been complaining the loudest about these changes, would not let us talk to any of their fundraisers because most of them were in New York. Can't be struggling too much then.

Curiously, none of the organisations we contacted would put their fundraisers on the phone, settling instead for emailed comments.

Good or Bad

So will these changes be "bad" for the arts. Well, if you are small to mid-scale then you won't notice any difference. You're not getting those kind of donations anyway so move along, nothing to see here.

As for the rest. Well, as the Treasury explained wealthy people use more than one mechanism to reduce their tax liability. If they can't use charitable giving as much as they previously could then the chances are they will just use some other method.

If that happens then large charities will probably lose out. However, if the government closes down all the other methods people use to limit income tax liability then...... well rich people may well just keep all their money to themselves. It is charitable giving after all and they don't have to give it to anybody if they don't want to.

At the moment none of this matters much because the changes are more than a year away so plenty of time for you all to become rich and worry about how creative your finances are.

]]> The Hashtag tag:www.article19.co.uk,2012:/06/written_feature//45.3362 2012-02-15T15:11:56Z 2012-02-15T23:16:46Z The inherent problem with many social networking systems or websites is, what we call, signal noise. There is simply so much information floating around that more often than not things simply get lost in the incessant chatter. Article19 http://article19.co.uk hash2.jpg

by Martin French

The inherent problem with many social networking systems or websites is, what we call, signal noise. There is simply so much information floating around that more often than not things simply get lost in the incessant chatter.

Twitter, by its very nature, is prone to the signal noise problem. Unless you studiously manage the people or organisations you are following then the average user is either going to miss a lot of stuff or just give up completely.

Outsiders, those without a Twitter account, searching for information will be even more likely to give up because general searches on Twitter often yield results that are completely un-related to the topic they are searching for.

The Best Hash

Step forward the, so-called, "hashtag". A hashtag on Twitter is any single word or phrase that is proceeded by a # symbol (referred to by Americans as a pound symbol).

Unusually the hashtag itself was not created by Twitter. It was suggested as a convenient way of managing groups of messages by an open source advocate called Chris Messina, who currently works for Google.

In 2009 Twitter made the hashtag a clickable "hyperlink" that presents the users with recent posts that incorporate the selected hashtag.

The principal is simple. You type your message into Twitter, add your chosen hashtag, which should be relevant to your message although not always, and then post.

For the recent State of the Arts conference, hosted by ACE, the #sota12 hashtag was used by dozens of people Tweeting about the event. The widespread use of that particular tag made it very easy for anybody and everybody to quickly locate the information on Twitter being disseminated about the conference.

Other online services also use hashtags but for the purposes of this piece we're just going to discuss Twitter.

Collating

Simply put, the hashtag is about collating information. If things are hard to find it helps if related information about a particular topic can easily be collated into one place. Instead of searching randomly or looking through dozens of Twitter feeds a user can simply click on a link and everything becomes a whole lot easier.

If a particular tag is used by enough people it may start to "trend" on Twitter, meaning the tag will be displayed on Twitter users account home pages. Trending is caused by lots of people talking about the same thing all at the same time and can lead to increased exposure for that particular topic.

US television shows often have hashtags permanently on screen (for example #fringe for the US Fox show of the same name), to encourage viewers to use the tag when talking about the show online.

The trending system is sometimes abused by Twitter users, this being the internet that should come as no surprise however. More often than not the misuse is aimed at spreading fake messages about celebrities dying unexpectedly.

There are, of course, downsides to the hashtag system. The biggest problem is getting people to consistently use the same hashtag when discussing or posting about a particular topic. Twitter doesn't care if something is similar (#sota12 vs #sota2012 for example) because the search criteria is absolute, not relative. If people use different hashtags then the utility of the system becomes diluted or lost completely.

Another issue is that the hashtag has a finite lifetime. Although Tweets containing hashtags are permanent until deleted by the user, Twitter's search system can be unpredictable about which Tweets it chooses to show and older messages are usually out of favour within a week or so.

Contemporary Dance

So now we get to the reason we're talking about hashtags. Getting arts organisations and dance companies to deliver a collaborative communications message is akin to herding cats high on LSD in a hurricane at night.

Many of these organisations are on Twitter, we follow most of them, so getting them all together to use a single, easy to remember hastag should be no big deal, probably.

The tag in question is, of course, #contemporarydance. By using that one phrase any and all information distributed by dance companies, agencies, dancers, students and Article19 becomes instantly linked together. Twitter, as far as contemporary dance is concerned, becomes less like the wild west and more like the wild west with an easy to use information management system.

Dance companies could place the tag in their publicity materials and their programs, on their promo videos, their websites and of course their Tweets. The same goes for dance agencies and theatres that are regular hosts of contemporary dance and anybody else who happens to be talking about the art form.

Because the tag is generic it will act as a general tool to promote the art form and not a particular company or piece of work, something that this art form could really do with.

Best of all it doesn't require a meeting, a panel, a steering group or approval from the board. It's free, it's easy and you don't have to wait for somebody else to do it first. You can just start doing it.

It will take time to become a standard but it will only become a standard if people start doing it and somebody has to go first.

Hashtags are no silver bullet for the profession but they are a simple, effective way to create a collaborative communication infrastructure. We can't think of a good reason not to do this because all you have to do is type #contemporarydance.

]]> The Alston Studio tag:www.article19.co.uk,2012:/06/written_feature//45.3339 2012-01-25T15:19:16Z 2012-01-26T09:21:00Z As we all know education is a big part of the wacky world of dance and to celebrate this Richard Alston Dance Company have set up a website that's all about educating the people. Article19 http://article19.co.uk radc1.jpg

by Article19

As we all know education is a big part of the wacky world of dance and to celebrate this Richard Alston Dance Company have set up a website that's all about educating the people.

Cleverly titled The Alston Studio (.com) it aims to give users a detailed insight into the inner workings of not only the titular dance maker but the company itself.

We won't be going through each and every bit of information on the site because there's too much of it and it's too fragmented, we're just going to cover the basics.

Features

The site contains 10 main sections and several sub sections, located within many of those. From the main sections we have "Richard", "Repertoire", "Music", "Creation" and so on. If you click on the section you get either some text telling what it's all about or a series of links.

The "creation" portion of the website, for example, includes several videos concerning the making of 'Gypsy Mixture', filmed at the company's studio in London.

These short videos feature Mr Alston talking through various sections of the piece with the dancers. Although the videos are reasonably interesting from the point of view of constructing movement sequences there's not a whole of depth in any of them.

In total, the four videos last for a little over 30 minutes.

Sadly, this lack of depth is something that permeates the entire experience at thealstonstudio.com.

At the bottom of the page are some links to PDF documents that act as written references for teachers to use if they are watching the videos with their students.

You can't download the video material for offline viewing however so if you don't have an internet connection handy you're out of luck. This is an odd decision on the part of the company, rectifying it would have been simple.

So it goes throughout every section of this website.

Issues

In terms of design and layout the 'Gypsy Mixture' section of the site is the perfect example of the poor design in evidence throughout.

The five videos that make up 'Gypsy Mixture' are just thrown onto the page one on top of the other. We feel sure there was a meeting held with RADC and the designer of the site where it was suggested that teacher's would just run the video full screen via a projector or interactive whiteboard.

Perhaps some teachers will do this but what about those using the site on their own computer, or in a computer lab? None of the videos has a text description alongside and each video is simply called "day 1, part 1", etc.

Despite the fact ThePlace has purchased a Vimeo "Pro" account at a cost of $200(US) none of the videos are in High Definition. If a teacher does blow these things up to full screen on a projector the students will not be amused by the pixelated mess that greets them on screen.

Let's just say that full screen on a 27 inch monitor was not a very pleasing visual experience.

Finally, whomever decided that a "credits" video needed to be created and presented separately should probably be relieved of their job.

