Say goodbye wave hello

Well, I did warn you March might be quiet on here... but I'm back. Kind of.

It's a bit of a shame, really, as in many ways I wanted to ramp up activity here, but it seems the work ethic got in the way during my last few weeks at the Arts Council. However, I was trying to do a few too many things at once to eke out the time and energy to do justice to the subjects that arose here. You may, therefore, never hear about the 'Cafe Culturel' discussion I took part in, with Kate Fox, in which I read poems by Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz and a women in the audience sang us a song after telling us about her job interview, or about what I learnt about arts leadership on the first part of a coaching course, about my struggles turning the theories of resilience into something like plain English or my writing the mother of all leaving poems for 14 colleagues leaving the Arts Council, or the fantastic and art-full week my wife and I have just had in New York.

Those of us who have departed as a result of the recent restructure - which stems back to the last Government Spending Review and will see an extra £6.5M for Regularly Funded Organisations, with the Arts Council having around 25% less staff - are now all off to pastures new. In my case that's my own business, Thinking Practice. The name combines the two elements I believe the arts and culture sector need to integrate even better - more consciously perhaps - than now, and because I hope other people will become involved over time.

The aim is to help the arts and cultural sectors, and maybe the broader third sector, create a fairer and more beautiful world, by helping them to increase their own impact and build their resilience through creative approaches that combine thinking (eg analysis and strategy) with practice (eg doing, learning, coaching). You can read about it on a beta site here.

Lots of people have asked whether I'll carry on blogging when I leave the Arts Council. The short answer is yes, although obviously it's a quite different context. I started Arts Counselling because it seemed the perfect form to share enthusiasms and ideas, whilst demonstrating that not everyone who works for the Arts Council is a faceless bureaucrat. (There are a total of 27 of those according to the most recent HR stats, apparently.) Sadly my Executive Board colleagues have been terribly slow in following my example, not for the first time either, though once someone shows them the on switch for the blogosphere, who knows? Seriously, I'm told Andrew Nairne's twittering is cult following amongst some, and there are more and more ACE-types on there, so things/people are opening up. If you want to petition Alan Davey to take up the Arts Counselling baton his email is publicly available, and I for one think he'd do a great blog.

Opinion has been split on whether I should keep the Arts Counselling name for future blogging. It is - obviously - a brilliant name, but given its origins can't help but relate to my now former employer. I'm incredibly proud of that organisation and my time there, and will be using what I learnt for the rest of my career, but it feels time to let go of that association for my writing. Later this week then, I will start blogging on Thinking Practice. You can expect the same mixture of ideas, thoughts, links, descriptions of experiences, questions and recommendations. You'll also be able to subscribe by email as many people do to Arts Counselling. If you are currently a subscriber you can subscribe to Thinking Practice by clicking here. Please do, I'll be disappointed, and my ego shattered, if too many of you were just watching out of funder-curiosity rather than hanging on my every word.

There's one more post I think it appropriate to put here, then this site will be dormant but available, as I think there's some useful stuff here. I'll find a way of archiving some of the more durable posts on the Thinking Practice site. Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the feedback and thoughts. Remember: it's time for some Thinking Practice.

Can you feel the force?

How my kids laughed at this… Apparently I am one of 500 of the most influential people in the North East of England. Well, at least according to a highly unscientific and undemocratic exercise in The Journal newspaper, that is, and if you want to make a sarcastic comment about the North East please do so using the normal channels!

The reason I mention it, apart from amused pride, is that I’m interested in the high number of cultural figures in the list. (To be honest, it’d be a shame if someone in my job wasn’t on that list, so I don’t put it down to my personal qualities especially.) These range from novelists such as Val McDermid and David Almond through choreographer Liv Lorent, poet Sean O’Brien, playwright Lee Hall, a good set of Chief Execs, producers and festival directors right through to giants such as Ant and Dec. The ‘Culture, media and the arts’ index is twice as long as the public sector one, for instance – surprising perhaps as the public sector is a big employer in this region. And there are more of us than there are lawyers. (They can probably outspend us in the Influence bar though.) I take that as an indication that culture here has, at least in part, and in the perception of whoever put this list together, put itself at the heart of regional life. On a good day I always think that, but it’s good to have some ‘external’ confirmation.

