Yesterday, here in TheLab™, we published our 200th video feature on Article19, a comprehensive look at the Cloud Dance Festival in London and some of the dance makers involved. The oldest video feature on Article19 has been online for over 11 years and this particular website (in all of its various forms) has not been […]
The mighty guardians of the arts in the United Kingdom – Arts Council England – have been, of late, making a big push into what they would probably describe as the digital realm. For ACE it’s all digital all the time. It’s like the internet has just been invented. Step forward the funding monolith’s new […]
Long time followers of Article19 will know that one of the things that makes us unique are the video features we run as often as possible. Here in TheLab™ we don’t just use promo videos from dance companies and re-publish them. We go out and film the work ourselves, do the interviews, do the editing […]
Verve13 from Northern School of Contemporary Dance A few weeks ago we wrote about the comically misguided and completely unjustifiable situation Arts Council England had gotten itself into with the £400,000* annual funding for (Sadler’s Wells Theatre) the National Youth Dance Company. Ostensibly, the purpose of NYDC is to provide a pathway into professional training […]
Anybody who has received funding from Arts Council England, or any other type of funding for that matter, will know that numbers are everything. Especially when it comes to audience numbers for the performing arts. Numbers can make or break your company because if they aren’t high enough, or the right kind of numbers, then […]
Two weeks ago Arts Council England contacted us via Twitter to ask if we would like to write a “blog post” for them. To be honest it did take a while for that request to get past our “WTF” filter. The Big Bad was asking TheLab™ to write something that they would publish with our […]
Last week the much anticipated, by some at least, televised “debate” in the House of Commons (the UK’s legislative body) about the wide world of culture rapidly descended into the “not worth bothering with” territory that we, here in TheLab™, had predicted. It’s hard to determine what was more depressing about the whole affair. Was […]
On Friday last week the announcement was made by the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) that Arts Council England (ACE) would, in all probability, receive a 5% cut to their funding for the year 2015/2016. The announcement was a prelude to the government’s “spending review” that will be announced in full on June […]
The rumours are swirling, or at least staggering about like an asthmatic mouse, that the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is a goner if the up and coming Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) has anything to do with it. Lest you be unfamiliar with the DCMS they are the government department responsible for funding […]
We have written often, here in TheLab™, about the fact that when the self appointed upper echelons of the arts complain about funding they often come across as self-serving, pompous buffoons. The reason they sound like self-serving, pompous buffoons is because, more often than not, they are self-serving, pompous buffoons. Step forward Nicholas Serota, Chief […]