Moving to No Music

Another section of this educational experience covers music. Music is of course very important to dance especially to the work of Richard Alston.

The music section however doesn't actually have any music on it. What you do get are some short quotes culled from various interviews with the dance maker where he talks about how he uses music and that's it.

Did it not occur to anybody that what they could have done was pick a nice piece of Creative Commons music (that is free from licensing restrictions), have Mr Alston craft a short work to that music, say 5 minutes, and then make a nice 10-15 minute video where he discusses musicality and how it relates to movement illustrated by this short work?

How do you encourage students to be diligent and work hard when the people who did this evidently couldn't be bothered?

We should also mention that Mr Alston does actually work for the company so it would not have taken a great deal of effort to conduct an interview with him.

Lighting The Way

Further issues with design and consistency emerge when you look at the lighting section.

We're not entirely sure why this is on the site at all but, like the music section, they try to talk about lighting with no visual explanation at all.

You do get some images of a lighting plot sheet and some sort of technical diagram but unintentional hilarity ensues when you click on the images and the resulting pop ups are too small to read the information on them.

Why are these "help sheets" in tiny image format and not PDF format like the other help sheets? Also, what exactly is a teacher or a student supposed to do with a highly technical lighting chart sans any detailed explanation from an expert about what's on it?

One of the images is below, actual size!

radc2.jpg

Interaction Action

A mainstay of today's internet is interaction. From simple comments to full blown web based applications the web is about being able to communicate.

The latter is usually very expensive but the former is a simple way to talk to your websites users. thealstonstudio.com doesn't even manage to do that though. There is no way at all to actually communicate directly with the company. A contact form is provided, if you can find it, but before you can use it you apparently have to agree to the terms and conditions for using the site.

You can't read the terms and condition though because the link to that page doesn't actually work.

Comment platforms like Disqus provide powerful and free systems to interact with your users. Again, we have to ask, why didn't anybody think of that?

As far as we could determine the company don't even have a Twitter account.

Dazed and Confused

From top to bottom thealstonstudio.com doesn't appear to know what it is supposed to be doing or who it's supposed to be doing it for.

Information is badly organised, badly presented and, more often than not, isn't actually that helpful or instructive when you do find it.

More attention seems to have be paid to picking pretty images to illustrate each section (a dreadful throwback to the 1990s) than to the purpose of the site and the information architecture within it.

A key mistake is the complete lack of focus. Instead of trying to do a single thing really well thealstonstudio.com does everything badly and it has all the hallmarks of a resource built by a committee and that committee had absolutely no idea what it wanted or how to achieve it.

Simply put, take this thing off the internet and do it properly before putting it back.

[ thealstonstudio.com ]

]]> Resolution Revolution tag:www.article19.co.uk,2012:/06/written_feature//45.3325 2012-01-16T17:41:51Z 2012-01-16T17:55:54Z The format of Resolution hasn't changed since the festivals inception during the reign of Ashford of Johns in 1786. It's just triple bill after triple bill, ad-infinitum. Here in TheLab™ we thought the tired format could do with an overhaul, so let's take a look at what we came up with. Article19 http://article19.co.uk place.jpg

by Article19

Right off the bat the headline is beyond cheesy but let's just live with it and move on shall we? Currently, in the murk and grime that is London, the Resolution festival is plodding its way through innumerable performances from many a new dance maker.

The format of Resolution hasn't changed since the festivals inception during the reign of Ashford of Johns in 1786. It's just triple bill after triple bill, ad-infinitum.

Here in TheLab™ we thought the tired format could do with an overhaul, so let's take a look at what we came up with.

Wedge Issues

The central problems with Resolution are; A) too many shows, so much so that The Place actually brags about how many show there are and B) the emphasis on the companies participation is too heavily weighted toward the performance of a piece of work.

Any artistic director or dance maker with a brain knows that the end performance is about 5% of the battle at best. The show lasts for about 30 minutes, the creative period to make that show lasts for weeks if not months.

Most Resolution participants struggle with no funding, no rehearsal space and no time to actually make their work fit for presentation to a paying audience.

So here's what we need to do. Restrict Resolution to 30 participating dance companies, provide £300,000 in funding for those 30 participants, persuade the National Dance Network to get their ducks in a row to provide rehearsal space and tech support (lighting design, et-al) and that's it.

The whole festival is done in 10 days because you keep the triple bill format.

The Progressive Festival

Creating a new format for Resolution would provide numerous advantages over the current all or nothing "benefits" allegedly provided by performing on a stage in London alongside several dozen other new dance companies.

As mentioned, the creative/rehearsal stage is almost certainly more important for new dance makers.

Choreography is a craft that needs, above all else, time to be learned and honed to a fine point. You need the time in the studio to create your movement, experiment with ideas, make mistakes, throw it all away and start again.

Providing funding of £10,000 per-participant will give them the luxury of the time they need to work with their dancers (who will be getting paid).

For their part the dance makers will have to keep their production to between 1 and 4 dancers but that shouldn't be a problem. This is about learning a craft after all, not an excercise in drafting patterns for the corps de ballet.

Many of the fledgling dance works on show at festivals like Resolution also suffer from chronic under-rehearsal and the lack of rehearsal direction.

Years ago on Article19 we suggested that all National Dance Agencies should have an in-house rehearsal director to provide support and guidance to dance makers on the work they are making.

Many established choreographers don't rehearse their own work and they don't rehearse their own work for a reason. They are just too close to it to see potential problems.

The outside eye brings in invaluable experience at cleaning up movement, editing out the unnecessary fluff from a piece and generally making the thing both leaner and meaner.

This type of production support should be integral to the "New Resolution" because it's a big part of teaching dance makers to be "good" dance makers.

The Money Question

Believe it or not coming up with £300,000 per year to pay for this idea is almost certainly the easiest part. For every good project funded by Arts Council England they fund several idiotic projects like the Ballet Boyz vanity documentary that we have already ripped to shreds in this very publication.

The £7Million of funding given to Rambert to pay for their new building in London would fund this project for a staggering 20 years.

ACE has the money, they just don't use it very well. There is also no reason why the arts funders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could not contribute to the annual running cost of the project.

Additionally, after the Olympics packs it bags in the summer there will be considerably more money available to ACE via the National Lottery, according to ACE that is, so paying for this should be easy.

Making the Cut

If you are going to pick and choose who gets £10,000 in funding then you will need people to do the picking and the choosing. We hesitate to nominate the National Dance Network for this task but they do have the benefit of being located in various parts of the country.

Bringing in the AD's of established companies would be a good way of balancing out the inherent administrative crazy though. It would also be a good idea to bring the bigger dance schools into this. NSCD, Laban, etc could all provide invaluable support and guidance.

Spreading the application process across the country would also be a good way of ensuring that the "New Resolution" does not become London centric.

Being accepted or not is also not too hard on the applicants. Since the project is annual. Fail the first time? Then you just try again the following year. If you are accepted you can be barred from applying again for a year or two just to keep things fair.

"New Resolution" should be about providing opportunities. Not selecting people because you think they are the next Wayne McGregor, because one Wayne McGregor is enough after all.

The mantra for "New Resolution" should be; "You Can't Learn If You Never Get To Try".

The All New Resolution

Shifting the focus from the performance to the creative side of dance making will be an invaluable learning experience for any new dance maker.

Providing proper rehearsal and creative support, through the National Dance Network and established companies, would be hugely more significant than the plethora of meaningless "associate artist" schemes currently running throughout dance right now.

Those new to the game need meaningful support so they can figure out if being a choreographer is something they actually want to do and to figure out if being a choreographer is something they are actually good at.

Not everybody is going to make it of course, but that should be based on talent and skill, not on having friends in the right places.

You don't guarantee better work at Resolution doing it this way but you do guarantee that the work will be better crafted, better rehearsed and better presented year on year and the really good stuff won't get lost in the noise of several weeks worth of triple bills.