(Another confirmation came last week in that the announcement of the Hodge Review and the abolition of the regional cultural consortia was, somewhat surprisingly, front page news in The Journal.)

Another noticeable trend is the number of ex-Arts Council/Northern Arts people now in senior non-arts jobs in the region. Maybe that’s the kind of thing we need to really ‘mainstream’ the arts: more people prepared to dirty their hands with the process of ‘influence’ and power? Perhaps the various ‘cultural leadership’ schemes need to also think about how some people can move not just ‘up’ but ‘across’?

Do you remember the first time?

I used to do lots of poetry readings. I’ve read to hundreds of people, and I’ve read to less people than I can fit round my kitchen table. I’ve had some great times performing and I’ve had some miserable times when reading poems out loud has felt like the most archaic thing you can do short of going to live in a cave. (I imagine my audiences’ experiences have varied similarly.)

Last week I did one of my rare readings. (Although I am still writing, it’s been a while since I’ve had anything substantial published other than in anthologies such as last year’s ‘A Balkan Exchange’, the output of a collaboration with some friends in Bulgaria and North East England.) Thanks to an invite from the kind folks at Richmond’s Georgian Theatre Royal I was the guest at their monthly reading. After my performance, there was an ‘open floor’ slot for other people there. (I was going to write ‘audience’ but the roles moved around during the evening.)

No less than three people said they were reading a poem out in public for the first time. It was clearly a big step for all of them, a brave, exposing and emotional moment, and something everyone there responded to. As the guest poet and ‘MC’ I felt nervous and responsible for the atmosphere. I was reminded of the huge commitment it takes to ‘participate’, one we who work in the arts can sometimes take for granted. That first time experience is a really crucial one: do we make it as safe as we can for people to take that risk?

Some years ago I edited Words Out Loud, a book of essays on ‘the poetry reading’ and what might be going on in one. I was reminded last week of something Keith Jafrate said in his essay: ‘All those life-changing moments can’t be sold, to ‘the audience’, to other promoters or to the arts quangos. That is to say, a faith cannot be sold.’ The book is now out of print but you can probably pick one up second-hand, and I have a few left if anyone’s especially keen.

Generation Why?

Suddenly everything I read seems to be talking about Generation Y. I’ve just finished reading Peter Sheahan’s entertaining, thought-provoking but also rather irritating book Flip. Put simply this challenges you to think counter-intuitively and turn things on their head to find the way forward. This leads him to conclusions such as ‘Action precedes strategy’ and ‘There is no wisdom in crowds’. Essentially it’s about coping with accelerating pressures by not carrying on acting in the old ways. (I’ll come back to suggesting a couple of flips the arts might think about.) He is also a global speaker on Generation Y – and boy, does he remind you of this - and makes a great deal of his youth.

And the papers seem to have been full of it. I’ve never bought into ‘generations’, perhaps because I was born on the cusp of two – the 110th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Rimbaud being practically the last gasp of the baby boomers apparently, or a premature arrival of Generation X – and always thought they were simply journalistic stereotypes. (And like all stereotypes, not without some truth.)

I blamed the baby boomers for Thatcherism, and Generation X for grunge. Many people in the arts have perhaps always been Generation Y – portfolio careered, striving for work/life balance, more concerned with job satisfaction than salary, not accepting historical patterns etc. Do we, though, also share the potential for being forgetful of the past and complacent about things we may soon have to learn will not always carry on – like cheap global travel, relatively plentiful employment opportunities, social cohesion, cheap credit and economic stability?

Why would you work for the Arts Council?

With this site I want to stimulate thought and discussion about how the arts sector might need to react to the changing world. I hope, in doing that, to give some insight into the kinds of things I’m thinking about as I lead the North East office of Arts Council England. It ‘s not going to be ‘behind the scenes of everyday life at ACE’. (You need to come and hang out in our kitchen to get the flavour of that.) But I hope it will help to show that people who work for the Arts Council, even at the executive level, are not ‘faceless suits’, robotic bureaucrats, secret agents of the state, or philistines working in deep cover so we can put a stop to theatre.

