Arts Council England Research Articles

Characterising affective and situational dimensions of creativity in the primary classroom through a posthuman lens

ABSTRACT The proliferation of creativity frameworks can be problematic for teachers and learners seeking to develop creativity in day-to-day classroom practices. Although some schools have successfully adopted standardised models, others lack models that are tailored to localised contexts and interface with pedagogical provision. This article reports on the development of one of eight projects part of the nationwide programme, Arts Council England Creativity Collaboratives. Using data collected through creative qualitative methods, we discuss how these partnerships have fostered novel and engaging creative encounters that exceed human-to-human interactions. In contrast to existing creativity frameworks, we advocate a posthuman perspective that recognises the importance of affective and situational intra-actions between human and non-human agents. Finally, we examine how such factors contribute to the development of ethical and inclusive understandings of creativity for learners aged 4–11 that account for their specific needs as well as those of their teachers and schools.

Theatre, disability and wellbeing: addressing best practice and creative outcomes across disabled and non-disabled communities through an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

ABSTRACT Background In the context of ongoing underrepresentation of disabled people and shifts in the theatre industry, this article examines the significance of personal disability understandings and how these are interpreted in relation to the wellbeing of disabled people in theatre. Methods The findings presented are part of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis; an interdisciplinary study detailing experiences of theatre practice and disability among professional actors and directors in theatres that are funded by Arts Council England. Results One of the six emergent themes from interviews, Navigating Inexperience of Disability in Theatre, assists in considering disability understandings and aspects of actors’ wellbeing in this article. It details interpersonal and emotional competencies required of disabled people in day-to-day practice; these relate to confidence, risk, empathy, compromise, value, and contribution. Conclusions Routes to building accessibility in theatre are proposed as a shared and personal endeavour; value is placed on learning from disability as crucial in preserving wellbeing, creativity, and effective arts practices across disabled and non-disabled communities.

The Museum of London ‘Diversity Matters Programme’ and Redbridge Museum: Creating Equality, Exhibiting Ethnicity from a Local Perspective

The Museum of London ‘Diversity Matters Programme’ was launched in 2018 and closed in 2021. The programme encouraged London’s small non-national museums to embrace the Arts Council England’s directions to stimulate participation across socio-economic barriers such as the Equality Act (2010) and the Equality Duty (2011) recommended. However, the project results indicate a top-down approach to the involvement of minorities that seems to clash with the idea of inclusiveness itself. The local museums aimed to establish a bottom-up local history experience where visitors were content creators. These two opposite perspectives share the same scope but use different methods to achieve inclusion. By discussing survey data, the article investigates the Diversity Matters Programme as realised by Redbridge Museum, London, revealing competing and conflicting power relations that underpin the engineering of diversity and inclusion.

Performance and the Critique of Resilience in Culture (England, 2004–2020)

In the wake of Brexit and COVID-19, this article looks back at resilience-building agendas in English publicly funded cultural production. The analysis examines the history of ‘resilience’ in arts policy debates prior to 2012 before analysing Arts Council England (ACE)’s resilience-building programmes called Catalyst and discussing a performance-based Catalyst case. With Catalyst, ACE and collaborating agencies sought to incentivise private investment and entrepreneurialism in culture to minimise risks linked to potential financial loss in the wake of the 2007–2008 financial crash and subsequent budgetary cuts. The argument of this article is that, in this context, resilience discourses and practices, which aimed to rationalise, legitimise, and effect a further move away from older funding practices, reproduced a distinctly cultural ideological form. Through the performance-based case, this critique also examines how certain styles of discourse and practice were more critical and made space for figuring alternatives to the politics of resilience.

Colonial-Looted Cultural Objects in England

This article provides an overview of the state of legislation and the efforts toward the repatriation of colonial-looted cultural objects in England. It discusses the National Heritage Act, Charities Act, and general trust rules which make it challenging to deaccession any objects from museums in the United Kingdom, including and especially colonial-looted objects. It highlights how the UK’s former period of colonization resulted in vast holdings from these territories, but that the UK has yet to create a comprehensive policy on repatriation, despite numerous calls for return of several famous heritage objects, including the Maqdala treasures and the Benin Bronzes. This article sketches the powers of the current possessors – namely national, regional, and university museums. Finally, the article considers the many updates in the conversation surrounding colonial repatriation in 2022, from the debate at the House of Lords to potential changes to the National Heritage Act to the new Charities Act to the publication of Arts Council England’s guidelines for museums on restitution and repatriation.