Resolution is a starting point and what better way to make that start than by ensuring the participants have every possible chance of getting it right?

]]> My CV tag:www.article19.co.uk,2012:/06/written_feature//45.3308 2012-01-09T14:03:56Z 2012-01-09T14:39:03Z The days of mailing in a printed copy of your CV for a job are over. That ship has sailed, anybody who thinks otherwise is probably working at the Royal Opera House but even that creaky old wreck is getting with the times. Article19 http://article19.co.uk by Martin French

The days of mailing in a printed copy of your CV for a job are over. That ship has sailed, anybody who thinks otherwise is probably working at the Royal Opera House but even that creaky old wreck is getting with the times.

Everybody tends to assume that you will have access to a personal computer and a word processor so you can put together your own CV at any time.

Even if you have your own machine though a straight forward word processor is not something that comes with a new computer, even the most expensive ones.

Before you run off a buy into Microsoft Office or some other offering from Apple, et-al there is a fully functional free offering in the shape of Google Documents.

Getting Started

The first thing you need is a Google account. If you already use Gmail then you are good to go, otherwise set up a new account by visiting Gmail.com or one of a million other Google related websites.

Once you have your account and you are logged in click on the main Google logo and select "documents" from the drop down list.

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On the next screen you will either have a blank list or the "imported from Google Notebooks" document. Here in TheLab™ we never have used Google Notebooks so we have no idea where it came from. Just delete it if it's bothering you.

Click on the "create" button in the top left of the screen and select "document" to get started on your very first creation. You can create interactive spreadsheets and all manner of other things with Google Docs but we are interested in a normal text document at the moment.

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You will then be presented with what looks like a very clean and simple word processor with all the usual controls to format your text and layout your new CV.

To change the name of your document simply click on "untitled document" and type in a new name.

There is no need to save at any time. Google takes care of all of that automatically as you type in real time. Even if the power is suddenly cut from the computer you are using then you won't have lost a thing.

google3.jpg

Getting Things Done

Almost everything you can do with a regular desktop word processor is there. Fonts, tabs, bullet points, colours and images are all available should you choose to use them. Keyboard shortcuts also work for undo and redo as well as bold text, italics and underlining.

If you want to insert an image then click on the small icon illustrated in the screen shot.

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This will open a small window and from here you have two ways to insert an image into the document. You can either drag an image from your computer's desktop into the large box (illustrated) or click on the "choose an image to upload" button.

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Once the image is in place it will automatically set itself to "fixed position" which, on most occasions, is not what we want.

To move the image you need to click, somewhat confusingly, the "fixed position" text to switch it to "in line with text". This will allow you to place the image almost anywhere that you want within the document. This feature is probably one of the flakiest in Google Docs since the image seems to jump around fairly randomly and can make a big mess of the text if you're not careful.

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If you really must insert images into your document then do so with care.

Share Time

Once you have completed your document then it's time to share it with the masses. Google Docs offers a number of formats for exporting your document so you can have a personal copy to share through email or print out.

The most popular format is PDF (Portable Document Format). To export to this format simply click on "File> Download as > PDF" and you will be prompted for a location to save the document.

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If you are on a shared computer then you can save to a USB thumb drive and take your document home with you on that.

The other way to share is straight from Google Docs. Simply click on the "share" button, in the top right corner. By default your new documents are private and cannot be seen by anybody else.

To change this, first of all select "change" on the privacy settings as illustrated in the image below.

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When you select change we recommend that you use the "anyone with the link" option which you can then email to people who need to see your CV (no Google account required for viewing). Take care with the "public" option especially if your CV contains personally identifying information like telephone numbers or a home address.

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Free and Simple

There you have it, a free and simple way to create your CV, or other documents, with Google Docs (other options are available from different providers).

Other than being free the main advantage is your documents are saved remotely, so no need to worry about things being lost and you can access your stuff from any computer, anywhere in the world.

The downsides? There may be performance issues depending on the browser or the computer you are using since the word processing application is basically running inside a web browser and there is a lack of flexibility with some of the features, like handling images.

Those are minor annoyances however when using what has become a very polished product and creating your CV and storing it this way could prove very useful if you need to apply for an audition and you don't happen to have a copy of it with you, digital or otherwise.

]]> The Awards 2011 tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3277 2011-12-15T13:24:15Z 2011-12-16T23:21:09Z This years awards ceremony took place inside two fast moving vehicles on the south-bound carriageway of the M4. It made serving drinks a challenge and the Imp™ was driving one of the cars so it was all very exciting. Our... Article19 http://article19.co.uk This years awards ceremony took place inside two fast moving vehicles on the south-bound carriageway of the M4. It made serving drinks a challenge and the Imp™ was driving one of the cars so it was all very exciting.

Our winners take away a giant bar of Toblerone, the losers will get run over by a combine harvester, just as soon as we can boost one from the local farmer!

Outstanding Achievement in Dance

In a year when we have seen a lot of older works restaged for a new audience, non stood out more than Candoco Dance Company's reworking of 'Set and Reset' (with an appended 'Reset' thrown in for good measure). Performed with with enthusiasm and enormous skill by the company of 7 dancers this is a piece that epitomises dance. It's sublime music and it's sublime movement, end of!


Mentioned in Dispatches: Ervi Siren 'Viita'. Performed at this years Coda Dance Festival in Oslo the Finnish dance maker, hitherto unknow to us, presented a company of 7 female dancers in a work about feminism, movement and the art of dance. Mission accomplished.

Outstanding Achievement in Dance Performance

It's always a joy to see a skilled dancer cut loose in a evening of work and Ellie Baker of Candoco Dance Company is one such dancer in her performance of both 'Looking Back' and 'Set & Reset/Reset'. This artists ability to blend movement like mercury shifting through zero gravity is unmatched.


Mentioned in Dispatches: Azzurra Ardovini Phoenix Dance Theatre a dancer who is quick as a cat and almost as small and gives new meaning to the words speed and precision.

James MacGillivray of Scottish Dance Theatre. A dancer of incredible experience and poise, deftly illustrated in his performance of 'Dreamt for Light Years' at this years Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The Professional PR Mute Association Award

ACE London, IdeasTap, Jan Younghusband, and that idiot from 'The Most Incredible Thing about Contemporary Dance'.

If you are too gutless to stick up for the ideas and projects your addled organisations come up with on the record then it's time to get out of the game because not only can you not play it very well but the chances are your ideas are demonstrably crap.

The Kim Jong-il Award for Transprency

Mathew Bourne and New Adventures for their completely incompetent handling of their choreography award. Not only did they give the award to two former employees but also had company members sitting on the judging panel.


A perfect example of how to turn a good idea into bad press that leaves a horrible taste in the mouth reminiscent of cold medicine mixed with a half measure of arsenic.

The David Cameron 'All in This Together' Award

Arts Council England for failing completely to reign in the funding of large scale organisations in the great funding whitewash of 2011.


The big guys and their salaries went unharmed as small and mid-scale companies took a severe beating to the head and neck. ACE presumes all of this will be fixed by Catalyst Arts a policy with more holes in it than a piece of cheese full of holes.

Coincidentally, at one of the seminars for this wretched scheme, somebody mentioned that we spend more on cheese than charitable giving.

Well that's sorted that out then!

Roll on 2012!

]]> Say It With HTML5 tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3276 2011-12-15T12:58:55Z 2011-12-15T13:16:55Z Video on the web has become as ubiquitous as fast food on the high street. Chances are most web users will watch at least a few videos per week online. Whether it's a full length TV show using on the BBC's iPlayer, an interview feature here on Article19 or something terrible on YouTube. Article19 http://article19.co.uk

by Martin French

Video on the web has become as ubiquitous as fast food on the high street. Chances are most web users will watch at least a few videos per week online. Whether it's a full length TV show using on the BBC's iPlayer, an interview feature here on Article19 or something terrible on YouTube.

