Yesterday Arts Council England (ACE) announced that all of its regularly funded organisations (RFO) will be taking a cut in funding from them of 6.9% based on their budgets for the current financial year.
If you check below you can see a detailed list of all dance related RFOs using numbers supplied by ACE. Our list runs from the most expensive to the least expensive in monetary terms.
At present it excludes The Royal Ballet because their funding is rolled into funding from the Royal Opera House. At the time of writing the Royal Ballet press office didn’t know what their year on year budget was, which is more than a little worrying. (from previous numbers we estimate it’s around £11-£12Million per year).
Richard Alston Dance Company doesn’t appear on the list either because funding for that company is rolled into the money for the Contemporary Dance Trust.
As always the massive gap between funding between ballet companies and contemporary companies is the first thing that becomes immediately obvious. A combined total of £28Million (approx) is being spent on just four companies.
The largest amount of funding to an organisation that isn’t a dance company goes to Sadler’s Wells, the London theatre that “is dance” (stop laughing at the back). Their funding is £2.2Million after the cuts.
Curiously the theatre just announced “record” audiences and an operating surplus of over £450,000. Sadler’s Wells received an emergency grant from ACE (under their Sustain programme) of £700,000. ACE told Article19 that “the Wells” don’t have to give the money back. Well, if they spend it all on drug fuelled parties they will but otherwise it’s theirs to play with.
Overall dance will be losing £2.6Million in funding next year with more to follow as ACE tries to hit the 15% reduction demanded by the hacks at DCMS.
On a slightly more comical note it’s always interesting to look at the funding for Hofesh Shechter and Jasmin Vardimon. Ms Vardimon’s company receives £195,409 per year in RFO funding with Mr Shechter on just £1 less. The political correctness brigade in overdrive at ACE towers on that one.
Complete numbers below.