Multilingualism, diversity, and performing arts. A home for Spanish language theatre in post-Brexit gentrified London

ABSTRACT In 2016, the Spanish Theatre Company (STC) opened the doors of its Cervantes Theatre (CT), the first British (and European) venue devoted to showcasing productions of Spanish and Latin American plays in a bilingual format. Four years on – and at a critical juncture given Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic – this article reflects on the current state and future prospects of this nascent migrant theatre initiative based in Southwark. This, I hope, will serve as a first step to re-think the Arts Council England's diversity strategies in relation to multilingual initiatives. Drawing on in-depth interviews and critical analysis of archival and online documents, I focus on four interrelated factors crucial for understanding how and why this unique project sprung into life in a London hotspot for real estate speculation just as the UK split from the EU, with the aim of exploring if the STC case could be used as a model for future endeavours.

Using the short story as a tool for well-being in arts and health workshops for the NHS staff

This article focuses on creative writing workshops run online for NHS staff during 2020–21 organized through Lime, the Arts and Health Department of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT). As the pandemic and lockdown hit in 2020, all Lime activity had to cease. Lime’s premises were reassigned for administrative staff and its staff redeployed. Using Arts Council England emergency funding, Lime demonstrated the need for creative outlets for stressed NHS staff and moved online with its participatory workshops. This work was piloted with creative writing workshops focusing on the short story; the workshops used writing techniques that would help participants focus on their mental well-being as NHS staff during one of the most stressful and exhausting periods of work for them. The article further explores the use of the short story in those creative writing workshops, examining the premise for the use of creative writing practices, the workshops themselves and the facilitator’s experience of running them, alongside the (anonymized) feedback of participants.

Cultural governance within and across cities and regions: Evidence from the English publicly funded arts sector

There are significant inequalities in the publicly funded arts sector in England, including significant spatial inequalities. If anything, the critique of spatial inequalities in this ecology do not go far enough. This article uses a unique dataset of the boards of directors of Arts Council England’s national portfolio, derived from Companies House. While a majority of national portfolio organisations do not share board members with any other organisation, the analysis demonstrates that London-based organisations are significantly more likely to share board members with other companies than organisations outside London – and that, where an organisation outside of London does share a board member with a company in another region, it is more likely to be with a company in London than all other regions put together. It further demonstrates that this effect is most pronounced where these organisations are part of the same artform. Crucially, the organisations connected to London have more than double the portfolio income of other organisations, whether they share board members or not. This illustration of the concentration of power in London in the publicly funded arts sector, over and above the distribution of organisations in general, demonstrates the conceptual value of a cultural economy that emerges from interconnections within a local or national ecosystem. At the same time, the analysis and findings push the cultural ecology literature to centre inequality as a core issue as the concept is developed. Even the local cultural ecosystem is not exempt from the impact of the nation’s uneven (cultural) geography.

(In)visibility and African Fashion in UK Museums

(In)visibility and African Fashion in UK Museums

‘Speaking nearby’: Reflections on the conversations with Erika Tan

How can we reconfigure the concept of Chinese art when the term Chinese extends beyond geographical specificity? From May to December 2021, researchers Lenette Lua and Huanzhi Zhang initiated a series of informal, open conversations with London-based Singaporean artist Erika Tan over Zoom. In these conversations, Tan shared the thinking process behind her moving image Journeys of Remembrance ([1993] 2008) and project The ‘Forgotten’ Weaver (2016–19), as well as her involvement in calling for Arts Council England to defund Centre for Chinese Contemporary Arts in Manchester for its White occupancy. By reflecting on the conversations with Tan and her propositions, the conversation unveils the struggle in grasping the exponentiality of Chineseness and seeks to unravel Chineseness as a fluctuating silhouette of continuous constructions and deconstructions that defies definition.

Depoliticization, participation and social art practice: On the function of social art practice for politicization

The purpose of this article is to explore how the process of depoliticization occurs in neoliberal governance, with the aim of identifying approaches to counter its control over the way we live together. Depoliticization is a process of neoliberal political and social organization that undermines democracy. An instance of how depoliticization happens is through a lack of accountability in the way that government devolves responsibility through non-governmental agencies or quangos. Arts Council England is a quango with an increasingly instrumental policy agenda. Arts-based participation is being fostered through policy agendas; art projects that are funded in this arrangement are expected to promote social inclusion or audience engagement. While this is superficially laudable, a reduced gap between state policy objectives and commissioned artistic outcomes sees artworks utilized as interpretive publicity for policy objectives. In this way, the funding of the arts can be considered as part of the wider process of depoliticization. Yet, we argue, contra much of the depoliticization literature with its formalist understandings of power, that politics is not limited to the actions and non-actions of the state alone and can be radically understood as an everyday process. In this conception of politics, we conclude that certain forms of art practice, those that employ social praxis and critical citizenship through critical pedagogical and participatory methods, can perform a politicizing function and thus potentially reshape democracy in more emancipatory ways.

