Guest post: "Inspiring a love for the arts in younger audiences", by Consuelo Hidalgo (Ecuador)

Consuelo Hidalgo is a person full of energy and enthusiasm that makes you feel that everything is possible. And she works hard enough to actually make things happen. Right now she is the right person for the right job. Being the Executive Director of Fundacion Niños con Futuro, she brings together her love for the arts with her love for children. In this text, she is sharing with us the story of her contribution to Ecuador´s future. She is dreaming of and working for a country populated by citizens who are sensitive, creative and genuine critical thinkers. mv

A pre-school student at Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra´s concert for kids. (Photo: Consuelo Hidalgo)

I remember the first time I heard my grandmother tell me in a very enthusiastic way the story of La Traviatta. I was five and very impressed by the plot and the way this passionate music and voices narrated this drama in such a magical, but incomprehensible, way.  This is how I was introduced to the opera, a grandmother’s storytelling game that developed a new way to perceive and understand this art form.

Every art form has a story to tell. For me, having worked for several years in audience development projects for younger people in museums, symphony orchestras and children’s foundations, taught me the importance of the way, quality and frequency of the stories we tell children to get them involved in the arts.

In Ecuador, most of the performing arts activities are free for children, so why are ecuadorian younger audiences so detached from the artistic environment? I think the problem starts with the ‘willingness’ of educational institutions and parents to bring them to a performing arts show or rehearsals (which are almost all open on specific days to the public). My question now is, what is the story we are telling educators and parents about the benefits of attending a performance, and how do local arts institutiosn plan their activities to serve younger audiences? And how sustainable are arts institutions going to be in the years to come, since the arts and music is no longer a mandatory subject in schools and when other kinds of entertainment are being consumed by the population?

Maestro Ivan Fabre (Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra´s first violin) giving a concert for kids at Fundacion Niños con Futuro. (Photo: Consuelo Hidalgo)

We still haven´t got any formal studies on the impact of arts education programmes on younger audiences in Ecuador. Our parametre to measure results is the feedback given by parents and teachers. I clearly remember when my first ‘formal’ arts education programme was taking shape, “Cultura para todos” (Culture for everyone). I was working at the colonial art Museum Nahim Isaias and, as you can imagine, getting kids excited about colonial arts was a very tough call. So, I started playing with concepts used by our curators in our exhibitions that could be presented as a parallel story in a familiar language for pupils. For example, based on a permanent exhibition inspired in iconography, we created a special programme, in accordance with the academic standards established at national and local levels. Each teacher received a worksheet to guide students and was supposed to implement the programme in the classroom, while specific art and iconography concepts were taught during the museum visit.  The programme was designed to support arts learning in classrooms. The purpose of this, as well as of the following young audience development programme at the Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra, was to engage students through a creative approach to education, provide arts experiences for children and empower students with tools of self expression. This experiences included visits to the museum where the children received a special workbook with fun activities, like, crosswords, riddles, and clues to play a mistery game guided by the staff, and visits to the symphony orchestra and strings quartet concerts at their schools, also with a workbook focused on their experience after the concerts. The response we had from teachers and parents was very positive, since they could clearly see an increase in students’ engagement in learning and a more active and sustained appreciation for the arts. The most rewarding experience for us was to see these children coming back with their parents on the weekend (and letting us know they came back), as well as to know that schools that participated in our programmes were know including arts and culture fair in their academic calendar (we were invited to inaugurate eight of these fairs).

This was how, eight years ago, I started developing community-based partnerships, as a means of building the audience required to ensure high-quality arts learning for young people, and settled my goal to improve schools and community capacity to embrace the arts, which would hopefully develop a systemic demand for arts education in the future.

Children from Fundacion Niños con Futuro visit the theatre in Guayaquil. (Photo: Consuelo Hidalgo)

So, what is the story we should be telling society about the importance of arts in children’s lives? Art is a relevant strategy for education in all areas. In early childhood, it enhances creative, reflective and critical thinking. It is a learning tool that stimulates the ability to create and innovate. So, we can certainly say that, through art, children can express their feelings and creativity as they develop critical thinking skills.

The question we are now facing is not one of "education minus art" versus "education plus art," but, rather, what is the quality of the core skills set with which we hope to - and must - equip future generations? Will it be a tool kit designed for the performance of simple practical tasks? Or will it promote, instead, the sort of flexible, imaginative and critical thinking that is required to deal with the complex and ever-shifting challenges posed by the contemporary world? Will it limit its compass to the classroom? Or will it, instead, become a lifelong resource for personal growth and enrichment? Will it make us more aware of the subtle details of life, instead of hungry for all quantifiable consumers’ gratification goods?

