Catalogues of Capital Failures

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 Theatre Company, the self professed "Foremost Black Theatre Company in Britain" which, by the time it was saying that, wasn't saying much, to build a theatre in London. Its debatable exactly what "foremost" actually meant: they were certainly the richest; they received a huge annual grant from ACE by the time I spent an unhappy six months as their administrator. I felt they were badly run and poor value for money: I estimated that each seat sold for one of the shows I managed for them was subsidised by nearly £300! But once you start getting big bucks from ACE, you're guaranteed to get more. When it became apparent to me that the most important criteria for this proposed venue was its proximity to the Artistic Director's house, I knew the project wouldn't happen and wasn't surprised when ACE eventually withdrew the grant. Some strategic face was saved when ACE announced that the grant would be ring-fenced for the development of black theatre- that initiative became "Sustained Theatre" and it is a piece of that is the grant that I'm still chasing today.

But, times are harder, friends fewer and the people holding the reins aren't the same ones who started the journey in 1995. These people have had their wrist slapped for various monumental cock ups that have wasted public money and none of them want another on their watch. The Public in West Bromwich and the Waygood Gallery in Newcastle are good examples of how not to do things. But one asks- how those projects were allowed to start in the first place? I am convinced that it was more a case of the quality of the relationships between funding officers and managements than the strength of either proposal weighed against financial risk. It infuriates me that  the experience and expertise my company brings to a project with a fraction of the risk of its predecessors should be stymied by the legacies of nepotism and old boys networks, not to mention and incipient racism that assumes that black people can not only not manage, but are incapable of learning from high profile mistakes.