Reading and listening to some of the reaction to our recent funding decisions, you might think that’s exactly what we are. I don’t plan to deconstruct the media coverage here, but the depiction of Arts Council staff in some comments is one reason I’ve decided to start my posting with five paragraphs on why I work for Arts Council England. Then you’ll at least know some of where I’m coming from. (And, by the way, I think they’re pretty common in our staff!)

PASSION The arts are central to my life and my enthusiasm for it, as well as my darker moments. The arts are how I think and feel my way through life. I’ve had my life changed by the arts and I want more people to have that happen to them. Although I don’t come from a background rich in the arts (few books in the house, didn’t go to the theatre until Shakespeare time at O Level, no music lessons etc – continue until parenthesis becomes the Four Yorkshiremen Sketch…) somehow good teachers and a fantastic village library helped grow a love of reading. Then punk and the exhilarating discovery that you didn’t have to practise for years to be creative with a guitar and your voice fuelled an obsession with music, which through following my curious nose led me to writing. And that led me to performing, editing, publishing, promoting and from there off into other art forms again. And I’ve always wanted to share that passion.

OPPORTUNITY I think that is too important to leave to chance and the market and want more people to try the arts and see what place they might have in their lives. That’s going to vary – from 24-7 passion, employment and life’s work to occasional pleasure and night out or emotional release at key times in life. And that’s fine. Goodness knows what good luck led me to the arts. My parents were always supportive but puzzled. (My dad worked in a carpet warehouse and my mum was a secretary most of her life.) But I know there are lots of people who could make or enjoy the arts who miss that almost random occurrence. Arts Council’s work and investment multiplies the chances for it to happen. (And no, I don’t think you can guarantee it happening by audience development or by ‘target-olatry’. It’s kind of the reverse of the fact that healthy living doesn’t guarantee you won’t get cancer, but makes your chances better.)

RESPONSIBILITY I believe in public funding of the arts. The arts play a range of vital roles in healthy societies, including economic, and that can both require and deserve government support. That means someone has to make choices – and that shouldn’t be the government. The arts are by nature always going to be in opposition to Power at times and need to be free from direct political influence. Of course there is a general influence that cannot be avoided, but that is the deal those who accept public funding accept. I was always told that if you want a job doing well you do it yourself, and eventually reached a point where I wanted to take greater responsibility for decision-making than sitting on panels. I didn’t want to whinge from the outside. I did that at times early in my career and it made nothing happen. This is at times a sacrifice (my publishing career as a poet has slowed to a crawl due to avoiding ‘conflicts of interest’, for instance – or at least I like to think that’s why!) but I get huge satisfaction from doing what I think is an important job that makes things happen for other people. I don’t want to sound noble – I am far better paid and more secure than when I was a freelance writer teacher and project manager, and am grateful for that.

CHANGE. Most of the things I’ve done in my career have started off out of enthusiasm and dissatisfaction. I started a poetry magazine because the ones I was getting published in weren’t good enough. I published books because writers I wanted to champion needed help. I devised arts projects to change the world or my corner of it… I work at the Arts Council because we improve things for artists, organisations and audiences. We are also supporting them as their needs change. In the last 10 years the face of the arts in the North East has changed dramatically. So has the Arts Council. I know both can get better yet and want to be part of that.

ROOTS I am still a writer when working at ACE but only in a way. There are lots of artists here – people who you might in other circumstances, call peers. We have to manage some process that would drive other writers and artists mad, I’m more than happy to admit that. But we do our human utmost to hold onto the roots of our passion to create opportunity and positive change for the arts. (As a member of the national executive team I also take my geographical and cultural roots, which spread across the north of England from Preston, Lancs to Preston-on-Tees, into a national context. But that’s another story!)

So, five words, to kick off. Lots more to come, not about me.