Standing Room Only

Ockham’s Razor visited Dance City, Newcastle this week with ‘The Mill’, an hour-long aerial theatre production staged by five performing artists. The matinee performance was standing room only and, being a matinee, full of kids aged 8ish and older. An hour of pure entertainment followed – reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, the performing artists ‘worked’ on a series of spinning wheels and ropes commanded by a Big Brother voice. The work routine gradually disintegrated after one performer decided to take it easy. It was clever, funny, dangerous and beautiful. Even better was that all the kids were fully engaged in the performance – laughing at the funny bits, gasping at the dangerous bits and mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic spinning of the performers on a hamster wheel.

James Berresford, CEO of Visit England, visited the North East this week and I attended a briefing session organised by NewcastleGateshead Initiative to hear his views on the changes happening in the tourism sector and insight into tourism at a national level. Whilst inevitably there was a lot of talk about the economic downturn and spending cuts I thought there was a real feeling of pulling together to get through the challenging times ahead.

BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival of ideas took place over the past weekend and I attended the launch event at The Sage Gateshead. Whilst I’ve never considered myself within the Radio 3 audience segment I think I’m going to have to revisit this. I downloaded a lovely 20-minute audio drama ‘Take Me to the Bridge’ by Sean O’Brien, designed to be listened to on a short walk from The Sage Gateshead to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. It follows the tale of a man and woman who find themselves on either side of the bridge, drawn together by the currents of memory and desire. (Text BRIDGE to 83111 – text charged at standard network rate.)

This week Arts Council England launched Achieving great art for everyone, its 10-year framework for the arts, and its new National Portfolio Funding programme for arts organisations in England. The Arts Council’s regional briefing meetings on these were also standing room only! As one of the Arts Council’s current RFOs it’s a relief to finally find out the detail of the Arts Council’s plans so that we can get down to the business of planning where we fit within the Arts Council’s future priorities. I attended the briefing event in Leeds and amongst the things I’ll take back from this is the aim to have a more flexible, transparent, efficient and fair relationship with the Arts Council. Cluny Macpherson, Regional Director of Arts Council England, Yorkshire, also said that the Arts Council was: “very, very interested in cross area collaborations” and this is something that audience development agencies as well as the wider arts sector will no doubt be considering seriously in the coming weeks.

On Wednesday this week we held our annual stakeholders’ event in Newcastle. Attended by 45 representatives from the cultural sector, the event focused on ‘Evidencing impact and value’, a topic we thought was particularly pertinent given the times we live in. This is a huge subject area so we concentrated on reviewing six key frameworks for evidencing impact and value crossing different sizes of organisations, artform areas and rationale and highlighted the best elements from each. We also focused on economic impact and what organisations could do if they had insufficient resources to carry out a full economic impact review. ANE has recently carried out its own impact and value review and we used this to show how to cascade down from an organisation’s priorities to articulate impact and value.

I suppose it’s a sign of my age that I’ve moved from being a mentee to being a mentor! I’ve recently joined the AMA’s mentoring scheme and have been matched to mentor a member of staff from a cultural venue. We met for the first time last week – it felt weird at first and we followed the AMA’s guidelines to the letter. But it’s amazing how quickly the ice was broken – I’m really excited and looking forward to seeing how this works out. In 2001 I was Andrew Dixon’s PA at Northern Arts and he offered to find me a mentor from one of his contacts within the arts sector. Nine years later, following years of studying, secondments and mentoring by a very experienced arts marketer I’m now CEO of ANE. I think that the single most important thing that propelled my career forward was the critical friendship of my mentor and I hope that I can do the same for someone else.

Alison O’Hara

Chief Executive

Audiences North East