PATHWAYS TO THE PROFESSION SYMPOSIUM 2012 TRANSCRIPT OF ANDREW DIXON’S PRESENTATION REMINDER: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS NOT VERBATIM Date: 19/01/12 Venue: West Park Conference Centre, Perth Road, Dundee Operator: Louisa McDaid Thank you very much. The images showing on screen while I speak are images of Creative Scotland. I want to reflect on what I heard earlier. Someone asked me the benefits of Scotland getting independence will be. You must have Visas and passports to get to England so we won't lose Janet Smith to Manchester under Scottish independence. I have had her on my bedroom wall for 25 years! I went to see her and her dancers and it was one of the most inspirational dances I've seen in one of my earliest jobs. I have known her work for some 25-6 years. And Caroline I knew from Newcastle when she did great work at Dance City. What is happening here is very special and we observed it in Newcastle Gateshead. There are many special things about Dundee but what is happening here is genuinely ground breaking work and it’s a delight to have that introduction here. I have the privilege of taking an overview of culture in Scotland and visiting many of the projects across Scotland. Scotland doesn't celebrate its success well enough and today I will tell you about Creative Scotland and where equality fits in there and we shine a light on projects like this. We take the fantastic work of Solar Bear and Birds of Paradise and not just mainstream but make sure everyone knows its happening. The combined efforts of people here are delivering something that is very significant in terms of Scottish cultural strengths and the opportunities already created by the good work of
the Scottish Arts Council and are continued through Creative Scotland are setting the ground rules for the norm in the future.
I use these images for many talks and finish with this one. It's here because its one of the best shows I have seen in 18 months - Around the World in 80 days by Lung Har. It was selected by the Edinburgh fringe. These are the top dance projects we are showing to international audiences and it’s great we are profiling work like this. The broad context of where the work fits into Creative Scotland. I will speak about our progress and plans for Scotland, how we will put equality central to the work, and share the excitement of the year of Creative Scotland and how it creates a platform to profile the work. I had a 3 year task plan for the arts in Scotland. That is not a long time and to get people behind you you need a 10 year vision and a sense that people can be on a journey to deliver something special. The plan has a commitment to deliver for the people of Scotland. Artists and cultural organisations are important in the journey but our focus is on the people of Scotland who live all over Scotland and need an opportunity to participate in the arts. I want to share a few of our aspirations. We want Scotland to be a year round festival nation, one of the top 10 places in the world for culture, with the highest levels of creativity in the U.K. We have high levels of participation in the arts in Scotland but not for all parts of the geography and all sections of the community. We will target our efforts to reach those populations that don't currently participate. Dealing in generations and thinking about changing cultural activity over generations is a rewarding way. We have 5 objectives - the first being to invest in talent. This is an underground map with a series of tracks and stations. The picture is the programme of a theatre show by Plan B dance company showing the career paths of a director, a writer, a performer and a musician and designer. Our job at Creative Scotland is to get young people onto the track and provide the platforms where talent can be added and build new stations where there are gaps, and remove barriers. This is a map for 5 performers but could be a map for the whole of theatre and disability performers. We are keen that every one
of the platforms take equality seriously and the organisations help us move the agenda on.
The second objective - this image was in every presentation I have done for the last 12 months. We must value production wherever it comes from and ...
... We invest in audiences, we have got to make sure we invest in a new generation of audiences and it is very interesting to hear Janet and Caroline talking about the work from the perspective of the performers but that work is exciting from the perspective of audiences. I brought my teenage son and his mate to see Scottish Dance Theatre with Caroline performing in the fringe the year before last. Entranced by that work and he is not a dancer. We also invest in places and the contribution at different places make in Scotland. The unique contribution that different places can make and how places and the combinations of places and people can actually change nations and beyond the world. Dundee is making its contribution to a creative Scotland in part through the work that is happened with Scottish Dance Theatre. So, creative Scotland for those of you that are from England and haven't heard about what we do, we are an Arts Council merged with a film agency and we look after creative industries. But we are much more than a funding body we are an investment agency and we are a champion and an advocate for the cultural sector, been doing lots of things in our first two years to celebrate and to promote the cultural strengths of Scotland. Later this week we will be launching our festivals guide to 350 cultural festivals in Scotland. We have been developing partnerships with our broadcasters one of which will be STV, Scottish television, who want to follow our Get Scotland Dancing programme. We have been launching the London 2012 festival programme, our Made in Scotland programme which I will touch on further. This week we start the Celtic connections festival where we show case our best musicians in Scotland. We have just finished celebrating one of our artists Carla Black in Venice, with Scotland in Venice. This year we are also doing something new. We are showcasing everything that is happening in London from Clare Cunningham
performing at the UK dance audition to our orchestras performing at the hall. We want to find a way of packaging things and celebrating the cultural strengths of Scotland. And there is more. What about equalities? I think we are keen to stress that our approach is to mainstream equalities within our organisation and what we do. I think that has been demonstrated by the way that companies like Lung Har, Private Dancer (Janice Parker), Snails and Ketchup, Ramesh’s work and Scottish Dance Theatre has sat alongside Dundee Rep, the Traverse and other companies in our Made in Scotland programme. I hope that that will continue to be the case. This year we have been very fortunate to plug into the Cultural Olympiad and Scotland ironically the farthest away from London probably has the most impressive programme in the London 2012 festival and Cultural Olympiad. And great success because the qualities here in accessing commissions through the Cultural Olympiad, the Unlimited commissions programme will see work I think all of these are in the programme, from Claire Cunningham, Janice Parker, Caroline Bowditch, Ramesh’s work, he was telling me yesterday in Glasgow that his show is being expanded and will be premiered in the MacRobert in the summer and then London and other venues. Marc Brew and Evelyn Glennie, inspiration. Not just from dance, people here from Drake music, a fantastic project working with Drake music, I went to see early work on this project and it is using inspiring technology to enable composition from some of the Drake music participants. So, a huge amount happening in the Cultural Olympiad but in terms of ongoing work Creative Scotland supports a number of organisations. People like Birds of Paradise, like Solar Bear and the access work for deaf participants. We’ve given a grant to the Federation of Scottish Theatres for captioning equipment, hopefully to roll out captioning across all the theatres in Scotland. Drake Music Scotland and their inclusive music technology work and the fantastic ensembles they put together and Limelight given support for their inclusive youth choir and who do a lot of work in recording and music in Glasgow.