Being involved with the arts as a child changed my life forever. I wouldn’t be so active working on this specific matter if it wasn’t so. This is the story I want tell you and, hopefully, I will find similar stories in the future from the generations to come.

Consuelo M. Hidalgo is a journalist. She is currently working as the Executive Director at Fundacion Niños con Futuro. Before that, she worked for 4 years as cultural promoter at The Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra, where she was responsible for audience development programmes, international relations and educational programmes. She started her professional career as PR Manager at the Colonial Art Museum Nahim Isaias, in Guayaquil. During the time she worked at the museum, she developed multiple cultural projects that pursued the integration of people with fewer resources in the museum´s the cultural activities. This project was called Cultura Para Todos and it has been taken to other cities in the country. In 2006 she was offered a position at the MAAC, an anthropologic and contemporary art museum, to manage a new project called Vivir La Cultura - offering free performing arts presentations to the citizens by using regenerated areas of the city as their main stage. In 2008, she participated in the U.S Department of State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts International Cultural Exchange Fellows Mentoring Program for Performing Arts Managers. She just finished her Arts management fellowship at the DeVos Arts Management Institute at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

On public value

Image taken from detroitfunk.com

There already exists extensive litterature regarding the value of the arts and culture. The issues related to its instrumentalization by governments or its intrinsic character have been on the agenda for many years now, especially in countries such as the US, the UK or Australia. There was a moment when, considering all the ‘proofs’ one had to give, I thought that culture professionals are exactly and only that: culture professionals. They are neither teachers nor therapists or doctors or priests or policemen... If their work has a positive impact on other areas, this impact must be registered e professionals in those areas, as well as their ‘users’, must become our ambassadors. More than any study on, for example, the impact of the cultural sector on a country´s economy (there are various, governments use them or ignore them), more than any argument we might present in defense of our cntribution to society, there is a need for the testimonies of those who are the ‘direct beneficiaries’ – even of ‘colateral’ benefits – of our work. And let´s not forget, these are the people who vote in elections.

Nevertheless, more than once I´ve expressed here my concern regarding the fact that culture professionals are keeping a distance from society, from the people. Whenever we debate the importance of culture, the reasons why it should be state funded, our arguments are only good enough for internal consumption. It´s us talking to our peers in defense of our ‘small corner’. We even give the idea that we are defending personal issues and not the common good.

People defend and support with their taxes the existence of public hospitals (even if hoping never to set foot in them, but because they recognize in their existence a common good). What needs to be done in order to think and talk in a similar way regarding culture? So that everyone, users and non-users, envisages it as a common, indispensable, good?

Approximately two years ago, I came across for the first time in my readings with the term ‘public value’, in a text by John Holden, dating from 2004, called Capturing Cultural Value: How culture has become a tool for government policy. In this text, ‘public value’ is defined as the value added by government and the public sector in its widest sense. It is the difference between what citizens give to and what they receive from public bodies. Citizens recognize value when they give something up in return (in culture that might be, for example, money – for buying tickets or in donations -, time, energy, voluntary work, etc.).

Last month, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) became news when it suceeded in convincing the residents of three counties in Michigan to vote for a new property tax which will benefit directly the museum. Thus, the DIA will be receiving $23 million per year for the next 10 years (91% of its annual budget), while at the same time it will try to raise $400 million for its endowment so that, after the 10 years pass, it can continue its operations. After the tax had passed, the museum offered free entry to all residents in the three counties.

In what concerns this event, Diane Ragsdale, author of the blog Jumper,  did an excellent analysis (read here), with links to more texts, where she raises sime extremely relevant questions: has the museum calculated the impact (in the sense of reduction) on citizens´s usual contributions (donations, admissions, membership, etc.); would it have been a more intelligent and ethical solution to try and support various institutions rather than only one; is the DIA putting itself in an awkward position, having to renegotiate its relationship with the community in ten years’ time; what motivated people to pass the tax and how mat those who voted ‘no’ be feeling; how should one interpret the tripling of attendance in the week after the tax was passed; and, finally, what will the impact of this quid pro quo deal will be in what concerns the benefits a community may (and will expect to) receive in return for its support to a cultural institution?

