Leeds Dance Partnership Director

Leeds Arts Neighbourhood

Author Kenneth Allen
Source Wikipedia
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In Leeds Dance Partnership 29 Nov 2016, I noted that Arts Council England had announced that it had granted £750,000 to Northern Ballet out of its "Ambition for Excellence" fund "to support the creation of the Leeds Dance Partnership." The Arts Council's press release on the award stated that Northern Ballet will be recruiting a Partnership Director to help take the programme forward.

They have not lost any time. On 12 Dec 2016 the company advertised for a "Partnership Director who will provide strategic leadership and undertake the day-to-day management and delivery of the Leeds Dance Partnership." The post is offered on an initial fixed-term contract for 9 months but is expected to last for at least 3 years. The director will be employed by Northern Ballet and report to the Partnership Board (see "Partnership Director" on the company's website).  The successful candidate will be paid £45,000 per annum pro rata the length of the contract.

According to the job description the main purposes of the post are to:

• "Lead and deliver core programme activities, ensuring the Leeds Dance Partnership makes maximum strategic impact; 

• Support the Partnership Board, facilitating and coordinating shared leadership by the networks and working groups; 

• Ensure Leeds Dance Partnership is connected, networked and communicated with/to all partners, beneficiaries and funders; 

• Secure further investment into the partnership for the delivery of a 5 year strategy; 

• Ensure funding agreements are serviced and reporting requirements are met.

The post – and the work undertaken by the post-holder – will be overseen by Northern Ballet’s Executive Director on a day-to-day basis."

The experience, skills and knowledge of the successful candidate are set out expansively if not too precisely in the "Person Specification" (sic).

Applications have to be lodged by 20 Jan 2017 and interviews will take place on 2 Feb 2017.  An application form can be downloaded here. Although I am not a big fan of this sort of project I wish everybody who applies the very best of luck.

I have a number of problems with Arts Council funding not least of which is the inequity of asking Bentham's pushpin player to lash out oodles of tax revenue to support what is, after all, a minority interest.  As I said in

Ballet as a Brand? How to bring More Money into Dance for Companies and Dancers 13 March 2014 companies, theatres and indeed individual dancers could raise far more through exploiting their intellectual assets from licensing, merchandizing and sponsorship. Companies in other countries seem to flourish artistically as well as financially without an Arts Council. There are signs that it could work in this country. Birmingham Royal Ballet, for instance, raised £102,679 through crowdfunding in just a few days for a new production of La Bayadere in the Big Give Christmas Challenge. English National Ballet and Balletboyz raised £22,847 and £22,461 for their respective Parkinsons classes.

Leeds Dance Partnership

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On the very day that Northern Ballet's Artistic Director, David Nixon, addressed the London Ballet Circle, Arts Council England announced that it had granted £750,000 to Northern Ballet out of its "Ambition for Excellence" fund "to support the creation of the Leeds Dance Partnership." This is a £35.2 million fund to support

"Audio-visual, broadcast and transmission, commissioning, digital creation, exhibition, festival, original work, performance, production."

It is a rolling programme from 28 May 2015 to 27 Oct 2017 which is open to National Portfolio Organizations. museums and consortiums.

Northern Ballet is a National PortfolioOrganization as I mentioned in How Arts Council England supports Dance 10 Oct 2015. In that article, I noted that the Arts Council had recommended "dance hubs" to be developed in Birmingham and Leeds. As regards Leeds the Arts Council observed:

"Leeds has the potential to become a major regional dance centre. We suggested that Northern Ballet should work with Phoenix, Leeds City Council, Yorkshire Dance and others to explore how they might work collaboratively to build a broad dance culture in Leeds, capable of increasing audiences and attracting and retaining talent in the city."

Northern Ballet seems to have acted upon that recommendation for it held the event that was recorded in the video on 12 April 2016.

In conjunction with Burns Associates, a steering committee which included Mark Skipper of Northern Ballet and Sharon Watson of Phoenix applied for funding for the partnership. The committee set out its objectives in Leeds Dance Partnership A step change for dance in the north Update September 2016:

• "Better and more work made in Leeds and the north and toured elsewhere; 
• Better and more work toured into Leeds and the north; 
• More diverse audiences and participants watching, owning, co-curating and taking part in dance."

Will it work?  I fervently hope so but it will not be easy.  Leeds's population is significantly smaller than Birmingham's.

One of the problems of state funding for the arts in the way that it exists in the UK is that the funding agency looks at the arts from the producer's point of view rather than the audience's. That is entirely the wrong end of the telescope.  If you want to create a market for an art form you start where the market actually is and not where the creators would like it to be.  It is, after all, the public that pays for the arts whether as patrons or taxpayers and public generosity is not unlimited.  As the economy enters post-Brexit uncertainty how much longer an organization created by Lord Keynes can continue in a post-Keynesian age.

Statistics

Since I started this blog on 25 Feb 2016 I have posted 804 articles and received over 200,000 page hits. Our 10 most popular articles have been as follows:

1. A Romeo and Juliet for our Times 7 Nov 2016
2. Meet Gavin McCaig of Northern Ballet 3 Sep 2014
3. The Dutch National Ballet Junior Company's best Performance yet 8 Feb 2015
4. Thinking out Loud about Ballet West 8 Feb 2016 
5. Ballet West's Romeo and Juliet 1 Feb 2015 
6. The Nutcracker as it really should be danced - No Gimmicks but with Love and Joy 20 Mar 2014
7. Michaela's Masterclass 8 July 2015 
8. Mandev Sokhi 10 Oct 2015
9. Ballet Cymru's Summer Tour 22 May 2016 
10. A Unique Opportunity to learn a Bit of The Nutcracker 12 Oct 2016

Readers seem to be most interested in Ballet Cymru with three articles in the top 10. That may be because the company is about to start a short season in London and dance Darius James and Amy Doughty's Little Red Riding Hood at the Cardiff Millennium Centre on 4 Dec 2016. Sadly one of the articles in the top ten mourned the loss of the talented Mandev Sokhi.

The Dutch National Ballet's Junior Company is also very popular with readers who enjoyed my review of the opening night of the Junior Company's tour of the Netherlands in 2015.  There was also a lot of interest in one of my very favourite young dancers, Michaela DePrince, who visited London last year and this to deliver master classes at Danceworks. 

In fact, there was considerable interest in the young. I was delighted to see Northern Ballet's Gavin McCaig listed at number 2.  Actually, he led the field for well over two years until Ballet Cymru claimed the number one spot a few days ago. Reviews of Ballet West's Romeo and Juliet and The Nutcracker by Ballet West were also very popular as was my review of the same ballet by Chelmsford Ballet.  And still talking about The Nutcracker I am delighted that my preview of Jane Tucker's workshop on the ballet for KNT at the Dancehouse Theatre (which I attended) was also in the top 10.

For only the third month ever we have received more than 10,000 hits in one month and we still have a few days of November to run. My main audiences outside the UK seem to be the USA, Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands in that order.  Once again, I should like to thank all my contributors, Joanne Goodman, Peter Groves, Janet McNulty, Gita Mistry, David Murley, Alison Winward and Mel Wong for all their posts. The blog would have been much less interesting without your articles. I should also like to thank all who have supplied photos and other content especially Richard Heideman of the Dutch National Ballet,  György Jávorszky of the Hungarian National Ballet, Rae Piper of Chantry Dance and Jenny Isaacs and Patricia Vallis of Ballet Cymru.