Add a Comment

Comment by Tim Price on June 21, 2012 at 22:31

Thanks Peter! Anyone else fancy any of the offers, please sign up, as all money goes towards our next production...and we'd like to pay people. Thank you!

Comment by Peter Cox MBE on June 20, 2012 at 10:10

Thanks for the heads up Tim.  Have just given the the totaliser a modest nudge!

Comment by Tim Price on June 20, 2012 at 8:41

Hello all, please share this work your friends and networks:

http://www.sponsume.com/project/dirty-protest-theatre

Comment by Lucy Davies on June 15, 2012 at 11:28

hello friends and comrades - just a reminder that it's only a month until the deadline for the inaugural wales drama award - you can submit anonymously, it's a BIG cash prize, and you basically have a civic duty to submit something... more info at http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunities/wales-drama-award-2012

Comment by Kaite O'Reilly on June 14, 2012 at 23:04

Hello all,

I was on a panel at West Yorkshire Playhouse during their writers' festival the other week, debating with David Eldridge, Fin Kennedy, Lyn Gardner, Suzanne Bell and Dawn Walton whether it was 'Time to Get Rid of New Writing?' You can find my report on the event at:http://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/the-end-of-new-writing/

Hope all are thriving and working away!

kaite x

Comment by carmen medway-stephens on June 14, 2012 at 8:12

This week I have had the brilliant opportunity to work with Robin Soans, Stella Feehily and Max Stafford Clarke on a project exploring Gareth Thomas and Bridgend with the support of NTW. We are working with a brilliant groups of actors and I have learnt all about Max and Robins unique style of workshop and the verbatim style. It has been truly inspirational. Gareth has been such an honest and giving figure in the rehearsal room.  If anyone would like to know more about the process to use in their own acting/writing/directing practice contact me on here. Thanks, Carmen

Comment by Ace McCarron on June 12, 2012 at 4:11

As a former Specialist Advisor to the Scottish Arts Council, I was sceptical about the disbanding of the panels which met to assess applications for projects and for seed funding for previously unfunded companies. I was very proud of the work I did for these panels, and I believe that, through fair and sincere feedback to the applications made, the standard of applications went up and up, making our decisions increasingly difficult. 

Al this seems to have disappeared, and the result seems to be that organisations with experience, reputation and highly-developed working practices will suffer from disruption, disillusionment or disbandment. This, in many ways, is a British disease.

Hi Adam, this link is the one you're after.

http://www.front-step.co.uk/

Comment by Matt Ball on June 12, 2012 at 3:12

There's only one week left to apply for our first WalesLab summer camp. 

If you want to know more about it have a look at my blog or send me a message.

Comment by Adam Somerset on June 11, 2012 at 21:41

Re: Threat to Vanishing Point

Article continues

"In making this disrespectful and poorly-argued decision, in other words, Creative Scotland has succumbed to three particularly destructive deadly sins that now beset government agencies in the UK. In the first place, their thinking is still hopelessly infected – 22 years after the lady’s political demise – by a kind of undead Thatcherism, a half-baked, hollowed-out, public-sector version of market theory that reduces the language of creativity to a series of flat-footed business-school slogans, and imposes a crude ethic of sado-competition – “this will make you sharper and more creative” – on areas of society where co-operation, synergy and mutual respect clearly matter more.

Then the second deadly sin, betrayed in this review, is the bad administrator’s pervasive preference for structural tinkering over core activity. Creative Scotland is supposed to be Scotland’s main cultural funding agency, and champion of excellence in the arts; its core function is to act as a wise, well-informed, responsive and responsible agent of the Scottish people in identifying that excellence, and in providing funds to support it. Yet the organisation finds itself in the hands of leadership which refers to the allocation of funds as the “boring bit” of its job; and surrounds itself instead in a blather of mind-numbing policy-speak – about advocacy, social strategy and business development – that is often demonstrably none of its business.

And this barrage of needless strategy-making, combined with the shift towards project-based funding, helps set the conditions for the third deadly sin; which is to set up a mechanism that is bound to increase the control of funding agencies over the agenda and repertoire of artists. In order to make arts funding worthwhile, creative organisations should be set free by it, to pursue their own dreams, and to help change and reimagine society. Yet in last week’s announcement, Creative Scotland effectively guaranteed a huge increase in its own power to manage the agendas of some of Scotland’s most senior artists; many of whom – faced by mutton-headed bureaucrats telling them what kind of projects they want to fund this year – may well take the obvious option, and leave the country.

So what should happen? First, this failed attempt at a review should be binned, and Creative Scotland should take it back to the drawing board. That some of those 49 companies might benefit from a return to carefully-managed project funding is possible; but the idea that most of them will benefit from it is just a lazy fiction, invented to justify the substitution of one-size-fits-all structural change for the real exercise of artistic judgement.

Beyond that, though, this review raises serious questions about the board of Creative Scotland, who have knowingly appointed to key roles in Scotland’s cultural life people who clearly embrace a commerce-driven ideology that Scotland in general, and its cultural community in particular, has rejected at every available opportunity; we need to know why they thought it was acceptable to do this, and how they now see their own position, given the failure of this review."

Comment by Adam Somerset on June 11, 2012 at 21:37

Trouble in Scotland with Arts Funding

David Greig is writing about the changes in Arts funding on his site www.frontstep.co.uk

Joyce McMillan kicked if off a couple of weeks ago with a polemical critique, part of which reads

"Creative Scotland, the agency charged with supporting and promoting Scotland’s cultural and creative life....

Now it is worth emphasising that there is a reason, although not a sufficient one, for Creative Scotland’s decision to make changes. From 2013, a much smaller proportion of its money will come from Scottish Government grant, and a much larger proportion from lottery funds, which can only be used for one-off projects; Creative Scotland will have more money to spend, but will need to balance it differently. The organisation therefore needs to withdraw regular grant income from some arts companies, to reduce the regular element in the funding of some others, and to set up some large new project funds, open to all comers; and they need to make these decisions on the basis of current artistic performance, and future plans.

Yet instead of getting on with this basic job – hardly rocket science, for any well-run arts agency – Creative Scotland have instead decided to withdraw their entire middle range of funding, known as flexible funding, which offered basic income security on a two or three year cycle to small- and medium- scale arts organisations with a strong creative record. The result is to throw some 49 Scottish arts organisations from a condition of modest security, into a condition of complete insecurity, in which they have to bargain from project to project for their continuing right to exist. And this list of companies includes some of Scotland’s most admired and impressive arts organisations; among them are Tommy Smith’s Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, the internationally acclaimed Vanishing Point Theatre Company, Edinburgh-based Fringe stars Grid Iron, the CCA in Glasgow, and Stills photography gallery in Edinburgh."

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 70
• 71
• 72
• 73
• 74
• …
• 122
• Next ›
• Page