The whole-organisation commitment required to develop and sustain a new audience is nowhere more clearly seen than in successful cultural diversity projects.
New Audiences grants in this area have ranged from £500 to £500,000, supporting small organisations, individuals and large-scale developmental projects to provide training, organisational development and sustained programmes of events.
Momentum Arts (formerly Eastern Touring Agency) set up a pilot project in 1999, called Local Promoters for Cultural Diversity, which has now grown into a Diversity Programme with four dedicated staff. The project has widened from three to six towns in eastern England, with 45 groups and individual artists now participating. The team seeks to break down the barriers contributing to culturally exclusive arts programming, which could be due either to a venue’s unfamiliarity with ethnic art forms or to new companies’ lack of awareness of available funding.
The Programme supports organisational development for culturally diverse groups, giving them new skills in business, marketing and administration, and encouraging them to seek access to mainstream venues. Momentum is also exploring the feasibility of business incubators for culturally diverse arts groups: buildings which could provide office space, shared facilities, advice and support.
Developing skills
Companies and artists supported by Momentum include Chinese visual artist Ho Law, Ghanaian dance and drumming group Osagyefo and Watford-based Culture Shock. Geeta Pendaer (pictured), of Bhangra dance group T’Hop, found Momentum’s support immensely valuable. “I was able to manage a project from start to finish,” she says, “and it made me more aware of what was going on around me demographically and economically.”
Momentum’s own organisation has undergone significant change during the past three years, stimulated in part by New Audiences funding. A larger staff now concentrates on social inclusion, regeneration and cultural diversity projects.
Accepting the challenge
Another major cultural diversity development came through the Arts Council England, East Midlands Regional Challenge. £500,000 was channelled through a three-year programme. ACE-EM made grants to 47 organisations, many of them small community groups receiving first-time funding. A number of significant pieces of research were commissioned, including a study of Black disabled audiences. Other grants encouraged new approaches such as the successful Bollywood Drive-In in Leicester, led by Navrang, a community arts organisation promoting South Asian film and video. Its success was due in part to the unusual partnerships underlying the event, including Leicester Shire Promotions, the radio station Leicester Sound and the main daily paper the Leicester Mercury. Plans are now afoot to explore creating an East Midlands-wide Bollywood Drive-In programme.
Partnership was also a key strategy in the Leicester Mumbai project ‘A Story Without End’ at the City Art Gallery. This project brought together two primary schools, one in Leicester and one in Mumbai, using electronic media to link University students, school children and parents in a creative exchange. This resulted in an exhibition, which was marketed to new South Asian attenders, and which also toured to community venues. The East Midlands Regional Challenge made a strong link with Black History Month from 1999 to 2002, providing programming and marketing support for events in Derby, Leicester, Nottinghamshire and Northampton.
Partnerships for sustainability
The Diversity strand of New Audiences was intended both to support community organisations in creating their own programmes, and to develop connections between community and mainstream arts organisations. Again, many recipients had had no previous Arts Council funding.
The Lawrence Batley Theatre/Hudawi Creative Partnership in Huddersfield began in October 1998, based on the mutual interest of the partners in engaging more effectively with local African and Caribbean communities. The Hudawi Cultural Centre, a local authority-owned Black community centre, pooled its resources with the local mainstream theatre to develop programming and audiences at both venues.
George Matheson, the Hudawi Centre Development Manager, is certain that New Audiences funding stimulated the start of a process that continues to develop. “The money gave us the opportunity to experiment quite creatively,” he said. “As a result, we have developed a good, sustainable partnership.” The venues developed marketing and education workshop programmes with schools and other community groups, and are creating a shared database of theatre attenders. The partners now hope to move on to a new project to provide the first ever dedicated cultural diversity theatre in the Yorkshire region.
The legacy of the New Audiences Programme can show that long-term development and sustainable partnerships have created, not without difficulty, a basis for growth among both artists and audiences.
Beyond the Page
Find extra information, downloadable evaluation and research reports, summaries and other resources at http://www.newaudiences.org.uk and at http://www.decibel-db.org
Feedback to Essential Audiences can be sent to audiences@artsprofessional.co.uk
Essential Audiences is compiled and written by Catherine Rose. For more information about the New Audiences Programme, contact Arts Council England, 14 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 3NQ.
t: 020 7973 6497 f: 020 7973 6791 e: newaudiences@artscouncil.org.uk textphone: 020 7973 6564