This widespread availability of video may lead some to believe that delivering the moving image on the internet is easy for websites like Article19 and all the others.

That belief however couldn't be further from the truth.

Allow us to explain.

Up until about 10 days ago video on Article19 was delivered using a format called QuickTime (developed by Apple). QuickTime is a so-called "plugin". This means you, the user, have to download a separate piece of software to plug-in to your web browser (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc) so you can view the videos we publish.

If you don't have the plugin you can't watch the video, it's as simple as that.

The other popular video capable plugin used by the vast majority of web sites is Flash (published by Adobe Software, the people that make Photoshop, among other things)

Websites like YouTube and Vimeo use Flash to playback the vast majority of their content.

Choices Choices

The video above is in HD Flash format, try it and see how it plays.

Publishers have to make a choice as to which video format to use on their site both for the convenience of their users, the technical requirements of their site and the cost and time involved encoding, uploading and serving each video.

The easy choice is to use Flash because it is, by a wide margin, the plugin most likely to be installed on a users computer by default. Since it is more likely to be installed then a user is less likely to be inconvenienced by having to download it.

Flash however does come with a myriad of problems not least of which is when playing high quality video material the plugin uses a lot of computer processing power. Depending on the computer and the operating system you are using you might experience poor quality playback when watching certain videos.

In our tests Quicktime uses 60% less processing power compared to Flash when using an OSX (Apple) based computer.

The QuickTime plugin is also not without its problems. Although it comes pre-installed on all Apple machines the same cannot be said for Windows based computers. The installed user base for the QuickTime plugin is also dramatically smaller than the Flash plugin.

Bizarrely, Apple's own iPhone and iPad devices, which do not support Flash, struggle to support QuickTime video material unless it is prepared in a very specific way.

Codec

Now, QuickTime and Flash are not actually video formats. You should think of them as "wrappers" that encase the actual video material.

All online video is compressed and encoded from its original format using what is called a "codec". This is an acronym for Coder - Decoder.

We encode the video and upload it then your web browser, via a plugin or other means, decodes the video so you can watch it, simple.

The particular codec we use is called H264, what that means is not at all relevant, and up until very recently we encased that H264 video in a QuickTime wrapper to deliver it to our readers.

The Third Way

There is a third way however to deliver video material to users thanks to the developments of modern web browsers and a little thing called HTML5.

Without bogging you all down in inane technicalities, HTML is, simply put, the computer language Article19 uses to display web pages to you and it is now in version 5 of its long and torturous development.

A big part of HTML5 is a zero tolerance for plugins, especially when it comes to multi-media, especially when it comes to video.

All the new versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and the mobile web browsers used on the iPhone, iPad and some Android based phones, support HTML5. They all support it to differing degrees but that's another discussion and one that you are probably not at all interested in.

These new browsers all support the direct playback of online video material without any plugins at all. As long as the video is correctly formatted then you don't need to download any additional software.

What this means is that we no longer feel the need to use QuickTime to serve any of our video material. In fact all of our HD material has been switched to HTML5. The older videos will be switched to the new format over time.

So that's great, no more plugins, no more hassle, everything will now "just work"?

Unfortunately not. Remember the "codec" thing we talked about before? Well, in their infinite wisdom the makers of the web browsers have all decided to support different codecs for their particular browsers.

Safari, iPhone, iPad and IE9 support H264, Firefox supports something called Ogg Theora (not making that up) and Chrome (made by Google) supports another codec called WebM.

Chrome initially supported H264, and at the time of writing still does, but Google, in their infinite lack of wisdom, didn't like playing with the other children and switched their support to WebM. A format that they, coincidentally, own the rights to.

As a footnote, IE7 and IE8 don't support HTML5 video at all.

The video above is in H264 format using Sublime Video Player

Same Old Problems

So for us, here in TheLab™, what does this mean? Well the HTML5 specification makes it really easy for us to serve up the video that works on the browser you are using.

All we have to do is create a video in each format and all will be well. So if we take the bgroup video 'The Lessening of Difference' as an example we just need to create an H264 desktop version, and H264 mobile version, an OGG Theora version, a WebM version and a Flash version (for IE7 and 8).

Instead of creating 2 versions (H264 desktop and H264 mobile) we now have to create 5 versions which would dramatically increases the amount of time it would take to create a feature to say nothing of the uploading time and the storage costs. You can't store video online for free you know!

So how is HTML5 helping us out then, why not stick with QuickTime?

Step forward a small company called Jillion and their brand new service modestly titled "Sublime Video Player".

This player is a so-called "cloud" service which means that the video player itself is not stored on Article19's web server at all. Every time you load one of the videos in the HD section the player is actually loaded from Jillion.

Why do this?

First of all it means that the player itself stays constantly up to date and nobody, especially the user, has to download anything. No plugins, no updates, no nothing.

Secondly, thanks to some clever coding the player will automatically detect which browser or mobile device you are using and make the video play.

Here in TheLab™ all we have to do is make our usual two versions of the video (H264 Desktop and H264 Mobile) and the Sublime player does the rest.

In our tests it works seamlessly across all browsers and mobile devices no matter what their level of support is for HTML5 or particular video codecs.

All Is Well

Sadly all is not well. The Sublime Player is very clever but really what it's doing is trying to sort out the mess that is video format support across different web browsers and mobile platforms.

If you look at our videos in Firefox then the Jillion player has to apply a Flash wrapper around the H264 video to make it play because Firefox doesn't support H264 and we don't support OGG Theora. We don't support it because, to be blunt, it's crap. The same goes for IE7 and IE8.

It also adds another layer of complexity to watching video material. The player has to be loaded from a server that is not under our control. If Jillion's server goes down then the player will not load and you can't watch video material.

HTML5 and Sublime Video also can't fix the myriad of idiosyncrasies of the web when it comes to delivering content to your computer from a remote web server located thousands of miles away.

There are still a lot of things that can go wrong which might stop you from watching a particular video and, sadly, there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

[ Jillion 'Sublime Video' ]


]]> The Philanthropy Gambit tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3166 2011-08-07T19:13:44Z 2011-08-09T18:06:40Z by Michelle Lefevre Coming soon to an application form near you is Arts Council England's secret plan to fight government funding cuts to the arts with a £40Million philanthropy push. The plan is a secret because they won't talk about... Article19 http://article19.co.uk by Michelle Lefevre

Coming soon to an application form near you is Arts Council England's secret plan to fight government funding cuts to the arts with a £40Million philanthropy push. The plan is a secret because they won't talk about it, at least no yet, so we, here in TheLab™, thought it might be a good idea to take a look at the potential pitfalls of the funding monoliths latest big idea.

We should point out that this plan is not actually ACE's at all. It's been pushed on them by the coalition government via the Department for Culture Media and Sport. ACE didn't do a whole lot of pushing back though so they're fair game.

The £40Million in funding, imaginatively titled "Catalyst Arts", will be broken up into the three parts but, essentially, it's all about "enabling" arts organisations to enhance their fund raising abilities so they can plunder the hitherto untapped vast wealth of private individuals and corporations. Or at least that's the theory.

The Fundraiser Gambit

One possible hypothesis is a dance company, let's say a mid-scale one, get's a £25,000 grant to employ a specialist fundraiser for 12 months to, you know, raise some funds.

If the fund-raiser manages to score £25,000 then the whole thing has been a waste of time because ACE could have simply handed over the £25,000 to the company for their artistic work. To make the whole thing finically viable the dance company would probably have to raise double the amount it cost to employ the specialist, if not more.

Since the mid-scale dance company is not living in a bubble then they will have to compete with all the other arts organisations out there for the same limited sponsorship money that is, allegedly, available. Unless the specialist has a "no compete" clause in their contract they could, potentially, be working for more than one organisation at a time.