This last question takes me to another excellent text, by Nina Simon, author of the blog Museum 2.0, who focused on the public discussion during the museum´s campaign (read here). Nina analysed more than 300 comments in the Detroit Free Press Online and once again raised  questions regarding the way people perceive culture´s public value and the way these debates can and should be conducted by cultural institutions themselves. Nina quoted a very interesting study, The Arts Ripple Effect: A research-based strategy to build shared responsibility for the arts, which identifies, among others, three main assumptions regarding the arts: the arts are a private matter (they are about individual tastes, experiences and enrichment ans also about individual expression); the arts are a good to be purchased (thus, they should succeed or fail as any other product in the market); the arts are not a priority (even among those who value them). The study suggets that, knowing of these and other assumptions, it is possible to build arguments in defense of culture which may be understood by the majority of people, acknowledging its impact on their lives and that of their community. A common good requires a common language and a common frame, shared by all.

Rebecca Lamoin, Associate Director of Strategy at Queensland Performing Arts Centre and my colleague at the Kennedy Center, is currently working on a project about the public value of cultural institutions. As part of a two day forum, she is organising a national radio programme, open to the public. In this preparatory phase, she is inviting culture professionals from all over the world to make brief statements, answering the following questions:

- What is the most important thing your organisation delivers to your community?

- Why do your communities love you?

- What people in your city would miss if your organisation wasn’t there anymore?

I believe that trying to answer these questions, especially the last one, would be a good exercise for all of us. And it would also be interesting to know how many institutions in Portugal have already got the answers, because they actively collect and register these data. In the beginning of November, Rebecca Lamoin will be telling us in this blog of how things went in Australia.

Still in this blog:

So, what´s the plan?

We are for people. Or… arewe?

Ministry of Culture: Whichculture? Whose culture?

Who ‘deserves’ to be funded?(II) Some conclusions

More readings

Public Value and the Arts inEngland: Discussion and conclusions of the arts debate

Regarding other tax schemes benefitting cultural institutions in the US, do read this post by Ian David Moss on Createquity.

Guest post: "Reinventing and making museums matter", by Ihor Poshyvailo (Ukraine)

Ihor Poshyvailo is a very discreet man, but, once we get to talk to him, we discover a wealth of knowledge and experience. In these conversations, it becomes obvious how concerned he is with the opening up of his country, Ukraine, to the world and the role museums can play in this period, which is still one of transition, especially in what concerns the encounter of folk culture and contemporary artistic expression. In this post, he shares his thoughts on the present and future of museums in his country. mv

Parade of "vyshyvankas" on Independence Day in Kiev. (Photo: Bohdan Poshyvailo)

Arts and culture were embedded in the environment I was brought up in. My grandparents were prominent folk potters who founded the first home-museum in Ukraine, the one which happened to be a predecessor of the National Museum of Ukrainian Ceramics in Opishne, a small village that boasts the title of “Capital of Pottery”.

I have been working in the cultural sector for over twenty years, but I should admit that the last three were especially favorable for me. I became a Fulbright Scholar at the Smithsonian Institution and a Summer International Fellow of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the Kennedy Center. These generous opportunities have provided me with new knowledge and empowered me with new ideas and visions.

Our world is becoming smaller and globalized. Nevertheless, it remains unstable. The cultivation of multicultural respect and mutual understanding between different communities can be one of the solutions to the biggest challenges and threats of the 21st century. In this process, special roles are given to arts and culture organizations, and especially to museums, which today turn out to be not only classical institutions for the preservation and presentation of historical, cultural and natural values, but important communication facilities. They have the power to profoundly alter our knowledge and sense of ourselves and of the world around us by transmitting information by means of presentation of objects and concepts, and their interpretation. As a number of researchers have suggested, museums also implicitly communicate messages about authority, power and the values of the dominant culture. Museums help us to reconstruct the past as well as provide an essential background for the understanding of the present.

In the last decades, museums in the United States have become more responsive to a diverse public by shifting focus from the presentation of objects to their interpretation and the production of experiences, while exhibitions have become people-centered, idea-oriented and contextualized. As envisioned by Stephen E. Weil, “The museum of the near future as an intricate and potentially powerful instrument of communication…will make available to the community… its profound expertise at telling stories, eliciting emotion, triggering memories, stirring imagination, and prompting discovery.”