Who runs the arts in England? A social network analysis of arts boards

Recent research on cultural production has drawn attention to significant inequalities. This paper aims to unpack one possible explanation for these inequalities by focusing on the people with ultimate responsibility for arts institutions: the boards of directors. Using data from the UK's Companies House, it analyses the boards of Arts Council England's National Portfolio Organisations. It then “hops” to the other organisations with whom arts organisations also share board members, and their directors. While the network of NPOs is relatively sparse, with most organisations not sharing board members with any others, in the one-hop network the majority of these organisations are indirectly connected to one another. In addition to a large number of arts and cultural organisations, this network also contains a large proportion of film funding companies and financial services companies. The most central company in the network, measured by betweenness, is the Royal Opera House, followed by companies associated with significant tax advantages for their directors. Our results raise questions for the governance of culture, drawing further attention to its ties with financial institutions.

Participatory evaluation for large-scale arts programmes: challenges, adaptations and unexpected shifts in culture

Researchers at Staffordshire University have a long history of undertaking community-based research in and with communities in Stoke-on-Trent. Commitment to the principles and practice of participatory research by the university’s Creative Communities Unit (CCU) team led to an approach to participatory action research called Get Talking. This article highlights the use of Get Talking to evaluate Appetite, an Arts Council England Creative People and Places project in Stoke-on-Trent. Staffordshire University conducted a participatory evaluation using Get Talking for the three years of the programme’s first phase. As well as reflecting on the strengths of the approach, we also discuss the ways in which the approach was adapted in order to address some of the key challenges that were encountered, and the impact of taking a participatory approach to the evaluation on the programme’s culture in relation to community engagement and co-production.

'Emsallere Uygunluk İlkesi' ve 21. Yüzyılda Sanat ve Kültür Sektöründeki Rolü

This paper discusses the theory and practice of the ‘arm’s length principle’ in the UK arts and cultural sector. The discussion begins with a brief overview of Arm’s Lenght Bodies, historical events and moments that have supported and at times challenged the principle, focusssing on the ideological repercussions of the post-Second World War with reference to John Maynard Keynes’ views which largely shaped its formation and practice in the second half of the 20th century. The second part of the discussion looks at more recent distribution methods adopted by the Arts Council England observing a move away from the theoretical aspects of the principle itself towards more instrumental concerns. The discussion then moves on to consider this as the effects of the New Management, and the formation of the new funding strategies. Lastly, the paper concludes by looks at the relationship between what is known as the New Management and the theoretical idea of the ‘Arm’s Length principle’ considering its shifting role in public funding of the arts and culture. In conclusion, the question of considering whether ALP is the best approach to delivering public funding for the arts is raised by drawing a comparative account between international examples.

Leo Magnien: Clarières

Leo Magnien: Clarières

The Arts Council at a Crossroad: stories from Britain and South Korea

The Arts Council is at a crossroad today. In both Britain and South Korea, its role has been reduced from the self-organized “policymaker” to “policy taker,” and it now adopts a broad, relativist understanding of culture. Yet, Arts Council England and Arts Council Korea are envisaging their future differently. The former works within the explicated cultural policy framework and embraces its new roles as a national developmental agency, keenly exploring the broadened understanding of culture. The latter is desperately seeking its future in reinforcing self-organization of arts policy and minimizing the influences by non-artistic factors.

The Theatre of Yes: Beauty as the Axis of Change for the Transformation of Communities Through Their Own Stories

Tejidos is a community artistic project that aims to develop a community to give voice to the particular stories of those who live in Oaxaca (women and the deaf community) and Mexico City (older adults). The project has been funded by the Arts Council England (2018) and Iberescena (2019). “Theatre of Yes” is a methodology that uses the power of beauty as a language to break the stereotypes of situations that society views with apathy. By creating a provocative and emotional performance, we can transform the lives of people who suffer social exclusion. Yet, how can we create a high-quality performance with people who are not professional actors but have stories that should be shared? How can we use powerful performances as an axis of change? How can emotions be the motor for the struggle against the social oppression that many groups suffer? Artistic work has helped us to observe how creativity pushes people to find a freer self and, above all, to be close to the essence of the human being. The base of the Theatre of YES brings together the universal characteristics, honesty, simplicity, humility and generosity. The characteristics of the methodology developed with these groups are the yes as a weapon against the non-worthy self, beauty as the axis of change, physical theatre according to the Lecoq methodology.