From the specialists point of view they could care less who actually does well out of employing them since they get paid anyway, have no long term commitment to any company and they will only ever brag about their success stories, not their failures.

It's also not clear if there is a significant pool of fund raising talent available for companies to hire. We feel sure that many will come out of the woodwork when they get the scent of free money in the air but the quality of their skills will almost certainly be untested in the arts arena.

If their skills have been tested then where have they been all this time?

The David and Goliath Gambit

Large scale organisations like Sadler's Wells and the Royal Opera House currently spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year on fund raising. Organisations of their size have entire teams of people devoted to doing just that and only that.

Does ACE imagine that these large-scale players are all going to step back and make way for all the small and mid-scale companies who, thanks to the cuts, are going to be looking to the same corporate sponsors for support?

Also, does ACE imagine that Sadler's Wells, for example, is going to give up all its fund raising tricks and their list of contacts to anybody who asks?

The idea that the large-scale is going to come across as all magnanimous to help the smaller fish in the pond is completely laughable especially if the big fish are going to get hurt in the process.

Additionally, more often than not, large-scale organisations have the one thing that corporate sponsors are really looking for when they give money. Big shiny buildings with meeting rooms, conference halls, caterers and splashy shows with expensive programs for them and their corporate buddies.

Dance companies, for the most part, don't have those things, so what are they going to offer in return for the corporate shilling?

They could try offering dinner dates with their dancers, as Scottish Ballet did a few years back, but such things are not recommended unless you want to be hauled across the coals for the rest of your life.

The USA Gambit

Much has been made of the way the USA deals with the arts. Public funding is relatively low while private giving is relatively high but the UK is not the USA, not even a little bit.

That might sound blindingly obvious but bear with us here. First of all the United States is a vast country that covers four time zones with more cultural and socio-political differences than you can shake a few million sticks at. California is nothing like Illinois which is nothing like St Louis which is nothing like New York which, in turn, is nothing like California.

Ask a theatre company in Minnesota or Connecticut if they find it as easy, relatively speaking, to raise funding compared to a theatre company in New York.

Covering that vast country you have a plethora of state and federal laws that help or hinder cultural organisation to raise money from private sources, mostly in the shape of tax incentives. The UK has few such incentives and thus far the DCMS and the Treasury have announced no firm or coherent plans to introduce any.

Size also plays a part in the competitive nature of actually raising money. A mid-scale theatre company in New York State will be unlikely to try and tap the same funding sources as a mid-scale dance company in Washington State, some 3,000 miles to the west.

In the UK it's safe to say that arts organisations in Liverpool, Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester and Birmingham are all going to be going after the same potential sources of sponsorship. To put it simply, this country isn't big enough to stop everybody from every art form bumping into one another as they seek out private sponsors.

The We're Gonna Ignore The Fact That Companies Already Do This Gambit

If you have ever filled out an application for funding from ACE then you will be well aware of the fact that the funding monolith does not fund any project to 100% of its cost and they never have.

Even if your company is an NPO/RFO you don't get all the money you need to operate.

All arts organisations raise money from other sources, in some cases dozens of sources, so they can carry out their activities.

Most of this money comes from local authorities, charities, foundations and development agencies. It's somewhat ludicrous of ACE and the DCMS to think that for the last twenty years or so everybody has been willfully ignoring the £25Million ACE claims they will be able to raise over the next four years when Catalyst Arts starts running.

The Match Funds Gambit

Some of the money from the program is going to be used for match funding. If you get money from a sponsor then ACE will, if your application is successful, match that sponsorship money with some of their own. So far so good.

What's not clear is why this match funding is going to act as incentive to the potential sponsor. Why do they care that your company will get more money from ACE if they give you some of their money?

There is certainly an incentive for the company trying to raise the money but it won't make it any easier for them to get the sponsorship in the first place and that's the really hard part of the equation.

No More Gambits

From what we know at the moment Catalyst Arts doesn't seem to address any of the fairly serious issues outlined above never mind the fact that the arithmetic doesn't add up. Spending £40Million over 4 years and only guesstimating that you'll make an additional £25Million for the arts across a country of over 40 million people is a pretty poor investment.

Companies that recieve grants to employ fund raising "experts" won't be able to retain those experts without additional funding year on year. If the fund raising "expert" is raising money just so they can retain their own job then........ well, you get the point.

We feel sure that ACE will be able to explain all of this when and if they ever put somebody up for interview. Given their track record on NPOs, RFOs, Sustain and lot's of other big ideas there's probably not a great deal of confidence that the answers they give will make any sense.

]]> Share Fail tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3158 2011-07-21T14:23:34Z 2011-08-03T14:00:46Z Social networks are supposed to make sharing easy but they only work if everybody actually shares material and does it with some consistency. Reaching a lot of people should be a very simple task. Article19 http://article19.co.uk

(we recommend you watch in full screen mode)

by Martin French

Social networks are supposed to make sharing easy but they only work if everybody actually shares material and does it with some consistency. Reaching a lot of people should be a very simple task.

To illustrate the point we've made the above video which you might like to share with people, or not if our theories are correct.

We, here in TheLab™, have pointed out before that the wide world of dance was quick to share information about Google and their brief sojourn into the wacky world of dance with a short Martha graham doodle on their homepage.

Google is a multi-billion dollar corporation with a staggering global reach and needs the publicity about as much as a dog need instructions on how to chase a cat.

When it comes to sharing information about, you know, dance, the profession retreats back into its clamshell and says nothing. National Dance Agencies, dance companies, ACE, you name it, there is no end to the amount of information they won't share about each other no matter what it is or how important it might be.

Companies and organisations are also not really adept at getting their own staff in on the sharing game using their own social networking connections.

It's just an awful lot of people talking about themselves all the time. There's nothing wrong with talking about yourself of course but if that's all you ever do then people can and do get tired of you very very quickly.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this issue is that all that is required to make it work is the will to do it. It doesn't cost money, you don't need training, you don't need to hire a specialist, you don't need to fill in an application form and you don't need anybody's permission.

You just have to do it.

]]> Hiding Under The Stairs tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3151 2011-07-11T14:41:45Z 2011-07-11T17:55:00Z In the old country we often describe trying to get someone to talk to you who is being particularly intractable as being an experience akin to "pulling teeth". It's messy, painful and getting people to sit down and take that pain is getting harder and harder even though it might actually be good for them. Article19 http://article19.co.uk by Article19

In the old country we often describe trying to get someone to talk to you who is being particularly intractable as being an experience akin to "pulling teeth". It's messy, painful and getting people to sit down and take that pain is getting harder and harder even though it might actually be good for them.

Over the last several weeks Article19 has been trying to get various people to talk about various things with little or no success. They either outright refuse to do it or fall back to their default position of suggesting we ask them the questions via email.

Start Pulling

Take Arts Council England (ACE) for example. The London based funding monolith has announced its plans to boost philanthropy in the arts not once but twice, the latest announcement coming a little under two weeks ago. The first announcement was in December last year.

While the practical plans for the project, called 'Catalyst Arts', seem straight forward enough the actual thinking behind how it works appears to be completely non-existent. The second press release from June 29 says this about the £30Million section of the scheme;

"It is anticipated that the £30 million fund will enable arts organisations to generate around £25 million of new money from private giving by 2015."

Throughout the rest of the release there are words like "develop", "ideas", "capability", etc, etc. No actual details on how ACE came up with the numbers, how the £40Million in total funding was split into three sections and how or why anybody should believe that any of this is actually going to work.

From the press release the whole thing looks like a gold mine for consultants and advisors. Another pot of money that has nothing to do with creating jobs for artists and has a lot to do with creating another layer of bureaucracy.