Performance by a famous ethno-chaos group, DakhaBrakha, at Ivan Honchar Museum. (Photo:  Bohdan Poshyvailo)

The expansion of cultural heritage boundaries in the second half of the 20^th century prompted new answers in what concerns the relations between heritage objects and their consumers. ‘Heritagization of space’ – a process of reinterpretation of one’s environment – puts heritage objects and cultural institutions in line with other popular leisure facilities, including circuses and casinos, restaurants and resorts, even television and the Internet. This phenomenon has had an impact on contents and methods of presentation and interpretation of cultural legacy and has inspired the transformation of museums into special and important grounds for a dialogue about the role of cultural heritage in the development of democracy and civil society. According to the famous futurologist Rolf Jensen, the present society, characterized by scientific approach and rationalism, will inevitably return to emotions, history and values.

In this context, it should be mentioned that the social role and popularity of a museum in Ukraine are quite small, unlike in the Unites States and other developed countries. There are numerous reasons for this. The genocide policy of the communists in Ukraine and the cultural oppression of the last 80 years resulted, of course, in a considerable loss of historical memory for the Ukrainians. During the repressive years of Soviet culture, much of the distinctively Ukrainian heritage lay dormant, hidden. This was unfortunate in many ways, but our cultural isolation preserved our traditional culture as in a time capsule. Since 1991, new freedoms have come providing access to new markets and cultures. Along with this access came the flood of global cultures. Although there may be many economic advantages, in Ukraine this flood of global cultures meets a vacuum of cultural memory. For our nation, charting a distinctive course into the future and the democratic open society requires some memory of who we have been.

The Ivan Honchar Museum, as well as many other museums, can uniquely provide these cultural bearings. The only problem is how to shift from the still dominant communist model of museums - which served only as depositories for imprisoned cultural and ethnic treasures and for ideological purposes, for the ceation of a new nation, the Soviet people. Today, hundreds of museums in Ukraine can boast unique and rich collections, but they are not inspired for transition, to reinvent and make themselves matter. The museum field in Ukraine is at a critical juncture confronting daily challenges. This happens because of a lack of professional knowledge and international co-operation, outdated methods of operations, policies, and programs, that prevent them from becoming leading centers of learning and education, shaping, creating and interpreting values. Their collections, libraries, archives and other documentation resources are still not open to the broad public. New forms of art expression and new segments of the cultural sector are starting to emerge in Ukraine. But there is no effective professional management in this field and no efficient cultural policy. And the Family – an important element of The Cycle model, crafted by Michael Kaiser, the Kennedy Center’s President – has not been built in Ukraine yet.

Fashion show during the Lion Fest in the galleries of the Ivan Honchar Museum. (Photo: Bohdan Poshyvailo)

But I believe in cultural diplomacy and entirely agree with my DeVos fellow-mate Caroline Miller from London, who suggested in her post for this blog that a big cultural or sport event can effectively communicate to a mass audience more about the host country “in just one show than politicians have achieved in decades”. In my recent trip to Tunisia I was so surprised that many local people (even at the “gate to Sahara” south region) smiled friendly when finding out I was from Ukraine, admiringly saying “Ukrajna. Shevchenko!”. Of course, I wish they meant our national icon ­– the legendary poet, philosopher and artist Taras Shevchenko, who lived in the 19^th century -, not only our famous football player Andriy Shevchenko. Nice illustration of how this Euro 2012 Football Championship has served as a great cultural diplomat for Ukraine.

And I do believe that foreign experience in the cultural field can be of critical importance and value for Ukraine. It will help us find a way to comprehend and advance the use of our cultural legacy and of new forms of artistic expression in a rapidly-changing environment, focusing on why museums are important to our culture, what they can contribute to the quality of human experience and welfare, how they can enrich lives through engaging emotions, enhancing experience and deepening the understanding of people, places, events, ideas, conceptions, and objects from the past and present.