Some of this work is of great quality thanks very much to Ramesh and his photographers for this photo. This is work which demands the highest technical speck, demands fantastic venues and could stand up on any stage around the world. But what about the money? People often say it is all about the money and there is Mat (Fraser) said earlier, the money was cut in England for various companies. We do have an access and equalities budget. Maggie Maxwell who is here, looks after that for us, £750,000 over 3 years, that is not an insignificant sum to be putting aside specifically to develop strategic work in this area but it is not just about that. Got be about our quality arts production, about our festivals events and touring. Got be about investing in disabled artists doing international work. Got be looking at the capital programmes and how new facilities that develop in Scotland take equalities and access as central. It has got to be about all the other organisations that we support, our foundation organisations, our project companies and everyone else. But for me, I use this slide a lot. The glass is more than half full in Scotland and I think this agenda is very much on people’s minds. We have a few other opportunities. Creative Scotland is working a lot in partnership with other organisations and we are working in partnership with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. There is a great opportunity here to tackle some of the issues that Janet and Mat referred to so that our educators, our schools, our colleges, and our artists are better equipped to work in the equality sector. The Baring Foundation partnered with us, on a 2 year programme, a festival of arts and creative aging, great opportunities to develop work in this area. Over half of Scotland's population is over the age of 50 and it is really important if we are driven by a delivery for the people of Scotland, that we consider that very significant sector of our community. Our creative futures residencies, we have some 350 artist’s residencies across Scotland that we are packaging together in one way or another. There is a real opportunity here to bring in artists like Ramesh, Caroline and others to place themselves into some of the residency hosts and deliver a programme of change.
We are reviewing that railway map, we are reviewing the sector and trying to understand what is happening in the cultural life and ecology of Scotland. We need to find the gaps. We need to find the strengths and build on them and then what we are going to do is commission some new strategic interventions and certainly, there will be strategic commissions that will be about taking professional quality work forward in the equalities sector. I just wanted to simplify the process of this review and I found these 3 images which sum it up. I wished I used these before. First of all we will map what is happening in Scotland in theatre. We want to know where theatre is happening; we want to know what type of theatres is happening. We want to know who is doing it, where the artists are. We then want to look at that and analyse it and find where the strengths are, where the gaps are and then we want to take action and to, we can't do everything. But we can back some strengths and we can address some of the gaps. We have got this fantastic opportunity this year, I came home from work last Wednesday night, I don't see a lot of television but I switched on the news. News at ten, BBC. On came an advert for the year of Creative Scotland. Now this was BBC news. I then switched over to Newsnight, BBC 2 and on came an advert for the year of Creative Scotland with reference to Scotland's year of cultural and creativity and we were caught up in the whole issue of the Scotland referendum on independence and the BBC had picked up that we have just launched an advert to attract tourists to Scotland but it is fantastic to see the profile that we are already getting and if you look at my computer, the press cuttings this morning, there is probably about 15 press articles that are mentioning the Year of Creative Scotland. It is our opportunity and we want everybody in this room from Scotland to use it to make sure that they tell the world about the great work that is happening and this is part of a broader picture of the London 2012, the Cultural Olympiad and our move towards the commonwealth games in 2014 when we will have another platform to celebrate Scotland's cultural strengths and to welcome the world here to see some of the work that is happening. I mentioned the festivals guide. Part of Creative Scotland's role is to tell the stories that perhaps haven't been told and just as a festival's guide for Scotland's 350 festivals it would be great at this conference if we are telling the
story about our cultural strengths here in Scotland and here in dance and theatre production. Our web site is an incredibly powerful tool for doing this. Please tell us your success stories. Our web site is just astounded us has gone up to a hundred thousand unique visitors a month. There is 850 people read my Blog every week. Lord knows, they must have better things to do; but do go on to our web site, it is about show casing the work that you are doing. Lots of people are going be promoting Scotland this year and there is going to be some sensational events. I used to have a rule, I worked for a long time as Mat says in the cultural sector and I got the stage where I would go to only one conference a year. I got bored; they always said the same thing and never moved things forward. I set myself a rule; I would choose and go to one conference a year because now I speak at one conference a week. But if I had to choose one conference so far this year that I have seen, this would have been the one to come to. I think it is an exciting programme. I think that the accumulation of what is happening within this room and the people that are here, are creating that sort of generational change that I talked about earlier. So if I go to nothing else during the year, I hope today and tomorrow is a really good event and I wish you well in your efforts to connect with the entire world of cultural production in Scotland, thank you.