And by the way, if you're spending £30Million, essentially on administration, and only getting £25Million back by 2015 that seems like a bad investment. Why not just use the £30Million and invest it in actual arts projects?

So we asked ACE for an interview with the person in charge of 'Catalyst Arts' because it might be good for ACE to talk about this and explain the missing details.

A spokesperson at ACE said this in response to our interview request;

"As outlined in the release, the fund is still in development and last week's announcement was an update on our current thinking.  More information and details of criteria and how to apply will be available in the autumn.  In light of this there is not much more detail we can give at this point."

Apparently in the last 6 or 7 months the only things ACE have come up with is how to distribute the money and some numbers evidently pulled from thin air.

Tapped Ideas

When the website IdeasTap, kind of like LinkdIN for young arty people, announced they were associating themselves with the Sky Arts Ignition Fund we, here in TheLab™ , naturally enough, and any intrepid journalist worth their salt is going to pursue such an announcement with questions about associating yourself with Newscorp.

Of course Newscorp is owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns News International that owned the now defunct News of the World along with a lot of other charming news outlets like The Sun, Fox News, the London Times and of course Sky Television.

No dice there either unfortunately because their editor James Hopkirk, who used to work for The Sunday Times coincidentally, and is also a journalist wouldn't be interviewed on the phone, only via email.

We don't do email interviews for the fairly obvious reason that there is no way we can verify if the person writing the answers is the person we're asking the questions of, it's too difficult to do follow ups and it actually takes a lot longer than spending 10 minutes on the phone. And, yes, it's far easier to squeeze people when you're talking to them.

The list goes on and on.

NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) either wouldn't talk about or seemed completely incapable of discussing their "£1/2 Million research fund to stimulate digital innovation in the arts and culture" which they are launching alongside ACE and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

In fact they initially asked if they could see what we were going to write before it was published so they could edit their responses. (say what? Ed!) We of course refused that request.

ACE, again, wouldn't allow any journalists into their Building Digital Capacity for the Arts seminars lest we ask some awkward questions of the protagonists that might just expose these things as nothing more than a talking shop (they told us there wasn't enough room in the venue).

ACE also declined to provide interviews with senior staff about the funding cuts and what their level of responsibility/involvement was in that process. The funding monolith is particularly adept at not giving on the record interview about its programs.

The Green Room in Manchester, which recently closed down after losing its ACE funding from next year, declined to be interviewed about why they were shutting the venue down so quickly (they were funded for the rest of the the current financial year). From the outside it looks like they just locked the door and left town.

Over at the BBC they refused to put Jan Younghusband (commissioning editor) up for interview to discuss their train wreck of a documentary about contemporary dance or in-fact the entire train wreck of a contemporary dance season on BBC4 that featured very little actual contemporary dance.

Dance UK, the advocacy organisation for dance, wouldn't answer questions about funding cuts even after they themselves were cut completely. Such is their displeasure with Article19 they point blank refuse to link to anything we publish because pretending we don't exist is far easier than having to deal with our impertinent questions. So much for providing information to dancers.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

Perhaps the most puzzling or disturbing realisation to come from this culture of silence and obfuscation is that many of these people, and dozens more like them, are the ones responsible for pushing and promoting dance and culture in general to government, policy makers and, ultimately, the general public.

It should be alarming to all that when asked questions about the reasoning, operation and viability of a particular project those responsible stutter and stammer and stick their fingers in their ears and shout "la la la la la I am not listening to you".

The recent debacle with Opera North canceling a community performance, making a spectacular mess of explaining why and then humiliatingly re-instating the performance is perhaps the most graphic illustration that the management/administrative side of the arts are just holding on way too tight.

If you don't talk it looks like you're afraid, that you have no confidence in your project or the capability of that project to deliver its goals. If you only communicate via email then all that illustrates is that you lack confidence and are petrified of making mistakes. If we we're being more blunt we could call you a coward.

We've said this before and we're going to have to say it again. Just because you don't want to talk about the potential shortcoming of your work doesn't mean those shortcomings will magically go away.

Many working in the arts are beginning to resemble failed US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Ms Palin doesn't give interviews (unless they are on, of course, Fox News, the cable news network that pays her to appear).

Ms Palin feels, even though she seeks high public office, that she should not be accountable nor pressed on important issues because, in her eyes, the media will distort what she says. All the media will actually do however is report what she says, her own words and ideas are the things that constantly bring her down.

Making mistakes is not the end of the world so we strongly urge you all to own what you do and own what you say and take some responsibility. Being compared to Sarah Palin is not something you really want to be stuck with.

]]> Ad Space tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3109 2011-05-28T15:34:04Z 2011-05-30T15:50:10Z We've all been in a theatre, before a show or after a show and perused the messy, confusing mass of publicity flyers for other productions "coming soon" to the venue you're standing in. Article19 http://article19.co.uk by Michelle Lefevre

We've all been in a theatre, before a show or after a show and perused the messy, confusing mass of publicity flyers for other productions "coming soon" to the venue you're standing in.

They vary in size and quality but they all have one thing in common. They are completely impractical and most of the printed space on them is taken up with things you don't want to know or don't need to know.

One flyer we viewed recently, for a theatre production, was nothing more than pull quotes from critics top to bottom alongside the most boring photograph you have ever seen. Far from encouraging us to come and see the show it was more like a crucifix to a vampire. "Flee", it screamed, "save yourselves", so we did!

So what happens when you make things small, neat, portable and, perhaps, even desirable?

Shrink Wrapped

Let's imagine that upon entering a theatre you are presented with not a cheap flyer rack with a bunch of badly designed scraps of paper in them but a far nicer and cleaner display as illustrated below.

What we have here is simple. A large(ish) poster illustrates the show itself with what we call a P-PoD (pointless picture of a dancer) along with the associated marketing blurb.

Next to the poster we have a small holder that contains the actual flyers. Except, they're not flyers at all, not really. They're simple little cards (the same size as a credit card or a business card) that the interested theatre goer can pluck from the display and take with them.

The cards are simple, robust and easy to slip into a pocket unlike the current crop of handouts that need to be folded a dozen times before they can be put away.

You use the poster to get the attention of the masses and the pull-card to give them something to take away. We'll get to the "QR" code thing in a bit.

So what about the card designs themselves?

We've put together a mock-up (below) for the front and back of the card. The company is fictional, primarily to stop anybody getting upset.

Front

Back

Although the cards are very small, relatively speaking, you can fit more than enough information onto them for your prospective audience. In fact the size works in your favour because the less space you have to fill, the less likely you are to go crazy with lots of gibberish that nobody cares about.

The bottom of the rear of the cards would be left blank for over-printing by the receiving venue.

Some of you are probably thinking, "those things will be too small", "nobody will be able to read that!"

Our response? Do you have problems reading the information on your credit card, or a business card or your cell phone? Because those are all the same size as the designs shown above and the most important pieces of information (the date and time of the show) are nice and bold and very easy to read.

Who knows, if the cards are well designed, maybe they'll become collectable?

QR What

The back of the design, in the lower right corner, features something called a "QR" code or Quick Response code. They were developed back in the mid 1990's by a Japanese car company, of all things, and they work in much the same way as the barcodes on everything you have ever bought.

You read the code using a cell phone running a QR code reader. Such applications are available for all the major smart phones currently in the wild from iPhones to Android to Windows 7 Phones.

All you do is run the application on your phone, point the camera at the QR code and the software will scan it in less than a second revealing the information the code holds.

Go ahead, give it a try, the QR code on the demo design actually works.

The codes themselves can hold various types of information including plain text, phone numbers, etc. Generating the codes is easy (and free), you can use a number of online resources to get the codes saying exactly what you need them to say. The QR code itself is just a graphic that can be easily built into any design.

A code is also included on the poster so people don't even need to take the card with them. They just zap the code and they have all the information they need.

Once the information is on the users phone they can keep it for themselves or easily forward that information to others via text message or email. It's almost too easy.