Ihor Poshyvailo is an Ethnologist with a PhD from the Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences(1998). He is the Deputy Director of the National Center of Folk Culture “Ivan Honchar Museum” (Kyiv); the Chairman of the Kyiv Regional Branch of the National Union of Folk Art Masters; a founding board member of the Ivan Honchar Foundation. He is an expert in the State Art Commission of the Ukrainian Ministry for Culture, as well as in the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2009). He is the author of the award-winning book Phenomenology of Pottery (semiotic and ethnological aspects). Co-moderator and co-organizer of international museum management seminars (since 2005). Participant in the International Visitor Program (USA, 2004), Global Youth Exchange Program (Japan, 2004) and The World Master’s Festival in Arts and Culture (Korea, 2007). Curator of international art projects, including the traveling exhibition “Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Culture Of, By, and For People” (2011), “Interpreting Cultural Heritage” (2011), “Home to Home: Landscapes of Memory” (2011-2012). Holder of the International Charitable Fund “Ukraine-3000” Scholarship (2005–2006), he has also got the title of Honorable Man of Arts (2008). He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Smithsonian Center of Folklife and Cultural Heritage (2009-2010) and is currently a Summer International Fellow at the Kennedy Center (2011-2013). 

Clash of cultures

Aung San Suu Kyi in the burmese parliament on May 2, 2012. (Photo taken from http://photoblog.nbcnews.com)

I have been thinking about fear and the way it imprisons us, it restricts us, it makes us constantly accept compromises, it stops us from dreaming, it keeps us where we are, turning us into mediocre and ‘small’ human beings; the way and the reasons it is being cultivated. The culture of fear.

I ´ve recently read the book Freedom from Fear, a collection of texts and public speeches by Aung San Suu Kyi, the burmese activist, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who spent a number of years under house arrest, but who´s recently become a member of the burmese parliament. This meant a lot to me. The first petition I ever signed, I was 19-20 years old, was a petition of the International Amnesty for the liberation of Suu. One of the speeches I now read in the book started like this: “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."

With this sentence, my thoughts flew from Burma once again to the countries of the Arab Spring. I confess that, since all this started, I never looked at them as if they were countries which are now, ‘finally’, joining us – the ‘countries-guardians of democracy’, the ‘free’ west. On the contrary, following the developments of the Arab Spring and everything that followed, I felt that we should be paying a lot of attention, because there are a number of lessons here for us. What I saw in this revolution were people who joined forces to overcome the fear, who acted as one for the common good, who fought for democracy – for the rights it grants, but taking on the obligations as well. I´ve read articles in newspapers, texts in blogs, I´ve talked to some people who come from those countries and what I´ve encountered are citizens who feel responsible for maintaining the ideals which guided this action, who are perfectly conscious that the struggle is not over and that they must be on constant alert in order not to go back. Knowing the course we took, is it a total utopia to wish that they may remain like this? And that this actually works? Because I do confess that there were moments I felt ashamed: for the things we take for granted; for being part of the vicious circle of the culture of fear – sometimes in the position of those who wield it, other times subject to it -, unconscious of the ideals and values we have sacrificed on the way, or rather conscious, but acquitting ourselves with such excuses as “these are the rules of the game”, “it´s beyond me” or “I am following orders”. The words of Wassyla Tamzali, an algerian writer and activist who participated in a debate in Lisbon on the Arab Spring, sound extremely relevant, for all of us. Tamzali quoted Michel Foucault, who said that “Revolution is to say ‘no’ to the king”, and added: “In Algeria there was not this magic junction [as in Tunisia] among all elements of society. [In Tunisia] there had always been resistance, resistence to the ruler had always existed and within various social categories (the artists, the intellectuals, women, judges, miners...), but never had there been this junction of all categories. There is a revolution only when all social categories come together and take a stand.”  

In this context, the interview of the portuguese Secretary of State for Culture (SEC) to the french newspaper Le Monde last month caused me some consternation. Although he did not give the interview in his capacity as SEC, it is not possible to separate the man from the role, especially since his statements are deeply related to issues concerning a people´s culture.

Francisco José Viegas said: “(...) I belong to a generation which at a certain moment must answer ‘yes’. And accept compromises. When our country is going through a terrible crisis, writing in newspapers and blogs about what culture and society should be, how to help cinema overcome stagnation or save the libraries, is not enough anymore. (...) And he added: “We live in a society which has lost its dreams. The portuguese are afraid of the future, of speaking. And this is happening after the Inquisition, which was 300 years ago, and 50 years of Salazar´s fascist regime. Today, with the crisis, it´s still going on. It´s terrible.” (read the interview here).

It´s true, the Inquisition was 300 years ago and the country went through 50 years of a fascist regime. But there have also been 40 years of ‘democratic’ regime. What have they produced? A culture of fear; a culture of yes men; a culture of compromise, which makes even some heads which are sticking out to bend, to align with mediocrity, in order to survive (it´s very much worth reading an article by greek journalist Nikos Demou, The alliance of the lesser; the ‘democratic’ regime has nurtured similar attitudes in countries like Greece, with a different historic and political background from that of Portugal, which makes one think that the Inquisition and Salazar might not be the only ones to be held responsible). 

