The world’s most acerbic dance commentary
The headline gets to the crux of the problem. Why isn’t the wacky world of dance more fun, especially online? Dance, as a profession, is full of drama, hilarity, ridiculousness, stress, blood, sweat and, dare we say, tears! From creation through rehearsals to touring and teaching the whole thing is about as normal as Wayne […]
Yesterday, Arts Council England, along with their partners in crime at the BBC, held their first seminar on “Building Digital Capacity in the Arts” to talk about the wonders of IPTV and the building of Apps (applications). The BDCA project is, allegedly, about encouraging and teaching cultural organisations to use media and technology to ply […]
After the NPO decisions were announced many companies put out press releases expressing this, that or the other toward ACE. No such press releases came forward when everybody’s funding was cut, last year, by almost 10%. Here in TheLab™ we’ve put together the press release we think should have gone out when the NPO decisions […]
Vincent Dance Theatre, Candoco Dance Company, and William “Mad Man” Forsythe have all announced plans to present their respective companies works in 3D this coming autumn following a wave of popular success for the format. Theatres across the nation are, apparently, “gearing up” for the unprecedented interest being expressed by both theatre goers to see […]
Trawling through the publicly available accounts of arts organisations is not a fun thing to do. Wading through a mud pit full of man traps would be more entertaining but wade we did and this is what we found (all numbers are for year end 2010). Richard Alston Dance Company spent £57,660 on marketing, £31,356 […]
The latest report from the completely useless and entirely ineffectual Department of Culture Media and Sport select committee arrives at conclusions that several hundred thousand people came to many years ago. ACE for the most part, is a bit rubbish. Unfortunately this latest report focuses on things that happened so long go that the funding […]
A couple of weeks ago when we were writing ‘So Now What?’, our piece on the ludicrous salaries for various men in suits at the Royal Opera House we turned, naturally enough, to Dance UK for comment. Lest you be unaware Dance UK, in their own words are; “… the national voice for dance. [They […]
You would have thought that large scale arts organisations would have learned not to let TV cameras roam about at will through their murky innards. The Royal Opera House took that lesson to heart many years ago when a BBC documentary made them look like the worlds biggest collection of overpaid buffoons in the history […]
Arts Council England (ACE) has expressed confidence that it can adequately assess all of the applications it has received for the new National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) funding programme. When the deadline closed on January 24th for the NPO programme the funding monolith had received 1,333 applications from organisations across all art forms. Arts organisations will […]
The State of the Arts conference, held last week, was a ridiculous waste of time and money, mainly because those taking part were pretty ridiculous. We sincerely hope it was only the inarticulate, rambling, “couldn’t make a point if their life depended on it” people that got to speak or ask questions because if not […]