Playing the Advantage

For a company or individual dance maker, this type of advertising presents a number of advantages. First of all the cards are cheaper to print and transport, through the mail, than bulkier flyers. 10,000 of them can be had for about £300 and that's double sided in full colour, less than half the cost of a double sided A5 limp lettuce affair.

Posters are still going to cost you but you do need a lot less of those to begin with and 10 A2 ones are going to hurt to the tune of about £90.

Venues will be more visually appealing with neat poster/card combos rather than the messy flyer farms they have right now. If the venue doesn't have room for posters then..... well, close it down. What's the point of being a venue if you don't have space to advertise the shows that are coming up?

The cards are much smaller so use a lot less resources to produce which is good for mother earth. You could also go easy on the number you actually have made which helps on both the cost and environmental fronts. A lot of this advertising stuff just gets thrown out. Yes, maybe some of it gets recycled but it's far better not to make it in the first place if you don't need it.

QR codes make it easier for people to share information about the show. There is a learning curve to overcome but good design on the poster or promo card can help that along by illustrating what you actually do with the QR code.

21st Century

Doing all of this might take a bit of effort, especially when we're talking about theaters and their incumbent personnel, but change needs to come to make things a bit more user friendly for the paying customer and a bit easier and cheaper for the visiting company.

This is just one idea, what have you got?

[ QR Code Generator ]

]]> Brick Wall tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3084 2011-05-09T10:43:36Z 2011-05-09T12:13:36Z by Martin French A recent piece on the 'A Younger Theatre' website (weird name alert! Ed!) highlighted the fact that all too often, when arts organisations are using Twitter and, to a lesser degree, other social networking websites they spend... Article19 http://article19.co.uk

A recent piece on the 'A Younger Theatre' website (weird name alert! Ed!) highlighted the fact that all too often, when arts organisations are using Twitter and, to a lesser degree, other social networking websites they spend far too much time marketing and not enough time talking.

So, here in TheLab™, we thought what better way to spend a Sunday off work than to read through more than 1000 "tweets" from our beloved National Dance Network to see how much time they spend talking about themselves and others.

Analysis

For the purposes of this piece we looked at the Twitter accounts of Dancebase, DanceXchange, Dance City, Dance 4, Yorkshire Dance, The Place, South East Dance and Dance East.

To help us out there are, mercifully, a few toys around the web that can help analyse how individual Twitter accounts are interacting with the world.

We were able to tell how often an organisation replies to another Twitter user directly (by means of the @account responses) and how many times they "re-tweeted" somebody else's information. These numbers are measured as a percentage of their total number of tweets.

Additionally we looked at the last 100 messages they posted (as of Sunday May 8th) to determine how many of those messages were marketing orientated (specifically used to sell tickets or promote a particular service) and how many had no connection whatsoever to the organisation or a performance or activity they may be staging. These are hard numbers, not a percentage.

Chart Action
Agency Followers Tweets %Replies %Re-Tweet Marketing(100) No Connection
DanceXchange 1103 134 6 14 69 0
The Place 3042 829 8 9 87 0
Dance City 834 196 6 15 61 2
Dance Base 1326 643 22 11 38 2
Dance 4 1769 373 4 8 89 0
South East Dance 265 104 38 28 14 7
Dance East 712 250 7 38 42 0
Yorkshire Dance 706 84 6 7 43(84) 1
Article19 579 1335 46 3 0 ?
DanceUK 3062 2448 1 2 ? ?

The numbers tell us that Dancebase, the only NDA in Scotland, and South East Dance are far more likely than any of the others to actually reply to people using their Twitter account.

As for the rest? They all fall into single digits with the more tweets an organisation has published making the @reply numbers more damning as an illustration of their relative engagement or lack thereof with the public at large.

Although South East Dance has only tweeted a grand total of 104 times they have still managed to accumulate a response rate of almost 40%.

So called "re-tweeting" can be a good and a bad thing. If you only ever re-post information from other people then you might be perceived as being a bit "click happy" and not really paying too much attention to your followers.

Dance East comes of best/worst in this scenario with 38% of all their Tweets being rehashed from somebody else and South East Dance falling into second place with 28%. All the others seem to have their clicking fingers under control with single digit percentages across the board.

Marketing is where most of them all fall down, cartoon style, into the floor of the canyon. Both Dance4 and ThePlace hitting 89 and 87 respectively from their last one hundred Tweets on the "buy something from us" scale.

More often than not both of these dance organisations try and hit you with the same marketing message for the same thing with multiple tweets in a short space of time. We feel sure that goes down well with the followers.

Only South East Dance, again, and Dance East keep their numbers below half, although only just in the case of Dance East.

Nothing To Do With Us

The final column shows us how many times an NDA sent out a piece of information which had nothing to with the organisation in any way.

As you can see, it's a pretty poor state of affairs. Four of them sent out nothing and the rest should probably have a meeting to discuss their "social networking strategy". South East Dance, based on only 104 tweets, once again comes out on top with an approximate 7% rate of unrelated information sharing.

Perhaps the final number is easier to explain when you check how many of the NDA's actually follow dance companies on Twitter to keep up to date with what they're doing.

Article19 follows most dance company Twitter accounts (as many of the active ones we can find). Comparing our list to those of the NDA's tested we see that Yorkshire Dance doesn't follow any dance companies at all. DanceXchange follows one, ThePlace follows five, Dance City follows six, Dance 4 follows one, and Dance East follows three.

Once again, South East Dance wins the day because they follow eleven dance companies.

We've included numbers at the end for Article19 and Dance UK for you to use by way of a comparison. If you're wondering about the pathetically low reply and re-tweet numbers for DanceUK then wonder no more. More than 98% of their 2448 tweets were done automatically via their Facebook account, a common problem and a common source of irritation among Twitter users.

Conclusion

Of course Twitter is only one metric for measuring the level of interaction but the internet is, if you haven't noticed, a pretty big deal and thus far a lot of well funded organisations, based on this evidence, are not too good with the communications.

We feel sure somebody will get right on this.

[ A Younger Theatre ]]]> What's On? tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3080 2011-05-04T13:36:58Z 2011-05-04T17:31:00Z Time for something dry here on Article19 because we, here in TheLab™, want to talk to you about listings, the bread and butter of online information when it comes to the performing arts. Article19 http://article19.co.uk by Martin French

Time for something dry here on Article19 because we, here in TheLab™, want to talk to you about listings, the bread and butter of online information when it comes to the performing arts.

When you work on this side of the business you start to realise very quickly that simply finding out when a where a dance company is performing is, for the most part, no simple task.

Websites for dance companies vary in quality from excellent to "good lord, what the hell is that?" and the same goes for venue websites.

Finding simple, clear, to the point information is often such a struggle we have to resort to making phone calls. That's a pain if you're a working journalist but you're not going to care if you're a member of the public. Those folks will just go see something else.

Sketch

Third party websites are not much better. Take "The List" website for example, the sister site to the ubiquitous print publication that covers many of the UK's major cities.

If you take a look at our screen capture of one of their listings pages (see below) you will notice that less than 10% of the information they actually put on the screen in front of you concerns the show you actually want to see.

list.jpg

All of the key information is highlighted in the boxes, everything else is mostly superfluous to requirements.

The show in question is Jasmin Vardimon's '7734'. Apparently The List doesn't consider it important that you know the company's name. The rest of the screen is taken up with annoying advertising, an overly complex search box, a comments box and still more annoying ads.

A word to the wise for website operators. If your operation is so expensive that your core information and purpose for existing is being ruined by an excessive number of ads then your defeating your own reasons for existing.

Venues

As mentioned, some venues are better than others but they all tend to suffer from the same problem, they focus all of their efforts on delivering information you don't need.