It might not be enough to write in newspapers and blogs about what culture and society should be. But it is, undoubtedly, enough to be governed and manipulated, at all levels and in all environments, by those who belong to the SEC´s ‘generation’, the ‘generation’ (which actually embraces different generations, including the younger ones) which nurtures the culture of fear, which thinks that it must say ‘yes’ and accept compromises. Is it not time, also here, in our ‘countries-guardians of democracy’, to confront the culture of fear by recovering our culture of democratic thinking and practice? Is it not time to say ‘no’ to the kings and their courts and to declare certain compromises to be unacceptable, intolerable? Is it not time to dream of something more than mediocrity? To educate citizens who are attentive, sensitive, tolerant, demanding and critical, who are involved in the affairs of the polis, who may express their opinion freely and with a sense of responsibility, without being afraid of getting punished for it? To nurture the imagination, to support creativity, to reward effort and merit? To expect those whom we trust with an executive power to be accountable and all of us, as citizens, to take on the right and obligation to demand it? Especially because, as the SEC reminded us, this country (as others) is going through a terrible crisis, one that is not just financial. And this is also a question of Culture.

Until September

"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." Aung San Suu Kyi

Guest post: "Here´s to cultural diplomacy", by Caroline Miller (UK)

Caroline Miller is the dynamic and visionary director of Dance UK. She is one of those people who have the capacity to ‘think big’ and who work hard to make things actually happen, inspiring others to join and work with them. One of Dance UK´s major achievements was the opening, last April, of the first clinic for injured dancers, integrated in the british National Health System. While participating in the Kennedy Center´s Summer International Fellowship this year, Caroline realized she has one more role: that of a cultural diplomat. In this post, she shares her thoughts on the actual role cultural diplomacy can play in fostering mutual understanding. I couldn´t have wished for a more beautiful text to celebrate the completion of our second year at the Kennedy Center. mv

DESH, by Akram Khan Company. Choreographer/Performer: Akram Khan.  (Photo: © Richard Haughton)

I’ve been thinking a lot about cultural diplomacy in the last week. As the Director of Dance UK, the main advocacy organization supporting the professional dance sector in Britain, I’m concerned about raising the profile of dance in society whilst arguing for its value. I spend much less time thinking about the role dance has in promoting and showcasing British culture and society.

This changed when I met a group of cultural attaches last week as part of the Summer International Arts Management Fellowship at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. All experienced American civil servants, the group was about to leave for new postings around the world and they were keen to meet the international arts managers. Though I’d worked with various cultural attaches in London and benefitted from their support for specific arts projects, this was the first time I’d really stopped to think about the strategic purpose of these government positions and what they were trying to achieve in the big picture.

According to the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy, the American political scientist and author Dr. Milton C. Cummings defines cultural diplomacy as “the exchange of ideas, information, values, systems, traditions, beliefs, and other aspects of culture, with the intention of fostering mutual understanding”. This definition could have been used to describe my experience as a Summer International Fellow at the DeVos Institute of Arts Management. Does that mean I am a cultural diplomat?

What I’d thought was a great personal opportunity for my professional development and to take back skills and management ideas to my organisation, was actually just as much about me becoming an ambassador promoting the ideas, values and culture of Britain.

Reflecting on completing my first year as a Summer International Fellow in 2011, I had talked to my friends about my surprise that globalization and homogenization of culture wasn’t as common as I’d accepted. I’d spent an intense month living and working with arts managers from 28 countries and they had talked about their dramatically different working worlds in countries such as Zimbabwe, Egypt, Pakistan, Moldova and Cambodia, amongst others. Day to day we exchanged ideas, traditions and value systems from our countries. “In my country” became our collective catch-phrase.

Our experiences were wildly different. From the regions which didn’t have a culture of buying tickets for arts events to countries where political corruption and revolutions were the back-drop and influencer of arts production.

Working alongside arts managers from five continents, I’d been elevated from being the manager of a dance organization to “the Brit”, to the representative of an entire colonial history! Though it was said in jest, the stereotype of colonial British Empire was real and still current.

