Dance Mapping - Arts Council England

2. Grants for the arts
These funds are derived from lottery funding and for those companies who are not regularly
funded, this is the only other major source of Arts Council England funding. Those companies
who are chiefly project-based or new and emerging depend on Grants for the arts and in
some cases, now established companies are also dependent on this fund. However these are
declining funds facing increased competition for Grants for the arts. Regularly funded
organisations must get permission to apply to these funds and in some regions they are
actively persuaded not to apply. 41 Without such funds it is very difficult to get work off the
ground, artists will therefore rely on other employment to support their dance work. This is
demonstrated and expanded upon in the part of this research examining the workforce in Part
Five: Ecology.
Region/Year Total dance
2004–08
£’s
Total all artforms 2004–08
East Midland 2,151,910 23,830,331 8.8%
East 2,438,223 28,234,486 8.5%
£’s
Dance as % total
of Grants for the
arts 2004-08
London 9,244,883 83,536,791 10.1%
North East 1,819,399 20,353,772 9%
North West 2,333,358 47,495,475 4.9%
South East 4,761,369 44,402,650 10.4%
South West 2,623,250 31,226,121 8.4%
West Midlands 6,460,983 34,916,896 18%
Yorkshire 3,018,966 31,588,426 9.3%
Total
34,852,341 345,584,948 9.7%
Table 36: Total Grants for the arts funding awards for dance (main artform) by region
2004–08
Source: Arts Council Arena Data
Grants for the arts therefore provides a relatively small amount of funding to dance compared
to overall Grants for the arts expenditure in those regions. This is particularly noticeable in
some of the larger regions such as the North West and South West of England. What is
unclear and should be investigated further is whether there were fewer applications in these
regions or whether the applications were of poor quality and therefore rejected. It may also be
41 There are Managed funds held by the regions and National Activities funds which have been invested in Dance
and have driven some new initiatives such as Youth Dance England, Big Dance and Making a Move etc. We have
been unable to access these figures across the regions and from the national office in time for this research.
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