Wildewire

For five years I worked for a voluntary organisation that became the development agency for minority ethnic arts and artists in North East England. It built a network of groups and individuals. It identified the career development needs of creative professionals from minority communities in the region. The problem most articulated by the artists was that it was impossible to be programmed by major venues in the region. To achieve "cultural diversity" in their programmes, it was easier for those venues to scan national and international touring circuits to book artists "of colour" who were making the rounds rather than those working in the region. To justify this they and officers of the supposed support agencies calmly stated that there was a lack of minority ethnic artists in the region of regional or national quality to take to the major stages and galleries. I found this hard to accept and wondered how strategic cultural support agencies saw no irony in such...

I realise that ACE officers are driven by procedures and that those procedures derive from consultations and strategies based on post mortems of successive failures. I know there will be a showdown at some point in the future about the capacity of my organisation to effectively manage the grant we aim to ask them for so I spent much of the week end amassing copies of consultation reports about diversity and capital projects from the last ten or so years.  From my own experience I was aware of the cyclic nature of discussions about cultural diversity: every so often the lack of access to the means of production for creative professionals of colour reaches critical mass and has to be discussed. True to public sector form, the answer is always to commission new research that produces the same old conclusions and bits of cash are given to the usual suspects who mess it up and ACE is able to say "Well we tried..."  One such cycle gave rise to £5m being offered to Talawa Thea...

When Pat Cumper: the then Artistic Director of Talawa Theatre Company and me met the Arts Council's Head of Theatre in November 2010 to report on the progress of  Sustained Theatre , we were feeling pleased with ourselves. In the previous 18 months the target outcomes for the programme as set out in the 2006 consultation report ' Whose Theatre ' had been reached. Admin spending on the project had been drastically reduced during my tenure as Chair of the "National Artists Team" and there were 5 credible proposals for capital projects to create buildings across the country for the development of UK Black and Asian performing arts. Rather than pleasure or congratulations, this Sultana of arts policy became visibly agitated and expressed concern. She couldn't understand why we would want to develop independent capital projects when there were so many "established" companies with which we could have formed partnerships. Embarrassing fiascos like the H...

" Don’t confuse my passion for aggression, don’t say I am arrogant when really I am confident, don’t mistake my deep thought stare as intimidating, when really I am planning, organising & strategising. Don’t get it twisted and think I’m high maintenance or a bit of an air head just because I like to do my hair, nails and buy fabulous shoes. I know, I’m a woman of substance, regal / royal - if you make some time I’ll even list my qualifications! Don’t call me a coconut / bounty because I have a wide range of friends and also like to pronounce my words, when all I am doing is articulating my subject well & ever so eloquently, don’t call my country and continent (Ghana / African) 3rd world or developing because it was fine before people came to steal from our land, don’t tell me that I do not belong here and I should go back to my own *beep beep* county – for my parents & fore-parents built this and contributed heavily to the economy not just with labour but with lots o...