What, however, wasn’t stereotyped was the interest and excitement around British arts, whether it was theatre, musicals, visual arts, museums, music or dance.  This was the area of British-ness that caught international colleagues’ interest and imaginations. It was through the arts that people had gained a more sophisticated understanding of British society, values and beliefs. This for me was enough to prove the value of cultural diplomacy and the role of the arts as an effective communicator for the best attributes of individual nations.

Entity, by Wayne McGregor/Random Dance, 2008. (Photo © Ravi Deepres)

I’ve had to think again about how I talk about the value of dance in the UK, whether it is the British Bangladeshi Akram Khan whose show Desh explores a fictionalized relationship with his father (watch here); Wayne McGregor/Random Dance’s abstract contemporary dance mixed with new technologies (watch here); Rosie Kay’s dance performance Five Soldiers, which she researched by training with the army and spending time at the Birmingham hospital which cares for injured soldiers returning from Afghanistan (watch here); or DV8’s Can We Talk About This which explored freedom of speech, censorship and offence in British Society (watch here). Together, they say more about the real Britain of today, rich with tensions between tradition and modernity, religion and spirituality than any essay could capture.

By the time you read this post, the London Olympics will have opened and over one billion people worldwide will have watched the spectacular opening ceremony. As I write, I have only the smallest clues as to what the event will hold as details. We know that it will include many of Britain’s greatest artists and talents and its theme is “the Isles of Wonder”. The creative team, including Danny Boyle (known worldwide as the Director of the film Slumdog Millionaire), has promised a singularly British show. The Daily Telegraph reports that the show starts in a “green and pleasant land”, passes through the industrial revolution and a celebration of the right to protest, and the public service of British National Health Service nurses and maybe another key element of British life… the big Saturday night out. It also promises to be that rare thing in an opening ceremony – funny! Following the dress rehearsal, one participant tweeted that the ceremony is “Splendidly British and magnificently bonkers”!

Whatever the London 2012 opening ceremony includes, I am sure it will effectively communicate to a mass audience more about modern Britain in just one show than politicians have achieved in decades. And my parting thought: we must remember that no matter what our countries financial difficulties (or not), the arts have a role to play challenging the idea of what a country is and stands for… So here’s to cultural diplomacy.

Caroline Miller is Director of Dance UK, the national voice for the professional dance sector in the United Kingdom. She started her career as a box office assistant, before working as a theatre marketing manager and a publicist for major London arts venues including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Southbank Centre and Sadler’s Wells Theatre. She was Head of Publicity for the international art book publishers Phaidon Press. Caroline won a fellowship from the European Union identifying outstanding female emerging cultural leaders which enabled her to undertake the first MA in Cultural Leadership at City University, London in 2007. At Dance UK she created the Dance Manifesto which was presented to the British government and inspired similar documents around the world and she established and runs the All Party Parliamentary Dance Group which is a group of politicians who champion dance in government.

Comfort and disturbance - Part II

I was curious to find out where the quote from my last post came from: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. I did a search on Google and the name that came up with most frequency (although there seem to be at least two more contestants) is Cesar A. Cruz, Mexican poet, educator and human rights activist. I suppose that every sector - be it the social, the educational, the political, the media, the artistic/cultural sector - honestly wishing to have an impact on people´s lives aims at the same thing: to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.

This is exactly what Washington has been for me these last weeks. I am always somewhere between the two, sometimes leaning on the comfort side, others on the disturbance. For all good reasons, I suppose.

I could talk about a lot of things, but I´ll only talk about two: two people, whom we had the privilege to meet. These are their stories:

Yvette Campbell, an ex-Alvin Ailey dancer, is the President and CEO of Harlem School of the Arts (HSA). In January 2011, she accepted the invitation to head the HSA at a time when it was carrying a significant debt and was facing closure. Apart from the existence of the debt, she diagnosed the following issues: the school was mainly known to older people who had some memories of it from the 60s; the building was quite prohibiting, visually inaccessible, hiding the ‘treasures’ it kept inside (Yvette, herself being a dancer, had never walked into it); there was a need to re-tell the story, to the immediate but also to the larger community, and to build a ‘family’ that could contribute (also and especially financially) towards the school’s sustainability. It was around these problems and needs that Yvette Campbell built her strategy, focusing heavily on good institutional marketing and being open to every opportunity that would help the school be 'the talk of the town', placing it into people´s minds and hearts.