Again, if you look at the captioned screen shot taken from the website for The Lowry Theatre in Manchester we have many of the same problems. Key information plays second fiddle to images, simple things like the box office phone number are stuck at the bottom of the page, hidden away in tiny grey text.

lowry.jpg

You can view the notation full size by clicking on the image.

Ultimately both of these examples illustrate just how difficult some websites make it to actually get at the information you really want.

Keep It Simple

Now, because we work in TheLab™ we can experiment and build things to try to illustrate better ways of doing things for the wide and wacky world of dance.

So what we did was build listings.article19.co.uk, the world's most simplistic listings website, probably!

The thinking is fairly straightforward. At any one time there are fewer than 20 dance companies touring the UK with perhaps 10-15 dates per company. Because the company's themselves are the key element that people are interested in the homepage of the site offers you a simple list of the companies that are currently on tour along with the name of their work or works.

If you click on a company link you are given a simple show description and a chronological list of their tour dates. This list includes the bare minimum amount of information a potential attendee should need; the time, date and location of the performance with a direct link to the venue website. If a user needs a bit more detail then a click on the arrow delivers the "show card" page.

Again this is very paired down. The information is essentially the same but includes a venue address and a company website link along with some clickable "tags" so you can find information about shows at the same venue or the general geographic location.

The whole site has only two main links; "who's on tour" and "map". The map link presents you with, again, a simple, clear map with pins denoting the location of a particular performance.

Clicking on the pins reveals the name and date of the show with a clickable link to the "show card" mentioned above. If there is more than one show at the particular venue then we don't use multiple pins, we simply list each show, again in chronological order, inside the information bubble.

Maps are particularly useful for people who want to find shows close to where they live or close to where they might be going.

Stripped

Throughout the entire design there is no superfluous information. We don't include any images, pull quotes, videos (unusual for us), or pointless machine generated "things you may also like" recommendations that are always, always wrong.

The website has very few graphics, (the website title, the map pins and the map itself and that comes from Google). Every piece of information for each company and each show is included only because somebody might actually need it.

Our listings site is trying to solve a very simple problem as simply as possible

With more work we could almost certainly strip it down even further by eliminating the "show cards" and creating a customised pop-up or overlay on the main tour screen for each company, but that's for another day.

Our Point

Perhaps the main point we are trying to illustrate with the demo website and this piece in general is that keeping things simple and stripped down makes life a lot easier for the public and for you. The less clutter and mess you have to distribute the fewer mistakes that get made and the fewer shows that will get overlooked and you can spend less time telling people things they don't want to know.

[ Article19's Listings Demo ]

]]> On The TV tag:www.article19.co.uk,2011:/06/written_feature//45.3071 2011-04-25T21:23:11Z 2011-04-25T21:38:50Z Arts Council England has announced the first of its seminars for "Building Digital Capacity". This particular gathering will take place in London, of course, on May 23. To save you the bother of going and listening to people yap for 3 hours and 30 minutes, the total length of time this seminar lasts, we, here in TheLab™, explain everything they will probably tell you and why you probably don't need to hear it. Article19 http://article19.co.uk by Martin French

Arts Council England has announced the first of its seminars for "Building Digital Capacity". This particular gathering will take place in London, of course, on May 23.

To save you the bother of going and listening to people yap for 3 hours and 30 minutes, the total length of time this seminar lasts, we, here in TheLab™, explain everything they will probably tell you and why you probably don't need to hear it.

The big push is something called IPTV an unassuming little acronym that means internet protocol television or to put it another way, video delivered to a television screen using internet like technology.

If you have have ever stayed in a hotel then the chances are you have used IPTV. It's what they use to sell you pay per view porn. It's nothing more than video delivered via a clunky graphic interface from computer servers stored in the hotel.

Now imagine this; You buy a new TV set but instead of plugging it into an aerial or a cable box (from Sky for example) you just connect it to your home internet connection. When you turn the set on, instead of being presented with a television channel you get the image below (a concept image from Samsung). Instead of using your TV like....... a TV you use it like a phone or a tablet, or a desktop computer.

To watch a program you open an application from a particular provider, like Netflix or the BBC iPlayer, and watch your chosen program through the television via those applications that are in turn connected to the internet. Hey presto, so far, who cares?

As well as paid for providers, like Netflix or Sky Television, you also get applications allowing you to watch public video sites like YouTube or Vimeo. These types of applications basically provide a TV orientated user interface to let you watch content from those sites.

The applications or "channels" you are able to watch very much depend on the TV manufacturers. If they don't have a Vimeo app then you can't watch Vimeo content. If all your content is on Vimeo then too bad.

What's in it for you?

The simple answer to that question is, not much! From the point of view of a mid-scale dance company or theatre company for that matter all of this is irrelevant. Most of the content on these internet enabled TV's is still controlled by television companies. If you want your content on a Sky Arts application or channel then that's up to Sky Arts to make it happen.

Content on public video sites like Vimeo or YouTube suffers from the same issues as all the content you might currently have online. The fundamental issues of being discovered and getting watched.

From a popularity point of view that very much depends on the number of people who actually buy these types of TV sets or a set top box equivalent (like Apple TV or Boxee). No accurate numbers are currently available for the UK.

There also doesn't appear to be anything on the agenda about how you actually create compelling content that people might find useful or actually want to watch or who is going to pay for that material to get made.

Apps

Next on the agenda are "apps". The apps (applications) they are referring to in the publicity materials are small software programs that run on either, so called, smart cell phones, tablets (iPad, Blackberry Playbook, Samsung Galaxy et-al) or the aforementioned TVs.

They usually serve a very specific purpose such as locating restaurants, making photos look like polaroids, or some other task that was hitherto impossible sans a small battery powered walkie talkie.

Ironically at the time of writing Apple's iTunes store, the most high profile hawkers of these things, is currently working intermittently so we couldn't conduct a comprehensive search for theatre/arts based applications.

The one application we are aware of that was released by a prominent theater is the Sadler's Wells video application (SW Screen). Essentially all the "app" does is hook into the videos that are available via the Sadler's Wells website. Currently, more than a month after release, there are still only 22 videos available. That fact alone makes a complete mockery of the apps "search" facility and it won't work without an internet connection.

"The Wells" could have achieved the same thing with a free podcast channel and saved themselves the cost of developing this turkey in the first place, but we digress.

Once again cost is the determining factor here. Software applications don't come cheap even if you can come up with a genuinely useful reason to commission the thing in the first place. If you want to sell it for money it better have more utility than can be achieved through simply visiting your own website.

Applications are also not a one cost deal. If the app has any kind of long term use then it will need to be developed, updated and distributed for years.

For the most part, unless you are a large scale organisation, you won't have the money to spend getting these things made and if you do have the money, you should probably spend it on something else.

The People

As for the people presenting all of this trivia to an unwitting populace? Mark Dobson and Andy Hudson will be making the case for IPTV. Apparently they are representatives of something called the "Newcastle Gateshead Cultural Venues" (NGCV) where they have developed a "beta" test version of an IPTV channel.

All we could find about these guys is a closed Ning platform (think Facebook but on a smaller scale), but no phone numbers, no profiles, no nothing. We couldn't find any information about the channel itself or where it can be accessed. The NGCV is made up of 10 venues based in the North East of England.

The other two are Mark Bamber and Justin Spooner who are listed as BBC Academy Trainers. No information on these two either but the BBC Academy website does gives you lots of help about how to set up a tripod and other mysteries. No, we're not making that up.

Conclusion

If you're looking to get out of the office for a few hours, or even a whole day for non London folk, then we can think of about 200 - 300 more interesting ways to spend your time.

Before arts organisations look at possible distribution platforms for content ACE, the BBC and whomever else is involved in this push for digital expansion needs to seriously discuss the resourcing and creation of the content.

Dance companies and other arts organisations are content creators, distribution platforms are the purview of large tech companies and broadcasters.

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