Enrich Festival

Reviewed by: Enrich Festival Winter Phong ENRICH FESTIVAL. Herts Inclusive Theatre, Watford, UK. Online, September 5–6, 2020. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre companies sought ways to engage persons with learning and cognitive disabilities. Companies have mainly focused on audience initiatives relying upon relaxed performances to create space in theatre for more diversity. While efforts to include patrons with disabilities remains paramount, there are markedly fewer performance and training opportunities for artists with the same disabilities. Enrich Festival takes on the challenge of creating opportunities for both artists and audiences. Challenging itself to reimagine community arts performance, the festival seeks to overcome socially constructed ideas around disability and overtake the dominant narrative of disability, supplanting it with one defined and performed by artists with disabilities. The Enrich Festival was created and first produced as a live event in 2019 amid increasing social expectations to improve representation through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Through funding by Arts Council England and Hertfordshire County Council, the festival was designed to provide a venue to showcase visual and performing arts companies working with professional and amateur artists. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 festival forged ahead, taking on the challenge of fostering opportunities for artists and audiences while practicing safe social distancing. Featuring online programming, the festival utilized interactive workshops combined with previously recorded and newly imagined performances. From the onset of the festival, Teatr Bomba Bomba and DanceSyndrome set an early tone for inclusiveness through their company-hosted workshops. Day 1 opened with an interactive physical workshop hosted by Polish theatre company Teatr Bomba Bomba. Led by Janusz Janiszewski through modeled action with more than a half-dozen company members and an English translator, Janiszewski utilized a combination of physical directives and vocal commands reminiscent of Jerzy Grotowski. Participants were encouraged to turn on their camera and curate a personal narrative as part of a digital collective, forming a theatre using gallery view at home on Zoom. Physical storytelling in this environment helped to overcome speech and movement limitations that some participants were likely to experience while defining a character suited to their ability. Click for larger view View full resolution Xandri Selwyn in My Hands and Feet Are Wiggling. (Photo: Access All Areas.) The follow-up workshop was hosted by Dance-Syndrome, a contemporary dance company started and helmed by Jen Blackwell, a dancer diagnosed with Down syndrome. In their workshop led by three company members, participants experienced what inclusiveness and diversity might look like within performing arts. Physically identified by pregnancy, Down syndrome, and wheelchair reliance, the workshop leaders showcased inclusion of bodies frequently excluded in performing arts. DanceSyndrome subverts the common expectation of body type and ability through the simple act of including and showcasing dancers outside expected conventions. DanceSyndrome’s creation of space for broader body types allows aspiring performers to see themselves reflected within the art form. This is not to say that only those marked [End Page 242] with disability can find benefit in such workshops; instead, space created with artists with disabilities allows performing arts professionals and companies to move beyond conventional notions of ability and identify new modes of performance. While these workshops were a form of performance, they were not strictly defined as such. Through curated, forty-five-minute workshops, participants, scholars, and engaged community members were exposed to inclusive training hosted by diverse artist bodies. Click for larger view View full resolution Cast in Zara. (Photo: Andrew Youngson.) The Enrich Festival goes beyond mere inclusion for artists and audiences. Productions in 2020 by Access All Areas, Mind the Gap, and DIY Theatre provided what disability theatre activist and workshop host Jenny Sealy described as protest theatre. Sealy suggested that all actions taken in art by those defined as fringe members of society are protest. In this protest, we find the challenge of equity. While the workshops and training offered by these companies attempts to overcome this inequity, the simple act of performing stories showcasing their life experiences addresses major concerns for these artists and their identified social groups. In the talkback/workshop, Here’s Me, Access All Areas artist Xandri Selwyn and artistic director Nick Llewellyn discussed the process used...

The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP): An email conversation with Ami Clarke and Lozana Rossenova

Gustavo Grandal Montero (ALJ):Could you give an overview of the main aims and context of the project?Ami Clarke (AC): The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of artists’ books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers and a community of creative practitioners in contemporary artists’ publishing, developed via an ethically-driven design process, and supported by Wikimedia UK and Arts Council England. The project is inspired by the site of Banner Repeater's public Archive of Artists’ Publishing on Hackney Downs train station, with 11,000 people passing a day, in response to the need for a similarly dynamic approach to archiving in an online context.

Funding resilience: market rationalism and the UK’s “mixed economy” for the arts

ABSTRACT The contemporary emphasis on resilience in UK arts and cultural policy discourse has developed in relation to the longer-standing model of the “mixed economy” in which state grants, earned income and private sponsorship are imagined to provide a secure foundation for sustainable growth. This genealogy is evident in a series of programmes developed by Arts Council England and the UK’s other national funding bodies since the mid-1990s with the intention of fostering the sector’s strength and sustainability – most often by exhorting recipients of state funding to explore and develop new business models centred on non-state income sources. Tracing that history allows us to follow the ways in which specific neoliberal rationales have been naturalised through socio-ecological metaphor and, more significantly, how policy measures encouraging the entrepreneurial pursuit of private and earned income may introduce new forms of risk that exacerbate existing structural inequalities in the cultural sector.