In the months that followed Yvette Campbell´s arrival, Harlem School of the Arts  made sure they kept the media regularly informed on their activities and the determination to keep the school open. In April 2011, just three months after Yvette took up her position, there was an opportunity for a feature article on the new Director in Essence, which helped to significantly boost the school´s visibility. (Photo: Kwaku Alston)

Among the many things Yvette shared with us, I would like to highlight two. First, her relationship with the HSA team. Yvette did not bring in with her a ‘dream team’ to make a ‘miracle’ happen. When taking up her position, she started by finding out what each member of the team was doing. She then shared her vision and objectives with them, she explained what the goal was and told them what she expected from each one. Those who didn´t live up to the expectations were invited to leave, just like Yvette thinks that she should be asked to leave if she didn´t do her job. She aims to have a focused, motivated and dedicated team and she wants to be surrounded by people who are smarter than her in their own fields. The second point I would like to highlight is her relationship with the ‘family’. Yvette made herself accountable from day 1 to the school´s stakeholders and to those who might be able and interested in helping fulfil its mission (especially financially). She realized she had to share the story, so she´s been sharing information on the evolution of the project by personally sending detailed reports to a few dozen people (initially on a daily basis, then weekly and then monthly). She calls these “the CEO reports”. This is her way of keeping them all informed on the progress the school (and herself as CEO) is making in achieving the established goals and also of keeping them all involved in this collective effort, reminding them of the need for their support. Listening and watching Yvette Campbell, we have that very distinct feeling that we have in front of us a natural-born leader. Her energy, enthusiasm, determination, her structured thinking make us feel that she’s the right person at the right place. Thanks to her and the rest of the HSA team, a year and a half later the school is back on track and towards paying off its debt, becoming a financially heathy arts institution.

Our second remarkable encounter was with Taro Alexander. Taro, an actor and teacher, stutters since the age of three. He spent years and years trying to be just another cool boy and not to be seen as a freak; trying to hide, with a number of tricks, the fact that he stuttered (but not when on stage). He personally knows what a struggle this is for a lot of children and young people, who form part of a community of 60 million people around the world. So, in 2001 he founded Our Time, an organization that helps children who stutter to improve their confidence and communication skills through theatre. At the same time, it assists parents and teachers, including speech therapy teachers at schools, the majority of whom are very little prepared to deal with stuttering. This is a small organization of 5, working at the moment with approximately 150 children, hardly what could be of interest to potential sponsors and donors, looking for large projects that can offer the desired visibility and recognition. Thus funding has always been an issue and one of the ways of tackling it was the organization of an annual event, a gala, in order to raise funds. Things were quite difficult in the beginning, where the organization ended up actually losing money. But Taro Alexander and his team kept focused, continued with their work, continued organizing a good quality and exciting event, and managed to have better and better, albeit modest, fundraising results. Their best year ever was 2010, when Carly Simon, a famous singer - who also stutters -, accepted the invitation to be that year’s honoree, attracting a lot of people to the event and helping to raise more money.

The year of 2010 was the turning point for another reason. Taro Alexander was asked to give his opinion on the script for a new Broadway play on King George, the king who stuttered. Later on, it turned out that the script actually became a Hollywood film, starring Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush. Taro was invited to the premiere. He was overwhelmed by the film and by Colin Firth´s performance. As soon as it finished, and overcoming his shyness, Taro went to congratulate the screenwriter, David Seidler (a stutterer himself), and asked him if he would accept to be the 2011 honoree in the annual Our Time fundraising gala. He accepted, but the fact that he was not a very known person was a reason of concern for some people involved in the organization of the gala regarding the impact his name would have on the fundraising effort. But just look at what happened in the months that followed: people talked more and more about the film; The King´s Speech was awarded every possible prize, including the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for David Seidler; Colin Firth would not be able to attend the Our Time gala, but agreed to be Honorary Chair; the singer Carly Simon accepted the invitation to perform. 

The fundraising gala was a huge success and also the award for a decade of consistent and dedicated work. Taro Alexandre and his small team are now trying to carefully build on this success, considering the organization´s concrete mission and its resources. One thing they are certainly doing better and better is registering and sharing their impact, a primary way of communicating with their ‘family’, with existing and potential new members and donors.

Why were these two encounters particularly important? What did we take away?  We took away the comfort: about the things that can and are being done. We took away the disturbance: about the things that can, and should, but are not happening. And we were also reminded that it takes courage, persistence and determination: from overcoming one’s shyness, to dealing with teams, to bringing about significant change. Because going against the wall is part of the process.