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The Evil Imp

Bad Acting in HD

You know you’re watching a high definition (HD) television channel because all the station ident logos, like the one above, have lots of wispy clouds of colour floating around to emphasise the fact there is more detail in the picture. They also add the “HD” tag onto absolutely everything lest the poor viewer becomes confused […]

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The Evil Imp

ACE Drops The Hammer

On October 16th this year Arts Council England (ACE) told Article19 that the “vast majority” of regularly funded arts organisations (RFO) in England would be receiving “good news” about their ongoing commitment to provide support. It would appear, following some recent revelations, that ACE has an interesting interpretation of the phrases “vast majority” and “good […]

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The Evil Imp

Painting Pictures

When they close the book on dance blogging, history will note that it was here, and here alone, that Panda bears and cocaine were mentioned in the same piece of writing. It is those two most disparate elements that highlight at least one of the shortcomings when professional dancers take to the blogosphere. Pandas come […]

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The Evil Imp

ACE Goes Bargain Hunting

It’s one thing when we, here in TheLab™ have to get on the metaphorical soap box and decry ACE for wasting huge sums of money on things that were, on reflection, not worth the price of a carton of milk. It’s another thing altogether to ask, if they were really serious about something, why didn’t […]

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The Evil Imp

Social Dancing

Social networking, on the internet at least, is a phenomenon (or irritation) that’s very hard to ignore and depending on who you talk to it is either the saviour of mankind or an unrelenting scourge that will be the end of us all. (the Imp appears to be in Drama Queen overdrive today! Ed!) For […]

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The Evil Imp

Misquoted?

People on the “inside” of the business that we call show are well aware of the dubious practice of selective quoting that goes on for publicity materials. A word removed here and there, a little bit of context obscured, that sort of thing. It’s well known that when it comes to dance film we, here […]

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The Evil Imp

What Are You Doing?

Arts Council England (ACE) has a mantra which states; “never say anything with 100 words when it can be said in a 10,000 word summary that no one will ever read”. With that in mind they have released the results of a year long “Public Value” study, the point of which was to keep someone […]

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The Evil Imp

Dance City, Takes Ball, Goes Home

The procedure for Article19 securing permission to film a performance is pretty straight forward. We call or email the company, explain what we want to do, the company, almost always, say yes. The company then let the venue know that a camera operator will be there and that’s pretty much all there is to it. […]

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The Evil Imp

Can We Have Some More Please?

Last weeks announcement that arts funding will not be cut back to pay for the Olympics, in fact funding is going up in line with inflation plus 1.1%, have brought the great and not so good out of the wood work to wax lyrical. Arts funding for ACE will increase by £28million over the next […]

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The Evil Imp

Didn’t We Fire That B*tch?

The petition to try and persuade the Government to not spend huge sums of money (£9.5Billion at the last count) on the London Olympics in 2012 has, as expected, fallen on deaf ears. The Prime Minister’s office has responded to the petition, as they are required to do, and Fauston Carpet, our resident language expert, […]